"Devices, Deals & Music" Panel

Musicians, forget about baring your soul. Jay Frank, senior VP of music strategy for Country Music Television, opened today's SF MusicTech conference by admonishing recording artists to adapt their music to new media - not to wait for new media to adapt to their music. At a lively panel discussion called "Deals, Devices, and Music," attendees at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco's Japantown learned just what that might mean.

Moderated by Dave Ulmer, Motorola's senior director of multimedia, the panel of four mobile-device execs explained how they aim to deliver compelling musical experiences on cell phones. One collects and distributes royalties on lyrics delivered online, another delivers music streams. But the action is clearly in games and social media. Tim O'Brien of Tapulous described his company's iPhone app, a game that lets players compete at tapping out rhythms while listening to their favorite songs. Roy Kosuge of Heatwave Interactive talked about Platinum Live, which simulates the life of an up-and-coming hiphop star. He's busy courting big-time artists who can attract and rally a community of players.

The audience for games is huge, Ulmer noted, especially casual games that are "part of breakfast, lunch, and dinner" because they don't require much attention to play. And these games become even more attractive in a social context, where people play with friends. Last Valentines Day, he pointed out, Facebook played the role of an online 1-800-FLOWERS by delivering 4 million virtual roses. The roses themselves didn't matter - they didn't exist, after all. It was all about giving and receiving social strokes.

In this regard, the Tapulous model looks especially ingenious. "We'll debut a new song - something the users have never heard - by alerting them that we'll play it in two minutes," O'Brien said. "So they're all chatting about it, wondering who has heard of it and what it sounds like. Then we run the song, and they play the game. Then they're back to chatting about it." The music is presented in a social context that strengthens the audience's impression from the first moment they hear it, and then reinforces that impression afterward.

All of which leaves Ulmer, at least, upbeat about an industry that appears to be caught in a death spiral. "You may hear that the music industry is crashing and burning," he said, "but music consumption is higher than ever. Standard pop radio is sucking, but Spotify is taking off. Music is doing quite well."