First Tuesday is back with a band Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Is it dot com mania all over again - oooh errr? Well after the domain Boo.com was bought, perhaps it was inevitable that First Tuesday should reappear.

Tonight was the resumption of First Tuesday in London and I was one of the 75 guests at its inaugural event held at the Soho Hotel. "Music to my Ears" was an event proclaiming it would reveal the next music website hits.

True to its reputation, it drew a big name to open the event in the form of Patrick Vien, Chairman and CEO of Warner Music International. Sadly he read a prepared statement explaining why Warner Music was hip and with it (my summary). Partnerships would be the key to future success and he outlined 4 tests that any potential partner had to be pass. One venture he did loiter upon was Rhino TV which draw revenue from ads, sponsorships, downloads and merchandising. It was an important section in one respect -Patrick made a point of saying this was their first direct to consumer play.

Pandora Music was represented in the form of Paul Brown, the Internation MD, and he gave a great insight into their operations. Each track is subject to 20 minutes of analysis by one of 48 trained musician analysts, who score it against 400 attributes which is the basis of the recommendation engine. I confess to some scepticism to Paul's point that the analysts would score statistical consistently between them, but when you adding 15,000 tracks a months to an existing database of 500,000 I guess a few shortcuts are necessary. Recapping on their business which generates revenues from ads, commerce and most recently through subscriptions, he may almost no mention of their current struggle with the US royalty regime. He did however mention that Pandora will be introducing classical music into their repertoire in October.

But then onto the 4 firms they choose to spotlight which were
Not presenting, but one company I spoke to and worth looking at is Chilirec which is a personal internet recording facility that records thousands of radio stations simultaneously. The service offers the user and endless directory of personal music and media files to download. In essence, you start the service recording, come back later and after one day it has recorded 50,000 songs; 300,000 songs after a week and 1 million songs after a month. They insist this is legal because it is a personal radio recording. Tracks may be downloaded and are all indexed using the music meta data from the radio stations. Tracks will have some DJs talking over them, but if that affects your listening, there are up to 2 other version of the same song stored for you. I'm going to check it out - it seems to good to be true.


First Tuesday have 7 more events planned for the next 12 months. Keep it real kids!

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posted by John Wilson @ 10:02 PM Permanent Link newsvine reddit



2 Comments:

At 8:12 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey! Cool Post! I didn't even know about Jamendo. That IS a great quote; right on point.

I didn't mean to say Warner is giving their catalogue away for free, but that it's free for consumers. Although, I see the confusion.

Thanks for the tip!

 
At 10:32 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Good summary of the night, thanlks for the mention
Steve CEO We7

 

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