Music discovery is more a service to users than it is a sales-driver for content owners. But if it where, the objective would be simple: recommend songs that a user will have the highest probability of enjoying, but does not yet own. Triangulate with friend’s listening patterns, similarity profiles, crowd favorites, music blogs and then cross off what’s already owned (thus not a sales lead)

What kind of recommendations will you get? I would venture to guess that the best sales leads will be remixes, live performances, covers of songs a consumer already likes. Essentially, there’s money in selling the same song/variation to people over and over again! I’m a Dave Matthews fan, and boy have they milked me with their many live performance recordings.

Of DMB’s top 5 songs, I own an average of 6 variations each. The same could said of Pearl Jam and their streak of “bootleg” live CDs

Sure, not everyone is a big fan of these two artists, but we all could have at 2 favorite artists whose music lends well to variation. This is essentially a different take on the Long Tail where over-selling takes the place of over-pricing niche demand.

…The problem is that most ads have a 1-stage engagement process: you’re either not engaged (ignore ad) of fully engaged (leave current page via click-through), and that conversion rate is minuscule.
Ads generally show 1-3 messages and expect users to decide whether to fully engage based that limited quantity of information.

With Flash-based ads, especially in square-ish dimensions, we should be showing users interactive, and even useful widgets instead of conventional ads.

Music discovery is a revenue driver for content owners before it is a convenience to consumers. So why are music discovery services more like destinations than features? Look at Last.fm, Pandora, Imeem, TheSixtyOne — they all require users to break out of the normal habit of listening on iTunes/WMP and proactively visit a separate site.

Facebook chat is sexy and well implemented—we didn’t expect any less from them. Adding more communication features is a great way to increase the “stickiness” of the Facebook experience and drive up engagement (and therefor page views). But being a late entrant into IM with an ulterior motive makes f-Chat a tough sell [...]

This article on GigaOM got me thinking about how little we hear about software piracy these days. SaaS essentially expires all issues of piracy: vendors are no longer selling pieces of IP on a shiny disc, but sell the proper execution of their software. On top of that, users don’t even have physical [...]