Midway through last night’s Music Startup Academy at New York’s General Assembly, an audience member posted the following tweet:
“in terms of mechanical rights, ringtones have higher royalty rates than full length songs. Interesting #musicstartupacademy”
While that info might be fairly common knowledge amongst music industry folk, the entrepreneurs and hackers crowded in to the classroom last night found it fascinating and illuminating.
Relations between startups and the industry have never been smooth, and NARM’s Bill Wilson is attempting to remedy the problem by holding the Music Startup Academy. Last night’s session, the first, hosted by Wilson and Indaba Music’s JJ Rosen, was a basic music industry 101 primer. Forthcoming sessions will tackle the intricacies of publishing, the world of labels, content management and tales from the trenches.
Wilson says he put together the series because he saw common threads between the industries and wanted to start a dialogue and an education process. “Entrepreneurs don’t know why working with music is so complicated,” he says. “They don’t understand why they can’t just roll music in to their cool new idea.”
“I wasn’t really there with an agenda,” Rosen told Billboard.biz, “I just wanted to make sure people got the most valuable information they could. The folks who came up to me afterwards were really complimentary, and I feel like this is just the start for a lot of opportunities.”