Unexpected Things: Guy Capitalizing On The Concept Of Music SEO By Recording 100 Songs A Day
from the this-modern-world dept
There's an incredible story that recently played on On the Media's awesome off-shoot TLDR podcast, talking about a guy who basically spends all of his free time writing and recording songs on pretty much every topic imaginable, and then uploading them to Spotify and iTunes, just in case someone is magically looking for a song about any particular topic. He's already recorded 14,000 songs, and says last year he made about $23,000 from royalties. Many of the songs seem quirky, and I'm not sure many people would consider them to be any good, but that's not really the point. The point is to have some music on pretty much any topic.The more I thought about this, I realized this is yet another unique outcome of the modern digital era. In our Sky is Rising report from a few years ago, one of things we noted was the massive explosion in books (mostly ebooks), but we carefully noted that many of them were these odd automated productions, pulling feeds of information and releasing them in book form. That kind of thing is designed to be created cheaply and never sell many copies, but still might be incredibly useful for the 2 or 3 people who need exactly what's in that book. If you can produce enough things like that, perhaps it's worthwhile.
And, with digital music becoming so common, it's not such a crazy idea to basically try to thrive on search engine optimizing (SEO'ing) music searches. I say this as someone who has created Spotify playlists about trains, bananas and (just last week) "the ABCs" for my son. As I was setting those up, I thought about just how incredibly different the world my son will grow up in is than what everyone else has experienced. When he says, "I want to hear songs about trains!" it's actually not that difficult to do exactly that. This goes beyond just what many people thought the rise of digital music would bring about, which is the breakdown of the need for "albums" as people move to singles, but the opportunity to create songs on a theme or topic for those people who are looking for it. There may not be that many people actually searching for any such particular song, but if you can make enough of them, covering enough topics that when someone needs just any song on a particular topic, there's now an opportunity to do that.
This isn't "the future of music" or anything of that sort. It's just one of those wonderful, tangential things enabled by our digital world, filling a need that is actually quite useful for some, in a way that really wasn't possible not too long ago.
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Filed Under: itunes, music, new things, search, seo, songwriting, tldr
Companies: spotify
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Re:
Troll, meet Projector.
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Which had me wondering, why would the troll be so offended by this? Then it occurred to me--this level of production requires a tremendous amount of effort, which is obviously offensive to his entitlement-minded sensibilities. The thought that anyone would work that hard to make a living is terrifying to him.
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Re: Re: Re:
One would think people commenting on a tech website would understand the definition of trolling, which is participating in online discussion for the sole purpose of irritating others, which you are poorly attempting to do. But I'll go ahead and feed you anyway.
The article presented a fascinating case, inviting numerous viewpoints. This guy is throwing everything at every wall and seeing what sticks, and this would have been practically impossible without recent technological advancements. But time is limited, so if you divide that by 14,000 songs it's safe to assume that some sacrifices in quality were necessary, as evidenced by the song samples in the TLDR podcast if you actually clicked through to hear it. These are obviously low-budget, low-production works, but thanks to technology, they are also low-cost, and Matt has turned his quantity of effort into five-figure revenues if not profits.
But anyway, since you're so fixated on copyright, I'll oblige. He's made personalized birthday recordings for presumably hundreds of different people's names. And he did this without plagiarizing the song "Happy Birthday to You" (which may fall into the public domain after a court decision, but that's another matter) or using any samples of existing sound recordings.
Paradoxically, limits breed creativity. Just look at Vine and how creative people can be with a mobile app and six seconds of video. Listen to "Short Music for Short People" on Fat Wreck Chords - 101 bands playing 30-second songs. Listen to NES music, particularly on SunSoft titles, and then read up on the limitations of the medium. To truly creative people, copyright law, Vine's six-second cap, and the NES synth aren't prohibitive; they're opportunities to push the limits of their respective media.
And what happened? Matt earned $23,000 in [copyright] royalties from iTunes and Spotify. I just wish they told us about his touring and t-shirt sales revenues...
Further, Matt's model is definitively long-term. And like some parts of the tech world, some works and creations are ahead of their time, or they can otherwise enjoy spikes in demand and popularity many years after their inception. Thus, if** Matt seeks his maximum-entitled copyright protection for his works, he can earn royalties on his creations even if it takes until the year 2042 for North West to use a sample of one of Matt's songs about poop in what turns out to be the hit single of the summer. As unlikely as that may be, Matt has already indicated that he's interested in profiting from his efforts, so copyright law effectively encourages such creative risk-taking.
And lastly, not all artists support the retroactive copyright extensions of 1998, AKA "Sonny Bono Act" or "Mickey Mouse Protection Act." Many will agree that public domain is very important to society and that works should not remain under copyright forever.
So yeah, counterpoint, I guess, if you consider your comment a point. Troll.
**Yes, "if." Copyright protection is optional, not compulsory. And yet, even that one Beatle who said "imagine no possessions" didn't just throw that into the Creative Commons.
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NOT better: "just how incredibly different the world..."
I'm not sure many people would consider them to be any good, but that's not really the point. -- OKAY, at last Mike comes out openly that the only important point is getting money any way can, all the "creative" and "artistic" interests for doing away with copyright that Mike has used are all just guff.
Weenies are always excited by "new" without understanding the how and why of the old, the practical limits and flaws, nor why business must be regulated. They just see "new" and believe it must necessarily be better.
12:36:21[n-297-3]
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I guess the enlightened ones over at google are too busy building robots to manage their core product.
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Re:
It's one dude, filling a need. Not a content farm.
RapGenius is another group of idiots who are screwing up search results for everyone else.
Uh, totally different. This is a guy actually creating music. Filling in gaps where there is no music that fits.
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O'rly?
I think that if you are holding this up as a great example of things advancing, then you have already lost the argument. 14,000 quirky songs isn't going to make the world a better place, it doesn't advance us much. Rather, it's just more "water" in the sea of noise drowning out the good stuff.
He's not trying to fill the gaps of anything, he is just trying to profit from abusing the system. If pictures of dog sh-t worked, he would have taking pictures of 14,000 piles of poop. Instead, he created what are likely 14,000 pile of poop songs.
If this is the Utopia you were telling us all about for years, you can keep it.
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New capabilities
Long, long ago, it cost real money to do something like that. Money that would have been way out of my league. But today, I just got on Amazon, some lyrics sites and Google, searched out some songs with her name in them, bought the individual MP3s for her (and me), packaged them up in a CD, then bought the MP3s on Christmas Eve, with an email showing up in her inbox with instructions on how to access them from anywhere.
She loved it.
Sometimes I luck out!
Here's the [eclectic] song list:
Sara - Bob Dylan
Sara - Fleetwood Mac
Sara - Starship
Sara Smile - Hall & Oates
Sarah Brown Eyes - (from the musical Ragtime)
Sarah - Thin Lizzy
My Sara - Thin Lizzy
Sarah In The Summer - Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
This Is Sarah's Song - Glen Campbell
Brave - Sara Bareilles
Once Upon Another Time - Sara Bareilles
It was really Fleetwood Mac that planted the idea. The rest was just gravy. And I had a blast doing it.
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Re: New capabilities
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Re: New capabilities
Sara - Fleetwood Mac
Sara - Starship
Sara Smile - Hall & Oates
Sarah Brown Eyes - (from the musical Ragtime)
Sarah - Thin Lizzy
My Sara - Thin Lizzy
Sarah In The Summer - Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
This Is Sarah's Song - Glen Campbell
Brave - Sara Bareilles
Once Upon Another Time - Sara Bareilles
There's also a really good song called "Sarah" by the band The Slackers...
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Re: New capabilities
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Re:
Think about it. 100 songs a day... the guy only has maybe 1000 minutes a day to work - so 10 minutes or less per song, from creation to recording and then publishing That pretty much means schlock, spewed out 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can imagine the "quality" here.
Welcome to Mike's utopia of "more", and watch out, the sky is rising (or probably leaving for a more reasonable planet).
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A handful of purchases would be expected if people were just buying them for the novelty factor, the fact that he's scored $23K in royalties however suggests that even if the quality isn't the best plenty of people still think they're good enough to purchase, which is all that matters.
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Its a step in the right direction, to which the RIAA is noticeably pissed off about and has even their chairman crying for more regulation.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/195107-googles-100-million-notices
- Betting this is filled with Freelance, Non associated to Record label work. After all the dream is for RIAA and google to be side by side. Can't have independent artists make money :P
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Problem Is "Free"
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Problem is "free"
One of the more annoying trends I've found is not so much content farms as passive and useless content aggregators (i.e. doing the same, only with Google linking). I'm searching for a specific error message text, half the occurences are websites that simple drag in a huge list of links to ral content containing that specific text. However the link is the searched-for text, plus reams of other links. Google finds this as a match, presents it as one of the early choices, I click, they get an ad payout.
If the person were producing some value-add, great; Tom's Hardware, Petri - great. A collection of lists of errors and links to other conversations - waste of my time and Google's service.
(Worse yet, is running across a dozen sites that have stolen(?) and replicated the exact same discussion thread on a topic.)
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The good old days.....?
Is there just too much choice out there today or am I getting old?
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Created a new site
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