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