Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

Discovering music by triangulation

Green Man main stage
Photo licensed under creative commons.

This time last week I was at The Green Man Festival in a beautiful part of Wales, soaking up lots of music on the fringes of the new and old folk scenes (plus a moderate amount of rain, but not enough to spoil the weekend). Much of the fun is checking out the bands in the line-up of whom you haven't heard. But how do you choose which unknown act to see when there are two or three on at the same time?

A few days before the festival eMusic was formally launched in the UK, and I signed up for two-week trial with 25 free downloads. I started searching for some of the Green Man acts, and was delighted to find that a fellow user had already created a playlist of the acts at the festival. I used half my free downloads to try out some of these acts, with the intention of using the remainder to get more tracks from the acts I enjoyed at the festival (it hasn't quite worked out that way: instead I used the rest of my allocation exploring more new stuff, and 'saved for later' some of my favourite Green Man acts).

New stars of the Flickr screen

Flickr Icon Rebekka in the Observer
Photo by Orhan*, cc licensed.

I've got mixed feelings about yesterday's piece in The Observer about Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir building her career in photography via the interest she attracted on Flickr for her publicly available photoset. (Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir's photos have all rights reserved, so I cannot post one here without permission. The one on the right says it is licensed for reproduction.)

It's good to see that the mainstream press is expanding from the online-music-discovery theme into other artforms. On the other hand, I increasingly have a feeling of "how unsurprising" about the basic storyline that artists, musicians, photographers and so on are using the potential of the net to further their aims. It's like those stories about terrorists and pornographers using the net. In that case the subtext was, "how scary: shouldn't someone be stopping these people from communicating online somehow". In this case it seems to be, "how nice: a handful of creatives can make names for themselves without first being anointed by the mainstream media (now let us anoint them)."

Why unsigned bands are the new pixie dust

The announcement of a new Coca-Cola/iTunes partnership highlights as one of the key features that, "In the UK, Germany, Austria and Switzerland unsigned artists will have a venue to upload songs, giving them potential for broad exposure on the site through artist highlights, European podcasts available on iTunes, and invitations to play at Coke sponsored European festivals."

It's interesting that mainstream services are now featuring unsigned bands as one of their selling points. The BBC aims to be "the destination for unsigned bands and young musicians to turn to for support" (source: official briefing), and already has a dedicated unsigned microsite, including a podcast. The Financial Times interpreted this as a response to the buzz-driven success of bands like the Arctic Monkeys, in which MySpace may, or may not, have played a key part. MySpace's parent company seemed to think so too, being quoted, "That the BBC is openly saying that it wants to create rival [sic] to MySpace shows there is no end to their commercial ambitions." (It wasn't openly saying that, but that's News Corporation's reporting standards for you.)

What's going on here? Shouldn't these major corporate players be focused on providing high-quality filters so that they can guarantee high quality music for their users? Why make a point of featuring unsigned music, when we all know that the bad unsigned music is even worse than the bad music on major labels, and there's quite a lot of it?

Dating and discovery (and snobbery)

The Guardian's blog reports a survey suggesting that people may be better disposed to smiling at or talking to people who they see reading a well-respected book. 'Well-respected' in this context apparently means the classics (e.g. Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen, as long it doesn't have a 'now a major TV series' splash on the cover), followed by modern literary fiction like Zadie Smith. Dan Brown and John Grisham are, apparently, the book-snooping equivalent of garlic breath: a turn-off unless the other person has read/eaten them recently too.

According to this account of the YouGov study, 2% of respondents — and 4% of men — had asked a stranger on a date after liking the look of their book, while 6% had asked the readers personal questions.

If you discover people via the sophisticated books they read, can you also discover books via their attractive readers? My instinct is that you can. One no-messing, pragmatic comment on The Guardian's blog puts it, "Anyone who leaves the '3 for 2' stickers on their books is a no-no. But let's face it, if someone's fit you'll give them the benefit of the doubt anyway." So if you were initially wary of the latest Douglas Coupland, but you saw someone you fancied reading it on your regular commute to work, that might give you the nudge you needed to read the book after all.