heute:pop:blog.  

There are many voices (including mine) that claim Apple does not see the iTunes music store as one of their core products but just as a support tool for another product: the owners of the iPod needed a simple and convenient way to purchase new music to add to their device. Ironically, the store that is just seen as a side business for its owner has become the largest music retailer in the world.

The market dominance of Apple makes many people argue it worries about every new competitor entering the market. Google Music has been hailed as the latest service that will be able to compete with iTunes and even though details have not been announced the music industry is already preparing for a big fight between the two technology giants.

In truth, the launch of a new music service, such as Google Music, probably has little influence on Apple’s real business, which is selling hardware devices.

More recently we have seen a priority shift within Apple’s ‘portable’ product range with the iPhone and iPad become hugely successful. What does that mean for Apples music business?

Quite clearly apps are economically more successful than recorded music and potentially also easier to ‘acquire’ for Apple without the need to negotiate with struggling and demanding major labels. With apps being to the iPhone/iPad what music is to the iPod, I assume Apple is not very concerned with any new music services launching even if they were to take market share within the music space from Apple. We also have to keep in mind that Steve Job and his team have always been less protective in the music space than we give them credit for: there are many music apps for iOS that could be seen as a competitor to Apple.

Of course there have been rumors for a while that Apple wants to launch a ‘cloud based’ music service. I see this less as an action based of the fear of losing market share against someone like Google but just as an upgrade to their existing service – with most Apple devices already being able to connect to the internet is just makes sense not to store music on the local hard drives but in the cloud.

Whatever Google will do around music, it will probably be successful but Apple is not concerned. There will be a Google Music app.

Photo: Mengfei Sh

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.