Rocking Like a Social Media Rock Star

This past week I had a chance to attend the Social Media Rock Star Summit in Los Angeles. As part of GRAMMY’s week, the panelists included the following:

Ian Rogers from Topspin Media
DA Wallach from Spotify
Andrew Fisher from Shazam
Seth Goldstein from Turntable.fm
Alex Iskold from GetGlue

Topics ranged from the evolution of sharing and socialization of music, monetization and of course, artist royalties. Much of what was discussed around royalties was on par with a previous blog post but the subject always perks ears. It was revealed during the panel that Spotify has over three million paid subscribers and has paid over two hundred million in royalties to date.

Another factoid from the panel specifically for Shazam is that if an artist reaches #1 on their playlist, they have an 85% chance of being #1 on Billboard within four weeks. Given how accessible music has become, this statistic isn’t too surprising. A strong fan base can help make or break an artist and the more music is shared, the more accessible the artist becomes thus adding to their star power.

Turntable.fm stated that they are looking to create DJ Stars – an opportunity for up & coming DJ’s to spin. This could be a great way for new talent to build a strong following and continue to raise their profile.

Overall, it was a solid seminar. Given the collective user base for these companies, I’d love to get a sense of how they are handling their data storage. How many servers does each site maintain? How is the data separated for each site? Is it by user? Or maybe it’s by geographical location? Yes, I may be geeking out a bit at the thought of it, but it’s interesting to look under the hood sometimes to see how things work.

How do you share your music or do you prefer to keep your listening habits private? Leave a comment below or drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook.