How to Track the Future of the Music Industry

There is simply nothing like Twitter for being a fly on the wall. People sit at work and tweet about what they're doing. They tweet at night, they tweet in the morning and they tweet a lot on the weekends - find a vein of good tweets from a group of people you want to learn from, watch it over time and the world is your oyster.

That's my theory, anyway. One of the things I'm interested in tracking are the streaming music services. So tonight I built a Twitter list of people who work at Rdio, Pandora, Mog and Spotify. (Then I remembered Grooveshark!) Give it a click and you can follow it too. I'll show you how I made it below - and of course this process could be applied to any field.

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Step 1 - I knew where the list of Rdio staff members was, because I had asked my darling virtual assistants at FancyHands by email to find it for me a few weeks ago. So tonight I sent that link to them as an example and asked them to find similar lists of staff members curated by other companies in the space. I asked for Pandora, Spotify and Mog. I remembered Grooveshark later.

Becky from Fancyhands sent me back great links for lists to Pandora and Spotify right away. The list she sent from Mog wasn't so great but no one appeared to have made a list of Mog employees yet.

Step 2 - I made a list of Mog employees by searching for them on LinkedIn. Then I trained the point-and-click database creation tool Needlebase to go to that search result page URL, click through each person's profile link, check and see if they had a Twitter profile linked there and if so scrape it for me. (My tutorial.) I created a new list of Mog employees myself and added each of those people to it.

Step 3 - I only had a small handful of Mog employees so far and I knew there were more on Twitter, so I searched for mentions of Mog in Twitter bios using Twellow. At that point I had 8 Moggers and was ready to move on with my life. Then I remembered Grooveshark and saw that they had a nice staff list they had created themselves.

Step 4 - I was complaining on Twitter today about how hard it is to splice multiple Twitter lists together and my new pal David McKinney said "try Formulists!"

I did and it was AWESOME. Click click boom, thank you Formulists, here now is a list of exactly 140 people (coincidence!) on staff at the 5 leading streaming music services:

Streaming Music Industry People

Give that link a click, follow the list, then either visit the link on your Twitter page or add it as a column in Tweetdeck or Seesmic and just like that, you'll have a front row seat for conversations between some of the hippest cats online. Hey, Team Rdio, thanks for the music - I'm so happy I subscribed!

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Kate Moss Zhang Ziyi Nikki Reed Natasha Bedingfield Audrina Patridge