You’ve always thought outside of the box in terms of presenting 30 Seconds to Mars. Your marketing projects and the different ways you’ve used the Internet really represented new ways of promoting a band. Did you know from the beginning that you were going to use these alternative avenues to publicize the band?

Yes; we tend to look for things that have been tread upon just a little less than others. I think that it’s exciting to do things that haven’t been done so many times before or not at all. And it keeps it interesting for us and I would hope the audience as well. And, uh, it’s a way to deepen the conversation with our audience around the world and to have a stronger connection as well.

Does this harken back to your early days when you were listening to bands and hoping to somehow meet your heroes? Did you ever think, “I’d love to go and meet Jimmy Page or hang out with the Who?”

Photo credit: nicogenin on Flickr

I think for me, some of those bands – whether it was Zeppelin or Pink Floyd or the Who – they certainly had an idea of community that went along with their bands. And I always responded to that. I was always interested in a very active participation from the audience and the bands. We’ve always been really open and engaged with our listeners.

Does that give-and-take with your fans truly inform your music? Or is it more of a social networking type of situation?

It’s definitely informed us; it’s inspired us. And I think the interactivity on This Is War is really a huge part of the album. The Summit that we did, the very first one in Los Angeles, was so encouraging that we ended up doing eight of them around the world. And then eventually a digital version as well.

Can you explain what the Summit is?

For people who don’t know what the Summit is, it was just really a collaboration between our audience and the band. And we invited people to participate and record on the new album. It made a big impact on This Is War.

Where did this Summit interactive material end up on the album?

Yeah, they appear on every single song except for two or three.

Another tactic you undertook was a live chat on MySpace. What were the results of that?

It was inspiring; it was exciting. We enjoyed it a lot and we’ve done it now and I’m not so sure we would repeat that but maybe in a different way we would build upon that idea. It was definitely an interesting thing to do and we learned a lot from it.

If the band had come out back in the days of vinyl, how do you think they might have been perceived? Could 30 Seconds to Mars have created the same musical profile in a pre-Internet world?

Uh, not in the way that we’re doing now. We certainly utilize new technologies and we’re able to further some of these ideas and make these projects work in a way they wouldn’t have been able to in a different age. We’re takin’ full advantage of the digital age here and it’s exciting to use some of the new technologies to help implement creative ideas.

Read the full Steven Rosen‘s interview at UG!

Ten years after Napster tried to make a deal with the record labels to digitally distribute their content, the record labels have found themselves dragged kicking and screaming into the late 90s, offering exactly the same thing Napster proposed. DRM for music has come and gone, having shown that it created hassles and limitations for paying customers while remaining a triviality for infringers. The recording industry’s cry of “we can’t compete with free” has been proven false, with the iTunes Music Store selling billions of dollars of digital music. These sales all happened while P2P traffic remained significant, thereby discrediting the notion that file sharing and digital music purchases are a zero sum game; that an illegal download is a lost sale. In fact, several studies have shown that heavy P2P users are among the biggest music buyers. Consumers have proven that they pay money when there is a good value for their money, even if they have a free alternative.

Napster logo

In fairness to the record companies, it is true that digital download sales have not replaced lost CD sales. But it is unclear to what extent that this is related to piracy. Consumers, especially young ones, have many more forms of media — games, internet, DVDs — jockeying for their attention than at any time before. Perhaps the era of the long form CD has simply run its course.

Much like a doomsday cult’s members have to figure out what to do when their prophecy fails to come true, we are left to envision the future of the music industry now that the bogeymen of technology have failed to materialize. The recording industry is free to innovate without the fears of the past impeding its imagination and vision. Novel distribution models such as blanket site licenses, new relationships between artists and labels such as three-sixty deals, new forms of product packaging such as the iTunes LP are all indications that the music industry has hope for the future.

What will that future look like? Technology has driven down the cost of recording and producing a professional-quality album or single, making the dream of creating music more accessible than ever before. The internet, with social networking, YouTube, and internet radio make marketing and distributing that music equally accessible to aspiring musicians. Without the need for their recording studios or distribution networks, what is the value proposition of the major labels? How will the labels take advantage of these new tools and incorporate them into their businesses?

By Tony Berman. Originally published on M.E.L.O.N. blog. Reposted with a permission.
EAZSSHRUV46B

Then MySpace came along and blew the net apart. It had been around a few years with a modicum of success, but it wasn’t til 2005-06 that it really started to earn its corn. What was different? Well, it had a music player, for a start. That meant that bands could sign up, whack a few demos or samples up there and urls were basic and easily-searchable. The simple page also featured gig dates, release news, contact information, blogs, pictures, video and crucially the ability to add the band as one of your “friends”. Befriending a band meant nailing your colours to the mast; you were not just a fan but a mate, and you could even email the group directly. That removed the record company/webmaster/management barrier in a swathe.

MySpace Music

It reached its peak in 2006, when playcounts were still a reasonably reliable indication of how popular a band was, and before spider programs were set loose to spam as many potential friends as possible. Everyone spent hours on MySpace, adding friends, listening to music, participating. MySpace is a facilitator to bring like-minded people together and people feel incredibly passionate about their favourite acts. You had stories of bands breaking just through MySpace (all untrue, Arctic Monkeys toured their arses off before getting to the top). It was a huge story and it was essentially the first time the music industry as a whole took the internet seriously as a marketing – and sales – tool.

Now, MySpace is clunky, slow, old-fashioned, and usurped by the new kids on the block. And as everyone’s on MySpace (they still are), it’s nigh-impossible to find anything interesting without an hour-on-hour slog. Facebook’s modular customizable functionality was attractive to a net-and-tech-savvy generation, Twitter’s strangely compelling basic 140-character format is used for minute-by-minute updates by everyone from Lady Gaga to Stephen Fry. It is an instant insight into the sharp-sudden thoughts of those who create our music, and as such is somehow more valuable. When Gaga talks of a favourite designer and adds a link, she’s acting as Google for us, as a gatekeeper, an arbiter of taste. We like her style and her music so we trust her judgment.

Whose Space Is It Anyway?

Ultimately, this is what it boils down to: our bands are now performing the same role that once was the highly-guarded one only of A&R and record companies. What this has shown more than anything is that the net is impossible to navigate successfully without trusted guidance. It’s not only musicians getting in on the act, either: things with peer/self-recommending routines like Last.fm and Amazon.com are so useful because, based on our own previous preferences, they make recommendations to us that we’re free to turn down. And as our own preferences develop, so the recommendations are refined, a bit like checking friends of a particular MySpace act to see what else they were listening to.

The exciting and somewhat scary feature about the internet is that it is developing purely based on the requirements of its users, not the other way around. The implications for music are enormous: embrace it, or lose it. Technology is only useful if it is necessary for a human experience, and MySpace was the pioneer of a much wider discussion of which the ripples are still being felt.

Joe Shooman’s “Whose Space Is It Anyway?: An Unofficial Guide to the Sites That Changed the World” is available through Independent Music Press (US Amazon).

Obviously, finding a song of a favorite artist is getting easier than ever. Not only you can listen to a tune with one click directly from a search results page, now you don’t even need to type in the name of the song to find it (you can use a line from the lyrics, for example). A post on the official Google blog lists the smart new search capabilities.

Google search results example

The downsides? First of all, due to the licensing issues some of the songs will only include 30-second samples. Secondly, the service will be rolled out only in the US, so far.

There are surprising advantages though, according to the recent TechCrunch report. The blog reveals that Music Onebox will feature exclusive songs from “a number of well known artists.” Over 20 acts are said to be offering tunes that can only be found through Google search, and some of these tracks will be given away for free.

On the business side of things, Google is not working directly with record labels for licensing, but the company says that the labels approve the new feature, according to DMW . “Everybody’s been very supportive. Indeed, our business model is to improve the search experience with the help of streaming partners, which offer interesting business models of their own,” R.J. Pittman, director of product management for Google, told Reuters.

“Google is the most powerful internet partner that these music services could have,” Michael Nash, Warner Music Group’s executive vice president of digital strategy and business development, told Wired.com. “We think that it’s potentially very significant from the standpoint generating revenue and gives a big boost to legitimate digital music services.”

Now, why should bands that are not among those 20 “well known artists” care? Hypebot just reported that indie artists and labels might be able to control and improve the content of their search results with OneBox.

Says Matt Rosoff on CNet’s Digital Noise:

Eventually, artists will be able to use Lala’s platform to ensure that specific content, such as a new song, shows up in the music search results at Google… (they)  will also be able to work with Lala to sell products other than MP3 downloads through Google’s search results. For example, Lala is working on a deal with Rhino Records where users will be able to buy vinyl Joy Division records directly from Lala.

Interesting? Indeed. In any case, if you are an artist, getting your music to Lala and MySpace seems pretty essential.

By the way, the improved search results will link to bands’ websites as well.

Check out the OneBox in action.