2011: The Year of Music Services | Musicology.fm

By leaving Hypebot for Billboard and taking a non-editorial position, I unknowingly took a backseat to 2011. I published a few essays, but I stopped reporting the news.

This is significant because many of the things that were speculative at the time—such as the launch of Spotify, iHeart Radio, Google Music, iTunes Cloud, and Facebook Music, among many others—actually happened. Going into 2012, many of these services and their activity on Facebook now feel commonplace when they were once press musings.

I’ve never used Google Music or iTunes Cloud, because I don’t buy digital downloads.

But I’ve spent a significant amount of time using other web-based services, such as Spotify, iHeart Radio, Pandora, Songza, Slacker, exfm, MOG, Earbits, and 8tracks.

Interestingly, the future that Spotify lays claim to—accessing music over owning it—is a decade old, yet new to everyone else. What it accomplished is still revolutionary and significant, it’s just a statement to how long it can take new technologies to catch on.

I used to tell people that I wrote about iPods, because no one had heard of Spotify. Now it seems like I could have a conversation about the future of music with almost anyone.

What a difference a year makes.

The Spotify effect is largely due to Facebook Music—another major event in 2011. This may be due to my odd listening habits, the taste of my friends, or the unappealing way in which music activity is displayed on Facebook, but I don’t care about the music on it.

The entire appeal of discovering music through Facebook friends is lost on me, because it’s not a problem that I needed solved. I’ve only clicked on a playlist that a friend listened to once or twice. Surely, younger kids with cooler friends find use in this, but I still don’t.

Exfm remains one of my favorite music services from 2011. I don’t read blogs and rarely find a song to play using their browser extension, but it has a great player and a constantly updated music selection. The service isn’t perfect and a bit chaotic, which is why I love it.

Listening to radio stations on exfm and browsing through their charts allows for music discovery in a way that services powered by recommendation engines—like Spotify and iHeart Radio—don’t provide. The music that The Echo Nest suggests is great, but pretty soon, it seems like every service will be powered by them. I know you can link into their API and utilize their data in many of ways, but I fear every service will start sounding the same. This anxiety may be unwarranted; it’s a concern only a tech-writer could develop.

I also love 8tracks and Songza.

These services have brought contextual and personalized music playlists to a wonderful place, as they deliver a high return on discovery and ask for a low investment of time.

Songza has done a great job at organizing their music, grouping playlists together by genres, activities, and moods, among others. This makes it easy for fans to navigate through the hundreds of playlists and choose their own adventure inside the app.

Lastly, I’ve taken a liking to Earbits. I don’t use it as much as the others, but I love what it aims to achieve. It creates stations based on where you live and plays music by the artists touring in the area. When an artist is playing a show, the details are shown in a green box.

If clicked on, it lets you to share the event info to your friends.

On the web, the service has another great feature: it brings your Facebook friends into the player and suggests which ones may enjoy hearing the song you’re currently listening to.

2011 reigned as the year of music services, and I’ve only listed a handful of them. This is why I don’t buy digital downloads, because of how many great streaming options exist.

If you’re going to write about the future, you might as well live in it.

Invent Your Job | Musicology.fm

Imagine you’ve landed your dream job. Here’s the twist: your employer doesn’t know what your dream job is and refuses to define it. The company is brand new and the mission is huge, but what you do is up to you. Clearly, there’s tons of work to do.

What projects would you manage and which tasks would fill up your day?

I am a product manager and lead writer at Live Nation Labs. My first project is to invent my job, create the products that I’ll manage, and choose the companies I want to disrupt.

In order to invent my job, I need to be honest with myself and lay out the things that I love doing, the things I hate doing, and leave a bit of wiggle room between the margins.


Things I Love

1. Asking big questions.
2. Exploring new ideas.
3. Developing theories.
4. Envisioning the future.
5. Writing in long-form.
6. Interviewing people.
7. Marketing my vision.
8. Imagining products.

Given the things I’ve listed, it’s no surprise—in hindsight—that I fell into becoming a music industry analyst and a deep thinker about technology and culture, but it was.

If you had asked me in college why I enrolled in a program focused on the music industry, I would’ve told you that I wanted to be a lyric writer, live music promoter, and A&R person at a record label. To me, this sounded like exactly what I wanted to do.

I spent hours and hours writing lyrics, attended tons of shows, and loved discovering music. In an attempt to combine these interests, I signed up for music industry school.

Little did I know, I’d discover a thing—a state of being, if you will—that I loved even more than these things: curiosity. If you distill the things that I love into one, it’s this:

I love being curious—about damn near everything.

With this in mind, I need to develop a blueprint for my job.

Ultimate Chart and Live Nation Labs require me to ask big questions, explore new ideas, develop theories, envision the future, market my vision, and imagine products. Labs, on the other hand, is much more focused on writing in long-form and interviewing people.

Beyond the blog we just launched, it has these other aspects too.

We’re in a position to lead several tribes: live music fans, music industry professionals, designers and developers, and rebel intellectuals, across other industries and disciplines.

In effect, it comes down to these questions: What does the future we’re trying to build look like—both for ourselves and everyone else involved? What type of change do we want to see in the music industry and how will we become the force that drives it?

Answering these questions is my job—the mission fueled by vision—that I’ve chosen to “invent” for myself. But in order to obtain this job, I’ll need to dream up the future first.

That’s my job. What’s yours?

Be Good, Be Safe | Musicology.fm

I dropped my dad off at the airport yesterday. We engaged in a familiar, yet awkward dance. We hugged and said goodbye as he held back the tears welling up in his eyes.

This scenario has played out before. When I moved to LA back in April, he and I drove across the country—all 1,828 miles of it—and saw the city together for the first time.

I don’t remember much about the trip, but I do remember how it ended.

We were standing inside his terminal. He asked me if I wanted to come with him to the airport gift shop and I said “no.” We would’ve needed to take a shuttle to get to the other side of the airport and I didn’t want to get lost. I had no idea where I was and didn’t want risk forgetting where I parked. So there we were, standing there—squirming through the moment—and my dad started to lose his shit. It hit me hard and twisted inside my stomach. We’ve never said goodbye like this before and I didn’t see it coming.

But he did.

Prior, we had eaten at Jack in the Box, where he quietly stuffed a handful of napkins in his pocket, in anticipation for the moment when he would leave his son alone in LA.

He tried to hold his composure, but fell apart. The emotions overtook him and swept me up too. I held things together and maintained myself. As we separated, he muttered to me, though the tears, the parting phrase that he’s told me for years, “Be good, be safe.”

I walked to my car in a turmoil and once I sat inside it, I cried too.

Driving home, I realized something that’s always been apparent to me, but hadn’t been revealed in such a public manner: somebody loves me and that person is my dad.

It’s an insight powerful enough to break your heart and put it back together again.

Never Trade Your Blog For A Job | Musicology.fm

I launched Musicology.fm with the intention of keeping people updated on the writing that I published at Billboard and ideas I’ve been thinking about. As it turned out, my former employer wasn’t too keen about me doing this, so I’ve left this blog dormant.

Since the early days at Hypebot, I had my own login and access to the publish button. I never had to ask Bruce about what I wanted to write about or when I’d post it.

Things didn’t work that way at Billboard and there’s good reason for this. But I’d never worked under an Editor and that took some time to get used to. I learned a lot. I fought a lot. I eventually stopped pitching my ideas and started writing and turning in whatever I wanted. This upset my Editor, but it delighted him too. He didn’t like it when I turned in writing he hadn’t approved of, but he seemed to love the boldness of my ideas.

I blame (and thank) Bruno for this approach. After months of banging my head against the wall and getting nowhere, I called him and after hearing me bitch long enough, he finally told me that I didn’t actually need to pitch my ideas and get them approved.

What?!?

Bruno is known for doing things his own way and being averse to oversight, so it’s not surprising that he gave me this advice. But this conversation changed everything.

I naively submitted to the idea of having an Editor and tried to follow the rules, but doing so killed me. Everything went slow and I wanted to move fast. I turned things in and waited to get an edit back (in part because I can’t write anything shorter than a thousand words). I’d get inspired and want to start another piece before he finished the previous one. He’d push back and make me wait. I’d pitch another hundred big ideas.

And then, I stopped.

I chased my ideas to and turned them into essays. I spent hours walking around and pondering the future of the music industry. I read books on my Kindle and never asked permission to write anything again. I published some of my best work this way.

Welcome to capture culture: Where music is not solely bought from a store and collected in our home, but captured from our environment through mobile apps and instantly stored in the cloud.

But it couldn’t last. As much as I loved breaking the rules, I knew that I couldn’t get away with it forever, because I spent a majority of my time at Billboard working on projects that no one knew about. I managed my charts and wrote my weekly column, but after that I determined how I spent my time. There were many moments, however, where I felt guilty and sought out actual work, such as magazine stories and chart related projects.

Herein lies the problem: I love what I do. I burned through weeks and months at Hypebot, publishing thousands of words of copy, because it never felt like or became work. There were things I didn’t like doing (see: press releases) and Bruce always tried to broaden my horizons by forcing me outside my writing comfort zone, but I loved it.

I didn’t love writing about Taylor Swift and her new video. I didn’t love working behind the scenes and feeling unable to bring my ideas to the world. My passion turned into a job and I started to hate my life, because I worked and I didn’t like it. Suddenly, I became the person who bitched to everyone they met about their “horrible” job and problems.

I had a great, supportive boss and a job that I couldn’t quit — until I did.

Kyle Bylin Exits Billboard, Joins Big Champagne + Live Nation Team

I left Billboard, which means this blog is fair game now. Writing that sentence makes me absolutely happy, because I have an amazing new job and missed having my own blog.

The lesson: Never trade your blog for a job — unless you have to.

I had to trade Hypebot for a job at Billboard, because I had to learn things Bruce couldn’t teach me. I had to keep this blog silent for nearly four months, because I had to submit to the reality of having a job and working in the corporate world. But this blog is mine now.

And I couldn’t be more thankful for everything that I’ve learned.