heute:pop:blog.  

It’s the time of the year again: SXSW is looking for suggestions for panels and presentations for the 2011 edition which will as always take place in March in Austin, TX.

This year I have submitted not one but two panels since I will attend the Interactive as well as the Music part – one idea for each part of the conference.

I would appreciate if you could vote for my ideas in the SXSW PanelPicker, this is what I’m suggesting:

1. Digital Content: What Books Should Learn From CDs

I always found it fascinating that other content industries have difficulties learning from the mistakes of the music industry from the last ten years. This panel will invite people from the music and book publishing industries and discuss what they can learn from each other. You can vote here.

2. Entrepreneurs in Music

I will invite different music entrepreneurs and compare how they’re making it in their respective fields. Starting with a musician I will also get a start-up CEO, a indie record label boss and a band manager on the panel and talk about the joy and struggle of working independently in music. You can vote here.

Voting closes 27th August. Also, make sure you support my fellow OpenMusicMedia organizers, you can find a list of their suggested panels here.

Since I started working as a contractor (I prefer this term to ‘consultant’) I have been making an effort to spend more time on observing, analysing and understanding all the digital music services out there. I really want find those websites and applications that are not only exciting and disrupting but also user-friendly and actually useful.

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.

Only two more shows to go after this one. Regular listeners will recognize many of the songs below – going through all my old playlists brings up good memories. Interesting how with some songs I know exactly why I played them on my show and where found them and with others I have no recollection why they ended up on my playlist.

I know you might be sick of hearing about it by now but if you can please have a look at my SXSW panel and vote. Thanks.

You can listen to this show here.

1. Alias ‘Unseen Sights’
2. Ulrich Schnauss ‘On My Own’
3. The New Pornographers ‘All The Things That Go To Make Heaven And Earth’
4. Cansei De Ser Sexy ‘Let’s Make Love And Listen Death From Above’
5. Phosphorescent ‘Wolves’
6. Nina Gordon ‘Straight Outta Compton’
7. Seu Jorge ‘Life On Mars?’
8. Lightspeed Champion ‘Stay The Fuck Away From Me’
9. Iron & Wine ‘Boy With A Coin’
10. Feist ‘My Moon My Man’ (Boys Noize Classic Mix)
11. Daft Punk ‘Human After All’ (SebastiAn Remix)
12. Modeselektor ’2000007 feat. TTC’
13. Tes ‘New New York’

If you have seen me recently on a panel or doing a presentation you would have noticed that there is one topic that I’m very interested in: how the consumption of recorded music has changed over the years and how it will continue to develop.

Looking into the past is vital but also fairly easy. The future is the tricky one and for some the most fascinating: I want to find out how we will consume recorded music in 10 years from now but to find some good answers I might need some help.

This is how I came up with my idea for a panel at SXSW next year in Austin. As you might know, they encourage people to come up with ideas for a panel or presentation and post them on their website for anyone to vote on.

Of course you guessed it by now: please vote for my panel suggestion at the SXSW 2010 Panelpicker. You can see from my description on there what I’m trying to do. Also, please suggest people that should be on that panel by posting a comment here or on the Panelpicker. Maybe I won’t be the only one that’s trying to promote themselves.

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.

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 would love to play this song on my show but I can find the mp3 so I just post it here instead: be sure to check out the video below – the song is called ‘September’ by Tvärvägen, a “one-man-orchestra, consisting of Henrik Öhberg”.

Just beautiful stuff. You’re suppose to be able to download this track here but it didn’t work for me today.

Tvärvägen – September from Henrik Ohberg on Vimeo.

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.