Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

How does my listening look?

Software is giving us ways of analysing our own listening habits that people never imagined a generation ago. Once you've tracked a lot of data, there's no end to the ways you can cut it — or present it. Recently it has seemed that I've come across a new way of visualising people's Last.fm data every week. I blogged a measure of my 'eclecticism' on my Last.fm profile a couple of weeks ago, but recently came across another way of measuring this. However, this has been a bumper week because Jadam Kahn has just catalogued several more visualisation tools over at the Rocketsurgeon blog.

I was going to write some reflections on these measures, and I still may, but in the meantime I recommend keeping an eye on Rocketsurgeon: the blog has only been going three weeks but has already built up a good head of steam.

IODA PROMONET support for bloggers

Music bloggers have developed a code where they post a track from an album they review, usually without permission, but on the grounds that (a) the track is available for download for a limited period only, (b) links are provided to stores where you can buy the album, and (c) if rights owners object, the track will be removed. Distributor IODA is aiming to work with the grain of this bloggers' practice by making it easier to blog their labels' music with consent. I've registered as a blogger on IODA's PROMONET. I haven't found a lot of music I want to blog about, but first impressions are pretty good. Here's an example from a recent Tom Zé album. PROMONET gives me all the code for the column on the left, which I just had to cut and paste. As a registered member, it also enables me to listen to 30-second samples of all the tracks on the album. Of course it's not quite as liberal as Creative Commons licensing for these tracks, and IODA retains some control by virtue of the tracks being hosted on their server. But you can't really begrudge them that, since they are bearing the bandwidth costs and understandably would like to be able to monitor volumes of downloads and conversion to sales. And the downloads are unprotected MP3s.

Download "Cara-cuá - Revolta Nagô-Oió 1830" (mp3) from "Danç-Êh-Sá" by Tom Zé Tratore Buy at iTunes Music Store Buy at eMusic Buy at Rhapsody Buy at Napster Stream from Rhapsody More On This Album

Rise of the artist site

The flipside of sites run by fans is of course sites run by artists, and yesterday the New York Times ran a feature — Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog (hmmm, not a bad title; I wonder if I could adapt it…) — about what it refers to as 'B-list' artists and how they communicate with fans online. Leading with the story of Jonathan Coulton's successful DIY singer-songwriter blog, the feature reports,

Along the way, [Coulton] discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the "you rock!" variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton's love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he's now feeling guilty about being rude.

I'm interested in the different ways artists have of lifting the veil about their work and their creativity. Seven years ago I worked with the theatre/performance company Forced Entertainment on an educational CD-ROM they were making about their work. I asked them why they had decided to put so much time and effort into this: why not just create another performance work instead? The answer I got back was something along the lines of "if we don't create a discourse to frame and explain our work [which can at times be 'difficult'], no one else will."

Fan sites RIP?

Andy Aldridge, who created one of my favourite fan sites, and whom I interviewed for the book (notes to appear here when I get round to it), is asking whether such sites are on the way out.

The fan site was the baby of the dedicated individual who lovingly hand-crafted huge lists of tour date archives and setlists, photos and audio, reviews and interviews painstakingly transcribed by hand from magazines and newspapers, and a discography that included the most obscure and pointless of releases just for the sake of being complete — only a real fan could possibly care that the album version of Superfreaky Memories was given away on a Mojo coverdisc…

I hope he's wrong, and here's why I think he may be.

Last.fm charts get TV tie-in

Intriguing news that Last.fm and Channel 4 TV are going to collaborate on a global music chart show (via cityofsound). I can't find many details on this, but it will be intriguing to see how they present the data, because a lot of the Last.fm charts are, well, not very interesting. I checked the current charts for the UK and found that the Arctic Monkeys are occupying the whole of the Top 12 — so I tried France, a country with a proud tradition of cultural independence. As you can see (image on the right, click to enlarge), the story is only slightly better there.