Communiqué

Musedot and the Future

The following is back story information about Musedot that DeAngela requested from me and which I thought might be good to share with the rest of the family.

Musedot Mission: To use Internet technology to help you find music that you would like if only you knew about it.

Is Musedot a Social Music Network?: “Social Music Network” is an interesting concept and one put forth by DeAngela, however it’s not quite an accurate description of Musedot. Musedot is a music discovery tool (albeit a very crude one), and over time will develop into a suite of much more sophisticated and complimentary tools, all focused on connecting users to music they don’t know about as the primary goal, and as a secondary goal providing resources and functionality to aid in integrating this music into their lives. I’m being intentionally ambiguous about the secondary goal because I don’t want to give away too much strategy at this point. Recently, I’ve become especially fond of the Google model- which I didn’t know that much about or think about when conducting the research and development for the Musedot project. Now that I’ve done some homework on the history of Google, it is apparent there are some interesting similarities between the two stories. I’m not in any way comparing myself to the founders of Google, they’re brilliant computer science guys and I’m definitely not that. However, the similarities in the genesis of these two tools is worth noting, at least to my mind, and I feel some of the Google strategies are worth emulating.(*)

At any rate, Google started as a search engine and has continuously created other tools that tend to be synergistic with the core search utility- Google Maps, Gmail, Google News, etc. The plan is for Musedot to develop in a similar fashion. Musedot will always have some social networking aspects, such as the ability to share a recommendation in some form, but I don’t envision it ever being a full-blown social networking site along the lines of myspace or facebook. Let them, or their future replacements, do that.

Revolution: Frank’s Agenda?: This is where some of the aspects of my personal goals seem to be easily confused with my analysis of the music industry and the impact Internet technology will have on this industry going forward. Internet technology is both causing and facilitating revolutionary changes in the music business and has been doing so for years. This has absolutely nothing to do with me, other than the fact that I made some pretty accurate predictions about how things would play out and am continuing to make predictions. Primarily because of the advent of compressed file formats like mp3 and the rise of peer-to-peer networks like the original Napster, the music distribution eco-system has been experiencing some major upheaval and re-organization (I like the term creative destruction myself, which was coined by my favorite economist, Josef Schumpeter). If you don’t want to take my word for it, just ask the RIAA.

The transformations in music distribution that we’ve seen thus far are a prelude to what we’ll see in other aspects of the music business once the technology is able to displace people/organizations/business models in the same way the peer-to-peer/mp3 and related technology displaced (and continues to displace) the people/organizations/business models associated with getting CDs manufactured and into the hands of customers. Think Sun distributors, Tower Records, your former local record store owner, etc. I’m simply asserting that Internet technology will have the same revolutionary affects on how we not only physically *acquire* the music we listen to, but how we found out about it in the first place. That’s it. It seems like a rather safe prediction from my perspective and I’m willing to stake my future on it.

The prediction itself is even less radical if you consider that this is already happening to a small degree. Sites like lastfm.com, pandora.com, and others all share commons goals in terms of exposing users to music. The difference lies in the approaches, and I believe that will eventually make all the difference.

Revolution: How does Frank see them tied together? Whenever you have revolution that generates opportunity. In fact, that’s really what a revolution is- an opportunity generating mechanism for people who didn’t have any or at least not the kind they wanted. As I’ve stated, the revolution has already started, I just want to lead them to where it is they want to go. This will be done by organizing a family business developed to carry out the mission. Let’s call this entity Musedot Inc. to keep things simple. The fact is there is no way in hell I can do anything significant on my own, so the building of the family business is critical.

The overarching ideal of Internet technology disrupting and creatively destroying the marketing and advertising aspects of the music business is what I previously referred to as the Movement, but I was basically using the organization I’m trying to build around Musedot interchangeably with this phenomenon as a whole. In my mind they are synonymous, but aside from my personal goals the Movement is a term meant to evoke a broad zeitgeist, not a specific person, organization or technology. Hopefully, Musedot will be one of many organizations involved in leading the Movement, so a person can actively participate simply by joining or collaborating with Musedot Inc. The things that we’ll try to accomplish will be revolutionary just by their very nature, because of the potential impact on established companies, behaviors, business models, etc. However, the only thing people in Musedot Inc. will really need to stay focused on is the mission.

What Makes it Different from MySpace?: MySpace is a social networking site and Musedot is a music discovery tool. The goals are different although there is some overlap of course, and there is some overlap in the means as well. For instance both MySpace and Musedot might enable you to share some sort of information with people you consider your “friends”. Lots of other sites do that as well, but that certainly doesn’t make them the equivalent of MySpace.

What is the Future sans MySpace?: Musedot will be resource neutral, meaning it might aggregate information from a number of sources and those sources may include MySpace and they might not.

Legal Ramifications?: No more than any other Web information aggregation/analysis technology, like your garden variety search engine.

Frank Note: I think that just as the term “search engine” entered the lexicon, some kind of term to describe the category of applications like Musedot will have to enter the lexicon as well. I generally use “music discovery tool” because that makes sense to me, but it’s entirely possible that will not prove to be popular with the masses.