heute:pop:blog.  

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.

We’re very pleased to have Spotify speak at our next OpenMusicMedia meet which happens on the 10th March, as always at the William IV in East London.

Spotify is a streaming music service that gives listeners free and legal access to millions of tracks via their desktop client.  It’s a service that has proved popular amongst early adopters and is already changing the way that many people access music.

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?

Join us for our OpenMusicMedia Meet in London next Wednesday (4th Feb 09). This time Songkick’s Ian Hogarth will be leading the conversation as always at the William IV near Old Street Station.

The theme set by Ian is ‘Live & Kicking’ and he’ll be talking about how the industry has boomed over past 9 years and where the concert industry is going to be in 5 years time. How start-ups and technology are going to accelerate that, and what you need to do to get on the train. With traditional recorded music sales in decline is the future of the music industry live? What can artists and bands do to monetize their live performances? Is it sustainable? What changes are we seeing in the live music sector? And what happens if the music doesn’t lend itself to the live arena?

Find more details on the OpenMusicMedia blog and hope to see you next week!

I always want to blog while I’m going to conferences but more realistically I will give my report on Midem next week when I’m back in London. Things just get too hectic for me to be able to sit down for a moment and write a few words. I am told there are less people going this year but my schedule is now full. I know already I’m going to regret having booked too many meeting.

I will leave you with with a video from one of my favourite bands of the moment, Frightened Rabbit (found this via nomnomnom). Awesome stuff.

Frightened Rabbit “I Feel Better” from Sam Molleur on Vimeo.

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.

I found this via Anthony: I played Little Boots on my show before as she seemed talented and there was quite a buzz going on around here already. In fact she is the only act I put forward to the BBC Sound of 2009 that actually made it into the Top 15. (No one else for Frightened Rabbit?)

Then I found the video below and was blown away. She is gorgeous and being a geek I love that she is using the Tenori-On live on the Jools Holland show.