PART DUEX

The discussion features prominent hip-hop bloggers such as Meka Udoh (2 Dope Boyz), Dallas Penn ( Dallas Penn & the Internets Celebrities), Jason Reynolds (), Frank William Miller Junior (FWMJ of rappersiknow.com ) and Casey Rae-Hunter (Future of Music Coalition) talking about why they do what they do and what they’re looking for to create compelling content.

These dedicated champions of hip-hop will address questions like: “How do I get attention for my project?” “What should I be thinking about in terms of web presence?” “What kinds technologies exist to help me do all this?”FMC will be on hand to talk about how policy shapes what the hip-hop community does, where it goes and what it says on the online.

FMC also present information that bloggers, artists, and fans can use to protect their right to free speech and entrepreneurship via the open Internet.

This is such a dope idea…lets keep it solid, historically artists never caked up soley off just the music. Merch has always been a big source of revenue for artists.

What do you think?

Former president of the storied Rykodisc label and founder of Slow River Records, George Howard is an accomplished musician, producer, executive, and educator. He currently holds posts as Assistant Professor of Management at Loyola University, Instructor and lecturer at Berklee College of Music’s BerkleeMusic program, and editor and frequent contributor to Artists House. He is the author of Getting Signed! An Insider’s Guide to the Record Industry, and Publishing 101, both aimed at educating aspiring artists in how to succeed in a music industry game that at times seems rigged against them.

A panel from the 140 Characters Conference moderated by Ted Cohen & with Steve Greenberg of S-Curve Records, Syd Schwartz of EMI & musician Matthew Ebe.

Props to Bruce

Spotted at Hypebot

Conduit Labs’ Music Pets app for Facebook may look cute, but it could have tangible ramifications for how music is discovered and sold in the future.

The goal of Music Pets is to entertain a virtual pet by training it to like the music you like, then using points to send the pet out to find more music to add to your collection. It sounds silly, but this cartoon-ish virtual world includes every element of the real-world music experience: getting recommendations, deciding whether you like songs, collecting music, and going over to your friends’ “houses” to play songs from your collection, which, as with just about everything else, requires that you expend points.

As with similar games, you can get everything you want for your pet and your music collection for free, so long as you have the time to add them to your pet’s training regimen by engaging in repetitive, somewhat amusing activities, including a Plinko-style game that has you trying to bounce balls onto all of the letters in a band’s name. Powering up for more points without spending lots of time requires that you pay up in real money, which is something many people simply don’t do for digital music in other contexts.

Conduit Labs passes on a percentage of revenue to labels, which then pass some of that along to artists and publishers. Is it possible that little furry cartoon characters from Tamagotchi-land will succeed where industry heavyweights have failed: in convincing kids to pay for music?

So far, the Music Pet Facebook app has drawn over a million users since its launch about a month ago, and the company recently inked a deal with the biggest record label in the world, Universal Music Group, to complement its healthy selection of independent labels (Beggars Group, Domino, Downtown and Modular) in Music Pet as well as its other games, Loudcrowd, which launched at SXSW last year and Super Dance. Rather than selling music at a specific price, the company keeps price vague, because users earn music through a combination of effort and time.

“The public perception of the value of a song is very skewed and has little to do with its actual price,” Conduit Labs founder Nabeel Hyatt. “We believe offering fun, social, interactive experiences with music is the best way to monetize.”

If the idea of grown men and women discovering and collecting music using a cute little avatar sounds absurd, you probably haven’t watched Jesse Schell’s DICE talk. If you don’t have the 20 minutes it takes to watch the whole thing, it can pretty much be summed up in one sentence: In the future, he claims, everything will be a game. It’s either a horrifying Orwellian vision of the future or an indication that we’ll all be more amused in the years to come, depending on how you look at it.

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/virtual-worlds-real-money-can-social-games-solve-musics-woes?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29#ixzz0ksJf8bLu

n the real world, people typically discover music through other people, give it a listen, decide whether to acquire it, and then take it out for a spin every once in a while and maybe play the song for friends.

Music Pets replicates all of that, except that it makes every stage into a game. If Schell is right, this is a template for how the kids of today will purchase music tomorrow.

Here’s how it works:

My virtual panda went to the mayor’s house to play him a song. You can listen to music together with real friends in the game.

You can buy coins for $5 to $100 or earn them within the game. Part of this money is used to pay the labels.

The post office, for some reason, is where you buy food for your pet. Maybe in virtual worlds, everybody orders everything off of a virtual internet — who knows.

Now that my panda is a level-2 music pet, it’s capable of eating food I buy at the post office, which restores its energy.

Now that I have trained my panda, it’s ready to go out and fetch me some new tunes.

The training segments are actually sort of fun. By bouncing balls against the letters in a band’s name, I’ve trained my pet to keep an eye out for its music.

My pet has a lot to learn about my musical taste. The way to teach it is through training — see the next screenshot for more on that.

I do not like Puddle of Mudd, but forgave my panda for suggesting it. Recommendations presumably improve the more you play.

The more you play (or pay), the more music your pet can fetch.

My pet is at the Mayor’s house, playing him a song. He’s everyone’s friend, but you can also make friends with real people and listen to songs together.

My music collection is still small, and listening to it costs my pet energy. An Amazon link lets me pick up the MP3, although a mobile version of the game could obviate the need for that.

In order to cheer this animal up, I must play it some music. It learns from what I play, and then goes out and fetches me new songs to audition based on that.

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/virtual-worlds-real-money-can-social-games-solve-musics-woes?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29#ixzz0ksJuecd6