If you check your social stats more than a couple of times a day, you might be addicted to the internet, In fact, as music marketers some of you are contributing to the addiciton of others. Internet addiction was dubbed a "clinical disorder" in 1996 is a study for CyberPsychology and Behavior. Are You Contributing To Internet Addiction? Are You Addicted? The survey stats in this infographic suggests that you (OK, we) might be:

via Sodahead

Guest post by former Warner Bros. Records digital exec Ethan Kaplan of Live Nation Labs. He blogs at Black Rim Glasses.

A year ago I walked out of the Warner Bros. Records building, put a box in my car and drove home. I left with a collection of memories, but also a sense of unfinished business that I intended to keep in mind when I started my next venture.

When it started becoming apparent what my next venture would be, I sat down and started writing.

I proposed this question to myself:

Given a green pasture, how would I architect a company or department?

All of this thinking ended up in one place: Culture.

What is culture anyhow?

A lot of companies throw around the word culture. Zappos has its 10 core values. At one point, Google's 20% time and "Don't Be Evil" defined it. Apple has a well-known culture of secrecy. Github uses its culture as a way to shape their product messaging, its community and best practices for its use.

Over the summer I spent a lot of time looking at how culture was defined by various companies. My brother-in-law works for Zappos, so I got some good exposure to that. I have friends at a lot of other startups and big companies, so I collected info from them as well.

Culture is a Product

One of the key things I learned after leaving WMG and examining my tenure there was that we focused more on projects than products. Products help you frame a holistic view of what you are building, from plans to deployment. Projects are only judged by the duration of time you spend on them, and forgotten quickly.

To that end, at Live Nation Labs, I wanted to be a product-oriented company, treating the products we build as their own independent companies, and staffing them as such. Included in this was the application of "The Lean Startup" build->measure->learn->(repeat) methodology.

When I started writing our department documentation, it occurred to me that if the culture of the department was treated as one of our products, it put "how the department works" on the same level as "what the department works on."

I've seen culture referred to as the immune system for your company. I believe that strongly, but I also think it is the most important product you create.

The Product

Here are my rules for the "Culture Product":

The Culture Product has all the same needs as a Web or Mobile product.

When you make a web application and adhere to lean-startup/agile methodologies, you start with a loose set of requirements, usually framed as user stories. From there you move toward prioritizing stories, developing them and shipping.

Stories

The Culture Product has the same needs. For Live Nation Labs, I even went as far as to start using Sprint.ly to shape them.

As a <noun> I need to <verb> so I can <noun>.

So for instance: As a developer, I need to have a continuous integration system so I always know if my code is valid in my branch.

Or more colloquial: As a team member, I need free soda in the refrigerator so I don't have to go to the liquor store on Hollywood Blvd. when I need caffeine.

Build

From here, you can "build" these features into the product. For us, the soda concern was solved by a Vons.com delivery every few weeks, and the continuous integration system was a combination of Jenkins, Janky, Hubot and Github.

These stories should be iterative. If you frame cultural issues as stories, it helps shape them as actionable concerns rather than complaints or "issues." And making them stories makes them not merely a problem for one team member, but things everyone can solve.

Ship

Shipping a Culture Product feature is not like pushing to Heroku, but still involves implementation of a process along with documentation. Usually, when we "ship" a Culture Product feature, it is through Evernote, and then into our internal Playbook.

The Playbook is a wiki/blog that is used by our team to document cultural practices and recipes for how to perform certain things (such as how to use our chat room or the Sonos system).

Learn

Once a feature is shipped into the culture, you can and should proceed with validating the story through "learnings." Sometimes this is quantitative learning through metrics, and sometimes it's a qualitative "feeling" if things are working out well.

Iterate

Nothing is set in stone. Our Culture Product is an iterative thing, as is the Playbook that documents it. We talk regularly to define and refine our culture.

The process of editing and changing the Culture Product also has the added benefit of exposing all parts of our organization to all aspects of its infrastructure.

The Playbook is in Github and the product management system is the same we use for our normal web and mobile products. The Culture Product's implementation serves a dual purpose for us: defining our organization and educating in a cross-domain fashion while doing so.

Culture must be fed

When you define culture as a product, it becomes easier to define its boundaries, and then constrain and nurture it to maintain them. This means, like any product, your Culture Product should operate within the constraints and allowances of a defined budget.

Too often, the things that constitute "culture" are seen as additive or "perks." I hate defining things as "perks" because it relegates them to things that should be seen as optional if and when times get tough. Similarly, in recruitment, "perks" mean "these are not core, but are additive in order to be attractive." I've found perks are always the first things to go as cultural efforts in a company's decline. And more damaging still, perks aren't an element of culture. They are frosting on a thin cake.

Zappos has a lot of perks, but if you strip them out the culture still stands. I suspect that if Facebook cut the perks in Menlo Park, the offices wouldn't be vacated any faster in the late evening—but the pizza delivery drivers in the Valley would have a new frequent destination.

If your culture is a product, it needs to be fed with money, time and enthusiasm. It can't be an afterthought or the recipient of "maybe if" budgeting. Like any product, innovating only through a balance sheet, meeting schedule and checkbook can kill it.

The Culture Product should be seen as a qualitative risk: a product whose very existence validates all others.

Culture Should Be Exportable

One of our mandates at Live Nation Labs is to export our culture to the larger company. By treating our culture as a product, one of the things we do ends up being "packaging" it for exporting. This includes all things from our social media presence, external blog, and internal documentation, and all the way down to the tools and software that enable us to work day to day.

Culture is an ephemeral thing, but part of treating it as a product is to force ourselves to make it reified, that is to say: concrete in some fashion. Forcing reification enforces a discipline of colliding reality with fantasy, and helps temper some less essential cultural aspects (i.e. foosball tables) in favor of more prosaic and pragmatic initiatives.

Culture is your Platform

Ultimately, the Culture Product is the platform on which you build all your company's other products. Much in the same way the Facebook Platform or Amazon Web Services form the foundation of those respective companies product roadmaps, so too should your Culture Product form the foundation on which you build everything.

Culture is not just the immune system for your company—it is the basis of how you build, function and evolve as a producer of products. It should be omnipresent on your roadmap, given attention and never thought of as an option or afterthought when resources get constrained.

The Culture Product is simply the most important product you'll ever manage.

Guest post by Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.

It's true, what they say: Our digital lives are moving to the cloud. Whenever we fire up Facebook instead of a local email client, we're taking part in the shift from locally-run software to the networked app world.

However, some fairly major parts of those digital lives — our music, movies, and other activities — haven't truly moved to the cloud, at least when it comes to all of those smartphones and tablets we've been buying, and they likely won't for the foreseeable future.

The reason:

We are running out of wireless bandwidth.

The supply of wireless data in the United States — the stuff that lets us use the internet on our smartphones and tablets — is fast disappearing, as reported by CNN Money, which found the crisis pressing enough to warrant a week of dedicated coverage.

[Above graphic: CNN Money's chart, which relies on data from the FCC, shows our wireless spectrum surplus becoming a deficit next year.]

Consumers - and music fans in particular - are already feeling the squeeze. As a recent example, AT&T reneged last month on its promise to provide unlimited data to customers who ordered and paid for it. Not only does AT&T not sell unlimited data plans anymore, but it won't even honor the ones it already sold, despite pledging to grandfather those users in (if they agree never to tether their computers to their phones and abide by other annoying restrictions). If you were counting on AT&T to let you stream all the music you wanted, well, you no longer can.

As a result, the streaming world that has taken over media consumption on our PCs (think Spotify and Netflix) doesn't translate cleanly to the mobile devices that are replacing computers in other parts of our lives. By our calculation, Verizon's $50/month limited data plan, which comes with 5GB of fast LTE wireless bandwidth each month, would only let you listen to about an hour of MOG's music (which Verizon streams at 320 Kbps) per day — and that's if you don't use your phone for anything else.

The last time we asked, Pandora's Tim Westergren told Evolver.fm he's not too worried about limited data plans because Pandora streams to mobiles at a hyper-efficient 32 Kbps (using aacplus). But even Pandora would benefit from offline playback in the subway and on airplanes, and has other reasons to consider offline playback, including improved sound quality.

In Spotify's iPhone app, you can choose to view only those playlists that have been cached for offline playback, which is a nice way of dealing with this increasingly important issue.

In addition, even if Westergren's right that Pandora is efficient enough that it doesn't need to worry about its users' data consumption, it needs mobile listeners who can be advertised to at higher rates due to the fact that they sometimes walk past an advertiser's physical location. And if mobile users are concerned about data usage, even without cause, they might think twice about listening to Pandora all day on their phones. The perception of a limit can be as effective as an actual limit.

[Graphic right: In Spotify's iPhone app, you can choose to view only those playlists that have been cached for offline playback, which is a nice way of dealing with this increasingly important issue.]

As the bandwidth crunch continues, we expect to see bargain plans proliferate alongside with new ways of throttling accounts when they play too much music or watch too much video. Are music fans really going to want to listen to another hour of music if it means they might lose the ability to read web pages or use Facebook by the end of the month? Maybe, but they won't use the cloud to do it.

This is particularly troubling because so much music listening happens in the car, where every digital music executive we've asked agrees that the smartphone will continue to function as the modem for at least the foreseeable future.

A solution to this problem exists, and some music apps already embrace it: offline playback. For example, Spotify's app can store up to 3,333 songs on your smartphone's or tablet's memory, so that you can play them without tapping in to your wireless data plan or staying near WiFi. Likewise, Slacker lets users cache entire streaming radio stations offline, so they can listen to programmed music without a connection.

This sort of caching requires a separate license from copyright holders. We have not been able to determine how much more that license costs, but it's likely to be an increasingly valuable feature as heavy media users seek to store pieces of the cloud on their devices.

However, one precedent suggests app developers shouldn't have to pay copyright holders anything extra for caching songs and videos on portable devices. ISPs don't have to pay for so-called "ephemeral copies" of media on their servers (stored there to ease transmission), so long as those copies are destroyed after being sent on to users. The same concept could apply to ephemeral copies stored on users' devices, which would make it easier for developers to add this increasingly important feature.

Regardless of how that plays out, offline playback is already here. Even if it might sound a little wonky and geeky — like something only system administrators would care about — offline playback could become a must-have feature for any music or video service that runs on portables. In other words: Don't leave home without it.

SXSW 2012 offers a variety of ways for folks in music and tech to interact, from panels to special events, despite the fact that the Interactive and Music festivals only crossover on March 13th.

SXSW Interactive events include Backplane's Managers Hack while both the Music Startup Village and Music Gear Expo take place during SXSW Music. Not surprisingly one of the strongest bridges between the two gatherings are tech-sponsored parties.

Backplane's Managers Hack

Backplane, the company behind Lady Gaga's LittleMonsters, is holding a hackathon on March 11 called the SXSW Managers Hack:

"Hackers will have 8 hours to build and prepare for demo presentations of their ideas around the future of digital music distribution to the music industry’s leading managers. The Managers will rank and award the most promising ideas."

Judges are said to include "Scooter Braun, best known for facilitating Justin Bieber’s rise to fame; Jay Brown, President of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation; and Troy Carter, manager of Lady Gaga." Information on a live stream of the event will be available @thebackplane.

Music Startup Village

Music Startup Village takes place March 14 as an umbrella event for music tech startups with "panels, Meet Ups, lounges, pitch events and mentoring/coaching sessions." That day's SXSW Accelerator activities are included with a showcase of Music Tech Finalists.

Music Gear Expo

Though music tech is increasingly used in relation to web and mobile-related developments, the Music Gear Expo is an opportunity to check out the ongoing crossover of music and technology via musical instruments and gear. It takes place during SXSW Music in the afternoons from March 14 to 17.

SXSW Accelerator presented by Microsoft BizSpark

Judges for the music tech finals at SXSW range from musicians Michael Franti and Kristin Hersh (Throwing Muses, co-founder CashMusic) to music tech xecs Jed Carlson of ReverbNation and Ian Rogers of Topspin. The music finalists will be showcasing during SXSW on Wednesday, March 14th in Austin. Details here.

Tech-Sponsored Parties

All sorts of tech-sponsored fun with music will be happening at SXSW. Here are a few parties of note:

• Sunday 11 - Mashable SXSWi House
• Tuesday 13 - BandPage HQ
• Tuesday 13 - EFF MASHUP PARTY: Music+Tech+Policy Makers Unite
• Tuesday 13 - Interactive Closing Party Presented by (mt) Media Temple
• Wednesday 14 - Hype Machine’s Hype Hotel
• Wednesday 14 - Pandora Discovery Den
• Friday 16 - Musicmetric
• Friday 16 - Sonicbids Official Party

Hypebot Features Writer Clyde Smith maintains his freelance writing hub at Flux Research and music industry resources at Music Biz Blogs. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.

When Marketing music, the focus must begin and end in a single place: THE AUDIENCE.

On Music Think Tank, David Greenberg blogs about the importance of knowing your audience and connecting with them. Clubs, promoters, etc. look to fill venues, so artists need some kind of way to build a fan list. How do you keep track of your fanbase?

“Your audience is your lifeline.

Your fan list is gold.”

(Read On)

Regular Hypebot readers know how excited I get about Cash Music. It's hard to imagine anything closer to what this blog is about than a non-profit group building free tools that help musicians to market and sell music online. That's exactly what Cash Music is; and for one of the first time's ever, they're asking for help via a Kickstarter campaign.

Let me say upfront that they've already reached their initial Kickstarter goal. But that didn't stop me from just giving $100; and it shouldn't stop you from giving whatever you can.

ReverbNation, Topspin, Bandcamp and many others run important valuable services that are worth every penny that they charge. But you have to admit that there is something special about knowing that I00% of whatever we give to Cash Music is going to build free open source tools that help power artistic expression and the new music industry. Please join me in giving.

Donate here.

"Forecast: The Evolution of the Digital Music Industry" is a free Midem sponsored research report from GigaOM Pro. David Card authored it with a focus on digital music sales and subscriptions; and discussion of Apple, as digital music incumbent, along with Spotify, Pandora, MOG, Rhapsody and Facebook as best-positioned for benefiting from disruption.

The report can be downloaded from GigaOM Pro for free. ( While we're on the subject of disruptive approachs, GigaOM Pro is an excellent example of disrupting industry research with a more affordable subscription model.)

Card considers the digital music market through use of "disruption vectors: the areas where large market shifts are occurring and where companies will position themselves to gain share and increase revenues."

Card defines the key disruption vectors as:

• Anywhere access
• Discovery
• Rent/buy
• Subsidization
• Listening
• The role of labels

And he predicts:

"As digital music services go mobile and into cars, the most important disruption vector in digital music will be anywhere access. Other critical disruption vendors include social-­media-­based discovery and two business models, paying for access instead of ownership and subsidization."

"These vectors will take some time to play out, but the overall industry should finally return to growth within the five-­year forecast horizon, as digital music spending, driven by subscriptions, will average double-­digit yearly growth to total $4.1 billion in 2015. Top disruptive companies to watch include Spotify, Pandora, MOG, Rhapsody and Facebook: They are the ones best-­positioned to take advantage of the disruption vectors."

Cards notes that unexpected moves from Apple are always a possibility and including Facebook is a reminder that they stand to benefit from all sorts of disruptive change as all media becomes more social.

Some key takeaways:

"The most important disruption vector is anywhere access. A large portion of U.S. music listening happens in the car, and even before digital services are integrated directly into auto audio systems, ubiquitous smartphones will plug in."

"The net result [of rising sales of digital downloads and increasing revenue via subscription services] is that digital music will increase from 41 percent of consumer spending on recorded music to 65 percent in 2015 and will finally start the industry on a growth path again."

The report seems solid enough and I have no serious criticisms. I might be a bit more opinionated if I didn't think issues related to major corporate approaches to digital music sales and streaming are possibly the least interesting aspect of current changes in the music industry as a whole.

Even though the shift to digital music is a key element in current changes, the more interesting responses to industry disruption are being exhibited by indie artists and labels, web/mobile companies that are offering services for indie artists and labels, web/mobile companies that are creating digital spaces for artists and fans to connect and firms reinventing offline possibilities.

Nevertheless, if you're interested in the future of streaming and subscription-based music services then Forecast: The Evolution of the Digital Music Industry is well worth a read.

Hypebot Features Writer Clyde Smith maintains his freelance writing hub at Flux Research and music industry resources at Music Biz Blogs. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.

Self-service ticketing platform Eventbrite has just passed the 50 million ticket sale mark since launching in 2006. Eventbrite's open, low-cost platform is often used for self-promoted shows and fan ticketing. The company's investors include Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, and Tenaya Capital.

In 2011, Eventbrite reported year over year doubling across key metrics. The number of events posted on Eventbrite doubled: from 222,353 posted in 2010 to 458,207 in 2011. And the number of tickets issued doubled as well: from 11,004,743 in 2010 to 20,798,509 in 2011.

With a second office in London, the company has accelerated European and international expansion, delivering localized products in several new markets. By the end of March, the company will launch its first translated products in French-speaking Canada, France and Spain.

• (UPDATED) BLOCKED: A court has ordered that a Danish ISP block Grooveshark (Music Ally), and the Pirate Bay may soon be blocked in the UK. (Guardian)
• Rdio has launched in Spain and Portugal.
• The Orchard has named Michael Black as SVP, Client and Sales Group. He was was a founding member of ADA and was most recently EVP, General Manager.

MORE:

• Pete Dodge has been appointed to the position of General Manager/VP of Kobalt Artist and Label Services. He was Managing Director of IODA UK and VP IODA International.
• Mastered for iTunes: Universal optimizes Madonna, McCartney, U2 and more for iTunes. (DMW)
• Megaupload's Kim Dotcom has been released on bail, but barred from using the internet. (ars)
• Wahwah.fm offers a social take on pirate radio. (GigaOm)
• How No Amount of Cloud Computing Will Kill Off Local Music Storage (Gizmodo)

It's difficult to sort out signal from noise in the uproar surrounding filesharing technologies. Even as a number of BitTorrent-related sites have begun to shut down voluntarily, a 5 year old academic project called Tribler may be about to take the lead in the battle over what can be shared via the Internet.

Described as "impossible to shut down," Tribler began at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and has also been developed at Harvard in Internet tv studies. Though quite legitimate uses are under exploration, a recent wave of publicity stemming from the MegaUpload shutdown has forced Tribler to shift its official site to download only status as filesharing enters an even more resilient phase of operation.

I don't follow the details of filesharing controversies. Too many lies, too much propaganda and way too many technical and legal fine points for my taste. Nevertheless, I knew enough to be impressed when I heard that The Pirate Bay was giving up torrent hosting and that its inventory of magnet links could fit on a USB stick. The game was changing.

What I didn't expect was the uptake of Tribler, a filesharing client under development since 2007 by academics studying the improvement of video distribution and Internet tv:

"Developed by a team of researchers at Delft University of Technology, the main goal is to come up with a robust implementation of BitTorrent that doesn’t rely on central servers. Instead, Tribler is designed to keep BitTorrent alive, even when all torrent search engines, indexes and trackers are pulled offline."

"'Our key scientific quest is facilitating unbounded information sharing,' Tribler leader Dr. Pouwelse tells TorrentFreak...'The only way to take it down is to take The Internet down.'"

Tribler's current popular can be ascertained by the shift of the official Tribler site to download only status due to recent demand. Here's how it works.

"Like many other BitTorrent clients, Tribler has a search box at the top of the application. However, the search results that appear when users type in a keyword don’t come from a central index. Instead, they come directly from other peers."

"Downloading a torrent is also totally decentralized. When a user clicks on one of the search results, the meta-data is pulled in from another peer and the download starts immediately. Tribler is based on the standard BitTorrent protocol and uses regular BitTorrent trackers to communicate with other peers. But, it can also continue downloading when a central tracker goes down."

Related efforts include the introduction of Open2Edit, a "Wikipedia-style editing system," P2P Next and the Swarmplayer as well as Harvard Internet TV.

So the takedown of MegaUpload and the subsequent shutdown of related sites, which appeared to be a major victory for anti-piracy forces, also led to popular interest in a filesharing client that is set to change the landscape of the battle. As Clausewitz revealed, war as a nonlinear phenomenon is inherently unpredictable.

More from Harvard on the Tribler project: FAQ ~ Research

Hypebot Features Writer Clyde Smith maintains his freelance writing hub at Flux Research and music industry resources at Music Biz Blogs. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.