Karlheinz Brandenburg, Co-inventor of the MP3
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MLOVE & Reeperbahn Festival present a brand new event format:
Mobile x Music, September 20, 2012, Hamburg
Karlheinz Brandenburg, Director Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT
MLOVE: What influence do you feel social media and the choice of music sharing tools relate to the success or promotion of artists?
Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg: Certainly one very important topic for any artist is to become known and popular. All the new technologies with their new possibilities help artists to become famous. This topic has an artist side and a consumer side. On the consumer side the question is how consumers can find the music they love. Through the possibility of recommendations social media can support these processes and help artists to become better known.
MLOVE: How important are cooperation between artists, labels, marketers, brands in the 21st century? Does Mobile technology give artists more independence?
Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg: In the last 10 years the music industry certainly has undergone big changes. One of them is that there is no longer one way to get known to the consumers, but there is a number of ways. Some of these ways can be used by the artists themselves to establish themselves as a brand, to have their own presence on the music market and to submit their own music to be sold. So there is much more independence than before, but it does not guarantee success. In that way, all these new possibilities help artists, labels and brands to simplify the process to push certain music and to sell the music.
One of them is that there is no longer one way to get known to the consumers, but there is a number of ways
MLOVE: In your opinion, what is the main source of income for artists today?
Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg: Of course I am not a part of the music industry. What we all have heard is that in the last years the artists´ live performance part has become more and more important. On the one hand, more and more people are willing to spend lots of money to attend concerts. On the other hand, selling recorded music has gone down and is now at a much lower level. The main source of income for artists is changing, but no type of income has gone away.
in the last years the artists´ live performance part has become more and more important
MLOVE: What is your vision for the Future of the Music Industry?
Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg: The music industry already has very different ways to bring the music to the consumers, e. g. streaming services, radio services, selling physical products or selling over the internet. There are different services, which work on a pay per month basis, pay per track or pay per CD basis. Some people have claimed that there will be a certain point of time in the future, everything will be just streamed, but I don´t believe in that. I believe in a future, which is complicated, because we have different ways to reach the consumers and the consumers use different ways to get the music they love.
MLOVE: How is your music library or collection typically stored, displayed or shared?
Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg: My music is in one part still CDs with only half of them transferred to my computer. Apart from that, I have a 40 gigabyte music library. To get more, I either buy CDs or I get my music from one of the commercial services like iTunes or Musicload. This music is saved on my pc on a home server, but I also carry it with me on portable devices. I share my music with my wife; we have a common library of music.
MLOVE: Do you watch music videos? Have your music video preferences changed from back in the days when they were available on MTV to currently, where we find video clips mostly on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, Tape, etc?
Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg: I have to admit, that I don´t watch music videos much anyway and I didn´t watch music videos on MTV in the past. Sometimes, when somebody tells me, “you should see this video”, I watch it on YouTube. But otherwise, music is for me something to listen to.
MLOVE: How do you consume music from your mobile device? Buying, listening to, recommending through social media platforms…
Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg: I have mainly two methods. One way is to listen to the internet radio or if that is not available I listen to the classic FM radio. The second way is buying music from one of the big music shops, like iTunes or Musicload. I signed up for a short time to one of the streaming services, but this doesn´t fit my way of listening very well and I do not use it anymore. Mostly, when I search for music, I search by artists or sometimes by genre. I try to find what else is there from the artists I like or from the music I like.
Theoretically I am a big fan of recommendation engines, but they should be easier to use. At Fraunhofer IDMT we are working on that.
