heute:pop:blog.  

The comfort zone. It’s hard to complain when your in it but you know that something is wrong. You become stagnant and you don’t seem to develop -  something that can not only be frustrating but also dangerous.

I don’t actually want to quit my job at Last.fm (I do really like it) but it’s time to set new challenges and see new things. I have been in London for about eight years and been with Last.fm for four of them and now it’s time for something new.

One of the most important things in any job is that you keep learning. It is part of your pay package and if you don’t gain any knowledge you are essentially underpaid. Applying that logic I was paid extremely well for years at Last.fm: I met a lot of great people, learned about the business (and its countless issues) and saw some amazing places. Unfortunately by definition any learning curve has to flatten out so it’s time to find something where I can start at the steep end again.

Raila and I will move to North America early next year after taking some time off and spending a few months in South America. We will live in Vancouver. My last day with Last.fm will be the 2nd October 2009 – please get in touch if there is anything you need before I’m off.

If you have seen me recently on a panel or doing a presentation you would have noticed that there is one topic that I’m very interested in: how the consumption of recorded music has changed over the years and how it will continue to develop.

Looking into the past is vital but also fairly easy. The future is the tricky one and for some the most fascinating: I want to find out how we will consume recorded music in 10 years from now but to find some good answers I might need some help.

This is how I came up with my idea for a panel at SXSW next year in Austin. As you might know, they encourage people to come up with ideas for a panel or presentation and post them on their website for anyone to vote on.

Of course you guessed it by now: please vote for my panel suggestion at the SXSW 2010 Panelpicker. You can see from my description on there what I’m trying to do. Also, please suggest people that should be on that panel by posting a comment here or on the Panelpicker. Maybe I won’t be the only one that’s trying to promote themselves.

I went to the UK launch of Chris Anderson’s new book ‘FREE‘ last night which unsurprisingly was a very busy event since he is a bit of a digital media pop star. With being a celebrity come the critics that have to proof that your ideas are in fact rubbish and that try to find examples where “The Long Tail” does not work and where “FREE” destroyed jobs.

I’m not one of those guys. However I had to think of something when Chris was talking about some of his ideas last night. They gave out free copies of the book (an abridged version, not the full one) so I can even quote him now. He is writing:

“What the Internet does is combine all three, compounding the price declines with a triple play of technology: processors, bandwidth, and storage. As a result, the net annual deflation rate of the online World is nearly 50 percent, which is to say that whatever it costs YouTube to stream a video today will cost half as much in a year.”

Although I agree that the above applies to any technology costs this does not work for any licensing expenses. The licensing fees for content is already the biggest expense for many services that stream or otherwise deliver content to consumers. Although there is certain evidence that the cost of content is going down (the PRS has recently lowered they per stream royalty for music streaming services) I don’t believe that this trend will keep on going at a rate of 50% per year.

Nevertheless, Chris Anderson’s book ‘FREE’ looks like another must read for anyone who is interested in how technology changes moder day economics.

Many of my readers will of course be aware of Seth Godin but for those who haven’t heard of him: make sure you check out his blog, his books and start with the talk below from TED.

If you feel like me and you need some inspiration at work after a long weekend just watch this:

Helsinki reminded me of Hamburg. Maybe is was the lake in the centre or the lack of an Old Town (which was like in Hamburg destroyed in WW2). But most significantly I had a brilliant time in Helsinki, just like whenever I visit my home town.

I was there for an event organized by the YLE (”the Finnish BBC”) called “Embracing the music – music, Internet and public service” last Friday and it was well organized, informative and a lot of fun. Often these kinds of events are exactly the opposite.

As well as taking part in a big panel discussion I did a presentation (hopefully) giving an overview of the development of digital recorded music over the recent years and where it might be heading in the future. It had the catchy title “Development of digital recorded music and the way we consume it – the past, present and future”. I even had slides (which I never do).

My talk was built on the following assumption:

Music is like a rumour:

• It will spread around and one cannot control it
• It has a creator but no owner
• It has a ‘value’ but it can’t be set by the creator

“Control” is the key term here – we lost it when we started digitizing our recorded music and started to conntect our computers to a network. Control over recorded music is something we will never get back and any effort on this is wasted energy.

Today I’ve been sharing my challenging experience while getting my motorbike license but also mentioned a topic that we will probably discuss in more detail over the next few months: what is happening with advertising supported music services?

I mentioned the Techcrunch article on imeem. Please note that there is not a lot of truth in the details of this but it certainly raises a big issue for the digital music industry: what if ad supported music streaming does not work?

You can listen to all this here.

1. Nena ‘99 Luftballons’
2. Passion Pit ‘I’ve Got Your Number’
3. Fever Ray ‘When I Grow Up’
4. Whitefield Brothers ‘In The Raw’
5. Thunderheist ‘Sweet 16′
6. Grizzly Bear ‘Cheerleader’
7. Fredo Viola ‘The Turn (A Pegan Lament)’
8. Low ‘Fear’ (Live)
9. Weinland ‘I’m Sure It Helps’
10. Red Red Meat ‘Gauze’
11. Bob Dylan ‘The Times They Are A-Changin”
12. Jimi Hendrix ‘All Along The Watchtower’
13. Louderbach ‘Shine’

This just made my day. I feel that this is exactly what 2009 is about: not talk about old issues and keep discussing ideas that might or might now work. Now is about getting things done, work hard and (hopefully) making some money. Talking about the next big thing will not pay the bills in tricky times.

via xkcd

I talked about this on my radio show this morning and I wanted to publish this on here as well in case people couldn’t write down the links: these are some very easy ways of finding new music using on the internet. Those are not the only ways for me to find music but I use these tools every day discover songs that I want to play on my show.

Many readers of my blog will be aware of all the sites below so this might be more relevant listeners of my show on Tide 96.0 in Hamburg.

First of all, if you want to discover music easily on the internet you of course need a Last.fm account. I’m scrobbling everything I listen to to my Last.fm account in order to get events and new music recommended to me automatically by the system. This is a must have.

Over the last few months Spotify has become an essential tool for many people to listen and discover music. I used to use it only to listen to tracks that I knew already but more recently I started using the the shared playlists to find new tracks – I’ve started a heute:pop:morgen collaboratice playlist, feel free to add tracks.

I’ve been talking about Peel before on here. It is basically a software that automatically goes through a bunch of mp3 blogs and finds all the mp3s for you so you can easily download and listen to them. It safes me a lot of time every week when I want to find new songs to play on my show although I still have to go through a lot of tracks that might not be suitable for heute:pop:morgen. Mp3 blogs that I check out regularly include  Captain Obvious, Music Is Art and Song By Toad.

I actually still like reading print magazines but after my subscriptions ran out (I must have had at least 10 at some point) I never renewed them. I don’t mind paying for them but having all that paper around is a bit of a inconvenience sometimes. I pick up (print) magazines when I travel but don’t read any on a regular basis any more.

As you can see, what I produce every week is a very ‘traditional’ way of recommending music: putting together 13(ish) tracks, talking about those (amonst other topics) and playing them on the radio. But as much as I enjoy creating this I also still appreciate this as a way of finding new music: the BBC shows are something I listen to on a regular basis but only after they went on air in the iPlayer or (where available) as a podcast.

What am I missing?

Even though the attendance was down at Midem, I (and most people I talked to) had an enjoyable time and it was certainly worthwhile making the trip this year. Everyone I wanted to meet was there and there was an interesting vibe in the air: everyone wants to get on with their business and make it through 2009. It looks like a tricky one.

If you can get your hand on the latest copy of Billboard (10th January it says on the cover) make sure you read the Opinion piece on page 4. In addition to giving a good pitch, Lala.com’s Bill Nguyen wrote a short and well formulated article on listening to music online and business behind it. My favourite quote:

“The web is home to more new music each year than was released in many previous decades. Critics say the music is mostly junk – but the same could have been said for the Web before Google made the knowledge there accessible.”

I couldn’t agree more.