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.

Stefan, Rupert and I have been invited to host a Last.fm radio show at the Big Chill Festival this year. They always have a local FM license for their site and they encourage people to bring radios so you can extend the Big Chill experience for when you are not in front of the stages. I think you might also be able to listen to the Big Chill radio station online.

It might seems a bit counter intuitive to have a radio show hosted by Last.fm since the service is all about your personalized music experience and not about us three DJs deciding what will be played. But we came up with a slightly different idea:

The two hour set will be based on the Last.fm Hype Chart as well as the music taste of the people who are attending the festival. This way the Last.fm users have indirectly decided what will be played and we only act as a filter and make sure we don’t only play Michael Jackson. To give the show a bit of a ‘geek edge’ we will be talking about Last.fm, how it works and what we are doing at the festival.

I believe we are on air from midday to 2pm on the Sunday. I wonder how many people will actually be away at that point but that will not stop us from having some fun in the studio.

If you’re going to the Big Chill this year, make sure you mark your attendance here and we might play your favourite songs. We might even give you a shout out (your Last.fm user name of course).

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.

That’s it. I have to set up a Google alert for my name – and don’t pretend that you haven’t done that already. Then I wouldn’t have missed Michael Schmid’s great summary (sorry German only) of the panel discussion at the Dancing With Myself conference on the FM4 website. This round table took place in Berlin on the 17th of January and I was part of it.

There we discussed the future of music reviews anf journalism. In this very lively discussion I took the role of someone who doesn’t believe that we need ‘professionals’ that recommend music to us and who decide what is good and what isn’t. My point was that we have enough tools that allow us to find more music in a democratic way such as Last.fm.

Almost ironic to hear that from someone who is producing a radio show every week for over four years. I guess have fully excepted the fact that it’s very old fashioned and that the ‘relevance’ of my show can only go down from now on.

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?

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.

This is a blog post I wrote for the Last.fm blog, head over there if you want to join the discussion:

With the Artist Royalty Program we wanted to solve a crucial problem. Since we started in 2002 we had licensed music from various ‘content owners’ (major and indie labels as well as digital music distribution companies), and we also paid money to collections societies all over the world. But there were certain artists and labels losing out: those who do not have access to all the above, or chose not to be part of this traditional music industry network.

The process to solve this started with two goals. First, we wanted to continue to be an effective promotional platform for all artists, a place where we could connect music makers with new fans. (Our recommendations are key to achieving this: an artist on Last.fm doesn’t have to keep reaching out to people, as our system will automatically find new music for everyone based on their existing music taste.) Secondly, we wanted to build a fair system that shared Last.fm’s revenue with those artists. In this way, as Last.fm grows, the commercial success that comes with that will be shared with all music makers, of whatever stripe.

After months of research, discussion and technical development, we launched our Artist Royalty Program at the beginning of July. From then on, artists and labels that opted into the program started accruing royalties (if their music was being played on the site, of course). Last Friday we finished the final part of this work, and have published royalty reports to all artists, and will now automatically do so every three months. And for the first time we could actually see ourselves how our royalties were being distributed between all artists and labels.

First of all, I saw something that was not surprising: there are many labels that will collect a small amount of royalties and some who collect a lot. The Long Tail never fails. Then I was looking through the labels that were the top earners and I made some interesting discoveries: there were plenty of labels in there that I had never heard of. I was surprised but equally pleased that some (what I would call niche) content owners used Last.fm to find their audience through our recommendation system, and were able to do this successfully. We have been saying for years that Last.fm can work very well for less well-known artists – since our recommendation system will find fans even for the most obscure artist – and now we have some very hard proof for that.

There are now 85,000 artists and labels collecting royalties from us directly and this number is rising steadily. And of course I want to mention: if you make music too you can join right now.

If you are going to the SXSW confernce in Austin next week and you have a Last.fm profile your life is getting a lot easier now: we have developed a tool that recommends you bands that are playing at SXSW based on your music taste. Everyone who’s been before knows that it can be tricky to find all your favourite gigs down there since there are 1500+ bands performing. Also, join the group: www.last.fm/group/SXSW+Music

I’ll be there too so I hope I see you in Texas!

This actually a really cool thing from the Beebs: They have developed a widget (for Mac OSX and Yahoo! Widgets) which allows you to listen to BBC Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music or 1Xtra which then also ads the tracks that are played into your Last.fm account. The scrobbling probably only works for their non-specialist show, ie only when they are using their special playout software and not CDs or vinyl.

The probably best option is that I have the option of NOT having it scrobble everything automatically – surly I don’t want every track that I hear on one of the BBC station to show up in my profile. Just listening to BBC Radio 1 now (first time for quite a while) and it’s not easy to get used to all the talking when you’re normally only listen to Last.fm or your own mp3s.

I said on here before that I’m still a believer in ‘traditional’ radio where other people (who I don’t even know) decide what I should be listening to; if it’s someone I trust I’m happy to listen to his/her music selection. If I can scrobble that even better: I can then keep track on what was played and it’s easier for me to find the tunes later on and buy them.

Now I just want to be able to skip the tracks on the radio…