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. Read more …

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. Read more …

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.

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.

Three years ago, my first blog post ran on Hypebot. At the time, I worked as an unpaid, marketing intern at 50 Records in Minneapolis, MN. The tasks assigned to me included reading blogs and adding friends to their artist’s MySpace pages.

For such a simple, mind-numbing job, it was hard to get. The first time I applied, they turned me down. The second time I applied, they needed a warm body to fill a cubical.

Diligently, I put in my ten hours a week, but I quickly grew bored.

The company had a blog that only a few people read. Other interns posted on it, mostly to kill time, and hoping to do the same, I decided to write for it too.

I published a post about The Spilled Canvas and their online fan club. I found it interesting that they charged $20 to enter their club and credited that money in their store. That way, fans who signed-up reinvested their money in the group and promoted them by wearing their merch. Here’s an edited snippet from the original post:

By embracing the web, [The Spill Canvas] have made their website a place where people can gather, connect, and interact rather than a sales brochure. Through incentives, they’re giving fans a reason to consider joining the club and spend money. Within a single transaction they are increasing the frequency of their interaction with the fan. This lets them to sell the relationship, not the product, and provides them with a platform to deepen their connection with their fans.

The next time out, I grew more ambitious. I combined insights gleaned from a TED Talk  by Seth Godin and a YouTube lecture my Professor Mike Wesch:

This cultural inversion that Wesch speaks of is a perfect example of how the way people interact with music has changed. Many of us have developed very diverse and complex listening habits.

We now form communities around our favorite bands, we want to establish a connection or relationship, and we have a strong desire for music that is real, authentic, and meaningful.

As music fans we are now walking in a crowded room where everyone wants our attention and what happens naturally is that we’ve tuned out the frequency of noise in our lives.

The permeability of the walls we put up around ourselves now only lets certain messages through. You now have to be smarter about what you do, because it’s no longer as easy to buy your way into our headphones.

Bruce Houghton, the founder and publisher of Hypebot, reposted this piece on his blog on September 12, 2008 and Seth Godin even commented on my post:

This is a great analysis. Well done.

After that success, Bruce encouraged me to keep sending stuff in.

The next 1,095 days are history. I graduated college and worked at Target. I wrote by night and published essays once a month. In June of 2010, I was promoted to Editor of Hypebot and soon after got drafted by Billboard to be their Social/Steaming Chart Manager.

Quite serendipitously, on September 12, 2011—my three year blogging anniversary—I will be speaking on a panel at SF MusicTech and officially launching this blog.

These words from former Apple CEO Steve Jobs stand out in my mind:

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

I trusted in my curiosity. I had faith in myself. And thankfully, some amazing people had faith in me too. These people, who I’ve never met, changed my entire life.

That’s what makes the rise of the web and blogs so powerful. Since leaving Hypebot, I’ve greatly missed having a platform to call home, so I started this one.

Musicology.fm is going to be a highlight reel of my Billboard writing, my personal writing, and anything else that makes me curious. I don’t know exactly what I have in mind for this blog. I’m just going to start publishing and connecting the dots.

Why?

Because: Curiosity is the beauty of a journey that may never arrive at an absolute answer.