Google Wave Amazon MP3 Bot

The features that make Google Wave most interesting as a social platform are Widgets and Robots  (bots).  The Google Wave Amazon MP3 Bot is a great example of a recently developed robot application.

What is a Wave Robot ?  A robot is an application that is invited to participate in the wave just like you would invite a person. Once added to the wave as a participant, the robot performs a particular automated task. In the case of this robot application, the Amazon MP3 Bot, auto detects the artist name that one of the other participants types in and automatically converts identifiable artists, songs and albums into Amazon MP3 product links.

Rather than embed the excellent video demos here in my blog post, I would invite you to go to the Google Wave Amazon MP3 Bot micro-site blog. Not only is there a great Vimeo  demo of the bot in action, but the author also shows how to install a robot.  As many of you do not have a wave developer account yet and can’t try it out, you will definitely want to check this site out to get a taste of how Google Wave works.

Google Wave Amazon MP3 Bot

view all Google Wave related posts

How will Google Wave impact online Music?

Google showed a preview of Wave at Google I/O last month. A few of my friends were able to attend the event, but I was only able to watch the video playback of the Google Wave rollout. The key takeaway I would describe for the technology is “Real Time”.  Real time chat; it displays as you type (no waiting to type into a chat window and hot ‘enter’). Real time spelling correction is context sensitive.  If you can integrate Google Voice into the Google Wave framework, you’d have a powerful Unified Communications platform, but that would be the topic of another blog on another site entirely. Google rolled out the technology partly to encourage developers to begin creating gadgets and robots. A gadget is a program application similar to a facebook application.  A music player or video player would be good examples of gadgets.  A robot could be an automated conversation participant (like a character in a game).

So how will Google Wave impact the way we socialize around Music? To hypothesize around the possibilities, focus on ‘real time’. I would imagine that someone will create an internet radio or internet video widget that would allow real time chat among the listening audience. Imagine a fan page for a popular artist with over a million fans pre-announcing the release of a new single exclusively on a Google Wave-powered fan page? Do you think this would instantly draw the fan base over to a waves-powered social media site? I do. This would be a very good test of the platform’s scalability. Imagine a hundred thousand fans furiously typing away “Love the new song!” and similar messages all at the same time. Will it scale? It likely will. Google’s app engine technology allows for multiple processors in a cloud computing environment.

Google Wave could also be a viable platform for social media game development. So take the previous example and take it a step further adding some robots. Imagine playing a virtual reality game that you 1^st must reach the end of the game to play the newest music video release of your favorite recording artist. Follow the clues. What was the lyric from the 2^nd song in the 1^st album that opens that the door to the final stage of the game? Imagine the buzz created on the social media web site(s) that will have fans teaming up to solve the problem. What? The game new I was playing from the SF bay area and I just stumbled across two tickets to the next concert in my area? Fans chasing Avatars of the recording artists for a free poster? The possibilities are endless.  Could Google Wave be the basis of a social media and gaming platform that could seriously undo MySpace and possibly even Facebook? The potential is there. It will be very interesting to watch the Google Wave story unfold. It could significantly change the way fans socialize around music on the internet.

UserVoice survey of topic requests for this blog

I just discovered UserVoice and their great feature suggestion/survey tool.  I set up a free account to try it out to have readers suggest and vote on blog topics for Social Media Marketing in Music (this blog). You can find the link both in this post (below) and always find it from the right hand side navigation column directly under the author’s picture.

Suggest or vote on future topics

In order to tempt you into checking out the topic request survey, I’ve pre-populated it with a few topics I’ve been considering (but feel free to add your own suggestions):

Compare the new HD video services out there
YouTube now offers HD formats but YouTube is not the only game in town. What are the players? How do you embed a video in a blog, webpage , Facebook, or MySpace?

Creating a Musican/Band webpage on Ning
4000 new web sites are being created every day on Ning by ‘regular folks’ . It isn’t that hard to make a page … and it’s free.
http://bit.ly/16xW1
… and their Music Player can be embedded in both MySpace and Facebook
http://bit.ly/mnKuH

Music sites (the new ones)
http://mashable.com/2007/11/08/tools-independent-musician/
For this blog, I’d spend some time using Google trends to see which ones are registering traffic.

Digital Music startups
Check this list: http://musically.com/blog/2008/12/17/200-digital-music-startups-from-2008/
Any of these interest you ? If yes, don’t just vote for this topic… but rather create a “new idea” in this forum with this tool and suggest the one that interests you as a “New idea”… more

Mixcloud player
http://bit.ly/zg4He
I met Mixcloud founder at a Facebook Garage event. He offered some free user account codes.

Jamzee – create a playlist of YouTube videos
Jamzee is a service that allows you to create a playlist of YouTube videos that you can share on other websites like your own blog or MySpace.

How musicians/bands can use twitter … and why
By adding a twitter feed from this blog, I’m now getting views from other followers tweets. Might this work for you?

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Reminder, please don’t comment here, but rather use the survey tool to vote or add your topic preferences.

Suggest or vote on future topics

Bigfoot’s Lookin’ for Bernie

A while back I wrote a blog entry titled “Can you get your song on someone else’s blog?”.  Obviously, having a YouTube video that has viral properties that get lots of links from friends on social media networks like Facebook could help do that.  That’s how I discovered the song  “Here comes another Bubble” by the Richter Scales in the first place. But probably even more important than getting on someone else’s blog would be to have a video that has viral properties.

What would make a music video viral?

1. Humor – everyone likes sharing a video that makes them laugh.

2. Outrageous – although sometimes distasteful (and hopefully faked or simulated) a headline like OZZY BITES HEAD OFF BAT! will grab a lot of attention.

3. High Tech/ Novelty – iPhone App by Smule: Ocarina [Stairway] video (YouTube) has over 500,000 plays and a 4 ½ star rating.

So if you are an unknown band or recording artist looking for new fans, how can you capitalize on ideas like these to get your YouTube video seen and heard?

Humor

Pick something topical and newsworthy and keep it short. If you have a gift for comedic writing and can turn around a song in 1 or 2 days, imagine the number of plays you could get if Jon Stewart played your song on The Daily Show. That should be your goal. How you will get your song noticed and chosen, I don’t know. Surely Jon Stewart has writers and producers. Check Wikipedia. However, even if your song is not picked to be featured on the Daily Show, if it really makes people laugh, surely it has the potential to spread virally as a YouTube video. Post it to YouTube and show it to some Facebook friends. If it’s funny, your friends will share it with other friends. They will share it with their friends… and so on. Keep in mind, producing a video is not easy. If you have a great song and shoddy video production, it will fall flat. Use stills. Use PowerPoint. Think “How would Ken Burns shoot this”? Look at the Video by the Richter Scales I featured in my post “Can you get your song on someone else’s blog?”

Notice the credits at the end ? The last thing you want is to create a truly viral video that you have to pull because of copyright infringement or legal issues.

Outrageous

The now defunct Weekly World News had a very long run as a supermarket tabloid and should be your inspiration if you need to create a headline grabbing song title. Buy Bat Boy Lives!: The WEEKLY WORLD NEWS Guide to Politics, Culture, Celebrities, Alien Abductions, and the Mutant Freaks that Shape Our World (Paperback) on Amazon as your resource. Nothing more needs to be said. Consider this your “bible” for outrageous headlines or, in this case, song titles.

High Tech/ Novelty

If you can associate your song with the latest high tech buzz related to Music, you could quite easily reach new fans with a YouTube video. Certainly Smule will be coming up with other instruments that will even surpass their success with the Ocarina  iPhone app. See if you can sign up be a Smule Beta tester (if you and your band mates own an iPhone or iPod touch). You can sign up for the Beta trial of “Leaf Trombone”. Read the agreement, though. You have to promise not to release your YouTube video until Smule releases the product. Would one of your songs benefit from a horn section? Maybe a “Leaf Trombone” horn section is your answer.

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Here is an idea for a song and YouTube video that combines all of the above…

Song title:”Bigfoot’s lookin’ for Bernie”

Storyboard: Bigfoot comes out of hiding to find Bernie Madoff after losing most of his savings. Bernie Madoff escapes to the woods and “Bernie Madoff sightings” become the stuff of legend and tabloid news for a few months. Bigfoot ends up managing a successful (and legitimately run) Hedge fund. Bernie eventually gets caught and goes to jail. Since Bigfoot makes a fortune as a hedge fund manager and no longer has hard feelings, Bigfoot visits Bernie in jail. The song ends with an iPhone Leaf Trombone duet played by Bigfoot and Bernie.

If you choose to write this song and create the YouTube video, please include me in your song credits. After all, I just came up with the idea. Don’t forget to show a link to your band’s website in your video. After all, that is the whole point of doing all this work … getting fame, new fans, and brand awareness for your band.  If it’s good, who knows, maybe you could get it played on The Daily Show.

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May 2, 2009 Update:

A friend advised me of this useful URL if anyone was seriously considering adding Bigfoot” to thier music video.  http://www.livingsasquatch.com/

LinkedIn Groups

I joined several LinkedIn groups intitally with the purpose of announcing the MySpace Playlist Power app and describing it’s potental as a toll for fan-based viral promotion. I did this before I started this blog. These are the 2 Music Industry LinkedIn groups I joined:

Music & Marketing - 4,790 members 

Music and Entertainment Professionals - 18,165

I’m still waiting to be accepted by the moderator of the Music & Marketing group (as of 1 week later). I was added within 1 day to the Music Entertainment Professionals group.  Seeing how many members this group had, I was thinking that if even 1% of the members checked out the Playlist Power app, I might see a significant number of app adds on our app stats page. The number of adds we were now getting from MySpace “recently popular” pages was slowing due to the volume of new apps being added daily moving our app from page 1 to the 2nd and then 3rd page. I posted to the group. I saw no discernable volume in new users adding our app. How could I even track if this was having an effect? Maybe if I create a blog (this blog), I can create more interest and start tracking some web metrics ?

Deciding this is what I would do, I also decided that my new blog might also be of interest to LinkedIn groups related to  Social Media Marketing. I also joined these LinkedIn groups:

eMarketing Association Network

Innovative Marketing, PR, Sales, Word-of-Mouth & Buzz Innovators

Social Media Marketing

I figured that as long as I’m going to blog, I might as well measure where my blog hits were coming from. I have no idea of how effective a post of ones blog to a LinkedIn group is.  I’ll get some idea of interest in my blog topic from two industry group types.

Social Media Marketing in Music

Welcome. This is a blog for musicians, internet marketers, application developers and music industry professionals looking for insights, tips and tricks to leverage social media tools and web services to market your music and your brand more effectively. This blog intially started as a weblog of my social media marketing efforts for a MySpace application called Playlist Power launched on February 22, 2009 at WeekendApps-OpenSocial. Playlist Power was  a MySpace playlist sharing application allowing MySpace users to share Music playlists with friends.

In the 1st part of this blog (under the category “Marketing-Product“), I cover ideas I had and things I learned while executing elements of a marketing campaign for the ‘Playlist Power’ MySpace app.

Several weeks into this blog, I found that my blog interests became more about the larger topic of Social Media Marketing in Music, so on March 10th, I changed the title of this blog and expanded it’s scope.

Read More

Music Social Media

Social Media Music

MySpace and Music and Playlist and Viral and Social Media Marketing and MySpace and Facebook and LinkedIn, but especially MySpace or Music and Musicians and Bands and sometimes Record Labels would all be keywords to search for.