Independent musicians and Google Play Music All Access

If you ask me, I have one of the coolest jobs at Google: to create success stories for independent musicians on Google Play.

From my time as a music critic and band manager, I can tell you that no two musicians are the same, whether it's in the art they create or the ways they want to share that art with the world. Some artists will put their music anywhere to gain exposure with new audiences, while others are more particular about how their music is sold.

There's no right or wrong answer in this brave new digital world, which is why I'm proud of what we've built within the Google Play artist hub. 

Through the artist hub, independent musicians make the decisions about how their music is distributed on Google Play. Since there are no limits to how many albums you can distribute, and no per-album or annual fees, we've seen artists doing all kinds of interesting things with their music, like posting recordings from live shows. Still others, like The Civil Wars, Lindsey Stirling and Kopecky Family Band, have climbed our charts with studio recordings, after distributing through the artist hub.

Many musicians don't realize that iTunes isn't available on Android devices, but Google Play is. With over 900 million activated Android devices out in the world, that's a lot of potential fans for any musician to reach.

With the roll out of the All Access service on Google Play Music, we're giving musicians another option for distributing their music via the artist hub. Just as you can choose how and where your music is sold on Google Play, you choose whether to make your music available on All Access.

When you do, any All Access subscriber can easily add your music to their collection. Imagine your tracks popping up in a personalized radio station, or in a playlist handcrafted by the Google Play editorial team. I've been blown away by how spot on the recommendations are. Opening a Third Eye Blind radio station delivered songs more fitting than what I put on my own mix tape in 1998.

Independent artists can opt-in entire albums or just specific tracks for All Access.

1. Log-in to the artist hub at http://play.google.com/music/publish
2. Click on an album you want to add to All Access
3. Select "Edit Album Details"
4. Review the "All Access Setting"
5. Click "Publish changes"

The best part is that music fans in the US, Europe and Australia will still be able to buy your tracks, too (if you've opted-in to international distribution). Now you have two ways to earn money and find more fans.  

We know the money stuff can get confusing when it comes to streaming, so we've provided transparency and clarity in our Support Center.

At the end of the day, musicians want to create music, and not TPS reports, for a reason. It's our goal to help artists spend less time on the business of their music so they can get back to making it.

Cheers to the next chapter of Google Play.

Caren Explains the Cannes Lions 2012

If you keep up with me on Twitter, you were probably overwhelmed by my tweets from Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity last month in the south of France. Now in its 59th year, the festival brings together the most creative minds in business -- mostly from advertising and marketing but increasingly from other fields.


Thanks to the ever-generous Google, I was invited to the Cannes Creative Academy for Young Marketers for "Young Lions" under the age of 30. During the week, I heard from some of the industry's top creative minds in a small classroom setting, as well as the festival speakers in larger sessions.

Some staggering stats from Cannes:

• 11,000 delegates attended Cannes Lions 2012, with 90+ countries represented
• There were 34,304 entries for Cannes Lions awards, while 47% of all ad campaigns that ran last year were deemed failures by the market
• Research shows best brands in the world outperform S&P by 400%, confirming that the brand is an incredibly important intangible asset
• More #canneslions tweets were sent in a day this year than in all of the 2011 festival

If you're an ad geek like me and Don Draper, it was a week full of "pinch me!" moments (as well as business buzzwords like "earned impressions" and "creating value"). Here are some of the best things I heard and saw over the week...


The Work


Each day, the festival displayed the short list of finalists for Cannes Lions awards in each category. Other work, including videos from the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors' Showcase, was shown in sessions. Here is a pinboard of the best stuff I saw.


Favorite Case Studies


Of the thousands of celebrated campaigns, here are three that stood out for their impact and effectiveness.

• Nike Fuelband by Nike + R/GA (Titanium Grand Prix winner)
• Help, I Want to Save a Life by Droga5 (Grand Prix for Good winner)
• Hilltop Reimagined for Coca-Cola by Google and Grow Interactive (Mobile Grand Prix winner)

Soundbytes: Quotes from the Experts

“Search the right place, not the bright place.” - Morihoro Harano, founder and chief of creative at PARTY Tokyo

"The revolution is coming from all sides... and I hope what we witness is the rise of the independents." - Dan Wieden, co-founder and global executive creative director of Wieden+Kennedy, on the changing agency landscape

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance a heckuva lot less.” - Joe Tripodi, EVP and Global Marketing Officer of The Coca-Cola Company

"Leadership is the responsibility you have to articulate your ideas in the face of 'no.'" - Jonathan Mildenhall, Vice President of Global Advertising Strategy at The Coca-Cola Company

“Fax machines don’t have APIs” - Michael Scissons, CEO of Syncapse, on bringing companies into the present of techology

“We’re always inclined to chase the new, new thing... but it’s about pace.” - Michael Wall, President of Lowe & Partners, on bringing your customers with you when you're selling tech

"When you're a young client, you make the mistake of thinking that creatives want a big white page, but really they want more concise things." - Laurie Coots, CMO of TBWA\Worldwide

"I didn't write 'Just Do It'... I just did it." - JR, street artist and TED Prize winner, on art versus advertising

"If you ask creatives what their job is, all of them will say the same thing: to do good work." - Tor Myhren, President of Grey New York

"Our desire to measure ourselves is unique and universal." - Stefan Olander, Vice President of Digital Sport at Nike, on the insight that lent to Nike Fuelband

"The problem with advertising is you buy the drink, but don't have the friends... you buy the 4x4, but don't have the freedom... you buy the promise, but end up buying the wrong product." - philosopher Alain de Botton

"Great advertising deeply impacts the ways executivies think about and talk about their companies." - Jean-Marie Dru, Chairman of TBWA\Worldwide

"You can never expect the young people to learn if you don't let them speak... let them get involved." - Val diFebo, CEO of Deutsch NY

"Does anyone ever start at their best? That would be so depressing, to start at the top and work your way down." - Debbie Harry, lead singer of Blondie

"Nobody expected a '10' was possible... the scoreboards could not accommodated a '10.'" - Nadia Comaneci, star of new Visa campaign, on earning the first perfect score at the Olympics in 1976

"Do well and do good." - President Bill Clinton in his keynote on advertising responsibility

Cloud computing: will it breed pack(et) rats?

I have a confession to make: my Gmail inbox just hit 1,000 unread messages. Yup... 1-0-0-0.

Though many friends and colleagues -- namely @godlovesjacob and @jrdwlls -- have tried to encourage me toward Inbox Zero, 1,000 unread emails are too daunting to deal with; consequently, I keep letting the problem get worse.

My lack of email discipline was a problem when I worked at Paste and was restricted to a mailbox disk quota limit, especially because I had a lot of file attachments stored. But it did teach me some email discipline. With Gmail, though, I have a long ways to go before I hit that 7357mb limit...

Why not just delete these unread messages? you ask.

Good question -- maybe I'll need to reference them some day in the future, or intend to read them later?

When I think of my inbox I think of my old neighbors, who used to park their cars in the street because their garage was full of boxes. These people were pack rats who liked to hold on to "stuff" -- be it memorabilia, magazines or, I don't know, notebooks from 5th grade science class that may come in handy some day.

I was considering these things this morning when I saw this ad pop up on Tech Crunch:



It struck me that the very selling point of Google Apps and other cloud-based services might be a bad thing in that it encourages people to store all they need, or moreover, want to save.

Will this create a breed of "pack(et) rats" who never learn how to clean up their email, but rather put it in storage?

Now granted, there is consequence to such seemingly unlimited storage. The cost may be a utility-like payment stream, or a flat rental fee, or having to subject yourself to Google Ads. But I wonder how many companies or individuals will have enough discipline in the early stages of their SaaS usage to sort and purge information appropriately (clearly I don't).

"Your Inbox is Full" error: good thing or bad thing?