heute:pop:blog.  

Holidays. And not just sitting by the beach for a week but really getting away from life’s routine, seeing other places and getting to know new people. That’s what I’m doing right now.

I haven’t had an iPhone/Blackberry for four months and of course haven’t been working. But I also haven’t produced a radio show (in fact have hardly listened to any new music), haven’t been involved with the new OpenMusicMedia events and haven’t even been blogging.

I spent the last four months in South America with Raila and feel truely relaxed – in fact I’m surprised how easy it was to disconnect from my life in London. We are moving to Canada soon so I have been ‘homeless’ since we left and all my belongings boil down to a 15kg Deuter backpack. I have two pairs of trousers and two jumpers.

Nevertheless (or perhaps because of all this) I look forward to getting back into something you can call a ‘normal routine’. And for me this routine will start with something fun:

I’m moderating a panel at SXSW in Austin this year, the topic of our discussion is ‘how will we listen to music in 2020‘. I will be joined on stage on the 17th March by Alexander Ljung (SoundCloud), Ben Perreau (Gigulate) and Steve Savoca (Domino). With such speakers this should be an intersting talk, if there is anything specifically you want to see discussed, feel free to post a comment here.

If you are at SXSW as well please let me know, would be good to meet you there: jonas(at)jonaswoost(dot)com.

PS: if you’re more intersted in my time off rather than SXSW you can find some pictures here and you can follow me on twitter here.

This is a copy of a post from our OpenMusicMedia blog, would be great to see you there on the 17th September!

After months of trying to get this nailed down we are very pleased to announce that Joi Ito will be in London and joining us to lead the conversation at the next OpenMusicMedia! Joi is the CEO of Creative Commons so make sure you clear your diaries for 17th September for what looks set to be a great session.

Most of you will probably have heard of Creative Commons already, but we think that it’s a topic that is not discussed enough by a music industry that has traditionally built its business around a different view of copyright. There’s lots to discuss and we’ll only have one evening, but here are just a few of issues that we’d like to talk about:

• What role does Creative Commons have to play within the music industry?
• Does CC mean we are just giving away our music for free and no one makes any money?
• The existing licensing structure for the music industry has been working for so many years, is CC just making it more complex?

As always we want you to get involved as much as possible in the conversation – before, during & after. We’ll be meeting at around 6pm and the talk will start at 7pm, usually lasting around an hour. We strongly recommend that you stick around after as often the best part of the conversation happens over a beer or two.

The event is free and open to everyone but please RSVP on Facebook to help us working out how many people will attend. Please note that we expect this to be a busy night so we recommend arriving early in order to find a seat. If you’re late we can’t guarantee entry. Leave a comment below or contact us on Twitter if you have any questions.

Thursday, 17th September 2009
6:00 PM

William IV

7 Shepherdess Walk
London, EnglandN1 7QE
(Yahoo! Maps, Google Maps)

When I realized that I won’t be able to attend this years Transmission conference because of other commitments (it will become more clear next week) I was disappointed. I had such a great time last year and I felt I’m missing out.

Fortunately I was able to participate at least in one way: I took part in their Politalk48 session which is basically a panel of experts who discuss a topic via email over a period of 48 hours. The results are then published on the TransmitNow website for anyone to read. The topic was “Next Generation Leadership” and the outcome can be found here.

This post was originally published on our OpenMusicMedia blog but I re-posted it here for you guys to read as well. Would be great to see you there:

We wanted to do something slightly different for this next meetup, we wanted to discuss ‘Music As Culture’. Leading the conversation will be New Music Strategies’ Andrew Dubber and Jez Collins. This conversation actually started at Unconvention Salford but we felt it was one worth continuing down in London for OpenMusicMedia. But what exactly does ‘Music As Culture’ entail? We’ll leave it to Dubber to explain below…

Music As Culture

It’s no surprise to anyone that the music industries are struggling in the digital age. Faced with a filesharing populace, an incredible array of media choices, a tough economic climate, and plenty of other things for people to spend money on, it can be pretty tight for a lot of people in the industries.

Recent research demonstrates a link from openness and inclusion to massive untapped potential for all kinds of businesses. Consumers have a bigger say in the fate of the industries than ever before – and while they recognise the commercial aspects of music business, they do not accept that old systems of control are relevant to them anymore.

By empowering consumers, opening access to archives and for scholarship, enriching the public domain, according popular music the same cultural status as classical and folk musics, and treating audiences as part of the music process (rather than as merely passive consumers), the society we live in is a much richer and vibrant one.

It’s good for culture, it’s good for the economy, it invigorates local scenes, it’s a lifeline for artists – and it’s great for business. In fact, it might just be what saves the music industries.

As always this will be an open discussion and you will set the agenda for the night. We’ll be starting the discussion at around 7pm but feel free to be there by 6pm and have a drink with us. You can find all the details below, if you have any questions, leave a comment or contact us via twitter.

The event is free to open to everyone but if you can please RSVP at our new Facebook group.

William IV

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.

Those who listen to my show on a regular basis (and understand German) will see that Gerd Leonhard and myself share many ideas about the future of recorded music. He put together a brief overview on his thoughts in the YouTube video below.

It’s a great summary and there is a lot in those 10 mins – might be worth watching twice.

EDIT: as just pointed out by Chris, there is of course a second part to the above:

Because of the tube strike in London we had to cancel this event but we have now confirmed a new date.

We look forward to seeing you on the 1st July 2009 at the William to discuss Videos & Music. You can find all details below:

In all our previous OpenMusicMedia sessions the focus has primarily been on music – we talked about recommendations, live music, different ways of consuming recorded music and of course how the whole ecosystem of music works (or not) and what has to happen to make it work in the future.

For our next night we want to discuss an art form which has always been closely related to music: videos. We have invited Caroline Bottomley who is the founder of Radar Music Videos, “a music video commissioning platform and music video director network” to present us with her ideas on the future of music videos. She will be explaining why her website is important for musicians and video producers and from there we will try and explore how digital technology has been affecting visual content.

As always the conversation will kept very broad – topics we want to talk about include:

• Do artists need music videos these days?
• Is it easier of harder to get exposure for your music videos in the age of YouTube?
• What makes a video ‘viral’?

As always this will be an open discussion and you will set the topics for this night. We’ll be starting the discussion at around 7pm but feel free to be there by 6pm and have a drink with us. You can find all the details below, if you have any questions, leave a comment or contact us via twitter.

The event is free to open to everyone but if you can please RSVP at our new Facebook group.

Wednesday, 10th June 2009 1st July 2009
6:00 PM – 11:00 PM

William IV

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:

I used to discover and select tracks for my radio show mainly by finding albums (in the shops or online), listening to them once or twice and picking the track I like most. It was time-consuming but it meant I would take in the full work of the artists.

Now it seems it is going the other way round – I find one track online and if I like it a lot I might also check out the rest of the album. Do I not have enough time to listen to entire albums? Even though this is certainly true it might only show half the truth: maybe I don’t want to invest the time into listening to music that I might end up not playing on my show.

When I prepared for today’s heute:pop:morgen show I really wanted to recommend some albums that I’ve been listening to a lot over the last month. Here we go:

Bat For Lashes – Two Suns
The Decemberists – The Hazards Of Love
Archive – Controlling Crowds (doesn’t seem to be available in th UK yet)
Fink – Sort Of Revolution

You know the deal: if you only want to listen to four albums this spring make sure it’s the above.

Haven’t posted a video in a while so it’s about time. Fever Ray is one half of The Knife (you will recognize her voice) and this is not just a great track but also a beautiful video. And you can almost see her face.

When I Grow Up from Fever Ray on Vimeo.