The SF MusicTech Summit attracted hundreds of participants in the music and technology industries to the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco earlier this week, where the buzz focused primarily on the launch of Google music.

In fact, the most exciting presentation probably came from Google’s own RJ  Pittman, who demonstrated how, by leveraging the technology of LaLa, iLike, Pandora and iMeem, you can now preview music directly from search results in Google Music. For example, you can type in a band name, song title, or even the lyrics from a given song, and the top search results will allow you to instantly listen to the song you were seeking. This offers a more efficient way to search for music. And because once the search result comes up you can click “buy” on one of the partner sites to complete a purchase, it closes the gap between instantly previewing and purchasing.

This approach also validates ImageSpan’s strategy with LicenseStream, which also closes the gap between search, discovery and payment. In fact, LicenseStream already lets content owners publish their content directly to their own online store or anywhere else on the Web and to global search engines, enabling anyone in the world to find their search-optimized content and pay for it with a mouse click.  

This SF MusicTech Summit was a departure from previous ones in that the tone of discussions were less “woe is me…the biz is changing” and bit more positive about the outlook (I think I only heard somebody say that CD’s are obsolete about 20 times—down from 50). As a result, I had chance to see plenty of great talks and presentations focused on the current state and future of the music industry.

Among the cool things I heard was a talk by Pandora’s CTO, Tom Conrad, who said that the streaming audio service would be integrated into car stereos in the next year or so. Being a huge fan of Pandora, I would love this development.

Also of interest was an item I heard from iLike founder Ari Partovi, who said that his company has partnered with SoundExchange to distribute royalties to unsigned artists who haven’t been able to collect thus far. SoundExchange specializes in recording royalties on digital and satellite streams – areas not handled by iLike. However, this effort is not about direct royalty payments. Instead, SoundExchange is performing database matching for artists who have uploaded their information onto iLike.  Partovi estimated that about $8 million in uncollected royalties sitting in escrow will be distributed via SoundExchange to about 8,000 artists (roughly about a $1,000 will be sent to each artist).

It’s great to see the music space embracing technology and creating new ways to reach audiences and monetize content. This summit made it clear to me that with so many great tools and services at hand, it’s a very exciting time to be a musician and artist.  

At the annual SanFran MusicTech Summit held last week at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco,  I heard some great discussions about the state the of the music industry and had the pleasure of speaking on the Musicians as Active Participants in Their Own Careers panel. The attendees consisted mainly of music biz professionals, musicians, entrepreneurs, and lawyers —all meeting up to talk about where the industry is going next.

The music world is in the midst of major changes right now – a fact reflected in all of the discussions I heard.  With less money to go around, everyone in the business is scrambling to figure out how to survive. The hottest topic up for discussion was the search for a way to confront the rapidly dropping sales of music due to file-sharing sites.

One potential solution that’s been gaining steam and that was discussed on many of the panels was the idea of having the ISP’s charge a monthly fee to customers for free access to all the music they want.  That fee would then go to the labels and artists.  For example, an AT&T customer could opt in and pay $10/month to download any song from any artist completely legally. That $10 subsequently would be split among the labels, publishers, and artists based on which songs were played the most. The concept has a lot of hurdles to overcome with respect to organizing the many thousands of rights holders that would need to provide clearance and then be paid—but at this point the idea seems to show promise. 

As we get ready to enable audio licensing in LicenseStream, I talked to a lot of musicians about what the service can offer them and they were very enthusiastic about making money through licensing. LicenseStream provides an automated service for registering, licensing, tracking and collecting and distributing royalty payments. It can handle the enormous complexity of both accepting and distributing the royalty splits to labels, publishers and artists. In fact, I spoke with several musicians about what such a service could offer them. They were especially enthusiastic about a service that would automate licensing transactions, making it easier for them to make money through licensing their music to movie studios, ad agencies, and TV shows etc.  After all, DIY is the name of the game these days and most musicians are looking for ways to monetize their content without losing control.

Licensing was just one of the many topics on the agenda of a Musicians as Active Participants in Their Own Careers panel, which was a good discussion about what it takes to survive as a musician today. Drawing from my experience as the guitar player and co-manager of Stroke 9, I discussed with the other panelists how nowadays musicians need to be extremely involved in every aspect of their careers from recording to promotion to business management. We all agreed that while every musician needs to be up to date with all social networking vehicles, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, imeem, etc., most important is that they don’t lose focus on their number one priority—writing good music.

Though you could sense a lot of uncertainty at the Summit, there was still a lot of optimism about how things will look once we get to the other side. The “old world” models of rights, pricing, and distribution will need to change drastically for creativity and commerce to thrive together in the digital age. Who knows how long this restructuring will take, but most people I talked to said that ultimately, it will be better for both musicians and music fans.