Music Recommendation - From Peel To Peer
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Tjaben, Christian
Göttlich, Oke
Music recommendation is an essential part of the music business. Artists like Trent Reznor have started to get involved in music disovery systems and talk of "Intelligent Curation". It might be time to envision a more emotional, i.e. relationship based approach to recommendations. Are we entering the age of "intelligent curation"? Just like the distribution of music has undergone fundamental changes in the last 15 years, so has the culture of music recommendation. The development of recommendation engines is an essential aspect of online retailers and music platforms, while social media has all but replaced traditional media as the dominant recommendation channel, resulting in a new ecology and economy of taste making.
 Hello and welcome back on stage four. The next two sessions are on the topic of music recommendation. They both take a different perspective. The first one that is organized by Christian Tiaben, Christian will be joined by Oge Götlich later. It focuses on the curation aspect of music recommendation. The session that follows after this focuses more on the technological and research aspect of recommendation. These sessions have been recommended to the Berlin-based network association. We start with Christian, who has dealt with the topic that he calls from peer to peer for the past few years and has thought a lot about how music recommendation works now differently in the digital age than it did before. Reader and writer, radio host and lots of different things. Welcome. Thank you, Andrea. Is this working? Microphone check. Hello. My name is Christian Tiaben. The session now starts with a little introduction by myself before I happily introduce my partner for today, Oge Götlich. And later so we'll be discussed some more recent developments and platforms in the field of curated recommendation. But I would like to start with some opening remarks in a more general vein. And also I'd like to thank Altogether Now and especially Andrea again for making it possible for us to speak here. The tradition of from peer to peer is something that started in 2009 at Altogether Now. And I like to call it a look at the ecology of music, particularly the change in music recommending media. At the beginning of this, I thought that it was a man versus machine kind of situation with the opponents being music experts versus search algorithms. Meanwhile, a lot of that has changed, like my opinion about this as well. And mostly that has to do with the success of social media and the various options for streaming music and embedding these streams. One radical change is that the so-called human music recommendations in the web now mostly occur as links embedded mostly that lead to the instant consumption of the respective music. So there's no more big need for abstract descriptions of something that can be heard straight away. And recommendation, even if it's not taking place inside one of the music platforms themselves, has grown much nearer to the actual experience of music. In most cases, though, the rhetoric used in a social media post hyping up some new track or act or video will be very similar to the rhetoric employed in 90s hyping when it was done in print media. So not a big change there. But the message is mostly spreading much quicker and the music can be heard instantly. Another change is the sheer volume of music that is being released or accessible by now. If you include back catalogs and the respective availability of also not so recent or even age old sounds on the streaming platforms, the amount of albums, tracks, complete works, lost sessions, mixtapes, bootlegs, and so forth can be quite intimidating. But obviously we're not alone. Out there is help in form of all sorts of recommendations. And for now, we want to look at the so-called curated models. Once you had the infamous culture of the gatekeepers, powerful figures in a system of restricted excess that watched over the scarce resources of so-called talent. I'm talking of radio hosts, magazine editors, TV show programmers, and their respective counterparts in the recording business like A&R men, mostly these were men, promoters, and other such people. In order to be accessible by a greater public, music had to be led through gates that actually meant financial backing and promotion in the fairly closed system of the old school music business. One could argue about the nurturing benefits the system offered for the lucky few. And not all of it was bad. But as is known, the system is now defunct in many ways. And the gates have mostly opened, or rather there are many, many new, less or unguarded gates and doors and loopholes. And there is no more scarcity of music, only scarcity of time and attention, and scarcity of money, some would say also. And we talk more of influences now maybe than of gatekeepers. Influences are not a specific breed of people or have a specific profession. In many ways, there were a so-called immaterial labor, something between amateur enthusiasm, semi-professional self-exploitation, and what is called emotion work done on behalf of internet, media brands, or other employers. But you can decide which influences you let in through your door. These influences can be a good friend who always has provided you with new music, depending on your birthday via mixtapes, mixed CDs, or some later form of sharing. But influences can also be musicians whose music you like, music journalists you know from traditional media channels, bloggers or collective blogs, DJs, clubs, labels, communities, or some mystic, reverential figure in a faraway music scene that you noticed in some other people's tweets. Everyone can theoretically, or rather quite easily, build themselves a system of social media page likes and friends, of newsletter subscriptions or subscriptions of video or Twitter or Tumblr, SoundCloud or Pinterest or whatever channels, and start getting more recommendations than you can manage. And I've not even mentioned RSS feeds from music blogs directly. Such a system of self-selected sources, if done smartly, will almost always guarantee an astonishing degree of matches with your own taste. And you will always find new music right the moment you access the respective channels. And once you start sharing your favorites from all this, you will obviously become an influencer yourself. Later on, Orca will introduce a concept of the distributor, maybe a more fancy word for that as well. And that sounds pretty easy and is also the easy part in theory, but there's a not so easy part and that is that this all takes quite a bit of an effort. First of all, you have to be interested enough to do all this, and you have to have time to focus your attention on all the new music that floods your inboxes and timelines, your dashboards or whatever you look at. Probably the scale of the system you use will reflect the degree to which your cultural practices in this is refined. Basically, and that's not too much of a surprise, more effort will give you more distinctive gain. So if you're not willing to spend much time and effort in finding good sources for recommendation, you will have to make do with a limited set of channels to subscribe to and probably have a bit of a less amount of discoveries of exciting new sounds. But if you're ready to engage with a wider range of influences and influences, you can find yourself better supplied with new music now than the music editors of the past who received a pile of records or CDs each day delivered to their desks for review. While these editors, and I'm speaking from experience, were forced to occupy themselves as all sorts of unwanted but personally delivered music, you can now choose freely from the whole big heap of released music and only listen to what you preselect. And you can even start to develop a certain independent stance or mindset if you're willing because no one will try to bribe you with advertising money or free flights to showcases or something. Instead, you can, if so inclined, start following only self-releasing artists or keep a strictly made up diet of music released by independent labels only. Maybe through all this, you can even emulate something that recalls the emancipatory moments of music consumption that were often part of the experience up until 15 years ago. At that time, the actual type of music you listened to was an important statement. And in order to be able to listen to this music, you usually had to engage with people, go to places and spend your money off the mainstream. Then again, everyone loves a good hit. And if that currently might be for most of us, maybe Darth Punks get lucky, then who cares if it's a major company that turns all the dollars with it. Personally I'm more interested in the niche streams than in the mainstream. And the current ecology of music, the new politics of taste making allow for great opportunities for spreading all sorts of minority aesthetics and niche sounds. To use a term from the discussion about the so-called auteur series like Breaking Bad or The Wire or Deadwood, who never had impressive ratings when they premiered on network TV, but find a much larger audience to secondary channels like DVDs and so forth, there are now ways of, quite elaborate ways actually, of distribution you could call narrow casting as opposed to broad casting. And this is for me one of the key aspects of today's curated models. Instead of opinion leading individuals and collectives that primarily determine a consensus of taste supposed to fit for all, we now have a multitude of collectively led opinions that allow for more diversity. And this makes it possible that more different kinds of music find our attention, even if less single track will find the attention of all of us. Others or influences or whatever we call them play a vital role in terms of charging our music with meaning, even if it's now more of a social meaning than sort of an expressive meaning. If you look at music television, you could say that it has benefited musicians who were able to turn into visual artists as well. On the other hand, when the internet arrived, it first of all turned music into mere audio files. So now everybody has to see how we can make more of them. And besides various strategies to charge music with more meaning by way of visuals, videos, artists, blogs, or performance aspects and so forth, the curated music recommendation can add a social factor to this load. It's not necessarily always only the music itself that determines what we like. It can also be who else is listening to this music and who's talking about it and how it is released. So in the final analysis, it is probably irrelevant on which platform you receive your recommendations. Maybe specific platforms will influence your influences. And so now we should probably look at some of those platforms. And to do this, I'm happy to have Orke at my side who prepared also a little thing which I don't know if it works. Will we have it? Or? Okay. So we will have a bit more visual now. And start talking about some of the later developments that you might be interested to hear about. I'm introducing Orke. Orke Götlich is, or would you want to introduce yourself? You had a nice tagline. But Orke is managing director of Fine Tunes, which is a digital distribution on service company. If I'm expressing that correctly based in Hamburg, which serves a lot of labels and artists to bring their music into the general market. And also he's on the board of the VUT, the German Independent Label Association, and at Merlin, which is the bigger brother of that on an international level. So hello, Orke. Hello, everyone. Nice for having me. Hello, everyone. Okay. There is no sound yet. Okay. So hello, everyone. Hello. What is it? Okay. Hello, everyone. Nice for having us here. And we present a, I made a little presentation on kind of some buzzwords. We're trying to reach out to what is happening to music consumption in, related to what is curation, what is influencing, what is consuming music, and how is it changing the landscape. And we can definitely say, of course, not only because of streaming services, but with everything what is happening at the moment, we see different kinds of curational models are upcoming. And these are helping, of course, artists and especially some niche artists, depending on the curation model in being more visible in the landscape. Because what we are facing here in Germany usually is that mainstream media usually has a kind of market share of 6% of niche content, even though the market share for music sold of niche content is around like 25% of the independent related music scene. And with the help of curational models, we can see the development from the US, of course, coming with Pandora, with other streaming services, that these kind of numbers of reach out of independent music is kind of getting not even up to the 25% I was just talking about is just even going much more higher, up to 40%, where, of course, established artists are being less visible in certain curational systems, which we want to talk about now. So I had prepared one question that was directed in sort of towards the idea that curated models might help independent artists or unknown artists better than algorithms, which might relate to sort of something that is called the filter bubble as well. So that strong things get usually enforced by something like algorithms. I'm sure the second part of the music recommendation session will be having some ideas about that. And you actually had some market research towards that about a recent release that basically said, yes, it is sort of more important to be in editorial systems, which are curated in terms of streaming services, what we are talking about now, rather than the algorithm-based stuff. Did I get that right? We can definitely see a slide of where editorial-based systems like, for example, iTunes or even editorial-based streaming services like WIMP and others where the release gets presented to the audience is, of course, much more interesting for newcomer bands because then they get a visibility which they usually are not getting. When it's getting more to the human and social factors, so sharing, then we see lots of, of course, already known habits like people are listening to music they known for years and which is quite common, so it is really interesting that a mixture between the human and social and, of course, the user-based sharing is needed for getting both effects for newcomers and for established bands. It is much easier as we all can see with the Daft Punk example where, of course, everybody is listening to it, whether it's a 50-year-old or a 70-year-old. One thing I came across in the preparation for this session was a study done by Nielsen Music, which is sort of a more industry-related organization, as I understand, who were looking at the discovery of music and the conversion of discovery into actual consumption, meaning in that regard, probably even buying of downloads or CDs. They still find the direct recommendation by radio is very important, but that's not so much what we talk about, but also recommendations by friends to be very effective, which relates to sort of a, I think, a relation of trust that is necessary to give the final impact for somebody to say, okay, I'll give it my attention, not because the starting page of my streaming service says so, but because my friend Oka, who's always had the best new music tips, has recommended it. So we tried and find out, as I understand, they didn't really have figures for that. How important, for example, inside Spotify it is to have the social recommendation, but I think in general there is a trend that this is a huge sort of factor in the consumption nowadays, the possibility to get, I don't know, everybody in your friends or whatever lists you have sort of sorted by way of their music preferences. And in that regard, there's like two services that will probably soon roll out. We could look at it for a moment. You've actually been in Austin, I think, presented by Beats, the ominous new venture which employed Ian Rogers of Topspin and Trent Reznor as sort of figureheads for their new music service, which basically is going to be, yeah, what? I mean, just another streaming service because they just bought one streaming service, which then of course has the kind, as a new aspect, like a curated model where they are really putting together more than 1,000 influencers who are preparing playlists, but this is especially when I saw it, it was nothing else than which we can already see on several other streaming services already being done by, for example, Spotify, creating artists playlists, looking for influencers, whether they are actors or they are musicians and they are preparing all the lists, which now of course Beats is trying to somehow combine with the brand they already have with the headphones, Beats of Dr. Dre. And this is of course where professional curation and this kind of cross curation, we always speak about cross marketing, but it's a bit more like cross curation. Get me some testimonials which are liking my product, in this case the headphones, they are also presented on the streaming service and therefore people might get more attached and more easy to listen to some music because I always wanted to know what Dr. Dre is listening to, but I am not too convinced of this kind of model at the moment. Well, it seems like primarily a money heavy investment scheme where you buy a lot of endorsements in the end, so nothing new technically, maybe Twitter music, the other sort of as of now only available in the English language countries, I understand, service might have more of an impact, I don't know, did we have any screenshots for that? We don't. Twitter is launching or has launched in the US and UK and some other countries a service where you can directly access music recommendations as far as they are done on YouTube, Spotify and iTunes, I believe, directly embedded into a Twitter environment where you can see what your friends are posting from these name channels or get the usual kind of popular now analysis of traffic in that direction. I believe that's going to be quite influential, but as of now not available in Germany, so we might look at some. We always have, of course, this kind of problem that kind of new services which are upcoming in the English speaking countries are coming here very late for several reasons, mostly because of licensing reasons, and this is, of course, somehow to be seen very crucial because newcomers and artists which are upcoming who want to tour in Germany or are young bands which want to get known via touring and are not really represented in those kind of services because they are just not available in Germany, and this is definitely something where young and newcomer bands in the other countries do have it much more easy. It's much more easy for them in other countries than here in Germany. So maybe we should also talk about another service so far not available here while we're on that topic. That would be turntable FM. I think there was just about one of the images on the screen. I learned yesterday that this is an instance of gamification. It's at work there besides other stuff. In Germany you can access a sound drop app on Spotify that has some aspects of this. In a nutshell, would you like to explain how turntable FM works? I mean, it's just like presenting records even in a mixed way to audience which can go into your room and which can listen to different DJs in this kind of surrounding. Everybody can open up a room. Everybody can open up a room, invite people, or people can, even if you make the room public, can go into the room and somebody can play the records. Even more DJs can present records. So there are up to five people being able to present records to their friends. So it's a bit like meeting up in the Keller room with old vinyl records and everybody is playing a vinyl and everybody is recommending something to the other. Something that you love if you love having avatar of yourself. And the publicity can then say, oh, I like the track. I don't like the track. Of course there are possibilities. You just can listen to the stream or you are able, of course, to download it somewhere at some stores. To a certain degree I find this kind of model not ultimately desirable because it employs sort of extra effects to get attention for music. We talked about sort of an economy of attention which is today very important that people not only look at the financial gains, the immediate ones, but first of all need the attention which makes it sort of very open to all concepts that are employing non-musical or specific musical strategies. Like things have to be spectacular, very sort of gamey and all that which is not suitable for all kinds of music. So I think that's always something where the need for disruption is getting bigger in all this. So I prefer basically other aspects, I guess, of curated models which we're getting the two minute sign. I don't know, we should maybe shortly mention Shuffle FM because it is here which is... I mean Shuffle FM is very nice because it's more of a kind of source where all blocks are aggregated into one source indifferent and we saw it on the screen, sort of indifferent genres and everybody can listen up to the genre. You feel very interested in and you can listen to new music which has been put on some blocks. But this is of course something where you're not curated by friends in this case, it's curation by all blocks of the world and it is by popularity. So the more one track got posted into blocks, the more visibility it is in Shuffle FM. It's a kind of hype machine, same like of a model, maybe looking a bit more interesting and getting the music from different sources as well, of course using YouTube as a kind of source, using not only SoundCloud or in-stream possibilities. As I understand for you, YouTube itself is also quite important as an income stream now already for music or does it work? Yes, definitely it is. And I mean what we really have to see is the kind of, we see that the user is getting more and more of a distributor which is why I call it the kind of distribuser which we need to a certain extent to get people listening to music they are not aware of yet. And this is of course with the help of all the different streaming models, with the help of different even algorithmic curated models, you can see what has been shared, what is flowing in the net and by popularity or by human interaction, you can see different kind of music which is definitely a big fear for public broadcasters especially in the radio scenario because the radio is so programmed in a stiff way that of course you are just listening to programmed kind of playlists which in the end are not curated at all anymore. Unless you are listening to Byte FM. Unless you are listening to Byte FM and Christian is working at Byte FM which is a nice radio channel by the way. But therefore we see a kind of really come back of curated models which have been in the past the radio stations. And the radio stations because I talked to some public broadcasters in Germany just recently they are not really being aware of becoming totally useless in maybe few years. Okay, so I think we have to stop here as I understand. So thank you. I hope it wasn't too boring. Thank you very much. There is like a 15 minute break. Oh you are going to announce the break in the next session. Thank you Christian and Oke. Thank you.
 Hello and welcome back on stage four.  The next two sessions are on the topic of music recommendation.  They both take a different perspective.  The first one that is organized by Christian Tiaben, Christian will be joined by Oge Götlich later.  It focuses on the curation aspect of music recommendation.  The session that follows after this focuses more on the technological and research aspect  of recommendation.  These sessions have been recommended to the Berlin-based network association.  We start with Christian, who has dealt with the topic that he calls from peer to peer  for the past few years and has thought a lot about how music recommendation works now differently  in the digital age than it did before.  Reader and writer, radio host and lots of different things.  Welcome.  Thank you, Andrea.  Is this working?  Microphone check.  Hello.  My name is Christian Tiaben.  The session now starts with a little introduction by myself before I happily introduce my partner  for today, Oge Götlich.  And later so we'll be discussed some more recent developments and platforms in the field of  curated recommendation.  But I would like to start with some opening remarks in a more general vein.  And also I'd like to thank Altogether Now and especially Andrea again for making it possible  for us to speak here.  The tradition of from peer to peer is something that started in 2009 at Altogether Now.  And I like to call it a look at the ecology of music, particularly the change in music  recommending media.  At the beginning of this, I thought that it was a man versus machine kind of situation  with the opponents being music experts versus search algorithms.  Meanwhile, a lot of that has changed, like my opinion about this as well.  And mostly that has to do with the success of social media and the various options for  streaming music and embedding these streams.  One radical change is that the so-called human music recommendations in the web now mostly  occur as links embedded mostly that lead to the instant consumption of the respective  music.  So there's no more big need for abstract descriptions of something that can be heard straight away.  And recommendation, even if it's not taking place inside one of the music platforms themselves,  has grown much nearer to the actual experience of music.  In most cases, though, the rhetoric used in a social media post hyping up some new track  or act or video will be very similar to the rhetoric employed in 90s hyping when it was  done in print media.  So not a big change there.  But the message is mostly spreading much quicker and the music can be heard instantly.  Another change is the sheer volume of music that is being released or accessible by now.  If you include back catalogs and the respective availability of also not so recent or even  age old sounds on the streaming platforms, the amount of albums, tracks, complete works,  lost sessions, mixtapes, bootlegs, and so forth can be quite intimidating.  But obviously we're not alone.  Out there is help in form of all sorts of recommendations.  And for now, we want to look at the so-called curated models.  Once you had the infamous culture of the gatekeepers, powerful figures in a system of restricted  excess that watched over the scarce resources of so-called talent.  I'm talking of radio hosts, magazine editors, TV show programmers, and their respective  counterparts in the recording business like A&R men, mostly these were men, promoters,  and other such people.  In order to be accessible by a greater public, music had to be led through gates that actually  meant financial backing and promotion in the fairly closed system of the old school music  business.  One could argue about the nurturing benefits the system offered for the lucky few.  And not all of it was bad.  But as is known, the system is now defunct in many ways.  And the gates have mostly opened, or rather there are many, many new, less or unguarded  gates and doors and loopholes.  And there is no more scarcity of music, only scarcity of time and attention, and scarcity  of money, some would say also.  And we talk more of influences now maybe than of gatekeepers.  Influences are not a specific breed of people or have a specific profession.  In many ways, there were a so-called immaterial labor, something between amateur enthusiasm,  semi-professional self-exploitation, and what is called emotion work done on behalf of internet,  media brands, or other employers.  But you can decide which influences you let in through your door.  These influences can be a good friend who always has provided you with new music, depending  on your birthday via mixtapes, mixed CDs, or some later form of sharing.  But influences can also be musicians whose music you like, music journalists you know  from traditional media channels, bloggers or collective blogs, DJs, clubs, labels, communities,  or some mystic, reverential figure in a faraway music scene that you noticed in some other  people's tweets.  Everyone can theoretically, or rather quite easily, build themselves a system of social  media page likes and friends, of newsletter subscriptions or subscriptions of video or  Twitter or Tumblr, SoundCloud or Pinterest or whatever channels, and start getting more  recommendations than you can manage.  And I've not even mentioned RSS feeds from music blogs directly.  Such a system of self-selected sources, if done smartly, will almost always guarantee  an astonishing degree of matches with your own taste.  And you will always find new music right the moment you access the respective channels.  And once you start sharing your favorites from all this, you will obviously become an  influencer yourself.  Later on, Orca will introduce a concept of the distributor, maybe a more fancy word for  that as well.  And that sounds pretty easy and is also the easy part in theory, but there's a not so  easy part and that is that this all takes quite a bit of an effort.  First of all, you have to be interested enough to do all this, and you have to have time  to focus your attention on all the new music that floods your inboxes and timelines, your  dashboards or whatever you look at.  Probably the scale of the system you use will reflect the degree to which your cultural  practices in this is refined.  Basically, and that's not too much of a surprise, more effort will give you more distinctive  gain.  So if you're not willing to spend much time and effort in finding good sources for recommendation,  you will have to make do with a limited set of channels to subscribe to and probably have  a bit of a less amount of discoveries of exciting new sounds.  But if you're ready to engage with a wider range of influences and influences, you can  find yourself better supplied with new music now than the music editors of the past who  received a pile of records or CDs each day delivered to their desks for review.  While these editors, and I'm speaking from experience, were forced to occupy themselves  as all sorts of unwanted but personally delivered music, you can now choose freely from the  whole big heap of released music and only listen to what you preselect.  And you can even start to develop a certain independent stance or mindset if you're willing  because no one will try to bribe you with advertising money or free flights to showcases  or something.  Instead, you can, if so inclined, start following only self-releasing artists or keep a strictly  made up diet of music released by independent labels only.  Maybe through all this, you can even emulate something that recalls the emancipatory moments  of music consumption that were often part of the experience up until 15 years ago.  At that time, the actual type of music you listened to was an important statement.  And in order to be able to listen to this music, you usually had to engage with people,  go to places and spend your money off the mainstream.  Then again, everyone loves a good hit.  And if that currently might be for most of us, maybe Darth Punks get lucky, then who  cares if it's a major company that turns all the dollars with it.  Personally I'm more interested in the niche streams than in the mainstream.  And the current ecology of music, the new politics of taste making allow for great opportunities  for spreading all sorts of minority aesthetics and niche sounds.  To use a term from the discussion about the so-called auteur series like Breaking Bad  or The Wire or Deadwood, who never had impressive ratings when they premiered on network TV,  but find a much larger audience to secondary channels like DVDs and so forth, there are  now ways of, quite elaborate ways actually, of distribution you could call narrow casting  as opposed to broad casting.  And this is for me one of the key aspects of today's curated models.  Instead of opinion leading individuals and collectives that primarily determine a consensus  of taste supposed to fit for all, we now have a multitude of collectively led opinions that  allow for more diversity.  And this makes it possible that more different kinds of music find our attention, even if  less single track will find the attention of all of us.  Others or influences or whatever we call them play a vital role in terms of charging our  music with meaning, even if it's now more of a social meaning than sort of an expressive  meaning.  If you look at music television, you could say that it has benefited musicians who were  able to turn into visual artists as well.  On the other hand, when the internet arrived, it first of all turned music into mere audio  files.  So now everybody has to see how we can make more of them.  And besides various strategies to charge music with more meaning by way of visuals, videos,  artists, blogs, or performance aspects and so forth, the curated music recommendation  can add a social factor to this load.  It's not necessarily always only the music itself that determines what we like.  It can also be who else is listening to this music and who's talking about it and how it  is released.  So in the final analysis, it is probably irrelevant on which platform you receive your recommendations.  Maybe specific platforms will influence your influences.  And so now we should probably look at some of those platforms.  And to do this, I'm happy to have Orke at my side who prepared also a little thing which  I don't know if it works.  Will we have it?  Or?  Okay.  So we will have a bit more visual now.  And start talking about some of the later developments that you might be interested to hear about.  I'm introducing Orke.  Orke Götlich is, or would you want to introduce yourself?  You had a nice tagline.  But Orke is managing director of Fine Tunes, which is a digital distribution on service  company.  If I'm expressing that correctly based in Hamburg, which serves a lot of labels and artists to  bring their music into the general market.  And also he's on the board of the VUT, the German Independent Label Association, and at  Merlin, which is the bigger brother of that on an international level.  So hello, Orke.  Hello, everyone.  Nice for having me.  Hello, everyone.  Okay.  There is no sound yet.  Okay.  So hello, everyone.  Hello.  What is it?  Okay.  Hello, everyone.  Nice for having us here.  And we present a, I made a little presentation on kind of some buzzwords.  We're trying to reach out to what is happening to music consumption in, related to what is  curation, what is influencing, what is consuming music, and how is it changing the landscape.  And we can definitely say, of course, not only because of streaming services, but with  everything what is happening at the moment, we see different kinds of curational models  are upcoming.  And these are helping, of course, artists and especially some niche artists, depending  on the curation model in being more visible in the landscape.  Because what we are facing here in Germany usually is that mainstream media usually has  a kind of market share of 6% of niche content, even though the market share for music sold  of niche content is around like 25% of the independent related music scene.  And with the help of curational models, we can see the development from the US, of course,  coming with Pandora, with other streaming services, that these kind of numbers of reach  out of independent music is kind of getting not even up to the 25% I was just talking  about is just even going much more higher, up to 40%, where, of course, established artists  are being less visible in certain curational systems, which we want to talk about now.  So I had prepared one question that was directed in sort of towards the idea that curated models  might help independent artists or unknown artists better than algorithms, which might  relate to sort of something that is called the filter bubble as well.  So that strong things get usually enforced by something like algorithms.  I'm sure the second part of the music recommendation session will be having some ideas about that.  And you actually had some market research towards that about a recent release that basically  said, yes, it is sort of more important to be in editorial systems, which are curated  in terms of streaming services, what we are talking about now, rather than the algorithm-based  stuff.  Did I get that right?  We can definitely see a slide of where editorial-based systems like, for example, iTunes or even  editorial-based streaming services like WIMP and others where the release gets presented  to the audience is, of course, much more interesting for newcomer bands because then they get a  visibility which they usually are not getting.  When it's getting more to the human and social factors, so sharing, then we see lots of,  of course, already known habits like people are listening to music they known for years  and which is quite common, so it is really interesting that a mixture between the human  and social and, of course, the user-based sharing is needed for getting both effects  for newcomers and for established bands.  It is much easier as we all can see with the Daft Punk example where, of course, everybody  is listening to it, whether it's a 50-year-old or a 70-year-old.  One thing I came across in the preparation for this session was a study done by Nielsen  Music, which is sort of a more industry-related organization, as I understand, who were looking  at the discovery of music and the conversion of discovery into actual consumption, meaning  in that regard, probably even buying of downloads or CDs.  They still find the direct recommendation by radio is very important, but that's not  so much what we talk about, but also recommendations by friends to be very effective, which relates  to sort of a, I think, a relation of trust that is necessary to give the final impact  for somebody to say, okay, I'll give it my attention, not because the starting page of  my streaming service says so, but because my friend Oka, who's always had the best new  music tips, has recommended it.  So we tried and find out, as I understand, they didn't really have figures for that.  How important, for example, inside Spotify it is to have the social recommendation, but  I think in general there is a trend that this is a huge sort of factor in the consumption  nowadays, the possibility to get, I don't know, everybody in your friends or whatever  lists you have sort of sorted by way of their music preferences.  And in that regard, there's like two services that will probably soon roll out.  We could look at it for a moment.  You've actually been in Austin, I think, presented by Beats, the ominous new venture  which employed Ian Rogers of Topspin and Trent Reznor as sort of figureheads for their new  music service, which basically is going to be, yeah, what?  I mean, just another streaming service because they just bought one streaming service, which  then of course has the kind, as a new aspect, like a curated model where they are really  putting together more than 1,000 influencers who are preparing playlists, but this is especially  when I saw it, it was nothing else than which we can already see on several other streaming  services already being done by, for example, Spotify, creating artists playlists, looking  for influencers, whether they are actors or they are musicians and they are preparing  all the lists, which now of course Beats is trying to somehow combine with the brand they  already have with the headphones, Beats of Dr. Dre.  And this is of course where professional curation and this kind of cross curation, we always  speak about cross marketing, but it's a bit more like cross curation.  Get me some testimonials which are liking my product, in this case the headphones, they  are also presented on the streaming service and therefore people might get more attached  and more easy to listen to some music because I always wanted to know what Dr. Dre is listening  to, but I am not too convinced of this kind of model at the moment.  Well, it seems like primarily a money heavy investment scheme where you buy a lot of endorsements  in the end, so nothing new technically, maybe Twitter music, the other sort of as of now  only available in the English language countries, I understand, service might have more of an  impact, I don't know, did we have any screenshots for that?  We don't.  Twitter is launching or has launched in the US and UK and some other countries a service  where you can directly access music recommendations as far as they are done on YouTube, Spotify  and iTunes, I believe, directly embedded into a Twitter environment where you can see what  your friends are posting from these name channels or get the usual kind of popular now analysis  of traffic in that direction.  I believe that's going to be quite influential, but as of now not available in Germany, so  we might look at some.  We always have, of course, this kind of problem that kind of new services which are upcoming  in the English speaking countries are coming here very late for several reasons, mostly  because of licensing reasons, and this is, of course, somehow to be seen very crucial  because newcomers and artists which are upcoming who want to tour in Germany or are young bands  which want to get known via touring and are not really represented in those kind of services  because they are just not available in Germany, and this is definitely something where young  and newcomer bands in the other countries do have it much more easy.  It's much more easy for them in other countries than here in Germany.  So maybe we should also talk about another service so far not available here while we're  on that topic.  That would be turntable FM.  I think there was just about one of the images on the screen.  I learned yesterday that this is an instance of gamification.  It's at work there besides other stuff.  In Germany you can access a sound drop app on Spotify that has some aspects of this.  In a nutshell, would you like to explain how turntable FM works?  I mean, it's just like presenting records even in a mixed way to audience which can  go into your room and which can listen to different DJs in this kind of surrounding.  Everybody can open up a room.  Everybody can open up a room, invite people, or people can, even if you make the room public,  can go into the room and somebody can play the records.  Even more DJs can present records.  So there are up to five people being able to present records to their friends.  So it's a bit like meeting up in the Keller room with old vinyl records and everybody  is playing a vinyl and everybody is recommending something to the other.  Something that you love if you love having avatar of yourself.  And the publicity can then say, oh, I like the track.  I don't like the track.  Of course there are possibilities.  You just can listen to the stream or you are able, of course, to download it somewhere  at some stores.  To a certain degree I find this kind of model not ultimately desirable because it employs  sort of extra effects to get attention for music.  We talked about sort of an economy of attention which is today very important that people  not only look at the financial gains, the immediate ones, but first of all need the  attention which makes it sort of very open to all concepts that are employing non-musical  or specific musical strategies.  Like things have to be spectacular, very sort of gamey and all that which is not suitable  for all kinds of music.  So I think that's always something where the need for disruption is getting bigger in all  this.  So I prefer basically other aspects, I guess, of curated models which we're getting the  two minute sign.  I don't know, we should maybe shortly mention Shuffle FM because it is here which is...  I mean Shuffle FM is very nice because it's more of a kind of source where all blocks  are aggregated into one source indifferent and we saw it on the screen, sort of indifferent  genres and everybody can listen up to the genre.  You feel very interested in and you can listen to new music which has been put on some blocks.  But this is of course something where you're not curated by friends in this case, it's  curation by all blocks of the world and it is by popularity.  So the more one track got posted into blocks, the more visibility it is in Shuffle FM.  It's a kind of hype machine, same like of a model, maybe looking a bit more interesting  and getting the music from different sources as well, of course using YouTube as a kind  of source, using not only SoundCloud or in-stream possibilities.  As I understand for you, YouTube itself is also quite important as an income stream now  already for music or does it work?  Yes, definitely it is.  And I mean what we really have to see is the kind of, we see that the user is getting more  and more of a distributor which is why I call it the kind of distribuser which we need to  a certain extent to get people listening to music they are not aware of yet.  And this is of course with the help of all the different streaming models, with the help  of different even algorithmic curated models, you can see what has been shared, what is  flowing in the net and by popularity or by human interaction, you can see different  kind of music which is definitely a big fear for public broadcasters especially in the  radio scenario because the radio is so programmed in a stiff way that of course you are just  listening to programmed kind of playlists which in the end are not curated at all anymore.  Unless you are listening to Byte FM.  Unless you are listening to Byte FM and Christian is working at Byte FM which is a nice radio  channel by the way.  But therefore we see a kind of really come back of curated models which have been in  the past the radio stations.  And the radio stations because I talked to some public broadcasters in Germany just recently  they are not really being aware of becoming totally useless in maybe few years.  Okay, so I think we have to stop here as I understand.  So thank you.  I hope it wasn't too boring.  Thank you very much.  There is like a 15 minute break.  Oh you are going to announce the break in the next session.  Thank you Christian and Oke.  Thank you.
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