S.F. MusicTech Summit: How Do Listeners Want to Discover New Music?

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​Designed to be a business-to-business convergence of the worlds of music and technology, the S.F. MusicTech Summit, which took over the Hotel Kabuki yesterday, is really many events rolled into one. The top three: A trade show, a forum for new ideas, and a place to make connections. Making connections was frequently the first thing people mentioned when I asked them why they came. There are many permutations of the connections people hope to make -- investors for new start-ups and customers for new products being the top two -- but this aim makes the Summit a veritable schmooze festival. Many attendees have a lean and hungry look, and have obviously worked long and hard on their pitch.

New product and technology demos are one of the highlights of the twice-annual Summit. New instruments, programs, and a plethora of apps held court in the Kabuki's main ballroom for two hours. More specialized panels looked at "Tools for Your Band," "Music in the Cloud," and "Digital Sheet Music, Notation & Tablature." Maybe it wasn't the most revolutionary, but my favorite was Musicshake, an iPhone app that creates remixes of music content it has licensed. You place music modules on the screen that look like neon colored blocks to stack up tracks (string, bass, vocals, etc.) Tetris-like, then shake the phone and create a remix as the blocks move into a new configuration.

The exchange of ideas at many panels centered on how to survive (and prosper) in the rapidly changing landscape of the music industry. The standing-room-only "Recommendation & Discovery" panel offered one of the more interesting glimpses into the internal logic of the music industry machine. Chaired by Kevin Arnold of IODA (also creator of S.F.'s annual Noise Pop festival), the panel brought together some of the heavy hitters in the music search business, including MOG, Rovi Corporation, The Filter (a Peter Gabriel brainchild), and Slacker.

An interesting discussion on the nuts-and-bolts of music recommendation and discovery services offered some contradictory food for thought. Music consumers looking for recommendations "prefer a man-to-machine to a man-to-man relationship" (David Hyman of MOG), and if you focus on personalized user specs, you get information that is increasingly "granular" (David Roberts of The Filter). Yet R & D is a "human-centric task," said Adam Powers of Rovi. Powers also asserted that when Rovi, a giant in the R&D world, was looking at other companies to acquire, it found 250 that thought they had R&D nailed. But from the number of R&D company reps in attendance at the SF Music Tech Summit, it seems that either that news hasn't gotten out, or nobody's actually nailed it.

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