heute:pop:blog.  

Assuming there will be no more ash cloud problems I will be over in Newcastle next week to speak at ‘The Know How‘ event. The panel is called Transmission and focuses on the changes in regional broadcasting and music consumption in general.

The event is organized by Generator and Evolution 2010 and I will be joined on stage by Ben Perreau (Global Radio/Gigulate) and Paul Campell (Amazing Radio) on the 24th May.

When I was on the phone today with our moderator Russ Conway I was reminded again of the gap in our terminology: we keep using the word ‘radio’ when we speak of services such as Last.fm and Pandora. The truth is that they have very little to do with the original ‘one-to-many’ broadcasting service called radio but we don’t seem to have a better term. ‘Personalized Streaming Music Service’ just doen’t sound very neat.

And something became clear today: I’ll probably have to get used to the fact that people will call me a ‘former Last.fm-er’. I noticed that’s the case with many of the guys that left Last.fm and I now often catch myself introducing myself as the former Head of Music. It just makes it easier for other people to understand what I’m all about even though we are more than the name of our old employer.

Back from Newcastle now, I was on a panel with Thomas Dolby, Scott Cohen (The Orchard) and John Webster (MMF) discussing “digital music” last night. The topic was broad and so was the 2 hour discussion. I prefer doing it in an hour and then having conversation afterwards with people individually but this worked pretty well as Russ was doing a good job guiding the conversation. I mostly enjoyed some insight from Thomas as he could talk about the changing landscape of the music industry over the last 30ish years from an artist point of view. 

It’s nice to have people on a panel that are ‘doing things’ as oppose to ‘talk about them’. We were discussing this when we talked about who we should invite for our new OpenMusicMedia meet. I felt it worked really well to have Anthony there as he could talk about his product as well as music blogs in general. It’s good to talk about ideas but even better to see them in a practical context. We are now thinking about the next topic, two things we are interested in is the ‘music feels like free’ discussion as well as data portability. More on that soon on the OpenMusicMedia blog. We’re also putting together an old school style mailing list, not everyone is good with rss and twitter it seems…

Oh and by the way thanks to everyone who made is down last week and contributed to a great night!