The second Music, Entrepreneurship, And Technology discussion gathering last Saturday featured a few interesting discussions, led by experts in their respective fields. Oon Arifiandi from 7Langit elaborated on developing mobile apps for music, and musician Arian Arifin explained the business potential of music merchandising. Abang Edwin SA, with his years of experience in digital communities, covered the do’s and dont’s of managing a community of fans, and Ricky Andrey shared something interesting: looking at bands as startups from a legal perspective.

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Several years ago, when I was still in University, I owned a USB thumb drive. It was still relatively new then and not many people owned one, to the point that I had to carry around the installer CD everywhere. That thumb drive was capable of storing a whopping 64 MB, much larger than the box of floppy disks that I carried everywhere, and was most certainly less prone to fungi. Today, a thumb drive with such capacity is probably not for sale anymore; even 1GB drives are usually given away as bonuses.

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Last Saturday, April 20th, 2013, a few friends and I had the chance to create a small gathering to discuss about music, entrepreneurship and technology. This gathering started off from people who had joined a group with the same name on Google+, moderated by Robin Malau and Widi Asmoro. Looking at how active the discussions were in the group, and the variety of topics covered in a group what was literally weeks old, I offered to create the first gathering for this group at the offices of Think Web, which is also where Wooz.in is headquartered. Thanks to Ramya Prajna for providing the space and the audiovisual equipment.

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One of the main pillars of industries based in intellectual property are royalties. In this definition, royalties is the amount of revenue shared and received by an owner of an intellectual property or work, from usage of said work by other parties; it often refers to musical works and compositions. The royalties paid can be 0% to 100%, depending on the agreement between the work owner and the party who wants to exploit it. Bottom line, every work that is used, whether it is duplicated, broadcast or used in sync with other products (in what is called synchronisation rights, usually for ads, movie soundtracks, and so on), the work owner will receive a portion of income as agreed.

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Last week I had the chance to participate in the Lean Startup Machine workshop in Singapore, with fellow contributor Dondi Hananto, who has written about his experiences in the workshop. In summary, the workshop was a valuable experience, which I would recommend to anyone who wants to build their own startup, wants to study a “quick” way of customer development, or wants to get a different perspective on how to build businesses. Of course, the LSM approach is only one of many ways in building a business. But I hope, for those of you who want to get into the startup scene, that you will think of how to build a business, and not just a program or application.

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Previously, the entertainment industry was a process that tended to be straight and vertical. Like now, anyone can create something, but usually the entertainment work that would be allocated the most investment (which usually meant the largest promotion and distribution) is the one, as determined by the stakeholders of the entertainment industry, that could be digested by a large amount of people, and gave return on investment – or even profit. The principle of scale of economies apply: invest in something with a fixed/static value, which could then be duplicated for multiplied profits. Of course, this vertical relies on complete control on all the aspects of the industry – from creation, production, promotion, marketing, distribution, and even the retail price.

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