When I want to download music, I really don’t care what label the band is on.  Honestly, most of the time, I don’t really know if it’s Universal or Sony BMG or Saddle Creek, etc.  iTunes is great because the majority (note, not all) of what I listen to is listed and available.  Sony BMG is now developing their own music service…. I’m calling it’s demise now.  Why?  Because it’s going to fragment the market and listeners have to worry about which labels their artists are signed to.  Yikes.

Today’s a beautiful day here in New York City - sun is shining and everyone seems to be in high spirits.  The day just got better…. received an email from The Warehouse, the official DMB fanclub with the 2008 Summer tourdates and some more information that’s gone overlooked…

Fans attending DMB shows this summer will be the first to hear the latest material from Dave Matthews Band as the band debuts songs from their forthcoming record!  DMB is currently in the studio with Rob Cavallo (Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Alanis Morrisette) working on the yet-to-be-titled album.  Guitarist and long time friend Tim Reynolds is playing on the album, marking his first recording with DMB since 1998’s Before These Crowded Streets.

I’m excited to see what Rob Cavallo comes up with for this album.  Having produced Green Day, My Chemical Romance, and Alanis Morrisette in the past, it should certainly have an edge.  There is a connection here - as Alanis Morrisette appears in the DMB song, “Spoon” on the album, Before these Crowded Streets.

As for the tour dates, I’ve not decided which show’s I’ll be at just yet, but I can almost garauntee at least one of the Saratoga Springs (June 20) shows (Saturday night probably) and potentially head out to Arizona for some others.

Click here for the full list of dates (quite a few).

This is the first interview in the CEO & Founders Series blogged exclusively here at DarrenHerman.com. Over the past two weeks, I have reached out to a handful of my friends who are Founders/CEOs of their respective startup or established digital media company and conducted a simple email interview for all to see. I hope you enjoy as I’ll be posting a new one each morning (EST).

If you’d like to subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed to have these interviews delivered directly to your feed reader, click here.

Please welcome, Haystack Media, a silicon alley based media company and current nextNY participants.

1. Your name and title:
Jordan Garbis - Founder, Chief Strategy Officer
Abby Schneiderman - Co-Founder, Chief Creative Officer

2. What are you currently up to? If entrepreunering (my word), tell me about your startup.

Well, where Haystack is now and where we started are two different animals. 2 years ago we launched a music social networking site all about connecting passionate music fans to new music, through trusted sources. We called them Tastemakers. We wanted to bring the John Cusack character from High Fidelity, the guy behind the record store counter, to the web. The idea was that if people thought that a guy like Darren Herman (yikes!) had great taste in music, they could go to your profile on Haystack, see what you had in your playlist, and listen to it right there.

As we continued to grow Haystack, we realized that no one destination was going to be able to able to reach the dominance of sites like Myspace. We asked ourselves how we could future proof destination-based music marketing and still allow an artist to reach the targeted masses that so desperately were seeking their music. In our view, the ad supported music model of the future was one that would an enable an artist, brand or label to float with the user. In mid 2007, we created The Haystack Network, which is now our primary product to address that need. To date, we’ve aggregated publishers representing over 42MM monthly unique visitors that provide ad space on their website to serve viral widgets containing music sponsored by advertising. The widgets themselves can be spread to individual users’ Myspace, Facebook and social networking pages and we can centrally control the release of both music and ad campaigns on an asset ID level.

Advertisers love it, because they can reach users in a real way, paired with the music they’re already looking for. Artists are happy because those advertisers sponsor the distribution of their music to sites they would never be found on otherwise. And, the publishers love it because they’re getting paid premium CPMs for the placements.

3. Why are you doing this? You could be doing so many other things in the world, what about this particular idea strikes you?
We’re doing this first and foremost because we love music, love helping others find music, and love the excitement of being young entrepreneurs growing a business. Every single person on the Haystack team has some background in music (both on the business and performance side). Whether or not it’s through the destination or through Haystack’s distributed widget platform, ultimately what we’re doing is helping to bridge the gap between artist and fan, and enabling advertisers to reach users in a targeted way. We believe that distributed models are the future of the web and we’re excited about advances that will bring further portability to the content we’re distributing in the future. That just means we’ll have even more ways of helping people find music in the places that they already exist, on and offline.

4. All startups should be addressing a problem in the market. What is that exact problem and how are you solving it?

Artists spend a lot of time building destinations. Whether thats on Myspace, iMeem, iLike, Last.fm, or even Haystack, they make a very large investment on building out a central home for their fans to find their music and listen to it. But the fans themselves are fickle. Recent news suggests traffic on sites like Myspace and Facebook are declining as users shift from new hot website to new hot website. We want to enable an artist with the means to future proof against that and build portable applications that can live anywhere. That way, when their fans move off of a destination they can take that music and promote it wherever or however they please. And ditto for the advertiser that’s getting the benefit of riding along with an artist.

5. Have you thought about your business model yet? I’m assuming so, so tell us a bit about it.

Of course we have. We’re ad supported and always have been. We believe that we’re producing a premium CPM product and we’ve proved that with our early clients.

6a. If you’re looking at an ad-supported model, how are you going about it? Do you have in-house ad sales? Using a rep firm? What are the challenges that you’re facing with getting ad dollars?

We have both in-house and sales and ad sales partnerships across the industry. We publicly announced a partnership with Clearspring in September, and that has been going great. Haystack encourages the publishers that are working with us to throw resources at it as well, and we give them financial incentive to do so.

6b. If you’re selling a product/service/subscription, how is that coming along? What are the challenges? Are you using the freemium model?

It’s all free and all ad supported. Guess you can call it freemium if you consider that music has an inherent value and we’re monetizing that and delivering it free to the consumer.

7. As an entrepreneur, what are your thoughts on competition? How do you view competition?

We love competition; it drives us to create better products, and keeps us on our game. Some of our competitors are brilliant and offer unique approaches that we would never have thought of. We use their products every day and are always thinking of ways we might be able to work together rather than independently.

8. If your competitor called you up to have coffee and discuss shop, what would you do? Would you go? What would you divulge?

It happens all the time. In fact, on Monday, we’re having lunch with a company some might definitely call one of our competitors. We’re totally excited to meet with them and we will most likely tell them everything we’re up to. The way we view it, the minute one of our ideas launches, anyone on the web with any know-how will be able to copy us. It’s a matter of finding the right partners and seeing how we might be able to leverage each others’ strengths to be able to build the best product possible.

9. Is the current state of the economic market playing to your favor? If so, why? If not, why? What is your forecast of the market throughout 2008 and do you see affects? Macro and Micro economic theory would be interesting to hear about.

The economic market affects everything. When there is less money flowing through the economy it has a trickle down affect to the advertising market whether the big guys like Google publicly acknowledge that or not. The market is in a downturn right now and historically those cycles suggest that we should be able to pull out of it. What it means for us now is that the discretionary budgets at many agencies and major brands are being cut, so we’re having to make pricing concessions in order to entice those buyers to buy. But with anything, if the value is there, and we can create valuable and limited supply, we eventually should be able to stabilize price competition and have a healthy flow of ad dollars coming in.

10. How much of your time is spent working? How much is spent with family? Have you found the entrepreneurial quality of life yet?

Let’s just put it this way: over the course of the last few years a LOT of time has been spent on Haystack and we’re lucky to have such supportive friends and family who have been here cheering us along the whole way. There have been many sleepless nights but it’s all been fun and worth it. We’re both always thinking of new ideas and bouncing new concepts off each other. You have to be in it for the love of it, because at a startup you certainly won’t get rich unless you’ve built a product that users or businesses are dying for. We know this is a long road and we’re fully prepared to stay on this amazing rollercoaster ride that is the life being an entrepreneur.

DH: Jordan & Abby, thank you for your time… I’m sure there will be a few comments on this blog and we look forward to you participating in answering the readers questions.

I wrote an article back in the day about the power of the music experience. Recently, U2, a band that I love, released a movie in theatres that is essentially a 3D concert. I couldn’t make it to the private screening last week but my wife went and said it was incredible.

U2 isn’t the first act to screen a show in the theatres, as the Beastie Boys had a really cool film produced which utilized fans who had digital camcorders.

In reading through my RSS feeds this evening, Bob Lefsetz talks about U23D:

I don’t give a shit if you like U2 or not, you owe it to yourself to check this movie out. Because this is the closest thing to the live experience other than being there. Hell, I’d rather pay ten bucks to see this movie than sit in the upper deck in the soccer stadium the gig takes place in. And I’d like to tell you it’s about being so close to Bono, being within touching distance of the band, but more important it’s about feeling a part of something, of rock and roll. My absolute favorite moments were when they situated us at the back of the pit, with those in front of us thrusting their hands in the air. I felt the pulse, the sweat, the vibe, the MUSIC!

If the Dave Matthews Band simulcast it’s shows in 3D to a movie theatre in Manhattan, I’d pay either for a full concert tour pass, or go to atleast 5 shows per tour. There is a business here… who is going to figure it out? An additional revenue source for people who cannot make it to the concerts but still want to experience it with likeminded fans and with fantastic sound systems.

Sherri’s review is here.

My day was going fairly well…

Tonight, it just got exponentially better.

On my quest to build a live concert “warehouse” in my home for the Dave Matthews Band, I came across a few songs posted on YouTube from the Izod show, which I went to last month.  Wow.  If you’re a fan of Grey Street, or just want to listen to some amazing music, listen below.

To see how DMB connects with the audience, if you concentrate on the 2:15-2:45 mark of the video, you’ll hear the crowd sing.  Yes, sing.  Sherri, myself and my folks all partook in the festivities.

I’m going to raise a technical question to the readers of this blog or anyone else who wants to chime in.  Thank you in advance for your thoughts and I’ll try and follow up in the comments area.

As many of you know, I’m borderline obsessed with the Dave Matthews Band.  The great thing about the band is that you can download their live concerts from different file sharing programs.  My end goal:  to have the largest repository of Dave Matthews Band shows in the world, to be played on my home network.  I realize that this is going to take a lot of storage facility to make this happen, which is why I’m reaching out to everyone because I have no idea where to begin.

A little background about my home network:   Optimum Cable is my bandwidth provider.  We have a full Apple Inc. network including their Airport Extreme and all of our computers are Mac’s (iBook G4, Macbook, iMac 24″, AppleTV, etc).

How would you set this up?  How would you go about building the largest catalog?  I wouldn’t mind allowing people to download from my servers if my network was live (on the internet) at home but I need to becareful about ‘hacking’ into my network.  I’m looking for thoughts from the hardware/technical implementation and the software (getting the music) side.  We’re talking TB’s worth of data - and to be able to expand.
How would you approach this?

The music industry isn’t about music, it’s about creating experiences for it’s fans.

I’m sitting here in my office listening to wDMBRadio while working on a presentation.  As each DMB song comes through my speakers, I smile and reminisce about what it was like to be at that show, whom I was with, and what I remember.   Music is uberpowerful.

As Kevin Roberts would say, DMB have created a lovemark.  Since marketing is all about a conversation between a brand a consumer, that lovemark exists between Darren Herman and The Dave Matthews Band.

On a side note, congratulations to the Dave Matthews Band for a great 2007! #8 on the top selling tours of 2007.  I certainly helped contribute to that.

One of the many exciting reasons why I love DMB shows is because of the random guests that Dave pulls on to the stage.  You never know when Neil Young, Robert Randolph, Eric Krasno or other folks will join him on stage.

DontBurnThePig, one of the longest running DMB fansites just finished putting together a list of many of the guests that have appeared alongside the band.  It’s a great list - and I’d absolutely love to purchase every song that a guest appeared on.  I know I can download them, but I’d love to just buy a copy.

Some folks from the list:

• ?uestlove - drums (with The Roots)
• Neil Young - electric guitar and vocals (official website)
• Maceo Parker - saxophone
• Trey Anastasio - electric guitar and vocals

Did you know?

The first “technical” guest ever, was Boyd Tinsley on 08.21.91*. At this time he was not yet an official member of DMB, but played in many shows with the band before becoming an official member.

I met Sherri and my folks last night ontop of the Port Authority and hopped into our car and drove to IZOD Arena (the new Continental Airlines Arena) to see the infamous Dave Matthews Band.  I was excited for two main reasons:  the boys are back in town and it was my father’s first DMB concert and he finally got to see them after 14 years of me talking about them.  I was ecstatic to share the experience with them.

We got to the arena in a breeze and made it inside for the second song of Robert Randolph & the Family Band, the popular choice for the opening slot for DMB.  I’ve not been a fan of their latest work but really enjoyed RRTFB back when they wrote “The March.”

When DMB hit the stage, the night really started.  The crowd was a bit older than I had anticipated which was really welcome and they were fairly vocal.  Throughout the night, duets between the band and crowd were common and the band treated the crowd to some oldies (#41, Ants Marching, All Along the Watchtower, Dreaming Tree, Jimmy Thing, Grey Street) and some new songs (Eh Heh, A Dream So Real, Round and Round, etc).  Fantastic set list.  A great mixture of new/old.

The band suprised me and everyone else with the Doobie Brothers’ Black Water.  Awesome song and it came out early in the set which got the crowd on their feet and dancing.

I barely sat all night and was so excited to share this experience with my folks (and of course, Sherri).  The band was ON and Leroi especially had a pronounced role.  I wrote in the past about the Power of the Music Experience and it was certainly validated last night.

Robert Randolph (RRFTB) and Eric Krasno (Soulive) also got to sit in with the band on All Along the Watchtower and #41 respectively.

Disney gets it, at least for now.  They’ve incubated Hilary Duff and now Hannah Montana.  Lots of press and commotion around comparing Hannah Montana to other artists and the demand to see her in concert.  In NewsWeek recently, she was compared to Bruce Springsteen as a much tougher ticket to get.

Anyway, a few months back, Disney acquired Club Penguin.  To give you an idea of their traffic, I’ve pasted the attached graph below.   Disney is probably still figuring out what they want to do with Club Penguin and in the midst of integration.  If you have children ages 5-12, I’m sure you’ve come across Club Penguin in one capacity or another.  Over the past year, Compete data shows that Club Penguin has goene from ~700k unique to ~2.7M unique inhabitants.  One year.  Substantial growth.

Not that there isn’t enough demand for Hannah Montana, but think about the cross promotion opportunities?  In-game radio.  In-world penguin shirts.  Club Penguin should have Hannah Montana music playing and allow the kids pick which music they want to hear.  Also, leverage this “virtual world” as a testing ground for new music and allow the kids to rate which songs they like and which they don’t.  With about 3M kids playing Club Penguin, there are tons of opportunities for these tie-ins.

There are obviously a lot of concerns around advertising to children and such; but if you handle this properly, I’m sure you can roll these types of programs out to much success.