On Saturday, we pointed out the possibility that a team has won the Netflix Prize, and why this is good news for musicians.

To recap: recommendation systems will increasingly become a way for music fans to discover emerging and niche musicians.

Also last week, we took a look at what the Big 4 record labels are doing to take advantage of the fundamental shifts in the music business. They focused a lot on “music discovery.” So, getting listeners to discover new music is one of the keys to success in the music commerce frontier, no matter what level you are at.

It may be helpful, then, to think of the basic business model like this:

1) Discovery

2) CwF + RtB = $$$

The second step is a concept coined by Michael Masnick, though I noted that even the Big 4 are following a plan very similar in spirit. For musicians and labels to be successful, they need to Connect with Fans and give them a Reason to Buy. But before they can do that, the fans have to find out about them.

Enter recommendation systems

Recommendation systems are improving every day, as the team that reached the goal in the Netflix Prize illustrate. But, as Paul Lamere put it, recommendation systems are broken. The most commonly-used recommendation engine (collaborative filtering) still keeps people stuck in the “head” of the distribution curve (as opposed to making their way toward the “long tail“), because it bases its recommendations on user behavior. A lot of people buy Harry Potter, it gets recommended more often, more people buy Harry Potter from those recommendations, and so on.

Recommendation systems that use the content of the music itself rather than user behavior offer a lot of potential for pulling in more relevant recommendations from all parts of the long tail. Pandora uses content-based recommendation to drive its playlists.

Social tagging provides another way for collaborative filtering systems to recommend more niche and lesser-known products to listeners. Last.fm has probably one of the most robust recommendation engines for a purely music-based site. It offers the ability to tag on all levels: single tracks, albums, artists, even users themselves.

Taking advantage of recommendation systems

For the independent musician, advice for taking advantage of the opportunities that recommendation systems offer is not too different from advice for marketing in general or search engine optimization.

1) Get your music onto sites that offer recommendations for listeners. Last.fm is just one example; it’s very easy and free to start a page for yourself or your band. Heck, you may already be on the site since Last.fm pulls a ton of data from other sites, desktop music players, and mobile devices (in which case, it’s just as easy to ‘claim’ your artist page).

2) Tag it, tag it, tag it. You want listeners with similar tastes to find your music – if you tag it with “Britney Spears” or “Eminem” thinking you can game the system, you won’t be pulling in people who may potentially like your music. Use relevant tags: tags that describe the music, instrumentation, genre, similar artists, etc.

3) Just as with general marketing and search engine optimization, make sure the text (bio, artist description, influences, etc) on any site you have your music is relevant, accurate, and descriptive. More and more, recommendation systems are crawling the web and pulling semantic information from band pages to incorporate with other data.

I’ve only covered the very basics for now. In the future, recommendation engine optimization may be just as important as search engine optimization for musicians. For those artists who haven’t thought about harnessing the power of recommendation systems to bring in new fans, hopefully this post has inspired you to get started.

(image courtesy of Telstar Logistics)

By now, you may have heard the news that Timbaland has been sued for unauthorized sampling.  The highly successful and influential producer allegedly incorporated large portions of a chiptune-styled track called “Acidjazzed Evening,” produced by Finnish musician Janne Suni and later remixed by Norwegian musician Glenn Rune Gallefoss into SID format. It is Gallefoss who has filed the complaint on June 12, 2009 in the US District Court, Southern District of Florida. No answer has been filed yet.

The complaint pulls no punches. It alleges that Timbaland used large chunks of Gallefoss’s recording without permission in the Nelly Furtado track “Do it.” It further alleges that he admitted to copying the recording, and even includes some choice quotes from Timbaland regarding the situation, including this one from a 2007 MTV interview:

“It makes me laugh. The part I don’t understand, the dude is trying to act like I went to his house and took it from his computer. I don’t know him from a can of paint. I’m 15 years deep. That’s how you attack a king? You attack moi? Come on, man. You got to come correct. You the laughing stock. People are like, ‘You can’t be serious.’”

At first glance, it seems odd that this dispute hasn’t been settled by now and has made it to court. It’s possible that is a result of the arrogance displayed by Timbaland as above. It’s not unlikely, considering a similar remark by a lawyer for Universal Finland in a Finnish case related to the same dispute. “In case that the artist decides to pursue the matter further, it’s on him to go to America and confront them with the local use of law. It will require a considerable amount of faith and, of course, money.” In other words, what are you gonna do kid, sue us?

Well, that’s exactly what happened, and now Timbaland and his record label are in a worse position. This could have been settled reasonably, considering that yes, Gallefoss probably wanted to avoid the costs of pursuing this in a foreign legal system and probably would have been happy with a decent-sized check and his name in the credits.

The complaint is seeking damages in the form of sales of the song. This includes the 8 million copies of the album “Loose it” (where the song appeared) sold world-wide. It includes sales of the single itself, which while not as popular as other singles off the album (Promiscuous and Maneater, for example), still managed to break the top 100 charts in several countries.  It also includes the rest of the uses of the song: DVD’s, videos, licensing in advertising, TV, and film. The song’s profits are nothing to sneeze at.

But even more, the complaint calls for a permanent injunction and impounding. That means all the copies left on the shelves are pulled, and any in the record label’s inventory are destroyed.

The threat of any of those happening gives Gallefoss far more leverage now. Any settlement the record label would try to negotiate now would have to be many times higher. Woops.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of this case are the issues it involves. Taking away the identities of the players, this is about sampling. What Timbaland did is no different than what thousands of unsigned artists do every day, and what many hip-hop artists have done since the birth of that genre. Many who see sampling as a legitimate practice (myself included) argue that sampling should not be considered copyright infringement, at least on a limited basis. At the very least, it should be afforded some protection as fair use.

But this type of case does not serve as a good example to further that type of argument. Here we have the arrogant superstar who has taken the work of an obscure and small-time artist and used it without credit in a song that sold millions of copies. Not only that, he has publicly shown disdain toward the artist.

Many sampling artists develop the opposite attitude. They realize that they are using someone else’s work in their own music. Most give credit to the original artists. They appreciate the original artist’s contributions and by using their work hope to keep the original music alive in a new form. As one scholar put it, they sample not because it’s convenient, but because it’s beautiful.

Perhaps the main difference between these artists and Timbaland is this. The struggling artists who sample would be more than happy to give a cut of their profits to the original artists. They just don’t have any profits. They either create what they feel is a legitimate artform for the love of music, or they simply haven’t gotten to the level of success where they can afford to clear samples. Timbaland is not a struggling artist. He earns an enviable living off his music. There is no excuse for him not to clear samples, or share part of his earnings with the original artists whose work he built off of. At the very least, give them credit, don’t call them ‘laughing stocks.’

Image courtesy of SkullKid