The annual San Francisco Music Tech Summit collects experts and entrepreneurs dealing with the ways technology is transforming the music industry.

A few highlights from this year’s edition gathered throughout the blogo/twittershepere:

-A RIVER OF (SMARTER) DATA

Digital music is still in its infancy. There’s definitely more than playlists, music in the cloud and artist pages. And a few innovative companies promise to have the answer.

-Say good-bye to editorial picks and dummy collaborative filtering. The future is a gigantic “music brain” that is fed by the massive river of unstructured information that is the Internet in a continuous learning process.

At the Music Recommendation panel, the Boston-based EchoNest demoed its product which spiders millions of blog posts, playlists and forums and draws from both the sonic analysis and text mentions to create smarter recommendations. The much-hyped Spotify will be soon deploying the EchoNest engine through its Expand Playlist feature.  Paul Lamere blog post is a recommended read for a better understanding of the engine’s ins and outs.

A different way to tackle the issue of discovery comes from theSixtyone with its Digg-style platform.

-BandMetrics

What are people talking about and what are they saying? Can the stream of data be analyzed to help bands improve their online presence and be used a prediction engine?

BandMetrics is trying to crack the nut. It is still a beta but the promise is alluring: using semantic, it aims to provide the tools to track the dissemination of, and sentiments towards, your music online. It demo’ed its product to the attendees of the summit and announced the release of a new music data exchange format.

-A SOCIAL EXPERIENCE: CONNECTING BANDS WITH FANS. IPHONE AND MOBILE

There has never been more opportunity for musicians to take control of their careers. Recording and career promoting technologies are now in the hands of the artist. At the same time, there is lots of competition out there among artists.

ILike brand new syndication platform, demoed at the conference, is meant as a tool to help artists’ marketing and distribution efforts. It allows them to update tour dates or band photos on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Bebo, Hi5, etc., from a single dashboard. iLike also allows artists to create and submit iPhone Apps for their band using a template powered by iLike.

Mobile was obivously a hot topic. Pandora’s CEO boasted some amazing metrics from its mobile experience: 5 million users through the Iphone and counting 18/20k new ones every day.

The bottom line  perfectly summatized by Boothism in his blog post

• Social networking can be an effective tool, but it’s not the Holy Grail. You should have a plan before going in and be active with your network-respond to fans, answer questions, interact and be fun! On the flipside, more and more bands and brands are hiring “community managers” to manage their online presence.

• Bands cant depend on the technology, the labels or anyone to control their careers, they have to take control themselves.  It’s a scary prospect for a lot of creative folks, but with the industry the way it is, not knowing your audience and your business model=yes, the soupline.

• By taking control of their careers many more musicians will be able to eat and live comfortably off their music, but we’ll likely see a decline in super mega ultra obnoxiously rich rock stars.

-BUSINESS MODELS?

TopSpin Ian Rogers claims that given a reason to buy, fans want to and will pay for premium content and services. Initial data, gathered in the beta phase ,prove that the average transaction value goes all the way up to a  $22 and in one recent case, 84% of the paying users opted for the premium tier price over the lower one.

But why wait for customers to come to you and chose whether they want to pay and for what. Griffin’s Choruss project pushes for a forced subscription model where college students are “volontueering” a monthly fee for p2p activity. The legal aspects of the project are still obscure, as well as how the indie and unsigned bands could participate to it

BREAKING NEWS

French National Assembly Adopts 3 Strikes Law

iLike Launches Custom iPhone Apps, Syndication Platform To Help Artists Connect With Fans

Imeem About To Expand iPhone Music Storage By Way Of The Cloud

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OPINIONS AND REPORTS

Seth Godin: Another View Of Free

Bruce Houghton: Despite The All The Gloom And Doom I’m Still Optimistic About The Music Industry

Is the Long Tail really long?

Not just a matter of semantics:about “pirates” and “theft” in the music industry.

Spotify CEO interview ortability and subscriptions to a social music experience as key future developments.

FACTS

Live Nation looks to ticketholders for more revenue

The Biggest Music Sites Online?

Music Industry So Weak You Only Need To Sell 83,000 To Be No. 1

Pandora Mobile In Numbers.

BREAKING NEWS

The Pirate Bay Verdict: guilty

-Wired: Why File Sharing Will save Hollywood, Music.

A good read on the importance of sites like The Pirate Bay “The complete DNA of social media was right there, from the very start of P2P”: buddy lists, user uploads, filtering content by user, viral marketing, ad-supported content and the potential of mining valuable data. “Even as the content industry celebrates another false victory over file sharing, the world is moving on, to cloud-based, on-demand streaming services — some licensed — where you can hear music and watch videos faster and in a more social way than you can with bit torrent. And as content holders look to monetize those networks, P2P networks provide the only useful template, because they share so many characteristics with today’s social-media networks”

-Cnet: Copyright holders cheer Pirate Bay verdict

Top industry executives voice their hope that the verdict will finally discourage illegal downloaders

-Mike Masnick at TechDirt: Pirate Bay loses a lawsuit; Entertainment Industry loses an opportunity

What comes out of this story according to Masnick, a long-time advocate of the necessity for the music industry to innovate. A good summary of Masnick’s view is his MidemNet presentation.

His take on the verdict moves along those lines: the battle was lost in a court by file-sharing fans, but the war will be lost by the entertainment industry if it doesn’t innovate and find new business models soon.  And by Pirate Bay fans, Masnick points out, you have to account for not only consumers but also content creators as “Paulo Coehlo, who found that “pirating” his own book helped him tremendously, and who recently spoke out about what a useful tool The Pirate Bay has been.”

-Billboard: Hundreds Protests Pirate bay Conviction

TRENDS

-Hypebot on Online Radio: Edison Infinite Dial Study Shows Growth And Potential Of Online Media Online radio and video viewership grows, only 21% buy music online.

-TechCrunch on Kindle2: 300,000 Kindle 2s Sold To Date

-TechCrunch on Facebook vs MySpace ComScore Data: Closing The Gap: Facebook Only 9 Million Visitors Away From Passing MySpace In U.S. Facebook is booming in Europe too.  According to comScore, unique visits in February more than quadrupled to 100 million, on a year-over-year comparison.  On a global scale, unique visitors jumped 175 percent to 275 million.

GOING UP, DOWN AND UNDER

Going UP

The Music Meta-Data Industry (Muze and Macrovision)- DigitalMusicNews: How Macrovision Changed Music Metadata Overnight…

Some big financing rounds emerged this week.  Goom Radio attracted $16 million, and SoundCloud lured $3.3 million.

GoomRadio – a new interactive radio service centered around  “social DJs streams” and with already a discrete success in France – gets a fairly bad review on TechCrunch where it is dubbed as a new Pandora for the mainstream: Goom Gets $16 Million To Litter Web Radio With Beyonce And DJs

German-based SoundCloud shows some potential with its filesharing services aimed at empowering musicians- but competition (both the professional and free one) is fierce. VentureBeat has the details: SoundCloud raises $3.3 million for audiophile file-sharing

Going UP and DOWN

Itunes Variable Pricing Effect- Billboard:iTunes Price Change: Sales Down, Revenue Up In Week 1 Tracks that now sell for $1.29, up from $0.99, sold 12.5 percent fewer units than during the previous week, while tracks whose prices were unchanged sold 10 percent more than the week before. (Overall track sales were up 3 percent during the week). Billboard also looked at how the sales of iTunes’s top 100 songs (about half of which now sell for $1.29) were impacted by the price hikes. While unit sales dropped about 1%, revenues were up over the prior week, according to iTunes, though exact figures weren’t provided by Apple.

WORKING ON IT

MOG Revamped Service – Hypebot-MOG Music Network Gets A Makeover. Wannabe the Huffington Post” Of Music

MySpace Music is on roll planning to release new features, recover from theFacebook storm and possibly generate some revenues.

–TechCrunch gathers rumors about Warner regrets for a poorly negotiated JV deal- An Embarrassed Warner Music Regrets MySpace Music Deal

–AP raises its praise to MySpace Music CEO, music executive Holt, but it might be too little too late- MySpace hopes to turn free songs into needed cash

QTrax come-back gets a harsh review from ArsTechnica: Hands-on: Free but inconvenient music doesn’t work for Qtrax “Ars gave it a runthrough and found that the P2P-based music service sounds much better on paper than it does in real life.”

UNDER

DigitalMusicNews reports that Passalong Networks Shutting Down; Top Execs Departing

MOBILE

Nokia Comes with music: going up?? Moconews: Nokia’s 5800 Combined With Comes With Music A “Big Hit” 20% of the downloads are over-the-air.

NineInchNails Iphone App is LIVE

Popular industrial band Nine Inch Nails has released a free application for the iPhone, allowing fans to interact with one another and receive streaming content, accessing content and remixes by fans, chatting with nearby fans,etc.

Ars Technica review: NIN’s iPhone app brings you Closer to the band

Chris Borgan insighful post: What Nine Inch Nails Knows About Tribes

Wired excellent video:

MediaPost on the AT&T and Iphone extended exclusive deal: Report: AT&T In Talks To Extend iPhone Deal

PCWorld on Verizon CEO plans for a 4G IPhone: Verizon CEO Says 4G IPhone Could Be on Verizon

MocoNews on new Iphone UI features that would be based on the user activity: Apple Patents Reveal Plan To Adjust IPhone UI Based On User Activity

AlleyInsider on an upcoming (maybe) Hulu Iphone app: Hulu iPhone App Coming Soon, ‘Badass’

MUSIC & SOCIAL MEDIA

Good reads for the week on Discovering Music Through Social media:

-Mashable on HOW TO: Use Social Media for Sharing Music

-Gizmondo: Discovering Music in 2009: The New Tools

New Services

New Chart Scans Web For Top Talk On Tracks We Are Hunted: tracks the most-favored music on P2P and social networks, Twitter, web forums and blogs. It then presents the 99 hottest tracks (according to its calculations) through an intuitive Brady Bunch-style interface. Wired: Sneak Preview: A Fantastic New Way to Find Hot Music

Hypebot shortly reviews WikiCharts “Somewhat like the just launched We Are Hunted, The Wiki Chart tracks data from a bunch of different sources of music (blogs, Billboard, YouTube, iTunes, radio, imeem, last fm lots more) and come up with a weekly top 40 of the most buzzed about tracks”

Marketing through social media

The most viral video ever: Susan Boyle. Mashable: Susan Boyle: The Biggest YouTube Sensation Ever?

Tapulous joins forces with iLike to promote the Coldplay-branded Tap Tap app -DigitalMusicNews iLike, Tapulous Marketing Alliance Begins…

Twitter as a Music Platform: Mike Skinner releases its new songs via Twitter. NME: He’s writing a song a day this week, and giving them all away for free

A lot has been happening in the TwitterSphere this week. Some snapshots here:

-Twitter’s U.S. users nearly double in March

-Oprah, Ashton Kutcher mark Twitter ‘turning point’

MUST READ

TuneCore CEO Jeff Price discusses music marketing and the state of the music industry

Music fans pitch in to design covers, back CDs, map tour