heute:pop:blog.  

I’m now making an effort to use my iPad as much as possible. There certainly is a lack of good apps (my brother said this morning that the only good app for the iPad is Safari – and he is a Flash programmer) but I love reading on it. May it be an e-book, pdf files or just a blog post.

However, I’m being constantly reminded that content producers keep making a crucial mistake: they try to use content that worked on one ‘data carrier’ and just copy it on another. This is what the music industry has been trying with albums, hoping they would just sell digitally like they did on the CD. It didn’t work and many music buyers decide just to buy the best track from the album as oppose to the whole package.

Another example and more specific to the iPad: You can subscribe to some ‘traditional’ magazines on the iPad and what you get is essentially a pdf of the print version (Zinio is an example and Music Week does the same). It doesn’t work. The way magazines are designed is specific to the ‘data carrier’ which is paper. The layout and typography doesn’t necessarily work on a screen even though the size of the iPad is similar to a magazine. It also feels very static, knowing that the iPhone can display (some) videos and all you get is text and images. There is also a lot of scrolling involved but I just want to turn the page when I’m done.

This is not to say that magazines will not work on tablet computers, in fact I think they will be one of the main types of content for this new category of devices. But publishers will have to re-think what a magazine can do. One company who seems to be on the forefront again: Wired magazine have showcased their iPad version before it even came out. Let’s hope there will be a lot to follow.

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 guess we can all see where this is going: Esquire’s October issue features a flashing e-ink display on the front page. It might not me the most sophisticated ‘digital cover’ but it surly shows us where things are heading in regards to magazines/newspaper and printing information on paper. I just don’t see any value in paper any more and I really believe that it will be replaced by something like the below, although it might take a while for e-ink to compete with paper in regards to costs. 

I’ve just moved house and having lots of ‘data carriers’ (books/CD/records) to move around is not just inconvenient but could also become an obstacle if I want to move abroad. I’m working on a solution for all my CDs and we just gave all the books we will definitely not read any more to Oxfam.