Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

Rough notes: two recent music events

There are a few rules of thumb I use to filter what I write on this site. The first is that it must have some bearing on the themes of digital discovery in Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll, the book. The second is that I don't really do 'news' items here, unless I come across something that I believe deserves higher profile than it's likely to get from other channels. If you want news, you're better off going to a site that specialises: I use mediaor (built by Jason Herskowitz), which aggregates material from about a hundred music news and discovery sites (including this one!). Thirdly, I always try and add something new to the 'raw data' in terms of analysis or insight — or, when I'm lacking insight, attitude.

But often I don't have time to digest what I take in, or to compose my thoughts. That's life, and we all probably feel that way, so no complaints. But I'm always experimenting with ways to make something useful out of the undigested stuff, to provide a 'light touch' way of passing things on. The 'recently noted elsewhere' stream on the right of this page is one example of that, based on a subset of my Furl archive. Another thing I do is take rough notes at the conferences, lectures and other events I attend. I'm trying out using my Vox blog to make these available in unedited form. The notes are rough, messy and come with health warnings about accuracy. But have a peek and see if you find these two examples useful:

• Music Connected — AIM independent label event last week, including Paul Brindley's state-of-the-digital-industry review and a panel on ad-supported models;
• Celestial Jukebox: free streams or pipe dreams? — Music Tank event yesterday, with keynote from Last.fm and responses from labels, rights organisations and technologists.

If you're feeling nosey, there's also a mix of other personal stuff on the same blog (and if you become a friend of mine on Vox, there's even more embarrassing stuff).

The myth, science and craft of music discovery

Marc Cohen writes a challenging post on The Myth of Music Discovery. Citing a Digital Music News report of two venture capitalists agreeing that "the next big thing is going to be music discovery", Marc says this ought to be enough evidence that it won't be.

Having written a book which takes music discovery as a pointer to the changes in the forces shaping our cultural lives, you wouldn't expect me to be disinterested, or to be able to avoid rising to this bait. Perhaps that's just more evidence to support Marc's argument. But let me try and engage with his points anyway.

Marc reports evidence that radio remains the main route to music discovery, but online channels are growing in their influence. This is now a fairly well-established trend (here's one previous post supporting this, and another). He concludes from this:

people don't seek to discover new music — it just happens. They don't listen to the radio, watch TV or talk to friends for the purpose of discovering new music. This is a byproduct of the intended object of the interaction.

For some — actually I'd concede it's the majority — this is true. But sweeping generalisations about what "people" do or don't do are not helpful to our understanding here. There is a minority who do seek to discover music. These are the 'savants' and 'enthusiasts' in the classification I use. The thing is that a minority within this minority are quite influential for the rest of the "people". They are the first movers in the interactions from which discovery is a byproduct. And they're proud of it. They take kudos from people reading the blogs in which they assiduously document their new finds, and from the buzz they build on social networks.

The dynamics of discovery include a whole ecology of social recommendations, automated recommender systems, happenstance and serendipity — and the interactions between all of these influences.

[Update, 26 April 2008: Marc has posted on the reaction and I have commented, so see there for further discussion.]

Building swarms of true fans

I wrote last year about Swarmteams cross-platform messaging service, and its application for coordinating networks of fans. Swarmteams is running a pilot project for the music industry this year, supported by NESTA, and going under the name of SwarmTribes®.

For many musicians, getting the first 10 or 20 dedicated fans is easy enough — but when it comes to multiplying this number things become more difficult. If and when their fan base does increase, they're faced with the challenges of managing it.

Musicians need a communication system to interact with their fans, which is adaptable and instantly reactive. They need to engage with their fans, using a means of communication that can be scaled up. This is where Swarmteams can help.

I'm pleased to say that I'll be working alongside Swarmteams as researcher, reporter and evaluator for the project (also funded by NESTA, but as an independent project). And I'm looking forward to working with Nancy Baym of University of Kansas and her colleague Ryan Milner.

The core of the Swarmteams concept is the combination of a "back to nature" communication patterns and the latest cross-platform messaging technologies.

Finding the sound that fits the vision

Here's a short story — the fifth in my series of future scenarios from the first draft of my book, which got edited out of the published version — about a casual music listener trying to find some music to go with a home video, and being led through the minefield of finding music that you can use legally on your soundtracks. [I found the picture on the left on Flickr: it's by quasimime, and used under a Creative Commons licence.]

There were several things I was trying to combine in this scenario, aside from the licensing question.

• I wanted to describe the experience of someone who doesn't care a lot about music, and just sees it as a means to an end. Most of us who write about music discovery are pretty fanatical about it ('savants' in the classification I use), and have to remind ourselves that not everyone behaves like us.
• The idea of building up a collection of digital music almost by accident: the download-era equivalent of acquiring lots of promotional CDs and the ones they stick on the covers of magazines.
• Having a search tool that sorts through this slurry of inconsistently tagged music files and returns something reasonably coherent from this Everything is Miscellaneous mess. Of course, the tool could equally well have been searching the miscellaneous grab-bag of music files online, as SeeqPod does, but for this story you perhaps have to imagine that the Englobulators have won and closed down SeeqPod and its siblings.
• Finally I wanted to show search and recommendations for using music instrumentally as an accompaniment for other activities. My hunch is that recommending music for specific purposes — whether as a video soundtrack or for a gym workout — is going to be more effective and more widely used than for the general, and more ambitious, purpose of finding your next favourite band. This doesn't apply only to music: I wish Flickr and iStockPhoto had better search and recommendations to help me find images to accompany presentation ideas.

End of introduction. Continue reading for the story.

Songkick combines recommendations and buzz measures

Earlier today I recorded some comments about Songkick — who have just announced some new features and funding — for PM, BBC Radio 4's main afternoon news programme. You can listen to the three-minute broadcast feature, including my edited comments, below.

Songkick could be described as Last.fm for gigs. There are important differences between gigs and recorded music, however. Gigs are one-off events; they aren't available on-demand 24 hours a day. You can't try them out with a 30-second sample to see if you might like them. Crucially, the timing of recommendations can be critical for popular gigs. Previously I gave the example of Bandsintown.com recommending the Led Zeppelin reunion show to me on the same day that it was due to happen — not much use when all tickets had been allocated by a complex registration process months before.

Another feature that has attracted comment is Songkick's measure of the 'buzz' for each band, giving a means of comparing who's on the way up and who's star is on the wane.

Discovery, dating and profiles

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Lynne Sandler, creator of the A Sound Match dating site, following up Paul Lamere citing my categorisation of music listeners at the SanFran MusicTech Summit. As her site explains, Lynne "stumbled upon her music-matchmaking theory over 15 years ago after a painful first date with a man who listened exclusively to 80's hair bands". Ouch.

A Sound Match profiles its users on the basis of questions about their music listening habits and then classifies them as either a Diamond in the Rough, a Heart of Gold, a Shining Star or an Unchained Melody. As you can see from the graphic, I came out as a Diamond in the Rough — "devotee, fan, music lover, you've heard it all…" — which seems more or less equivalent to the 'Savant' category in the Project Phoenix classification that I use. Lynne does not claim to have used rigorous scientific methods (and I don't know how the Project Phoenix methodology would stand up to serious scrutiny), but there seems to be a reasonable mapping between the two classifications.

Let's not get hung up over whether there is a proven link between music taste/listening and emotional compatibility between two people. (My view: the two areas are not independent of each other, but the exact nature of the link depends heavily on context, making it hard to predict.) The main point of A Sound Match, as I see it, is extending the role of music as an ice-breaker and help, errr, lubricate the first exchanges between strangers. If music be the food of love… and all that.

Recommender systems meet festivals

In the first of my scenarios from the "cutting room floor" I described a festival where friends clustered around their interests and discussed what they would go and see. Part of this was a portable recommender system that already knew your cultural preferences and matched them against what was on at the festival. Now, with its Last.fm goes to Austin feature, there's exactly that kind of service for the South by SouthWest festival next week.

Does anyone know of other applications of recommender systems for festivals?

As a regular gig goer Last.fm's mapping of events to my listening habits and friends is one of the most valuable and truly social functions that it provides. It's about connecting with culture through people and connecting with people through culture.

Latest discussions on music discovery, recommendations and social networks

There have been a couple of interesting panel discussions this week, on opposite sides of the US, about how people discover music and the growing role of, respectively, recommender systems and social networks in helping them do this.

At the SanFran MusicTech Summit on Monday Paul Lamere led a discussion (pictured right) between two techies who build automated recommendation systems and two 'curators' who make recommendations based on human skills and knowledge. Paul has provided his own summary and reflections on the discussion, as well as a video of the full proceedings — which runs for just under an hour from 14 minutes in. And thanks, Paul, for mentioning my book in the course of the discussion: here's more on the categorisation of listeners that Paul attributes to me (though I took it from Emap research).

In New York yesterday, the Digital Music Forum East ran a session on "Social Networks and Music Discovery: What It Means for Music Businesses". I can't find any recording of this, but Eliot van Buskirk of Wired has blogged the contributions of the panellists, who included people from US National Public Radio, the iLike social network and peer-to-peer monitors BigChampagne.

When do you want to hear 30-second recommendation clips?

I know the question I'm about to ask must have been posed many times before, but I'm not sure I've ever seen an answer. I've been revisiting my thinking about the different 'modes' in which we listen to music. Sometimes we're open to discovering new artists and songs, sometimes we just want to listen to our favourites. Sometimes we want listen to music in 'lean back' mode where we surrender control of track sequence to a DJ, a playlist we made earlier or even a playlisting algorithm; and sometimes we're more prepared to interact and intervene, 'leaning forward' to sequence the music track by track.

Into this spectrum of listening behaviours come recommender systems like MyStrands (above in the image on the right) and iLike (below) that offer me suggestions for branching my listening based on what I'm listening to in iTunes at this moment. But they offer only 30-second clips of each suggestion, and the suggestions disappear at the end of the track I'm listening to. So my question: in what context would listeners break off in the middle of listening to a track they had chosen to hear a clip (usually fairly lo-fi) of something they hadn't chosen — and quite likely hadn't heard of?

Is this user experience just a reflection of licensing constraints that will disappear as soon as the services concerned have licensed full tracks? Or was it designed that way on purpose, irrespective of legal parameters?

When I was talking about criteria for recommender systems a few weeks ago, I suggested that the key pragmatic measure of a good system is the degree to which people keep coming back for more recommendations. So how much do users actually engage with the 30-second recommendations? Does anyone have any figures they could share — or even anecdotal evidence?

And if people do break off their current listening to attend to recommendation clips are they more likely to follow up on those recommendations, or to forget about them?

Going beyond music, radio producers insert trailers for other programmes in their features (especially on the BBC!), but would you ever insert a trailer for a film in the middle of another one? TV does that, but then people pay a premium price to watch films without such interruptions, suggesting that this isn't seen as adding value.

How community builds audiences and makes discovery stick

At a music marketing event in London a couple of days ago, Scott Cohen, Co-founder of The Orchard (and on the left in the collage), presented a nice thought experiment that demonstrates the importance of community and narrative in making sure that discoveries stick in the mind of audiences. What if Simon Cowell (on the right in the collage) just cut to the chase on The X Factor and presented only one show in each series, saying "we've done the research, we've done the auditions, we've consulted audiences, and here's the winner"? The result would be the same — a winner like Leona Lewis (middle of collage) — but would this winner sell as many records? Answer: No, because it's the backstage access, the community that grows around the competitors, and the story of the winner's rise that engages the audience interest. They make an emotional connection with the artist and the song, and buy it to help it succeed.

Yet, as Scott went on to say, record labels do all the research and auditioning that X Factor and its equivalents do, but they hide it from view, and just say, "here's the winner we've identified: please buy their records". The solution to this is not to create some contrived competition for every new signing (personally I hate it when art gets turned into sport), but it may be to find other ways to involve the audience and give them "backstage" glimpses of artists that help people engage with them. Even a simple blog is a start.

Which are the best social networks for promoting music?

Last week I spoke to students at Westminster University's MA in Music Business Management (I'm always happy to speak to students about digital discovery and social media, so let me know if you run a course that you'd like me to take part in). Lots of good questions in the discussion session, including one at the end that I didn't have time to answer, which was along the lines of "How can we identify which are the best social networks for promoting music?" Here's the bulk of the answer I sent as a follow-up — please let me know if you can improve on it (or challenge it), since I know my knowledge of web metrics is less than comprehensive.

The way I see it you can answer this question with crude figures, more fine-grained measures or with hand-waving arguments. Let's take each in turn.

1 The Crude

Crudely, there are measures from the companies that specialise in website rankings that tell you how which of the social networks get the most traffic. Nielsen and Alexa (here are some old data reported here, but you can get up to the minute data yourself direct from alexa.com)

iPods and identity: a film and a book

What's on your mind when you use your iPod? Are you sealing yourself off from an inhospitable environment, or are you creating a soundtrack to add an imaginary gloss to that environment? These are the sorts of questions being posed by a new film project, Between Ears, by two Dutch filmmakers.

The film is in production and you can contribute to the research via a questionnaire. From the press release,

Between Ears will be a cinematic trip around the world, that leads the viewer along to a surprising diversity of people who shut off from reality around them. With the help of an MP3 player they try to move into a place between their ears. The focus of the film is mainly on the intense experiencing of image and sound, in a way which enables the viewer to identify with the people in the film.

Much of the field of sociological study of people listening to personal music has been staked out by Michael Bull at University of Sussex, going back before the iPod to the days of the original Sony Walkman. The Between Ears site has a video interview with Michael, and his new book, Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience, was published just a few weeks ago. Here's my review of his last book, Sounding Out the City (2000).

Audio whiplash from personalised ads with free music downloads

In the last month or so I've been dipping my toes into the ad-supported music download service We7. Their catalogue has expanded significantly since they launched, and there's now enough there that I like for me to have got 40-50 tracks that look interesting without having to spend too much time digging around on the site (the catalogue needs to expand further or the navigation and recommendations need to improve, however, for this to remain the case).

We7's model is based on their MediaGraft technology, which 'grafts' personalised ads onto the front of the track. Generally these are short enough — at 10-20 seconds — not to be too intrusive. Neither were the registration questions bothersome in terms of pumping me for details of my lifestyle. But the consequence of this is that you can end up with song intros like this clip:

Two points about this. One: the personalisation isn't working too well. I have never paid money for games hardware or software. I asked for Sim City for Christmas in 1992, but in the month or two immediately afterwards, I got so annoyed with myself for wasting whole weekends on it (sometimes not even eating properly) that I swore off it and have never gone back.

And, two: even if you leave that aside, listen to that audio whiplash between the ad and the track itself. When you're listening to French chansons from the '20s and '30s, just the tone of the ad is enough to make it come across like an aural invasion, and thus counterproductive in getting across the message.

Given that my selection of tracks is probably a better guide to my personality, lifestyle and buying habits than my age and gender, why not tailor the ads to the music rather than the listener demographics? No need for the clever software (patent pending) then, but the 'creatives' at the ad agencies might have to work a bit harder to think about the context in which their work will be heard.

Detecting exceptions and fraud on recommender systems

I stumbled across this iLike profile when I noticed someone who'd listened to David Bowie over 2 billion times. "Patrick S" has, according to his profile, been alive less than a billion seconds (and iTunes has been available for only the later part of his life), yet he's managed to register over 2 billion plays for 32 separate artists. The data concerned seems to be imported by iLike from iTunes.

Who knows whether this is just idle mischief, a software glitch, or a concerted effort at gaming or 'shilling' the iLike recommender system? Whatever the cause, recommender systems clearly have to detect such incongruent profiles — which can't be hard in cases as gross as this — and make sure the data is excluded from their recommendation algorithms. Cleaning up the profiles for this user and the 32 artists concerned would be a good idea, too, lest they undermine others' confidence in what they see on the site.

Hypocrisy that gives music bloggers a bad name

I've tried to define some of the characteristics that make up 'blog culture', including the ethos of a gift economy, where people are rewarded by recognition and 'in-kind' returns rather than cash, and the focus on the "individual, authentic voice". I've also been one of many to be wary of attempts to undermine this authenticity by marketers.

Now — prompted by an example of pretty crass behaviour by a blogger distributing bootleg recordings — I'm beginning to wonder if my belief in that authenticity may have been a little naive in the first place — a bit like the old white bicycles schemes that started with great intentions only to be undermined by the unscrupulous.

We all know that some artists and bands give explicit or tacit support to fans trading live recordings for profit. I guess the publishers may not always be happy about this, but that never seemed to stop the Grateful Dead. So far, no problem. But some artists make it clear that they object to this, and ask audiences explicitly to refrain from recording live shows.

So here is a blogger that has posted a recording of Robert Fripp and the League of Crafty Guitarists, with photograph, including a recording of the "statement of policy regarding no photos and no recordings". The "spread the love" text above is taken from this same blog site.

Fripp responds in his online diary:

Mr. Blogger seeks to present himself as a provider of music, a supporter of music & of particular musicians, unconstrained & unmotivated by commerce. This is a lie. He does not have the authority to give away our work. He attracts attention to himself, not for & from his own work & efforts, but by taking & using the work of others, not only without consent but with knowledge of their disapproval. Mr. Blogger is using our work as currency in a scheme of trading & attention-gaining, commerce of a different guise. He demonstrates an example of dishonesty dressed up in fine clothes, and presents himself for public commendation.

When recommender systems get it wrong...

I just received this email, timestamped 3pm London time, from the listings recommender service Bandsintown:

Here's a quick update for the next 7 days.



BANDSINTOWN RECOMMENDATIONS

---------------------------------------------

Mon Nov 26 - Paolo Nutini, Led Zeppelin, Foreigner, Pete Townshend, Bill Wyman @ O2 Arena - London, United Kingdom

http://www.bandsintown.com/event/565009

Leaving aside the widely reported fact that this gig isn't taking place today, but has been postponed for two weeks, what do you think my chances would be of snapping up a ticket, based on this recommendation, a few hours before it started?

And how do you think this makes me feel about other Bandsintown recommendations I receive? Trust is hard-won, but easily lost.

Sonic youth: ambassador fans of the future

The third in my series of future scenarios from the first draft of my book imagines a situation where pocket music players with better-than-Zune sharing features have become so cheap as to be almost disposable (like cameras).

It is also partly inspired by the story three years ago of Universal encouraging schoolchildren to act as ambassadors for bands like Busted and McFly. Universal suspended the initiative when it was exposed, but the principle will doubtless continue to be applied — and is being applied — as long as it is implemented more sensitively. I've been speaking to Ken Thompson at Swarmteams, and he talks about 'alpha fans' (comparable to the Savants and Originators in my book) building a reputation as trusted influencers with their network of contacts, and thus being able to act as ambassadors for bands (and brands?) — more on this in a week or two.

This scenario plays out as a dialogue between mother and daughter, as the former is at first suspicious of the latter's hidden motives, but they are reconciled by the end. I know I'm no Raymond Carver, and so, with hindsight, it's no surprise that this story ended up on the cutting room floor, but the idea of the scenarios was to stimulate ideas about future possibilities, and I hope it serves this purpose.

Nothing sells like a good story: Radiohead's In Rainbows

I don't often comment on major news stories here, even when they're reasonably related to my interests and my book. You won't read me reporting on things like Amazon launching a DRM-free music download store, because my guess is that people don't come here for breaking news. Other sites do that better and cover such stories more comprehensively and consistently, so I'd be unwise to try and compete with them. And I especially didn't write about In Rainbows last week because, well, everyone was — and I don't much like Radiohead. But perhaps because no one was talking of anything else last week, my publisher asked for my angle on what was going on. This is what I wrote.

It's very unlikely that Radiohead's In Rainbows will be seen, with hindsight and in the cool light of day, as playing a major part in the overhaul of the recording industry. But in its fan-friendly yet commercially unorthodox presentation (in case you hadn't heard, downloaders are invited to choose how much they will pay for the new album), it is a marketing triumph. It eclipses even the rock aristocracy of Paul McCartney, who sold his latest album through Starbucks, and Prince, whose album was given away with the Mail on Sunday, for the amount of buzz generated across the broadsheet media and the blogosphere. Can there be anyone in the chattering classes, who make up Radiohead's target audience, who could have possibly missed the fact that their new album hit the web last Wednesday? And the advertising spend to achieve this blanket coverage in an era of fragmented channels? Virtually nil. Artists like Sandi Thom showed the power of a good story, weaving together Cinderella's virtue and struggle with the fairytale consummation of a new, more intimate connection with an audience. In the murky forest of record industry woes, Radiohead have spun another tale where we all get to go to the ball while the ugly sisters (major labels) are sidelined for the moment. And boy do we all like telling it!

It will be intriguing to see what major label deal Radiohead are able to strike, as apparently they are seeking to do, in the light of reports that they have already shifted 1.3 million paid-for downloads and a further half a million unpaid filesharing copies. When Prince distributed three million copies of his CD, his label's response was to shelve plans to release the CD officially. Radiohead's case is different because they haven't yet produced a CD version of the album, but how many copies need to be out there before the labels consider the market to be saturated?

MusicTank Event: Too Much Choice?

In a couple of weeks, on 3rd October, I'll be taking part in a panel discussion organised by MusicTank here in London, about the role of experts and filters in helping us sift the massive quantities of music being produced. Here's an extract from the blurb:

Most people would agree that choice is a good thing, but there is a flipside to this vision of a musical consumerist's paradise. While aficionados and geeks might relish the challenge of judging vast swathes of music for themselves (choosing, aggregating and selecting between an array of filters, e.g. Pandora, Pitchfork, online communities), would more casual consumers (and thus the public majority) not prefer a bit of guidance, not just in terms of the music itself but also in terms of which filters are to be trusted?

I'm looking forward to meeting several of my fellow participants. First and foremost, Tom Robinson is giving the keynote. Tom is probably still best known as a songwriter and performer, though in the last decade he's become a well-respected DJ and radio presenter. In that respect, you might expect him to back the role of 'gatekeepers'. However, he has also been critical of the mainstream music business and has praised MySpace.

If you like The Beatles, you might like… what?

Via his blog, Paul Lamere is conducting an online survey in how people rate the suitability of different recommendations for fans of, variously, The Beatles, Miles Davis, Deerhoof and others. If you have ten minutes to spare, please consider completing the survey for at least one of these 'seed' artists, which will inform the tutorial that Paul and Oscar Celma are giving at the Music Information Retrieval conference in a couple of weeks' time.

I hope the results (and conclusions from them) will be shared more widely than just the tutorial. I completed the survey for the The Beatles and for Miles Davis. One of the things about these artists is, of course, that their output was so multi-faceted that it links in many different directions: fans of Kind of Blue-era Miles quite possibly won't like the same kind of music as fans of his 1970s work. Also my ratings of Beatles recommendations may be skewed by the fact that I know little of their pre-1967 albums (and am not a big fan of their post-'67 ones!). I thought I detected one or two 'trick questions', but I won't say any more at this stage, lest I bias the way you complete the survey.

New music search and search-by-example services

Still a few weeks to go until publication, but nevertheless there are a few areas where I've know for a while that Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll as a book is slightly behind the times (I submitted a "final" draft in February this year, and further revisions on 2nd April).

Even when I was reviewing the proofs I knew that Weedshare had ceased operations and BurnLounge were changing theirs, but I didn't have scope to do the fairly substantial rewrites these would have required.

More excitingly, some of the developments I wrote about as vague promises now have many tangible examples. This is most clearly the case in the area of music search, where services like SeeqPod and Project Playlist allow you to listen to the tracks found in your search results, while Audiobaba and OWL enable you to find tracks that sound like other tracks or even the parts of songs that you most like.

I've created an updates and errata page to log and point to these developments, and link them back to the relevant parts of the book's text. As and when you read the book and know of other areas where I should add updates, please make comments on that page.

Fan communities interview: Andy Aldridge

Chapter 3 ("Fans as Creators") of my book uses fan activities around Galaxie 500 as an example of the dynamics and evolution of a community of listeners. In particular I portray Andy Aldridge, who has played the central role in catalysing the community, as both a 'Savant' — one of the tier of super-fans (outlined here) — and an 'Originator' — one of the 1% of online community members who create original content off their own bat. [In the photo: Andy Aldridge (right) with Dean Wareham of Galaxie 500, Luna and Dean & Britta — used with permission, see original.]

I've been a member of the Galaxie 500 mailing list since 2000, but I'm very much in the 90% of 'lurker' members who just 'listen in' to the conversation without contributing. Since I moved to London four years ago, Andy and I have met at a few gigs (and Last.fm now lets us see each other's gig diaries), and he kindly spared me an hour or so over a drink in a West London pub last October, when I was writing the book. Below are my notes from that discussion.

Of personality and (unshared) playlists

Revelations about the contents of George W Bush's iPod were, one suspects, a fairly carefully managed media exercise — notwithstanding the disclaimers urging people not to psychoanalyse them. But if you look at the way people have responded to alleged new discoveries of Adolf Hitler's private record collection, you get a very clear idea of how impossible it is to resist such analysis.

One of the things that makes Hitler's 'playlist' so salient is precisely that it wasn't intended to be shared. If it had been published while he was alive, the inclusion of Jewish or Russian performers would have undermined his public pronouncements that denigrated the talents of those ethnic groups. Now the collection appears as a 'text', subject to interpretation both in terms of Hitler's hypocrisy and in terms of his preparedness for compromise in the private sphere and acknowledgement that the views he espoused in public were not as clear-cut as he pretended. He is either even more or slightly less of a monster than we thought before. (To be clear: I am not suggesting that either option mitigates the terrible crimes that Hitler orchestrated or the man himself. Arguably, exposing the traits that he shared with 'normal' humans makes the lessons for the rest of us all the more grave.)

Another thing that makes analysing playlists so irresistible is precisely their lack of context and their openness to different interpretations. As Steven Isserlis says of Hitler's collection, it's a puzzle. A playlist is both a projection from someone's personality and something you can project personality onto. If we had access to Hitler's blog (someone's bound to say they've found it sooner or later!) describing his record purchases and what they meant to him, his playlist might not be such a perplexing and portentous artefact.

Are you a Believer? How Sellaband sources its crowd and its cash

Almost a year ago, Stefan Kolle of Futurelab (who syndicate many of my blog postings) suggested that I blog about Sellaband, a new model for financing the recordings of new artists that relies on lots of small investments from fans — or in the Web 2.0 jargon, raising funds through "crowdsourcing". In the end, Stefan himself wrote about Sellaband, but I held my fire. Now that Sellaband is approaching its first anniversary we have a better idea of how the model works in practice. Prompted by a discussion over coffee last week and this Sunday Times article [thanks, Babs_05], here are my thoughts.

First, for a brief introduction to Sellaband, you can read the full account of how it works on their website, but Digital Music News provided this summary:

The artist makes their own profile on Sellaband.com including pictures, a bio and a maximum of 3 demo-songs. There is no charge to the Artist. The profile is meant to appeal to potential "Believers" who are invited to give money in $10 increments ("Parts") to pay for the production of a complete album. Anyone who wants to support the project can buy one or more Parts for $10. Once $50,000 is raised Sellaband will provide an experienced A&R person to guide the recording process. Of the $50,000, $30,000 is used for recording the CD. The A&R manager will book the producer, studio and mastering facility. The rest of the budget will be used for manufacturing, packaging and sending up to 5,000 CDs for the Artist's Believers. [This division of funds is shown in the graphic above.] At any time before the Artist reaches the goal of $50,000, the Artist can leave the service and shut down his profile page, and the Believers' money will be returned to them.

One of the criticisms that's sometimes levelled at the recording industry is that they've hollowed out the people that really care about the music and all that's left is the accountancy skills and some questionable promotional tactics. Sellaband was created by ex-recording industry executives, but they are delegating their responsibility for part of the A&R process: if it's the fans/Believers that determine which artists get recording deals, then the A&R has less of his/her personal judgement on the line. You could argue that Sellaband is taking the criticisms of record labels at face value and behaving more like a bank.

Universal access to all media will kill our culture: discuss

In time-honoured tradition, the final chapter of my book rounds things off by asking where we're heading with the latest wave of technology and how it may affect the prospects for renewal and development in our culture. I quote three white men of varying stripes and ages — Joe Boyd, Noel Gallagher and John Harris — who each give a different take on the "things ain't what they used to be; something has been lost" riff.

In an article last year, John Harris worried that popular music was running out of steam, with the rate of change slowed to a crawl:

Older readers will attest to the fact that 1977 was very unlike 1967: in the intervening years — and this is somewhat crude, but bear with me — psychedelia turned to prog, which was in turn avenged by punk, while glam-rock strutted about and the music industry inaugurated the age of the singer-songwriter. This year, by contrast, isn't that different from 1996: Blur and the Gallaghers are still here, the cranked-up guitar remains king, and it's still just about acceptable to walk around with a Britpop haircut (I should know — I've got one).

Today Harris is back on the same theme, and this time he's blaming the over-30s for not acting their age:

That's right: rock is dead, or it definitely might be. One or other must be true, because Glastonbury wasn't very good. The main problem, to hear some people talk, was the preponderance of those responsible for our Great Rock Crisis: people over 30, who are apparently buying most of the tickets for great musical events, taking the kids and a hamper, and thereby ruining their essential ambience.

Promiscuous discovery: another digital music survey

Entertainment Media Research weren't the only people publishing results of a survey of digital music listeners yesterday (see yesterday's post). On a slightly smaller scale, The Hype Machine — an aggregator of music blogs that many consider a prime indicator of "buzz" in new music — produced their figures for how their users like to discover music.

I took part in this survey a few weeks ago. I can't remember exactly how the question was phrased or whether the options were expressed as in this chart — I thought there were more of them, and neither radio or TV are mentioned here. But I do remember that I ticked all of the options that were available.

Judging from the Hype Machine chart (reproduced here), most people ticked several options. Which is obvious when you think about it. Only the most avid fans actually spend time setting out to discover new music. The rest of the music listening world is going about their lives, trying to keep themselves amused with some music on in the background, or just killing time on the web, when they happen to come across something that takes their fancy and is worth exploring more. That could come about from talking to friends, reading a magazine or a blog, or just walking the street. Anyone would be daft to rule out any of these sources as paths to discovery.

Social networks steam ahead as sources of discovery

It may not yet be a flood, but the role of social networks like MySpace and Bebo in spreading the word about new music by online word of mouth has increased quickly from a trickle to a stream, and shows no signs of slowing down.

That's one of several interesting conclusions from the annual UK Digital Music Survey by Entertainment Media Research and Olswang, published today. I found last year's survey really useful, and wrote about its findings on social networks and discovery. This year's survey report is even better because it includes a lot of trend data, comparing results year on year. You can download the full report for free (in PDF slide format).

Last year I featured the statistics on sources of discovery, showing radio and music television still leading the pack, followed by friends' recommendations and social networks influential mainly with teenagers. This year radio and TV are down, word of mouth and social networks are up — though the former are still most important overall.

What's interesting is that some patterns seem to remain consistent while other factors change. From the chart above, you can see that it's not that social networks have become more influential with their users: there's no significant change in impact. It's just that there are a lot more people spending more time on MySpace and Bebo year on year. And again it's the younger age groups that are leading this trend.

Peacefrog Records on building buzz via licensing music for ads

"Ain't singing for Pepsi, Ain't singing for Coke, I won't sing for nobody [who] makes me look like a joke," sang Neil Young a couple of decades ago. But can doing a deal with the ad-men help convince an audience that you're the Real Thing?

Music Week has fifteen minutes of video interviews with participants in last week's Music Meets Brands event: access to the article requires subscription, but non-subscribers may be able to go straight to the video.

One of the interviewees (5 mins 45 secs in) is Pete Hutchison of Peacefrog Records, who talks about how his label has sold synchronisation ('sync') licenses for their artists' music. The most famous example of this is the use of José González's recording of Heartbeats in a Sony Bravia advert that got people talking — see below.

The hardest part is getting noticed

I'm always trying to find new, snappy and pithy ways to explain why discovery — the central issue my book addresses — is a "problem" that needs addressing, and why it's particularly become an issue in the last few years. Bob Lefsetz (pictured) is often pretty snappy, and this excerpt, which begins his latest broadside, states the issue as it applies to major labels in the US:

The hardest part is getting noticed.

There are numerous media competing for the audience’s mindspace. And numerous musical enterprises/records as well. So, the plan must center first around getting attention, not getting paid.

In the old days, the major labels controlled a finite landscape. They had what was perceived to be the best music, and they owned both radio and retail, which were the major ways of learning about music. So, there were few companies with few products fighting over little mindspace. Furthermore, you had to buy the product to experience it.

Now we live in a land of abundance. There are tens of thousands of acts and albums emerging/coming to market every year, the majors don’t necessarily have the best, and just about all of them can be experienced at the listener’s leisure, on the Web. The question is how do you get people to listen?

If you’ve got a pop confection, the major labels are the place to go. They control the old outlets, which can reach the most people most quickly. The only problem is the old outlets, the mass media, are only interested in the mass market items, and a great percentage of the public isn’t even paying attention. So, even if you’re the beneficiary of a carpet bomb campaign, a great percentage of America will still be clueless as to who you are, and won’t care that they’re out of the loop, might even be proud of being out of the loop. So, the question becomes how to reach these people.

Later on part of his solution runs, "So, how do you spread the word? You don’t. Your audience does." Read on for the full analysis.

The flip-flop between live and recorded music

The Observer Music Monthly has a seven-minute video feature and debate asking, "Are record labels crushing real music — or does technology mean artists will take control".

Several of the points made by different people in the video will be familiar to anyone who's been following this area. There's a widespread recognition that artists and creators now have many routes to being discovered by an audience. Hence labels, who are having a tough time making money out of new recordings, are not the be-all and end-all for artists like Pete Molinari (pictured). Also Adam White of Universal Music observes that what's happened so far is only the beginning of the impact of the net.

There are a couple of references to how well the live music sector is doing. In the Music 2.0 era, we don't often focus much attention on live gigs as a route to discovery, but they surely do serve this purpose: that's why a good festival slot or a support slot for a major band is much coveted by new artists. But the dynamics of live and recorded music have completely flip-flopped in the last quarter of a century.

Music critics and MySpace battle to be prime source of discovery

BBC Radio 4 has a 30-minute programme on the history of the UK music press from the 1970s and '80s through to the present day. The last ten minutes looks at the future prospects for press and the critics in the age of MySpace.

Journalist Tom Artrocker wants to put MySpace in its place, arguing that it has its use as on-demand resource for checking out new music instantly, but does not itself lead to anyone discovering anything. He argues that professional media played a more critical role in breaking the Arctic Monkeys than MySpace (see my comments on this last year, and I broadly back the specifics of that account in my book). But he goes on: "without people to do the filtering, it's a mess, it's chaos, it's anarchy — I do maintain that no new band of any value at all has been discovered through MySpace." Well, there's nothing actually stopping a new band being discovered through MySpace or other social networks. Even if it hasn't happened yet, it will. And what's wrong with a bit of anarchy?

Paul Morley is good value as usual, highlighting the determination among music critics, professional and amateur, to get there first to the new bands, and thereby stake their claim to being in the vanguard of taste. He blames this for some of the over-hyping in the press and in blogs.

The essential motivation for all rock writing is to discover things before everyone else, and then of course to be disappointed when everyone else discovers them. At the moment what slightly saddens me from the rock writer point of view is that there's no value given to you finding it… [the new bands] are set up to be so extraordinary that there must be a constant sense of disappointment; and I think that slight sense of everything being celebrated to such an extent must ultimately start to crumble a little bit. People will start to realise that they're being over-egged and over-excited, on the basis, ultimately, that they're going to spend some money.

Listen to the full show until at least 21 July. Tom Artrocker section starts about 20'15" in; the above Paul Morley extract begins at around 23'30", and he's also on at 12'05".

City as playlist generator

There's a thoughtful piece by Graeme Thomson in the current issue of Word magazine about what happens when you stop trying to block out all the music that comes to you unbidden as you make your way about a city and actually listen to it instead. The result, Thomson argues, is a form of 'playlist' that is more random, and has greater capacity to surprise, enchant and educate, than that on any iPod.

After a few hours spent soaking up Bon Jovi coming from a parked car, Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey on a ringtone, a café playing Jeff Buckley, Stan Getz and Marvin Gaye, a bagpipe lament drifting out of an apartment window and (very) miscellaneous others, he concludes,

I could have been listening to my own selections during this time and probably heard what I'd normally consider to be better songs, but most of it would have been music I already know intimately and which inspires a Pavlovian reaction… I'm getting a bit weary of anything that arrives "pre-approved", even if it's me who is doing the approving.

I like this. Firstly it's a counterbalance to various slightly questionable research suggesting that consumers place a premium on control over their media. We do like control much, or even most, of the time; but we also need to let go some of the time, to open ourselves to chance and spontaneity.

Second its suggestive of how the discovery process — finding music and media that is new to us — can be most vivid when it's feral and anarchic. More on this another day.

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