heute:pop:blog.  

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.

1. David Bowie ‘Life On Mars’ 
2. Cassetteboy ‘Brackish Water’ 
3. Micah P Hinson ‘The Fire Came Up To My Knee’ 
4. The Beta Band ‘She’s the One’ 
5. Lightspeed Champion ‘Stay The Fuck Away From Me’ 
6. The Great Depression ‘Colliding (Into What Might Have Been)’ 
7. Film School ‘Compare’ 
8. Arabian Prince ‘Strange Life’ 
9. Architecture In Helsinki ‘Hold Music’ (Max Tundra Remix) 
10. Au Revoir Simone ‘Fallen Snow’ (The Teenagers Remix) 
11. Esbjörn Svensson Trio ‘Tide of Trepidation’

As always: click here to listen to all the above…

Below my latest playlist, you can listen to it here.

heute:pop:morgen playlist 11/06/2008
1. A1 People ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’
2. Zoot Woman ‘Live In My Head’
3. Funckarma ‘Woodface’
4. Sigur Rós ‘Gobbledigook’
5. Phosphorescent ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ (Righteous Brothers Cover)
6. Chris Garneau ‘Baby’s Romance’
7. Mclusky ‘Cassanova’
8. Emiliana Torrini ‘Sunny Road’
9. Phosphorescent ‘Wolves’
10. Studio ‘Origin’
11. Khonnor ‘Cantelopps’
12. Alex Smoke ‘Bonce’
13. Jan Jelinek ‘Discrete Machine’