Live Nation Labs

We are hacking on a huge stage.

[lnabs]

Live Nation Labs Acquires YourTrove

Ethan posting....

Many years ago, when I was still at Warner Bros Records, I met with three entrepreneurs and engineers at a restaurant in New York City. Seth Blank, Nick Vlku and Jesse Emery showed me this amazing product they had made that could take the amalgamation of social data from groups of people, index it, make it searchable and contextualized. It could expose trends, similarities, and from a simple search query you could find out much more about your world than just staring at a Facebook timeline.

I was amazed.

And then my one year old son threw one of their plates of food across the room before dumping a drink all over the table.

Two things happened as a result of that dinner:

Nick, Seth or Jesse don’t have kids, although Seth just got engaged in Paris. Mazel Tov!

I spent the next three years figuring out how I could work with them

It makes me extremely happy to announce that we have acquired YourTrove. The acquisition of YourTrove has given us two things: expertise in big data engineering, social network API’s and overall technical prowess, and the technology from YourTrove that will help us power the next generation of what concerts should be for a music fan.

We in the labs talk a lot about our continual responsibility to know, remember and respect fans. Implementing the YourTrove platform will allow us to do amazing things in support of that.

Eric Garland, Joe Fleischer, Jenny Connelly and I formed Labs two years ago aiming to challenge assumptions about concert going, and invent and create products that could enable this very 20th (and 19th, 18th, 17th, 16th, etc) century act of “going to a concert” to exist fully integrated in the 21st century. YourTrove will help us deliver on that and more.

[lnabs]

My First Smart Phone Looked Like This

Mmmmmmm. That's the stuff. Just take a minute and bask in her glow.

Sure, the earpiece was *required.* There was no speaker or mic built into this device. But in its day, the Blackberry 5810 was more magical (to me) than your iPhone 5S, your Galaxy S4 and your Tesla Model S combined. Okay, well, your Chevy Volt, at least. The year was 2002 (ringback tones, anyone?) and I told myself if I ever managed to swim out of the record industry litigation that threatened to drown us all, I would find a seat on the mobile rocket and ride.

Ride we did, and ride we shall. Today, I am pinker and prouder than previous to announce that Live Nation has acquired Meexo and that co-founders Romain David and Dav Yaginuma will be joining us here in the Labs to help guide what I can only describe as our "moon mission" in proving technology leadership at Live Nation. You can read Romain and Dav's announcement here and learn more about the critical role played by our friend Jacob Mullins and his amazing Exitround here. (Teaser: Exitround is the world's largest closed private marketplace for early-stage tech acquisitions -- and it's badass.)

By way of a hearty "welcome, pardners" and throaty "yeehaw" from me to Dav and Romain, and in the spirit of making the case for reposting, here is my original Jerry Maguire Labs culture manifesto:

Labs is a great team of people, and great teams are even more powerful than great ideas or great leverage.

A team of true believers will beat non-believers almost every time. Non-belief is a symptom of feeling powerless and disconnected; direct personal success almost every day is required to suspend such disbelief.

Listening is good, but not enough. Respecting and actually employing input makes the difference.

Great people want to be respected and treated as the competent individuals they are. Heavily legislating the behavior of great people is both demeaning and a lost cause.

In order to treat each other respectfully, we have to trust each other. Trust is first extended but subsequently earned.

If you set great people up to fail, they will enjoy great success. At failing.

I believe you are good and your motives are, too. You want to win and make us better. You fight against things you believe are making us less than great.

The Golden Rule is self-centered and therefore faulty. Don’t do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Instead, do unto others as they want and need you to do. And don’t expect them to treat you “the same” way — they are not you. Help them to extend you the same courtesy. Parity is a trap.

To do the above, you have to understand “which guy” you’re dealing with. And never stop explaining “which guy” you are. Be both aware and self-aware.

Taking 10 seconds to ask myself, “What am I adding? How am I helping?” before typing, speaking or meeting is impossible — but it’s still worth a try. If we could always take these 10 seconds, there would never be a bad conversation in the Labs.

The most important thing teams can learn from tribes (or happy families) is that we advocate for each other and protect each other. Good family members always work to give each other the benefit of the doubt. Your children are presumed innocent. You should be, too. It’s cold out there. The world will treat our fellow Labs people with careless indifference. We should not.

That said, healthy tension can make individuals better and is often an ingredient in the recipe for greatness. Yes, tension can be truly healthy. This is hard. (See Trust, above.)

Laughter is contagious, and we must encourage it to be. Playing together during “work hours” is important and productive.

All the beliefs I’ve described here are much more expensive than providing free soda. These things take time and focus and priority. I believe we are committed to prioritizing them.

I believe that great products and services are byproducts of everything I believe above. (Whoa. That’s heavy.)

Okay, anybody who’s read this far: It’s your turn. What do you believe about people and teams? Comment below or tweet to me @bigchampagne, thanks!

Eric Garland

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Live Nation’s Fan Meter shows Americans getting more passionate about concerts. [Click to download.](http://media.ticketmaster.com/en-us/img/static/ticketlogy/images/2012_Concert_Trends_v11.pdf)

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A drone's eye view of the Live Nation Labs office.

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North of Where We Are Today: Live Nation Labs in San Francisco

By Eric Garland

[Update: Rexly duderino Joel Resnicow has written a better and more informative announcement. Please read his first.]

Tonight I'm feeling reflective, on the eve of the announcement that we have acquired iPhone social music star Rexly and that the Rexly team will establish our new San Francisco presence, Live Nation Labs North, or LN² as it’s already known around here. I'm feeling reflective (in addition to yeehaw, hellyeah, and damnright) because Joel and Kyle have just entrusted to the Labs something handmade, something precious and rare. I did that myself just a few months ago.

I'm also feeling reflective because with team Rexly we continue to recruit the people who inspire us. The people we try to imitate and flatter on our best days. The people on The Short List*.

After we started the Labs, but before we'd told anybody what we were up to, Ethan and I started sneaking** up north to court Rexly. We bought them some drinks, sure. But mostly we listened and talked, in that order. When we listened and talked (and drank some very fancy teas), we learned a lot about each other's work and life experiences, and the paths by which we'd arrived at this moment. We started to sketch out the place we'd like to build next. The place we'd be excited to come into on a Monday morning, or blog about on a Sunday night. ;-)

The Live Nation Labs sketch looked a lot like Rexly's sketch. Only Rexly's was colder and foggier and had fancier tea service. I keed. What followed was a plan to build something big together.

Joel and Kyle, I am fortunate to know you and to have this chance now to partner with you in such a bold experiment. On the eve of our big pair-up, here are some things that I believe about Live Nation Labs. Some of these scribbles came directly from our earliest conversations with you on the shhhh. All of these beliefs have been informed and inspired by you both.

I believe:

Labs is a great team of people, and great teams are even more powerful than great ideas or great leverage.

A team of true believers will beat non-believers almost every time. Non-belief is a symptom of feeling powerless and disconnected; direct personal success almost every day is required to suspend such disbelief.

Listening is good, but not enough. Respecting and actually employing input makes the difference.

Great people want to be respected and treated as the competent individuals they are. Heavily legislating the behavior of great people is both demeaning and a lost cause.

In order to treat each other respectfully, we have to trust each other. Trust is first extended but subsequently earned.

If you set great people up to fail, they will enjoy great success. At failing.

I believe you are good and your motives are, too. You want to win and make us better. You fight against things you believe are making us less than great.

The Golden Rule is self-centered and therefore faulty. Don't do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Instead, do unto others as they want and need you to do. And don't expect them to treat you "the same" way — they are not you. Help them to extend you the same courtesy. Parity is a trap. 



To do the above, you have to understand "which guy" you're dealing with. And never stop explaining "which guy" you are. Be both aware and self-aware.

Taking 10 seconds to ask myself, "What am I adding? How am I helping?" before typing, speaking or meeting is impossible — but it’s still worth a try. If we could always take these 10 seconds, there would never be a bad conversation in the Labs.

The most important thing teams can learn from tribes (or happy families) is that we advocate for each other and protect each other. Good family members always work to give each other the benefit of the doubt. Your children are presumed innocent. You should be, too. It's cold out there. The world will treat our fellow Labs people with careless indifference. We should not.

That said, healthy tension can make individuals better and is often an ingredient in the recipe for greatness. Yes, tension can be truly healthy. This is hard. (See Trust, above.)



Laughter is contagious, and we must encourage it to be. Playing together during "work hours" is important and productive.

All the beliefs I’ve described here are much more expensive than providing free soda. These things take time and focus and priority. I believe we are committed to prioritizing them.

I believe that great products and services are byproducts of everything I believe above. (Whoa. That's heavy.)

Okay, anybody who’s read this far: It’s your turn. What do you believe about people and teams? Comment below or tweet to me @bigchampagne, thanks!

----------

*These are the people who squint and see the world as you do — as a better place. These are the people who want to get up in the morning and make it so. These are the people who add to one another, who complement each other yet sometimes clash — in the best and most productive ways.

**Well, I was sneaking. Ethan kept "checking in" everywhere like some newly paroled ex-con.

My high school sweetheart posted this on Facebook. I should probably source it better than that.

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3 Insights into the Future of Geosocial Music

The geosocial revolution (see Foursquare and Facebook Places) promises to connect us to the places we visit and the people who frequent them, while helping us discover music in new ways, too.

Over the past year, a number of startups have released location-based music apps—each aspiring to revolutionize the way we listen to music.

Wahwah.fm, the most innovative of them, enables users to listen to music and simultaneously “broadcast” the session to a larger community. Meanwhile, other users can join the audience, and all can send messages back and forth in real-time. The app has the potential to give users a window into what music people are listening to nearby and what’s trending in places far away. This is significant, because it hints at how music culture and user habits may evolve.

Location has always limited our access to distant music scenes, and while the web has upended the tyranny of geography for some listeners, it remains an everyday constraint for most. But as more music listening activities become linked to location—thanks to apps like wahwah.fm and others—it’s clear that connected devices will continue to lower such barriers.

What happens next? Here are three insights into the future of geosocial music:

1. Invisible culture emerges.

A new layer of music culture is emerging all around us, built not from brick and mortar, but lines of code. It’s located everywhere, but because it’s independent of place, it’s situated nowhere.

Welcome to invisible culture, where music culture is not tied solely to places in the physical world, such as record stores or concert venues that can be reached by foot, but linked to locations through apps on connected devices. The digital revolution made our music and players invisible and weightless, and it has now made a layer of culture that’s invisible and placeless.

When a user views this layer through a device, they’ll be able to see a map of the area and the density of listener activity and music experiences linked to it. These can range from personal radio stations and group-listening rooms to user-tagged songs and photos, and maybe even the location of low-key artist events like jam sessions and house shows. Users will be able to move between digital and physical worlds, dropping by a local Turntable.fm room—either from the comfort of home or while out and about—and even request an invitation to attend a listening party that’s being held at someone’s place later that week.

On the one hand, the physical world is going digital, making it invisible. On the other, the digital world is becoming visible, making it physical. Music culture is everywhere, but situated nowhere.

2. People are portals.

Wahwah.fm often uses radio as a metaphor to describe what it does: Users listen to music and “broadcast” the session as a “radio station” that other users can “tune in” to.

But that’s not quite right. In science fiction, a portal is a magical or technological doorway that connects two distant locations separated by space-time. If you think about it, a portal is exactly what a person becomes when they air songs through wahwah.fm, as it opens up a doorway that enables faraway users to connect to another city’s music scene and hear what people are listening to there.

This distinction is important, because the connections being made through wahwah.fm are to people and not to places. Users can be connected wherever they are, whether at home or out of town, driving in a car or sitting in a coffee house.

Prior to the web, the music culture that formed in many places consisted of communities of people drawn together around physical locations—such as record stores, clubs and radio stations—whose social activities in the aggregate created a local scene. After a decade of disruption and consolidation brought forth by the digital revolution and other market forces, the scene-making activity at many of these locations has ceased, causing their attendant communities to fracture and move elsewhere.

More and more often, the new “where” for members of these communities is online. As smartphones made the web mobile and integrated with GPS, it provided developers with the platform needed to build geosocial apps that connect listening activity to individuals and enable communities to form around them.

The person is becoming the portal—the primary hub of connectivity.

3. Scenes become global.

Since listening sessions in wahwah.fm are linked to your location, it means that user activity in New York or Los Angeles could be measured to reveal artists who are popular there. Those results could then by filtered to include only local artists, thereby creating a list of the most popular artists in that area. In this way, local scenes could be turned into a local music stations.

A wahwah.fm user who lives in New York could tap into Los Angeles and experience the sounds of the local scene, or perhaps enable a shuffle-like feature that would take him or her on a virtual tour of major scenes—like Nashville, Atlanta, or Montreal—and highlight trending songs in those areas.

While a user listens to a song on this platform, they could be shown biographical bits about the artist, fan-captured photos from their latest live shows, and facts about the area to provide context.

Of course, listening to a scene isn’t the same as being there. Roaming the streets of Los Angeles in Google Maps isn’t the same as walking them. A scene is a place regarded as having a sound, but it’s the people and artists that shape it. What a listener hears then isn’t the scene itself, but the musical essence of it.

That essence, though, gives users insight into scenes existing outside of their own. It also provides those of us without a local scene access to distant locations and the sounds attached to them.

As people become portals, scenes will become global. Trending music will spread more quickly from one area to another, further influencing the sound artists produce and the music listeners hear.

The Future

To many, this future may seem far out, but in some ways, it’s already here. The web continues to teach us that the communities that form in the digital world eventually seep into the physical one.

Take Jelli, the social radio service, for example. Last year, a few broadcast radio stations in Las Vegas fully integrated Jelli into their offerings. This enabled a station’s listeners to participate in a group chat and vote for songs in the service to be played on the air.

Over time, strangers became friends and regular users started hosting meet-up groups around town where they used the digital service in a physical space. The radio station and the music it played gave them something to talk about, and soon people discovered they had other things in common.

"They came for the music and to get their song on the air, but they stayed because of the people they met in chat and the real-world meet-ups,” says Jelli CEO Mike Dougherty. “These listeners are a great example of what a 'local scene' can be in the age of social media, mobile, and participatory media."

Indeed, the new music community is just that: a community. The culture and technology evolves, but human nature remains consistent. We’re made to be together, and often, music catalyzes that impulse.

By Kyle Bylin

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Mainstream Fanatic: Songza Takes Music Playlists To The Masses

Every year, dozens of startups attempt the impossible: to make their product mainstream. In the music sector, this proves to be a particularly challenging task, because startups are often founded by fanatics who are unlike the casual listeners they’re targeting with their product.

The team at Songza, a music streaming service, faces this hurdle.

The company presents itself as a destination for hand-crafted playlists and effortless music discovery, but the roll-out of its latest platform signals that its ambitions are much larger. Many companies have tried to create a mainstream playlist service before, but none have attempted this feat in the way that Songza has.

When a user visits Songza, they’re now encouraged to use a feature that helps them select the perfect playlist for that time period. For example, if you open Songza on a Tuesday afternoon, it suggests you may be seeking music for “Working or Studying”. If selected, it displays a list of genres, and if you pick “Pop”, the playlists “The World of Adele” or “Soft Pop” are recommended.

This feature, branded as Music Concierge, is innovative and intuitive; it narrows the pool of playlists and eases the burden of picking one. By suggesting the right music for their day, it has the potential to increase the amount of enjoyment users derive from it, thereby enhancing their mood.

But what’s striking about the feature isn’t what it does. The remarkable thing about Music Concierge lies in the fanatic activity that drives it and the effect it may have on those who use it.

II. Maximizing Music

Behind Songza, there’s a hoard of music experts and dedicated users. These are the fanatics who swap songs in and out of the playlists for “Working or Studying,” or “Getting Lucky,” or “Unwinding After A Busy Weekend” until they achieve perfection.

They imagine themselves working or studying in the future and attempt to align music with that experience in hopes that they can increase their focus and deepen their enjoyment of the task.

After several hours and possibly debates with friends, these fanatics arrive at a list of songs that suffice and now must determine how they fare in the real world. The next time they’re working or studying, they’ll cue up the playlist, make a few adjustments, and press play. Depending on how well the songs carry them through the designated activity, they’ll either redo or finalize the playlist.

This process takes time and effort, more than a casual listener will devote. Songza removes this burden for casual users entirely and makes it easy to harvest the fruits of fanatic labor. It might just popularize the notion that different times of day call for different kinds of music if the service goes mainstream.

For decades, fanatics have had a romanticized idea about having a soundtrack to their lives. When they wake up in the morning, they dream of a playlist beginning—just like in the movies—that syncs up the perfect songs to their day and only pauses for dramatic moments between star-crossed lovers.

The introduction of the cassette opened the door to this music utopia, making it possible for fanatics everywhere to capture their favorite songs and blend them together in a thematic fashion.

But this form of playlist curation goes beyond that. Playing the right music at the right time is only one part of the equation. That’s what a DJ does. When fanatics create playlists, they attempt to imagine future experiences and orchestrate music that maximizes the level of enjoyment they expect to derive from the activity alone. Their goal is to make the activity itself better through music.

Rather than settle for a playlist that’s good enough, a fanatic explores all possible songs and chooses the best ones. This is a daunting task, but their playlists speak for themselves.

Songza has now packaged these playlists and made them accessible to casual listeners. The question is: Could a feature like Music Concierge produce negative effects? If so, what might they be?

III. Conveyer Belt

Products are conversations—and Songza mirrors what users tell it. We may not recognize the person staring back at us, but that reflection is us, and it speaks volumes about music fans today.

We’re overloaded with choice, often opting to listen to the same old songs as a way to avoid facing unlimited options. Moreover, we outsource choice—using filters like iTunes and Pandora rather than “doing the work” ourselves. We stand alongside the conveyer belt that the web provides us, assigning thumbs up or down to songs as they pass us by. If unsure, we skip the song entirely, because determining if we like it proves just as—if not more—paralyzing.

Music in the digital age isn’t always the paradise of choice we sought. As often, it’s the paradox of choice. Recognizing this, Songza set out to develop a better product, one that helps users find great playlists and requires zero effort.

According to user feedback, even the act of typing in an artist name to create a playlist—the way a user creates a station on Pandora—demanded too much thought and energy. It also revealed that the best music service—to them—is free to use with no strings attached or annoying audio ads.

Added to this, Songza had to make it extremely clear to users how its product differed from web darlings like Pandora and Spotify, who are often wrongly compared to each other.

First the company released a new platform and a mobile app with an increased focus on its curated library of playlists—and it has now placed Music Concierge at the forefront of that offering. This is significant, because it encourages users to rely on a filter rather than on themselves and to pick a playlist over choosing one.

Perhaps more troubling than this result is the possibility that this passivity will carry over into the way users interact with the playlists they’ve chosen. Songza already assumes that a user is doing something else and listening to music, which diverts their attention from the response songs stir individually to the experience a playlist creates collectively. Rather than actively engaging with the music and the artists who create it, users begin an activity and use Songza to entertain them.

Now we shouldn’t pretend—even for a moment—that this scenario somehow differs from the way that most people listen to music. The distinction to make is that most musical experiences contain songs that have the potential to shake us from the motions of everyday life and captivate us to engage with them. When we listen to the perfect playlist for an activity, in contrast, it never interrupts our workflow or demands attention.

IV. Mainstream Fanatic

Generally, the first people a new music service attracts are fanatics. They instantly saw the value in joining Turntable.fm, the group listening service, and likely went on to become DJs. So too, they’re the people who discover Songza and feel compelled to submit playlists for consideration.

The web platform and mobile app that Songza developed, though, required too much investment to cross the chasm and captivate a casual listener. To streamline the product and broaden its appeal, Songza introduced Music Concierge.

Turntable eluded the mainstream market and declined in use because it failed to translate the fanatic activities that drove its product into one that solved a problem that casual listeners have.

The wider narrative of Songza, however, goes much deeper. As the service gains traction, it will likely further the transition of music to merely the audio backdrop to our daily activities. It won’t be assumed that we do something else and listen to music, it’ll be accepted that we’re always doing something else.

By Kyle Bylin 

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Live Nation Labs Fund

[]() Photo by Kris Krug By Ethan Kaplan, Product There are two ways of looking at how businesses work together. A common one in large companies is akin to a dance. Two big (or one big, one small) companies meet on the dancefloor, do a short dance, bow and be done with it. The only thing paid attention to is the dance, not how they got there, nor what they do afterward—and a press release about this dance is required. This has many problems. It isn't a holistic relationship, and orienting a relationship toward a press release is simply putting the idealized end state ("we're rich!" or "we're first to market!") ahead of any long-term gains. It also results in deal fatigue, because the courtship is often more elaborate than the result. These are cynical, press release-oriented relationships and they ultimately prove to be toxic. To me, the best business development has always been an API key exchange and filling out a credit card form on a website. I get what I want, they get what they want, and we are loosely joined but mutually dependent (them on my money, me on their technology). However, an API key relationship can only take you so far, and in some cases you find the holes that need filling in your ecosystem only by falling into them. Sometimes the products that fit those holes are not SaSS and PaSS. Sometimes they haven't even been created yet. Sometimes they are products with their own ecosystem and no clear way of monetary integration, even if the tech integration is clear. In these cases, you need a way to extend your business development strategy beyond swinging a corporate purchasing card and API keys around. The Live Nation Labs Fund was formed to give us this platform. We are not building an isolated product with Live Nation online. Rather, we are building an ecosystem of products to meet and solve the big problems for our customers. Given that, we know that at the edges is where our innovation must lie, in order to maintain our ability to be nimble. And at the edges is where not only the best products are made, but where they end up residing. Right now, it’s an amazing time in terms of product development. Different movements can take credit for it, but what it really amounts to is technology has given the ability to make many low-cost, high-reward moves to meet the needs of real people in immediately tangible ways. Everything from cloud computing to ubiquitous computing and pervasive connectivity can take credit for this. Live Nation Labs Fund (LN Labs Fund for short) lets us participate in this product ecosystem on a level playing field, both as a partner and player, as well as an innovator. When we set out to create this fund, I added a page to the playbook to outline how we should dictate the use of it. One of the things that I hold tight to at LN Labs is that "everything is a product." Meaning, even if no one aside from the internal team uses something, treating it as a product puts it into a structure that makes all aspects of its creation, deployment and operation a learnable and maintainble process. As a product, you have to have a metrics set that you can learn from, as well as user stories and personas that dictate how you reach those metrics. For LN Labs Fund, this was the creation of a rubric that we put pitches through as a way of maintaining our own products focus on the customer above all: 1. Is this additive to the user experience? 2. Are we taking into account implementation and deimplementation? Does the cost/effort involved in those exceed the possible "best case" scenario of normal run-rate? 3. Is this filling a hole that is created by necessity, resource constraints, product focus or a marketing need? 4. Does this relationship effect our ability to be nimble? 5. Is this partner aligned with our objectives? Are we mutually benefiting from this relationship in tangible ways? 6. Does our relationship with this partner have any negative effect on our ability to maintain the core values of our team? Are they a good actor in the space? 7. If this is an exclusive relationship, what is the downside risk? 8. Is this a temporary solution or a long-term engagement? LN Labs Fund is looking to work with partners in all aspects of our product: from infrastructure to media. Things that make our users’ lives better, and help us solve big problems: Connecting you to your favorite music and events on the world's biggest stage.

[lnabs]

Yesterday, we got our delivery of Steelcase node chairs.  They're designed for classroom sitting, but Zappos inspired us to get some for our office.  Turns out they work great for impromptu meetings and quick chats.  Now we don't need to steal chairs from conference rooms and other peoples' desks to have meetings any more!

They look great, are super convenient, and improve our productivity.  But they also have two more features that we love:

1. Wheels

2. Cupholders

So, (hopefully not surprisingly) we took the two of them to their respective logical conclusions:

1. Chair races

2. Mobile beers!

The enclosed video is the result.  Please enjoy.

[lnabs]

The office, by Andy Kim

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Today, a shark invaded Live Nation Labs.

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Busy building things....

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Advertising Indie: How Earbits Helps Bands Find Fans

It’s easy for bands to distribute their music, but hard to market it. They can pay to get their songs in the right places - iTunes, Amazon, and Spotify - but it’s unclear how to get them heard by the right people. Earbits, a Los Angeles-based startup, aspires to turn their radio service into an ad platform where bands can buy airtime and gain exposure for their songs and upcoming live performances.

While the web-music sector is crowded with established services like Pandora and Spotify, Earbits stands out because it focuses solely on emerging artists and provides fans with a compelling way to discover them. The service offers genre stations, which are common, but it has many features which aren’t.

For instance, if you log into Earbits using Facebook, the service pulls your friends into a toolbar and sorts them by who’d most enjoy hearing the song currently being played. If you click on one of your friends, a window opens up, which allows you to post the song to their Facebook wall.

Most interesting, though, are the ways in which Earbits nudges their users to engage more deeply with bands. While you listen to song, you can scroll beneath the fold on the website and find information about the artist, including a bio, discography and tour dates. If you give a song a “thumbs ups”—the way you tailor a station to your likes and dislikes—the service prompts you to tweet the track or post it on your wall. If you’re listening to music on the mobile app and the band is playing a show nearby, it will alert you—and with a one click, you can share the info with a friend.

“We think of Earbits as an artist-centric radio platform,” says CEO Joey Flores. “We’re always looking for ways to connect a band with fans instead of just playing music for someone in the background.” He continues, “People are doing more on our website than just turning it on and tuning out.”

And there’s a good reason for this. On Earbits the songs themselves are commercials, which makes bands the customers, and of course, you—the listener—the product. Rather than encouraging users to click on ads and interact with brands, Flores hopes they’ll discover bands, become fans and buy their albums and concert tickets.

He desires this outcome for two reasons: For Earbits to make money (and keep doing so), it must create enough value for a cash-strapped band to justify the expense—and provide a return large enough that it demands reinvestment. If a band buys airtime to promote a show and converts a handful of listeners into concertgoers, they’ll likely recoup their costs and use Earbits again. Flores also wants this to happen because he—a lifetime music fanatic—believes that a world with more active fans (i.e. music buyers and concertgoers) could only be a better one.

“Don’t just turn on the music and not wonder who it is,” Flores laments.

But wanting something to happen doesn’t mean you can make it happen. The truth is that a majority of consumers aren’t music fanatics and have no interest in doing a majority of these things.

And, as Earbits has learned, even fanatics have limits. Flores and his team have this problem where when they sit around and brainstorm on ideas, the ones that they find interesting oftentimes “don’t get any traction” and ones that they “think are totally stupid” end up becoming really popular.

Earbits has some of the most interesting sharing tools of any music service on their site. They spent lots of time building them only to find out that “like only 3% of people” will ever use the tools.

“Most people scroll right past [the Facebook toolbar],” Flores says, “they don’t even see it.”

This is illustrative. The very innovative feature that music and technology publications will praise Earbits for developing and having on their site ended up being the one fans didn’t care to use.

Many music startups develop features in their products that they “think” fans want without actually testing them or embracing the hard truth that most fans may not want any of these things.

“We used to add a feature [to Earbits] and assume that it created more value [for users],” says Flores, referring the time period before his team read the influential book The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Rather than making assumptions about the features users want and the value they create, they now utilize the “real metrics” that Ries advocates for—such as active users and user engagement—to determine if a feature is creating more value for their users and whether they should keep it.

Weeks ago, Earbits added a search bar so that users could start a station by typing in an artist that they like—akin to what Pandora and rival services offer—and Flores says user engagement “went down with this feature.”

Before reading The Lean Startup and implementing its teachings, his company wouldn’t have even been tracking that metric. “We would’ve just assumed that adding a search bar would’ve been a good thing,” he says. “Actually, for some reason, it has a negative impact.”

Describing what operating a startup for over a year without any real, important metrics and then embracing them wholeheartedly is like, Flores says the process has “been really eye-opening.”

This sort of awakening is necessary for startups. Music elicits passion in people and some of them grow inspired to create products. These people are often fanatics who see problems to solve in their own lives and feel compelled to create solutions for everyone else. But fanatics aren’t everyone else; their wants and needs are different. A chasm exists between them and casual fans, and they don’t see it.

Fanatics make assumptions about what users want and develop a product, only to learn that most people don’t have these problems and see no value in adopting their solution. As Ries argues in his book, a startup like this achieves failure by “successfully executing a plan that leads to nowhere.”

This is the startup dilemma: A fanatic founder will often perceive a problem as being more universal than it actually is and mistakes his own experience as evidence that a solution should exist. But most people have never had such experiences and can’t relate to the products they create.

A quick survey of the sector reveals that no one is doing quite what Earbits does. Services like Jango and Grooveshark let bands buy airtime and gain exposure, but they don’t nudge fans to attend their shows or share their songs. Pandora debuted a free concert series last year wherein they invited fans to attend a live performance by the rock band Dawes, based on where they live and the likelihood that they’d enjoy listening to their music. But they don’t promote shows within their platform—let alone, allow artists to buy airtime.

Deli Radio, a newly launched music startup, enables fans to create radio stations that play music by bands that’ll be playing shows nearby—the downside being that, since the service is free, bands can’t geo-target fans.

Generally speaking, music services take a hands-off approach to promoting bands. “They’re not making an effort to turn people into real consumers of those band’s products,” says Flores. “You’re always trying to send them to McDonald’s.” Like broadcast radio before it, Pandora’s customers are brands and it sells them a product—exposure to their audience. The music is the bait, and there’s nothing wrong with this. Many business models work like this.

Could Pandora make a better effort to help bands find fans? Of course. But here’s the thing: It’s not clear that casual listeners have a desire for this to happen. For them, a radio service that plays unfamiliar music and regularly alerts them about shows may be bad experience. That’s the reality. Flores is fighting a noble cause—and it’s one worth fighting for. But he’s targeting fanatics with Earbits and even they’re pushing back against his efforts.

“At the end of the day, if you want to build a company that’s good at promoting artists, you build a company that makes money from promoting artists,” says Flores, which is a fair assessment.

But first Earbits must find fans that want bands promoted to them and it’s a tough crowd.

By Kyle Bylin, Content Manager

[lnabs]

Culture is a Product

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](http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898)" 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 I need to so I can .` 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](http://jenkins-ci.org/), [Janky](https://github.com/github/janky), [Hubot](https://github.com/github/hubot) and [Github](http://github.com). 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. _Post by Ethan Kaplan, Product_

[lnabs]

Busy building things.

[lnabs]

I Just Want To Tell You Five Things...

From: Joe Fleischer <[email protected]> Date: Tues, 31 Jan 2012 18:23:06 -0800 To: Team Champagne Subject: FW: I just want to tell you five things

#humblebrag

TL/DR

From: Eric Garland <[email protected]> Date: Tues, 31 Jan 2012 18:21:18 -0800 To: Joe Fleischer Subject: I just want to tell you five things

1. You should try to be born an anesthesiologist.

2. It’s the people, stupid (not the stupid people).

3. It’s the stories you tell.

4. Be good. Be persistent. But, mostly, be fortunate.

5. Be not afraid.

We started a company. We grew a company. A Fortune 500 company offered to invest in our company and then they acquired our company. And now they’re supporting us in making it bigger and better.

We have chairs. We’re filling those chairs with outstanding people. And I’m almost all talked out about every last exciting little bit of it. I just want to tell you (and my young daughters) five things I’ve learned along the way:

1. You should try to be born an anesthesiologist.

Or a software developer. Or a banker. If you can.

I don’t mean try to be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever. That’s a terribly misguided thing to do, to try to tell someone what to be. What I mean is: try to be born that way. Because doing something you love (all day, every day) may be important.[1] And if you could choose to love banking or coding or doctoring — well, that’s a nice life! Ask anyone.

Of course, you probably have no say in this.

Yeeeeees, I know, I know. You have a choice, you can choose to do this or that. I know piles of litigators and physicians and CFOs who weren’t born to do it, don’t like doing it, and are very “successful,” blah blah blah, at it nonetheless.[2] What I mean is just this: envy those lawyers whose souls burn for their litigation work! Envy those CPAs who dream in spreadsheets!

Because I was born an entrepreneur. And some of my favorite people in the world were born artists and musicians.

And entrepreneurs and artists and musicians share an affliction. My friend Jill Sobule was the first person to point this out to me. I’m paraphrasing, so just know that she said something like the following, only clever-er:

“You think I’d do this if I had a choice? I do this because I have to! I should do something sensible, or something that makes a lot of money.”

When Jill Sobule says she “has to,” she means love is a drug. And that we can’t take the blue pill (even if it’s good for us). Our hearts beat for the red pill!

I’m saying this to you, kids: it’s easier to do “something sensible” with your life. But only if you are lucky enough to love doing something sensible. Seeking real emotional fulfillment from your work and finding it only in entrepreneurial pursuits… is harder.[3] Objectively hard, even. But if you are a red pill addict, mourn the addiction and then give in to it. You’re going to spend your life (usually in California) with all the other addicts. Nothing else will do.

And speaking of life among the addicts…

2. It’s the people, stupid (not the stupid people[4]).

Many red pill people are addicted, afflicted and flat-out defective: narcissistic, childish, explosive, tyrannical, extremely high maintenance. Stunted. There’s no business like show business! But the worst of these people is still gloriously defective. The worst is a P.T. Barnum. Or even a Harry Cohn. He’s a hustler, sometimes monstrous. But so colorful, and his red is a screaming fire engine red — it looks great on him. Oh, and you have to have a sense of humor about the characters, because without the laughs, it’s mostly tears. Seriously. Lots of people who did not get held by their mothers. As my co-founder Joe says, “Oy.”

Stupid people? I don’t know very many, truthfully. I know too many terrified people, though, thinking short term (out of panic). Chasing tactics, not developing strategies. And caged animals do lash out. They called us names. Sometimes it was funny. We were always the dumbest guys in the room. Until we weren’t.

It’s the extraordinary people. So, when choosing your team: I like to think that I arrived independently at a recruiting strategy usually attributed to Guy Kawasaki (and, by implication, Steve Jobs).

Solid A players hire A+ players; B players hire C players, Cs hire Ds…

In other words, find people who are better than you are. This is easy for me. I’m a non-technical founder of very technical businesses. There’s a big target on my back, as there should be.

Everyone says, “I have a great team.” I’ll say this: I consider it a rare and wonderful thing, to get to go to work with the people I respect and admire most. Adam and Joe: I am excited to continue to earn the opportunity to show up and learn from you every day. You are my brothers and if I were ever made to lie in a trench with bullets whizzing by overhead, I would hope the guys to my left and right were made like you.

An amazing core team got us to this fine place: Tom, Zack, Adam A., JD, Ken, Fred, Seth, Travis, Aaron, Taric, Rich, Jack, John, Shalewa, Brandon, Thomas, Joy, Paul and Farzad.[5] They are joined now by new dream teammates: Ethan, Jenny, Jake, Jennifer, Jacob, Kyle, Bennett, Andy…and counting.

Oh, and another people thing: you should try to marry well. I’ve walked away from perfectly good careers in favor of uncertain plans and all Amanda ever said was, “Babe, you have to do it.” Whatever “it” was. I highly recommend falling in love with your favorite person. And I know my kids get a lot out of watching me puzzling through life, admiring their mother’s many beautiful qualities and trying to emulate them every day. Aw.

I’m leaving out dozens of other great people who should be acknowledged here. (Look how long it is already!) But I’ve kept very good notes for the book and, no, I won’t change your name or leave you out (sorry).[6]

3. It’s the stories you tell.

My friend James Glassman was right. Starting in high school, he reminded me constantly. Really, he made a sort of a catch phrase out of it. He’d marvel at some past exploit, shaking his head with just half a smile. It’s the stories you tell. Or he’d offer it more forcefully, encouraging us, at the prospect of a new exploit:

It’s the stories you tell!

A life well told is as close an approximation of a life well lived as I’ve found. Do you savor the memories of chances you almost took but didn’t, adventures you packed your bags for but then never left the driveway?

Most of the things that have happened in my life in music I can’t even type about here.[7] Viewed at a distance, it all feels to me like one big blur of Cameron Crowe moments. A love letter to music and tech.

The earliest flicker is R.E.M.’s “Document” tour. Texas. We were fanatics and right down front. But we were also young adolescents and making a lot of noise. Pete Buck actually leaned out over his monitor to plead with us from the edge of the stage: “Guys, be cool… or Michael’s gonna get real pissed!”

Then Squeeze invited my high school band to Tipitina’s on a school night and I talked my mom into letting me drive the family wagon from Texas to New Orleans for the gig.

At a festival, we played side stage at a huge amphitheater, We were in the first support slot. Duran Duran was headlining on the main stage and it was my best friend’s sister’s wedding that night and then Simon Le Bon crashed the reception and…

My favorite comedian ever, for all time, George Carlin asked me and a friend to his green room. And we went. It was one of my first nights out with the girl who would become my wife.

The BigChampagne story all started with Napster and Glen Phillips and the estate of Peter Tosh. Phone calls from Jamaica. Aimee Mann and Michael Hausman. Glenn Tilbrook. Tim O’Brien and Stroke 9. Ken and Fred and Seth. But then it made the leap almost immediately to Robin at Capitol. McCartney! Guerinot, No Doubt and Offspring. Jimmy and Berman and Courtney and Axl and Bono and Rodney Jerkins. Eminem. Guy and Madonna. We worked all hours in my little apartment in the Fairfax. Then we rented those old screenwriting offices on Little Santa Monica Blvd.

Things sped up even more. It all happened too fast.[8]

And then, one day…

“Uh, MC Hammer is in the conference room. He didn’t make an appointment or anything, he just showed up.”

Hammer?

“Yeah. MC Hammer.”

The real MC Hammer?

Nod.

What does he want?

“To see you.” Uncomfortable pause. “He asked me for a Diet Coke.”

A colorful ribbon of planes, trains and hotel rooms tied it all together. New York and LA. London and Berlin and Beijing and Copenhagen and Kristiansand and Vancouver Island and Cannes and Vienna and Edinburgh and Brighton and Toronto and and and Austin, always Austin.

SXSW. My three-year-old daughter fell hard for the songs of Willie Nelson and announced she would marry him. Willie wrote Lucy a sweet love note back.

I met folk hero Billy Bragg at a bar on Sixth Street. Five minutes later I met his manager Pete Jenner and he remains my dear friend today. Pinch me. Will Page and Juana were married in Valencia and I wore my kilt as I was instructed. We toasted to his beautiful bride, and mine, and to the night we’d stood in Victoria Park, London, at the side of the stage as Radiohead washed over us, around us, through us.[9]

God, it really does start and end with the bands, those magnificently talented bastards! REM in Georgetown, the car ride with Bertis and hearing the record the world wouldn’t hear until the following year. Will Owsley’s memorial, Nashville. Nickel Creek at Largo. Jane's at El Cid. A few hundred other stages.

That’s just a few seconds of it. Life. It’s the stories you tell.

4. Be good. Be persistent. But, mostly, be fortunate.

When something very good happens to you in your life or business, everyone wants to tell you all about how you made it happen and how you deserve it. This is a nice thing. Your real friends value you and celebrate your success.

But you know the truth is that you don’t deserve any of it.[10] You have worked hard, you’ve been smart, you have been determined and good. But you definitely haven’t earned any of it any more than your equally smart (or smarter!), dedicated and good friends deserved that mouthful of knuckle sandwich. The string of failed companies. The divorce. The (don’t say it) failing health.

An important figure in my life (call him Mr. Hoodler), a family friend in the Bay Area who is like a favorite uncle, sat with me at a congratulatory dinner. He was quiet, listening to all the easy praise around the table. You deserve it. Good guys do win. You worked so hard. You stayed the course.

“And,” Mr. Hoodler said, finally, “it’s good to be lucky. Isn’t it?”

The first person to give voice to exactly what I’ve been feeling all along. Who deserves what we have? No. One. But that won’t stop me from receiving it humbly and gladly. Thank you, sir. May I have another?

Call it luck or fortune, call it God or call it something else. But don’t overlook the essential role of the happy accidents. We spend so much energy trying to control every aspect of our businesses. We micromanage, we obsess. And yet, we control so little. Talent and determination (and ten thousand hours) are necessary but not sufficient to success. The pixies still have to sprinkle their dust here and there.

And, actually, I agree with Seth Godin about ten thousand hours: the talent and determination are very often necessary to success — but not always.

Mr. Hoodler got it right, and so did those other Bay Area poets, when they sang:

Sometimes the light’s all shining on me

Other times I can barely see

Lately it occurs to me

What a looooooong, strange trip it’s been

5. Be not afraid.

Whoo boy, those are three scary words.

I think maybe that’s because fear, or what my partner Joe Fleischer calls “managing the downside,” is practically required, sometimes. But not that often.

I know this: I’m at my very best when I am completely unafraid. I bet that’s true of you, too. Serious studies show that positivity leads to increased creativity, better insights and greater success.

Conversely, fear cripples. It’s, um, neuroscience. If you read enough about the effects of fear (and unhappiness, generally) on mind and body, you could be forgiven for thinking that you can’t succeed without happiness.

But that’s not true either. There are plenty of objectively “successful” people who were extremely unhappy all day, every single day that they were creating their success. You can be successful and unhappy. But why would you want to?

The stuff I started to say earlier about stupid people — none of those people was really stupid. But they were all terrified and it can be hard to tell the difference. So, you want to be the smartest guy in the room? Start by thinking fearlessly.

“I never lie because I don’t fear anyone. The only time you lie is when you are afraid.”

— John Gotti

And speaking of John Gotti, I met with Michael Eisner (kiiiiiiiding) when he’d left Disney and was starting Vuguru.

He asked me: How many companies have you started?

Just this one, so far, I said.

He snorted. What are you afraid of?

It was not the question I was expecting. And it was rhetorical. Do more. Fail more, he said.

I will, I assured him.

Faster, he shot back. Really, what are you afraid of?

Of anything on this sprawling list of (ha) just five things I think I’ve learned, this may be the hardest one. But I do try to think fearlessly and to tell the truth.

And I do think that’s why I wrote this down.

That and because maybe you read this far.[11]

So,

· If you were not born to do something more sensible,

· If you believe in the power of extraordinary teams of people and the stories they live and tell,

· If you are an A+ player — talented and determined and unafraid, even in the face of real adversity, and especially

· If you are a mobile/web engineer or designer…[12]

If your life is a love letter to music and tech, I’m hoping you might join us. Be successful and be happy.

[email protected]

Look out world. [13] Hammertime. Let’s go.

[1] Don’t believe me. Hunter Walk says so.

[2] And when I say some of these professionals weren’t “born” to do this or that, I’m not trying to start a nurture/nature debate here. As a parent of monozygotic twins, I have plenty of empirical and anecdotal evidence that we are all products of a still-mysterious blend of both genetic predispositions and life experiences.

[3] Seth Godin predicts that there are no more “blue pill” careers coming, for anyone. So maybe we’re just ahead of the game.

[4] There are some. I’ll name names in the book.

[5] Alums: Tom W. and Luca.

[6] Relax. It’s not a slam book. I love you. Mostly.

[7] These stories are pretty safe. If you want to hear some better ones, you’ll have to buy drinks.

[8] For you fine print readers, here’s a little more of what I remember:

Shawn and his lawyer Milt calling to say that they couldn’t publicly support our work but that on the shhh they loved it and that we should keep going. Napster was promptly shut down.

Digital Brandcasting and Will and Jada and Peter Arnell. Alanis. Michael Jackson and HollywoodTicket.com and Rundell and Coursey and MJ’s $20M. Lars. Jay Boberg and Ed K and Gary Kurfirst (may he rest in peace).

Time on Sand Hill Road. Time with Marc and Ben and Ron Conway and…

Rewriting the rules. Testing leaked MP3s for No Doubt and Weezer. Hearing the first Alicia Keys record and seeing the “Fallin’” video in the J Records offices. Hearing that other young girl who made the tapes with her dad and opened for Hanson: Michelle Branch. Gregg Alexander. Carlos Santana.

Some new band from England had a song called “Yellow” and ABC was using it to promote their fall TV shows – could we track the impact online?

Everybody started suing everybody. I testified in the CA senate. Levar Burton spoke after I did and he welled up when he begged the senators to protect his work from “mash-ups.” Did I make the Reading Rainbow cry? David Draiman said he hated that the RIAA was suing kids and biting the hand that feeds them. He got most excited talking about his previous life in business: health care administration. Jeff Tweedy defended MP3 swapping on Nightline. I stuck to the numbers.

Niklas and Janus from Kazaa (later Skype, then Joost), sneaking around. They were fugitives from justice then, creeping into the country on private planes and taking secret meetings in LA. More meetings! Travis from Scour Exchange (later Red Swoosh, now Uber). Michael from AudioGalaxy. Ian Clarke invented Freenet. When he came to my office, his big toe was sticking out through a hole in his shoe. Morpheus. Bearshare. Limewire. Soulseek. Sued. Sued. Suedsuedsuedsuedsuedsued.

Ah, the piracy wars. Hilary then Cary then Mitch. I debated the legendary Jack Valenti (RIP) at the Cato Institute in DC. I lost. Bob LEFSETZ IN ALL CAPS!!!!! Everyone was so excited, for better or worse, but the songs just kept pouring out in a bittorrent. By the billions. Zuckerberg and Sean Parker went to Tom Whalley’s house to show him Wirehog. It looked a little like Napster, file sharing but “integrated with thefacebook.” The meeting with the record label president did not go that well.

The days were coming so fast, running into each other. I told Amanda I felt like I needed a flip top head to pour in all the learnings.

We just kept sprinting. When the bumper fell off of Silent Bob’s Dodge Neon, we tied it back on with bungee cord, called it “bootstrapped,” and kept on driving.

WIRED called. A cover story? The writer left Brooklyn and camped out in our first work/live loft in the ATL for days. He just kept staring at the tables of kids in headphones, coding. The magazine waited patiently for something to happen. Nothing did. Das blinkin’ lights in the server rack just kept blinkin’.

Life’s funny. You can see the dots connect in hindsight: that writer on assignment for WIRED is now Jeff, my dear friend. And together with Alysia and the kids, he is part of my life (and not my work) story.

Michael Ovitz wanted to have lunch. If we bought EMI, what would you do with it? Chris DeWolfe wanted to have lunch. If you were running music at MySpace, what would you do with it?

Roger Ames stood in the office, yelling at me, in his socks. I thought of Ian Clarke.

Alex Zubillaga paced Tom Whalley’s office like a tiger, roaring at me. You’re underestimating ringback tones! So American! So much shouting.

I turned 30 at the Beverly Wilshire hotel with Evan and Gregg. They’d just started something called Jib Jab. The dinner that night was in honor of Ken and Fred. I was very star struck by all the celebs. Then Robin asked two dates to the Grammys: Sean Parker and me. Parker couldn’t get into Pete Wentz’s after-party and I knew the manager, so he thought I was somebody for a minute.

At another party, I was introduced to Paris Hilton. When she laughed at my unfunny jokes and put my number in her phone, a writer for the Times of London wrote it up like a gossip column and called me the internet’s “It Boy.” In print.

Of course the heiress was actually asking for my wife’s number. Amanda had been a teacher at the Buckley School where Paris and Nicole met. It was all fine in the end. The Brit from the Times married my friend Lucie and now he’s just, well, Chris. And Paris is a place in France…

KLSX in Los Angeles used to let the old guys hold forth on the radio on Sunday nights. I co-hosted and took calls with with Lefsetz and Nose and Andy Gould and Rob Zombie and and and…we laughed at our own unfunny jokes.

Quincy Jones showed up at dinner with TED founder Richard Saul Wurman. Just like Robin, he brought two dates: Naomi Campbell and Salma Hayek. I sat at their table. And I’ll only say this: it’s good to be Q.

You remember a lot, of course. We all do. The stories you tell. But sometimes you are even more present, your senses heightened, every sight and sound written indelibly to memory. Thank God. I headed up to San Jose for a VC dinner. After the cocktail hour, Steve Jobs stood up to tell us how important we were, the young hopefuls, and to paint us a picture of what we could do together. My table assignment put me with Shawn Fanning and Tim Westergren. I can still see Steve squinting into the low sun. “I want to tell you something,” he began. Food was on the table, but every fork was down.

[9] Our passes to that show were the band’s thank you gift to us. We’d just completed a career-making (for us, not Radiohead) piece of research for them.

[10] Ticketmaster’s CEO Nathan Hubbard keeps a stuffed donkey on his desk. He says it’s to remind him that he is just another jackass. I don’t need a plush toy. I can always just call my brother.

[11] If you did read this far, and you are the first person to email [email protected], we'll hook you up with some great FREE tickets to a great show. In fact, I'm so sure you didn't read this far that anyone who reads this and emails us tweets @bigchampagne will get a very fashionable FREE BigChampagne t-shirt (while supplies last). 

[12] Ok, Ethan made me put that part in.

[13] (But not in a bad way. We only want to surprise and entertain you.)

[lnabs]

Welcoming Jacob Evans

Since we have been heads down hacking, we are just now getting to introducing the team.

Many years ago, I got a call from the head of Nonesuch records, asking that I let the son of his childhood friend intern with me. I said "sure," since Bob Hurwitz is and was and will remain one of my favorite people in this business.

I had no clue that this intern (who was all of 19) could do anything but play Guitar Hero to unlock achievements for us. For the first week, that is what he did. At some point he came into my office and said, "uh, you do know I can program?"

Every summer up until his graduation Jacob interned for us at WBR, and he was hired full time right as I left. He is now our first engineer and graces our humble offices on Hollywood Blvd with the unique combination of a Volvo, aviator sun glasses, hipster t-shirts, a briefcase and a Windows Mobile phone every day.

- Ethan