Music Business Blog by Jason Feinberg

I just published a new post over at the PBS Mediashift Blog titled “The Year in Digital Music and Predictions for 2010″

Focuses on recent and upcoming topics such as acquisitions, direct-to-consumer, ISP tax, Spotify, analytics, and more. Would love to get input from all of you as to what you think are the key digital music moments of 2009 and what’s next.

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/12/the-year-in-digital-music-and-predictions-for-2010350.html

En route to SF for the San Francisco Music Tech conference (thanks free WiFi on Virgin flights!). I believe this is the 6th, of which I’ve been to all but one. A really great conference, some good discussions to be had, and most importantly, some great networking opps.

I cannot stress enough how these conferences have been such a key part of growing my business. Between SFMT, Bandwidth, SXSW, CMJ, Digital Music Forum, and
any others, I get more done In a few days than in a month of sending emails and phone calls. For those of you pondering the value of conferences, I can assure you the networking opps are almost always worth the price of admission.

So, if any of you will be at SF Music Tech let me know, be great to meet up and discuss all things digital music.

I had been awaiting MOG’s new All Access service for a while – the idea of a socially-charged subscription service with six million songs for $5 a month is pretty exciting.

After using it for a day (I bought the six month subscription, bringing it down to just over $4 a month) I am really digging it. There are albums from all the majors and a great selection of indies; I’ve found most of what I was looking for so far.

The playlists offer a radio feature, which allows for solid music discovery. The feature most people are talking about seems to be the artist slider, which provides the ability to decide how much variety you get in your playlists. If you have it all the way to the left (Artist Only) it will automatically add songs from the artist’s catalog to your list. The further to the right you go (Similar Artists) the more variety it adds. This offers serious customization of the music discovery feature and to what extent your playlist is randomized. Or you can simply turn radio off and it functions as a straight-ahead playlist.

So as I am thumping R. Kelly’s new album (after listening to the Dead Kennedys “greatest hits” I couldn’t bring myself to buy) I am definitely feeling good about this service. But as a digital marketing professional, I’ve personally felt good about a number of streaming services that haven’t ever lived up to their expectations. Streaming has always been plagued by the inability to provide “everything everywhere” service like downloadable content (mostly) offers. But as an industry, we’re getting there.

The key to survival here is keeping the price low, adding a mobile service (coming in the next few months), and continuing to offer innovative user experiences.

More here: http://mog.com/