One area that is highly interesting from my point of view are ‘music delivery services’. That’s what I call sites and services that can deliver recorded music to me, may as be as a permanent download or as a stream. Also, looking from it from an North American angle, I wanted to see what is happening on this side of the world. As I posted before, unfortunately most of the excitement in terms of digital music is not happening in Canada so my Ace VPN account came in very handy when I needed to pretend to the in the US to access the American services.

Even though there are a lot of new on-demand streaming services starting right now it seems like almost none of them are actually doing anything differently: many of them are web-based and offer mobile apps, cost $10 per months with a three day free trial, and you can stream as many tracks as you want on-demand. I understand that most of those features and mechanisms are actually dictated by the record labels which is a sad development: having ‘suppliers’ decide on business models will never encourage innovation and creativity which is what the industry needs more than anything.

If exciting, disrupting, user-friendly and useful are the criteria then I really want to mention three ‘music delivery services’ in this post:

1. Playdar

I’m not going to pretent that I fully understand what Playdar could do but I love what I can see so far. They call it a ‘Music Content Resolver’ which means that Playdar is a technology that can find music for you, may it be on your computer, your local network or on other music services.

The key is that Playdar is an open-source technology and anyone can either use Playdar to find and stream music within their application or build plug-ins so Playdar can find music in new places. Playdar is neither useful or user-friendly at this point but Richard Jones (Last.fm co-founder and one of the guys who started Playdar) told me that there should be a desktop application soon.

2. ExtensionFM

I love mp3 blogs and there are a quite a few I’d like to check on a regular basis. Call me lazy but I just can’t check 20+ sites every week to see if there is anything new on there that I might like. Also, I will have to download it all and add it to my iTunes. Oh, and of course having to listen to it as well.

ExtensionFM is a great solution for this. It’s a Chrome plug-in that automatically adds mp3s that are available from websites you select to your ExtensionFM library. It then checks on a regular basis if there are new mp3s available from these sites and you can listen to then straight in your browser. Just like the HypeMachine it does not allow you to download the tracks but you can go to the actual mp3 blogs later and download the mp3 from there.

ExtensionFM does something similar to Peel which I have written about on here before. What I like about ExtensionFM is that it’s all happening in the ‘cloud’ and there is no need for me to download anything. I’m desperately trying to move away from having any files on my computer and this is another step toward my cloud based entertainment world.

ExtensionFM is certainly a disrupting concept; record labels as well as mp3 blogs will potentially not agree with the way ExtensionFM finds content and streams it.

3. Spotify

I will not write a blog post about Spotify, there are enough out there. We can’t really call Spotify exciting any more but it’s the most useful and user-friendly music services out there;  I now use it almost exclusively for my music consumption needs. A UK credit card and £10 per month make it possible. If you have access to those two things then you should subscribe to Spotify right now.

The full music experience is more than about recordings. Although the actual ‘audio’ part is often the focus point, music as an art-form is much more complex: only by adding up things like the social experience of music, the relationship with the artist, visuals around the music and live gigs you can make music complete. One of the other aspects that are important is news about artists you like. Being a fan is about enjoying the music as much as observing the musicians and following the journey that leads to the audio output and live performances.

With the amount of user-generated and professional journalistic work on the web there currently isn’t shortage of news. Unfortunately this increased choice of stories leads to an exponentially increased difficulty to find the items you’re after and services that manage the information on the web have not only been hugely successful but vital for our daily online life.

Many music fans will have a few trusted sources for their music related news but I always felt that finding stories about my favourite artists was a lot of work, especially with my diverse music taste. There are too many sites to check if I want to be up-to-date on what’s happening around the musicians I follow and tools like RSS and Twitter only increased the amount of information I would have to go through.

Gigulate solves this problem for me. Not only will Gigulate check thousands of sources for music related news but it personalises this for me based on my Last.fm profile or artists in my iTunes library. This feature might be in its infancy right now but has already been proven very useful for me.

I’m also very impressed with Gigulate’s ability to recognize that a piece of news is related to a certain artist and to work out that two separate news-pieces are about the same story by just analyzing the content.

Without a doubt, Gigulate still has a long way to go and I’m excited to be part of it. I will mainly be working on developing partnerships, both commercial and strategical, which help music fans as well as the music industry to navigate through the large amounts of music news on the internet.

The recording industry has always been more obsessive about metrics than other entertainment areas: music charts have been a vital tool not only to measure success of songs and albums but also to act as a marketing tool for record sales.

Over the last few years we see a lot of new services that focus their business on collecting and aggregating more accurate and detailed music data. The internet has enabled those services to get access to richer data sets than the pre-web sales driven charts such as popularity and discussion around artists.

In the second OpenMusicMedia NYC we want to discuss how those companies can (or maybe cannot) help the music industry to make better decision. Questions we want to address include:

• How important is more detailed data for the music industry?
• Does an obsession with numbers and statistics stop companies from taking risks and therefore stop innovation?
• Collecting data from different websites and displaying those seems straight forward – but what about interpreting them?

We have invited Alex White from Next Big Sound to lead the conversation and guide us through some of the issues of music related data aggregation. As always, this will not be a presentation but an open conversation between everyone in the room with Alex leading what could almost be called a round table discussion.

Moderating for the event will be Jonas Woost, co-founder of OpenMusicMedia as well as the former Head of Music at Last.fm. Jonas joins us from from his new home in Vancouver, where he is setting up a media consultancy business. Our co-moderator is Steve Savoca, global head of digital business for Domino Records and producer of OpenMusicMedia NYC.

We will meet on the 7th July at reRun and the event is free and open to everyone. However we would appreciate if you could RSVP on our facebook page. We look forward to seeing you there!

OpenMusicMedia NYC
Wednesday, July 7
at reRun (part of reBar, 147 Front St, 2nd Fl in DUMBO, 11201, New York, NY)
7-9 PM
Map: http://bit.ly/9VqMoh

Please RSVP on our facebook group.

The biggest criticism for the iPad seems to be the fact that it’s hard to say what its purpose is. “The iPad is just a big iPod Touch” I hear a lot. And this couldn’t be truer. And this is why it’s so great.

The size of the device is what makes it so valuable for the media and entertainment space. Even though functionality on the iPad might be something we have already seen on the iPhone and iPod Touch it feels very much different just because the device is bigger. Consuming media on a bigger interface doesn’t only decrease the amount of scrolling or page turning but changes the overall experience. Everyone who tried to read a book on the iPhone will know what I’m talking about. It works fine but reading a book on the bigger device is actually pleasant whereby reading longs texts on the smaller screen means endless scrolling so you spend more time interacting with the device as oppose to taking in the text.

Another example: I normally use kayak for my flight planning and they have released an iPad app early on. The big app does exactly what the iPhone app does but the overall result is very much different just due to the amount of information displayed at the same time.

The lack of additional functionality on the iPad is not a weakness but a strength. And if you ask yourself whether you need one: no, you don’t. But you want one if you like to consume media and entertainment digitally.

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.

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)

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.

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’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.

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: