Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

Do they know it's Christmas?

I couldn't help noticing the Last.fm Artist Hype List this week. Yep, these are the artists whose stars are on the rise, according to the vanguard of tastemakers who make up Last.fm's listening community. Are you wondering what I was wondering? OK, a bit of cheese is permissible at Christmas, but where's the port to wash it down? Where is Fairytale of New York?

Further investigation shows what is going on here. Fairytale has a total of over 79,000 plays on Last.fm, including over 2,900 last week (according to this page). That compares with around 700 plays last week for Greg Lake's I Believe in Father Christmas (source, allowing for messy metadata where the same song is tagged differently). But if you start from a very low baseline, as it appears Greg, Bing and Jona must have done — whereas The Pogues did not — you can achieve very high percentage gains without exactly reaching a mass audience. See you again next year, guys, and Happy Christmas, everyone.

Buzz vertigo from music blogs

There's a nice article in last Sunday's LA Times about blogging and buzz in keeping tabs on the best new music. It's right up the same street as my book:

My daily perusal of MySpace and the blogosphere, not to mention the piles of CDs under my desk, was seriously threatening my ability to focus on any one new release. There were just too many to absorb, all with tags attached declaring them the most downloaded, most discussed and most anticipated hit of the minute…

It's become difficult to distinguish between real critical interest and the momentary attention of Web surfers. And it's hard to tell when real fans, not an intern clicking a button, are upping the numbers on interactive websites like MySpace and YouTube.

To get some perspective on my own buzz vertigo, I consulted with pop geeks of all kinds, from the solo bloggers to major-label execs. The conversations left me feeling that, while everything in pop is new, it's old again too.

I actually got a new album sent to me, unsolicited, a few weeks ago, presumably in the hope that I would blog about it. It's the first time that's happened, and I have to admit I was rather flattered. Many thanks to Colin Donald of Futurescape for tipping me off about the article.

Wikis versus blogs as cultural commentary

(photo © Robin Holland, 1999)

Two years ago I created a wiki site about 69 Love Songs, my favourite album. I had in mind an evolving resource where people would add new perspectives on each song, so that it would grow in time to become a comprehensive guide to their many allusions, references and influences. At the time I first published the site, I wrote an account of its development and my hopes for it.

I've had a lot of positive feedback on the site in private and in public. However, as a wiki — a collaborative work — the site has been a relative failure. The inspiration I drew on was as much Simon Winchester's story about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, involving the co-ordination of the distributed work of several hundred Victorian volunteers, as Wikipedia. But the number of contributors is probably still in single figures, and 95% of the updates over the last two years have been done by one person: me.

This is a practical account of when and how to use a wiki for cultural reference sites, and when to consider other approaches. It accompanies a more abstract article on my main blog.

Music 2.0 Directory

Jason Herskowitz has started a wiki site so we can all collate examples of different kinds of new-generation music sites. (Everyone seems to hate the Music 2.0 label, but at the same time everyone seems to reproduce it.) As a starter, Jason has drawn on his own list of companies and Paul Lamere's suggested classification.

So if you want include your own site, or your favourite one, head over to the Music 2.0 Directory wiki and start contributing.

I've added a few playlist sharing sites to one page [update: page now moved]. One tip if you're using a Mac: use Firefox rather than Safari as the editing interface is a nightmare with Safari.

Debunking the MySpace 'revolution' and its effect on the charts

The current issue of Word has a good sceptical article by Peter Robinson on the promotion of new music through the Net in general and MySpace in particular. He concludes:

if you look at Sandi Thom's new twist on a promotional stunt, Arctic Monkeys' modern take on fans swapping tapes with each other, and Lily Allen's use of a personally administered MySpace page to get her personality across, three pop laws, each dating back into the middle of last century, leap out: people will buy music if they hear it and like it; people enjoy and are taken in by exciting stories about pop stars; and people like pop stars with whom they can emotionally engage. An exciting year for pop then, but hardly a revolutionary one.

Robinson dubs the people who claim a revolution is afoot as "web evangelists", and he clearly thinks that they're overstating their case. I agree with most of the well-researched article, but then I wondered, "Would he count me as a web evangelist?"

Social networks for music fans

I'm building my presence of a range of the social networking sites connected with music and entertainment. Some of them I've been on for over two years; some of them I've been on for a matter of days. So far you can find me on (the links go direct to my profile):

• GarageBand
• iLike
• Last.fm
• MOG
• MySpace
• MyStrands
• Vox
• Goombah (no web-based profiles, but if you have the client download, my member name is DJAlchemi).

If you are a member of any of these, please make contact with me via the links above, so we can make 'friends'. Frankly I need some more friends to make life more interesting.

Jazz blogs curate a 'lost' period

(image © Lars Klove for the New York Times)

There's an interesting article on jazz blogs in yesterday's New York Times (registration may be required shortly), which touches on several themes that I cover in the book:

• the use of blogs to articulate fan opinions and enthusiasms about music;
• the use of wikis to collate multiple perspectives and provide a collective view;
• the combination of these 'bottom up' media to re-animate neglected works (the Long Tail);
• obsessions with lists.

Second generation discovery sites

There's an interesting set of issues raised by sites like Best MySpace Band, which add second-generation features to discovery sites like MySpace, Last.fm and so on.

As the name hints, Best MySpace Band is a site dedicated to sifting through all the bands on MySpace and collating votes for them on a Wisdom of Crowds basis, to find which is 'best'. I haven't got involved in voting, but it appears to work similarly to digg, and, appropriately enough, that's where I found it.