CrowdRules Blog

Grayson Brulte Talk is Prize in Unsigned Band Contest!

CrowdRules.com, a new video contest site, is offering a competition for musical acts in Rock, Hip-Hop and Pop to land exclusive conversations with Grayson Brulte (formerly with Epic Records) of G|B Entertainment. Other prizes to be announced.

“Every unsigned band wants a chance to be heard and get honest feedback from someone with experience and connections inside the music industry,” says David Moss, CEO of Transilient Media, Inc., the creators of CrowdRules.com. “So we’re really excited to be working with Grayson on this. He’s a visionary for the new wave of the music industry. He tells it like it is, he knows everybody, and he makes things happen quickly if you’re ready to roll.”

“I’m excited to talk with the winning bands – to review them, give them advice, and answer their questions. It’s what I do every day for top acts,” says Brulte, formerly of Epic Records and now head of G|B Entertainment, www.gbrulte.com.

Video submissions from unsigned rock bands are being accepted at www.crowdrules.com starting today through Saturday, May 5^th at midnight, when voting will start. Hip-Hop and Pop competitions will follow in the coming weeks. A larger competition with more prizes is planned for the summer.

The competition is open to any unsigned Rock, Hip-Hop, or Pop act. Each act is limited to one entry. Videos can be uploaded to video sharing sites such as YouTube and MySpace, and linked into CrowdRules.com. All entries will be judged by the crowd only.

“It’s a unique way to get the one thing you can’t pay for in the music business: access,” says Moss. “We look forward to seeing and hearing some great new bands.”

About G|B Entertainment

G|B Entertainment, founded by Grayson Brulte, builds bands into brands. With extensive relationships throughout the entertainment industry, G|B Entertainment successfully leverages old and new media platforms for artist management and labels. Grayson Brulte is a young veteran of the music industry, starting his career by founding an interactive online music community, Sharing the Groove, featured in The New York Times. Prior to founding G|B, he worked for Epic Records/Sony BMG in Digital Media Marketing and Promotions. Mr. Brulte is a member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and the California Copyright Conference.

About CrowdRules.com

Designed to disrupt the $1 Billion media research industry, CrowdRules.com is a do-it-yourself Internet recommendation system for discovering the best content and talent. CrowdRules members team up in groups called “crowds” and create contest-like “challenges”. The challenge system is useful wherever fair and accurate results are needed, including audience testing, band battles, casting calls, film festivals, market research, political ad testing, talent searches, and more. Videos from anywhere on the Internet can be included in challenges. Support for text, photos, news, blogs, podcasts and audio are in development. Mr. Moss was founding CIO of Edmunds.com, and was President of Threshold Sound + Vision, a music television company.

CrowdRules: A Distinction and a Difference

I went to the Millennials Conference yesterday at UCLA put on by Digital Media Wire. Thanks, Ned Sherman and Tinzar Than Sherman for another great conference! And thanks for the invite!

A number of highlights:

Ted Cohen of TAG Strategic (formerly of EMI) saying that paying for music is going to die, and that music as a service is the future.

Pete Markiewicz of IndieSpace hitting the Millennial nail on the head in describing that parents and teens are making a lot of their buying decisions together.

Megan Healy of Nettwerk Music Group describing how they are using multiple concurrent campaigns, online and off, that get artists and fans really connected while promoting artists such as Barenaked Ladies and Avril Lavigne.

For those of you who haven’t yet heard, the Millennial generation are people anywhere from 12 to 20 years old. I know, because I’ve got two of them at home. They like to stay constantly connected with text, IM, cell phones, and MySpace. They love music and videos, and don’t particularly care about high fidelity or who owns what. (Well, not completely true: they love exquisitely rendered graphics in movies and games, and they can tell the difference between a poorly produced demo and a well-recorded track.) They grew up with all this technology and connectedness and entertainment as part of their everyday lives. But here’s the big catch: they want all of it for free.

So, what to do? And how does this relate to CrowdRules? Well, we recognize that everyone wants stuff for free. But someone has to pay, somewhere. By letting most people use CrowdRules tools for free, there’s a big crowd that’s available to participate in campaigns put on by those who do pay. So, that lets people who couldn’t afford any tools or services before to run their own casting calls, film festivals, video contests, and ask and answer questions.

But how does CrowdRules differentiate itself from a site like, say, Yahoo!Answers, where everything is also free? From an everyday user’s perspective - if they’re simply asking or answering a question – there’s not much difference. Knowing that CrowdRules removes Information Cascades and is focused on getting unbiased answers is, as my friend David Goldsmith is fond of saying, "a distinction without a difference". But nobody is betting any money on whether the answers at Yahoo!Answers are correct.

However if you are going to put money your behind something, you want it to succeed so you can at least get your money back, maybe even make a profit. And you want to know if people like it so you can tweak it before you throw too much money at it. And that’s called media research. People pay a lot of money for that right now; so much money that it locks most businesses and individuals out of doing it. They just go ahead and release their video, or song, or product, and hope for the best.

By running a Challenge on CrowdRules, we provide a free or less expensive way of doing media research. We provide the tools for people to forge the collection of people they have on their MySpace, Facebook and other sites, into a real, working collective. Which means a lot more people get to do media research. And that raises the quality bar on the Internet, at a time when there’s almost no quality control at all.

So we see CrowdRules as a way for anyone who wants to find out what people really think about something before putting their money on it. And that gives CrowdRules a distinction and a difference between other question and answer and contest sites.

Best,

DM

Sir, can I have another business model, please, sir?

Regarding what "doesn't" work: I was rather negative in my last blog, wasn't I? A reader’s email inspired me to address the business models in Web 2.0 that seem to be working. (Thank you, Sophy.) I see many of them as B2B2C models. These three-way relationships - with a sponsor a host and user generated content (UGC) - seem promising. And they are all essentially content and talent searches. That’s good, as there’s so much content that the only way to sift through it is to use the audience itself to find the best stuff.

Jumpcut worked with Doritos on the UGC Superbowl commercials, attracted additional traffic and attention to its own site, and made the audience part of the solution. Some great commercials came out of it. The irony there was that none of the finalists actually used Jumpcut to create their commercial!

Eyespot working with Paramount on the recent Mark Wahlberg "Shooter" mash-up trailer promotion is another good example, though again I'm not sure which, if any, of the entrants actually used Eyespot's software.

Yahoo Groups is taking audiences that organically grow from interaction over a discussion topic or passion - such as Battlestar Gallactica - and bringing in sponsors whom the audience will embrace without damaging the integrity of the group. The content remains user-generated. Facebook does the same thing with sponsored groups. The Apple group is very active and independent, and is of course sponsored by Apple.

I remain an optimist, despite my post. I believe the open nature of Web 2.0 can and will be embraced by traditional applications, thereby bringing them to a much larger audience. I think the greatest potential for monetization is in facilitating collective action. Amazon and Aggregate Knowledge are doing this passively by amassing vast databases of user purchases and offering "if you like this, then you might also like..." to increase average check-out. WalMart has been doing this for years, starting with putting the potato chips next to the beer.

But that's passive. What's really promising is software-as-a-service that facilitates active participation in collective action. The services can be free, subsidized by the value of the analytic data produced by the collective; or at one-off or subscription cost, where a sponsor pays to get objective outcomes.

With this approach, services where cost was previously a barrier can now be accessed by everyone. An excellent example of this is Mturk, where people are paid pennies an hour to accomplish simple tasks; however, the facilitation there really only happens in the exchange of money for work, but it's a great start.

The next wave is actually facilitating complicated tasks such as online panel-based media research, where people are currently paid for their time. To date, a traditional approach has been adopted by media researchers, in that they've simply used being online as a more efficient method of finding and compensating panelists. Yet with Web 2.0 applied, where the applications themselves become available to everyone, we have a whole new world.

That's the area I'm working in with CrowdRules, so part of this is of course self-fulfilling prophecy! But I do think that achievable new business models are just around the corner. Just like Spring.

Best,

DM

Brother, Can You Spare A Business Model?

The Web 2.0 paradigm has a fundamental flaw: it doesn’t define the creation of effective, sustainable business models. Instead, it supports building eyeballs through community-centric activities, while trusting the community to suggest the appropriate business model over time. That sounds more to me like Web 1.0 meets 1960’s flower-power. I thought all of us who went through the dotcom crash took an oath swearing that this time it was going to be about usefulness and business models. How soon we forget.

Business models. Remember them? Anyone who’s ever started and built a business of any kind, web-based or not, knows you must have one or more means of generating revenue or you eventually run out of money and go out of business. Then everyone loses.

Well, maybe you learn something. The way it’s going, most Web 2.0 companies and their investors are going to be learning some expensive lessons.

Under the Web 2.0 paradigm, companies launch early to get eyeballs, then wait for their users to tell them what business model they’re “comfortable” with (if any), all the while burning through their venture capital. News flash: your users don’t know and don’t care about your business model! They just want your site to be cool, fun and free, and to be left alone as much as possible to do what they want. Worse, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll ever pay for something you already gave them for free!

When I ran a consulting company, we always explained to our clients that contracting was what we did when they had the ability to assess the quality, effectiveness and completeness of our work. If so, we would simply supply the workers and they’d supervise them. However, our clients rarely had these assessment abilities - which of course didn’t prevent them from thinking they did!

If our clients were willing to admit they didn’t have the ability to assess their project’s quality, effectiveness and completeness, then to succeed we needed to create tangible definitions in their terms – a map - for their goals, and we would provide consultants with the ability to lead them across the terrain to their destination. Most important, we believed we had a moral imperative to do this, or else not engage with the client. That’s what we called consulting.

The creators of Web 2.0 sites are depending on their users to assess the quality, effectiveness and completeness of their business models.  Go ahead, mom and dad, ask your kids how you should go about making money to support them. See if they know. Now imagine that you’re dependent on your kid’s ideas to keep a roof over everyone’s heads. The kids still get to have exactly what they want, while you struggle to learn how to do the new work, and pray there’s money in it. Meanwhile, you live on food stamps.

Now I’m not saying Web 2.0 site users – overwhelmingly those under 34 - aren’t capable of suggesting a business model. It’s a different problem: to them, the web is all about abundance. They know that if they don’t find what they’re looking for on one site, or if they have to start paying where it once was free, there are a hundred similar – and free – sites a few clicks away. They simply have no incentive to help you solve your problem.

What I am saying is that only a handful of Web 2.0 sites built without a sustainable business model from day one are going to survive long enough to find a model.  What’s sad is that this is the same me-too mindshare frenzy that characterized Web 1.0. We all know how that turned out. Ignore history, and you’re doomed to repeat it.

To be fair, the Web 2.0 paradigm has been very successful for creating cool, fun, mostly free and low-tech destinations that grow exponentially through user contributions. MySpace, YouTube and Facebook are elegant and simple. Yet none of these sites were created with any business model in mind other than advertising or being acquired. Luckily, two of the three have already been acquired. Yet it’s easy to see why an increasing number of companies with a Web 2.0 framework are launching without business models: they’re banking that Uncle Google or Auntie Viacom will find them useful, pay the rent in the nick of time, and they’ll be saved.

Blindly following the Web 2.0 blueprint for creating low-tech, user-generated, data-driven companies is so very 1960’s, with communities and micro-economies replacing communes and grow-your-own. But YouTube, MySpace and Facebook have long outgrown their cozy little community status.  They're urban sprawl now, and it gets ugly out there.

The truth is that Web 2.0 simply doesn’t address how you monetize social networks beyond some vague idea of using Google AdSense or finding someone to buy your company. Perhaps it’s time to jump directly to Web 3.0 and Social Networks 4.0, where there’s a purpose and a business model. Show us the money!

Web 2.0 companies have certainly gotten a lot of eyeballs, and I have deep respect for that. But it’s only been seven years since the dotcom crash, which I lived through at Edmunds.com, where hundreds of companies with lots of eyeballs raced through insane amounts of stupid money on the road to finding a business model, then crashed and burned by the side of the road. It took years for the smoke to clear, a lot of lives were ruined, and the economy tanked. We're headed there again. It's only a matter of time.

In my humble opinion, the only companies with Web 2.0 pedigrees who will experience real long-term financial success will be, like many of the best viral videos on YouTube, mash-ups between Web 2.0 stuff that people find useful and real-world business models that are sustainable. And those successful companies will start out that way, with a map in mind, and not wildly change direction as they go. For the others, it’s going to be a lot harder than they think to change direction when they’re halfway across the desert and they run out of gas and water.

dm

Moving Right Along

With the 2008 election primaries getting earlier and earlier - New York just moved theirs to February 5th - it's going to be crucial for the candidates to have a tight feedback loop with their supporters.

This is the first election where interaction between candidates and their supporters - and detractors - is truly possible. User-generated content will help drive that interaction. But the key to that interaction is to provide tools so that crowds become wise ones, not unruly mobs. Those tools are not present on the current crop of social networks and video uploading sites.

For example, on MySpace top rock bands can get thousands of friend requests per day; these "friends" have no meaningful way of interacting with each other or their favorite band. They're merely a collection of id's that cannot be forged into a collective. Which is a real shame, because asking to be a friend expresses a need to connect and participate. So new tools are emerging outside of the current social network structure to allow interaction and consensus within the crowd, and to leverage the collective intelligence of those who share common goals. That's where the real power will emerge.

If you're a rock band, finding out what your crowd collectively thinks is important, but not profound. If you're a political candidate, it's sheer profundity. The quicker the feedback loop, the more agile the candidate. Collective intelligence is all about providing tools to enable crowds to self-organize and make decisions.

The theory is that collective intelligence applied to user generated content will make for a well-informed voting public. That's just what CrowdRules is all about. Let's see what happens!

DM

New Features!

We launched CrowdRules.com Beta just two weeks ago. Now we're adding a number of new features that firmly establish our leadership in the creation and management of online video contests.

• Everyone wants to be a star. So CrowdRules members can now include their own introductory video for each contest they create. This video can be changed at any point in the contest to provide new instructions to participants.

• Spam entries can ruin a contest. So CrowdRules members now have full editorial control over video submissions for each contest they create. This includes the ability to remove objectionable or duplicate videos before the crowd sees them. And members can assign these administration privileges to other members.

• Members now have full control over timing of each stage - submission, voting, and reporting - down to the minute. The submission process automatically stops when voting starts, giving every entrant a fair and equal chance.

• Each stage in the contest is now automatically advanced using the CrowdRules Heartbeat service. Administrators can also override the timing of any stage.Challenge widgets have been updated to fully comply with recent changes on MySpace and Facebook.

Membership is free at CrowdRules, as is the creation of contests. During the Beta period, CrowdRules is offering a limited number of free sponsorships in select categories. Come on by, say hi, take your shoes off, stay awhile...;>)