digitalmusic.org | Digital Music

I’ll be co-hosting a panel at the San Francisco Music Startup Academy on Feb 14 about the above topic.  I’ll host the same at SXSW. Seems straight forward: “I have a company, I want content, how do I get it?”

It’s not.

The original notion was the startup. How does a startup, and most likely a bootstrapped start up, engage with content?  What makes this a difficult topic is that before you go into modern methods, you MUST make a long, drawn out stop at the traditional music industry’s methods of gaining access to content. There are so many idiosyncratic details here that just explaining this method easily sucks up an entire panel. However to get to the good stuff (by that I mean API’s, 3rd parties, 3rd party API’s etc) one has to understand the notions of the past and why its in place. Simply put, to gain an understanding of the limitations around 3rd party access you need to know why they exist.

The first time I gave this talk I launched into how the traditional startup deals with content from the traditional music provider, I tried to talk fast. The faster I talked, the faster I saw eye lids droop and eyes glaze over. What I was left with, was a tiny amount of time at the end where I could actually address what these small startups wanted to hear: how to get content, fast and cheap.

SO, this time around, at the risk of getting some extra questions on WHY during the Q&A, I’m going to reverse things. Start out with the good stuff, the new stuff; the stuff people actually want to hear. If there is time left at the end, I’ll get to the traditional “Music Operations,” and if there’s just not enough time, I’ll be happy to talk further over a beer.