Innovation Papers #2: When will we learn to enjoy our music again?

When I recently pitched up to a publishing meeting in London – hosted by the MPA - to talk about ‘the future of music formats’, I had made a few notes about what music is and what it means to us. I was looking for those deeper insights if you will – an inspiration.

There was much discussion at the meeting about new models – with analysis and comment nicely covering the spectrum we’ve become familiar with – from ad-funded unlimited models to various cloud subscriptions – and talk of apps being the new album, etc.

As ever with these things my view is to look at it from the consumer’s point of view. In recent work on industry innovation (the previously mentioned Innovation Panel) we established the idea of a ‘digital music journey’ – which each and every digital music fan experiences. The journey begins with Discovery – how you find out about a band. It continues with Access – how you first get to hear the track or album. Further – it becomes about Acquisition needs – how you chose to keep or not to keep, pay or not to pay – etc.

So far, so simple. Then it gets much more interesting though. The next part of the journey is Management – how you manage your digital music library. For most consumers this is now the pressing issue – it’s not easy is it? Is all your music digitised? Where? In what file format and to what level of quality? Do you even know? In recent survey work, the industry is finding library management issues are increasingly important to consumers – including storing, arranging, moving, sharing, finding etc. It’s easy to think this is all solved by ‘the cloud’ – to some extent it is. But music fans still like ownership, still like permanence and still like to buy one at a time rather than subscribe.

The Management segment of the journey is really quite critical to all experienced digital music fans, but for me, the final segment of the journey is the most interesting. Enjoyment.

When I added this to the journey diagrams and graphics – everyone – without exception asked “what do you mean by Enjoyment”. I can quip here – that these days by the time we – the digital music fans – have spent endless hours Googling music, browsing on Last.fm, reading tweets about this or that new artist – snacking on tracks on Spotify and We7 – downloading free music from a million and one sources legal, illegal or ambiguous (there is such a thing – blogs for example) – how much are we really, honestly enjoying listening to our music?

I really mean it. For me this is bound up in the perception of music’s actual monetary value.

Music is in many ways the ideal content for digital – but it has one really big problem. For music to be at its most enjoyable it makes its own journey in each of us – from the new to the familiar. In some ways digital has enabled the journey, but in others it is getting in the way.

By way of example, think about your favourite records – your absolute Desert Island Discs – be they albums or songs. You’ve undoubtedly listened to these records countless times. You may actually have disliked some of them when you first heard them. In my own view, in what’s been a vintage year for music this year – the records I’ve enjoyed the most are the ones I’ve become the most familiar with. That, for me, takes at least three plays. If a record gets beyond three it can become endless from there – hence The National’s ‘High Violet’ has easily become my most played album this year – and my favourite.

I have found that digital discovery can make this process – of growing into a record – quite tricky. I’ll use Spotify to ‘preview’ a record (or I might stream it on a blog or download it from a legal free source, which seem to be abundant now). If I’m in ‘hunting’ mode this is less a preview and more a ‘gutting’ session in the way I often do with business books – just rip into it and hope to get a thin slice insight into whether I will eventually like it. This works, up to a point. But it could well be denying me the surprises, the revelations and the growers. I’ll sometimes choose to buy based on this initial instinct – an investment of sorts. But I find I pass on so much of what I sample.

I originally passed on Animal Collective's 'Merriweather' on this basis until I belatedly bought the album just recently. Really, the previewing of records doesn’t work in favour of any of those records that are in any way challenging or require some effort on the part of me, the listener.

I don’t think I would have gotten into The National's ‘High Violet’ through streaming. So ironically, despite the incredible value streaming represents as a music fan – in Access terms – it may have denied me the Enjoyment of a record I can now hardly put a monetary value on – ‘High Violet’ is virtually priceless to me – it’s the gift that keeps giving.

If this is too abstract a concept, let me put a bit more hard flesh on it. There’s a more direct way to improving the Enjoyment part of the journey for digital music fans and we are only just at the beginning in market development terms. If we put aside payment models and formats and think instead about the various ‘layers’ by which music is delivered to fans – there is obvious room for improvement in each and every layer. If we think about digital music in layers – then I suggest for music those layers are as follows:

Layer 1: The Music

Layer 2: The Data (as in metadata)

Layer 3: The User Interface (the presentation of the music to the user, including the recommendation engine)

Layer 4: The Social Layer (user-to-user)

On each and every layer, there is huge room for improvement in the current ways we get music to fans. Just a few suggestions for example:

Layer 1: More complete libraries, higher quality audio files, more live recordings etc.

Layer 2: Amazing metadata: song composer, the ‘story of the song’, track commentaries & liner notes, more simply: song visual data

Layer 3: Personalised home pages, shareable or switchable ‘music channels’, alternative ways to navigate music menus and libraries

Layer 4: Let’s leave this to Facebook, Twitter et al. But shareable playlists and social programming have plenty of room to develop beyond the current open API frameworks

There are new developments in every layer that are worth watching. In Layer 1 – high-end audio equipment makers like Linn now offer lossless 24-bit, FLAC or WAV downloads. I personally was never too convinced of the argument that song quality no longer matters in the age of MP3 files. I think more & more fans are realising it does matter, especially as we want to shift the music to household devices and in-car, where quality matters more than on headphones.

In Layer 2, new players like Decibel are working towards the ‘amazing metadata’ goal, where the marrying of content with context will make a notable difference the user experience – in terms of both library management and arrangement and they way we access information as & when we listen.

In Layer 3, we have brilliant new examples of music presentation, like Awedetorium – the iPad app developed by the team at the Sixty One – an indie brand yes – but with universal functionality in presenting quality over quantity, helping us to manage serendipity and avoid the blinding of choice that comes with searching from a menu of 11m+ songs. In music discovery terms, German research project GlobalMusic2One looks fascinating too and I hope it will bear fruit commercially at some point.

In Layer 4 you can bet that the social network geeks are working on the next mind-blowingly compelling way we can connect to music, through each other, using music. I’ll leave that in their capable hands and remain here to be convinced – I’ll use it if it works for me and helps me with Enjoyment more than with discovery or access.

So for me – in thinking about the future possibilities for music services, we need to begin to think beyond ‘models’ and ‘formats’ and get to the real drivers of why people love their music and what they want from it. Thinking in layers aids this process.

Juggernaut will be back for an essential end of 2010 music review and then for anyone travelling to MIDEM in the New Year I’ll see you there – especially anyone attending my Academy sessions on Tuesday 25^th January 2011.

Something's not right - "A'm affet"

The Scots have a saying “Am aff et” – pertaining to their current drinking habits (we’re talking booze, naturally). As in, imagine yourself in a bar in Glasgow hearing a guy ask his pal “right whatya havin”) only for the pal to reply “nah thanks pal, A'm affet”. Being set in Glasgow, our teetotaller will then of course be subjected to a torrent of abuse such we have never heard the like - in a language we don't in any case fully understand. 

I love the Glasgow patter – and have studied it off & on, over the years (there’s always something new to discover). What I love about this saying is it makes the assumption that the default setting for all humans north of the border is normally, to be very much “on it” – which is fair enough when you take into account the weather they put up with. Certainly, being “affet” is accepted only as a very rare state of being.

So it is though with me and music – currently. Something’s wrong – A'm affet. I’ve struggled to connect with anything on my iPod for the past two weeks. Yesterday in the gym I couldn’t find anything sufficiently motivational – not even from the usual suspects Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Feeder, Judas Priest, Van Halen et al. (It has to be metal in the gym don’t it? Please don’t tell me you listen to dance or 80s mixes?). I had to make do with some old Third Eye Blind which barely got me through it. During the warm-down I sought inspiration with a blast of the new Afrocubism album but despite the obvious genius on offer, again I just couldn’t connect with it.

Now this has occurred from time to time before. I can at rare times find that I am bored with my entire music collection – seven thousand odd tracks on the iPod, the ever present CD shelves (classics, current and those thrown in to the cupboard below which then hang on desperately forever in CD purgatory) – nothing can seem to offer a breakthrough (we can skip radio safely I think).

I don’t know what the root cause is. I know I had a recent episode of ‘the lurch’ over a Superchunk album I downloaded from Amazon. The lurch is another music-fan phenomenon these days very rarely encountered – namely when you buy (before you try!) a much anticipated or recommended record before actually playing back and feeling slightly sick at the fact that you know you don’t like it – and never will. The lurch is a hangover from the days when we paid £13.99 for a CD only to get it home and realise it really was a duffer.

These days Spotify, We7 and blogs have meant to have solved the lurch. Except they haven’t in some cases for me, because there’s stuff I don’t want to stream first, or I know won’t turn up on these services (the catalogue of American indie and alt country on UK streaming services is paltry). Besides, Amazon allowed me to download the Superchunk album on the Saturday before its Monday release date (can Amazon really do that?). So it all made sense until I played it back – too many unsubtle guitars and every track beginning or ending in guitar feedback and the guy can’t sing – urgghh.

That left me disappointed. Perhaps missing the I Am Kloot gig at Union Chapel was untimely, since that was the last record I really played to the point of pure enjoyment. No gig is on the cards now until Spoon on November 16th!

Given the age we are living in, this shouldn’t happen of course. So, I’ve made it my mission for this week to go out and discover something new. I’ll be trying out the Chompin mobile app for blog streams and sticking with Shuffler.fm too. I’ll get back on to Mflow for a bit and check out We7 and Spotify’s recently upgraded playlisting features. I might even re-subscribe to emusic or something similar. I’ll stick with my usual scan of the music papers and magazines of course and have a blast on Metacritic (though I’m not greatly impressed by the 83/100 score for Superchunk!).

I’ll report back on the efficacy of these various prescriptions when I’m cured. Or maybe I’ll just get back off the wagon with some classic Beatles or something...advice welcome.

What will Radiohead do next?

It’s just over a year ago since I wrote the post ‘thoughts from a beach’ – in which I referred to an Interview with Thom Yorke in ‘The Believer’ music issue (still waiting for the2010 issue from Amazon – McSweeney’s publishing is pure gold), and wondered a bit about what Radiohead would do next. It’s something I again came to be thinking about – on the very same beach – just week before last.

This week, viewing the band’s fan-sourced Prague concert video (thoughtfully sound-tracked by the band hence worthwhile streaming quality if you can get it through decent speakers), I went beyond wondering. I am in fact, now quite eager to get my fix of the world’s most talented band once again. It’s been over a year since Radiohead began new studio sessions with long-time producer Nigel Godrich so something must be due fairly soon, but when? However, it’s not so much when as what that interests me most.

Since In Rainbows, there is a massive distraction around Radiohead now – about the way they deliver music. Echoing the music scene itself all too often, there’s a fascination with how the band will release its new music – by what method – possibly more than an interest in the music itself.

But in terms of release strategy, what is there left for the band to do, having made their big statement with “In Rainbows”? Free agents as they are – and now self-appointed business model mavericks – the sky’s no limit – but is there anything that hasn’t already been done?

We’ve had free songs, free albums, track-by-track ‘episodic releases’ – dispensing with the album format – and the release of song-stems for fans to mix themselves. We’ve had crowd-sourced albums, pay-what-you-feel albums and a song-a-day for a year. It’s been done to death. It’s almost boring. Besides, the pay-what-you-like strategy with In Rainbows clearly underwhelmed. It was in fact the made to order box-sets that really ‘performed’.

I was impressed with the value-added packages The Arcade Fire released (through Topspin) – but not as impressed as the record itself, you will have gathered. I want the same from Radiohead. With all my interest in music business models and product innovation, what I need most of all, as a life-long fan, is an unceremonious release of a classic Radiohead album. But is that what they have planned I wonder?

Checking out the competition
Most musicians, especially popular ones who’ve achieved big success and have a reputation to live up to, can be fiercely competitive. Creatively that is. They wouldn’t be as crude as to be commercially competitive of course!

At Wilco’s show on Tuesday night at the Royal Albert Hall I was wondering what was going on through Ed O’Brien’s head as he nodded along throughout the duration of a wonderfully consistent evening’s music.

In recent times – like Radiohead – Wilco has delved deep into sonic experimentation and have gone way out there creatively – notably with records ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ and ‘A Ghost Is Born’ – but never at the expense of writing truly great songs – consistently.

It would be nice to think Ed took inspiration from the evening and that between their extraordinary creative individual and collective genius – Radiohead’s prime strategy next time out is to make a major statement first and foremost through the music.

It’s good to be back
A brief thanks to all for sticking with me through a busy summer in which writing JB posts has had to take a back seat. Hopefully I’ll post more often towards the end of this year – a vintage one music wise in my view and well worth more reflection.

Meantime – for fresh discovery I recommend the new Shuffler.fm blog streaming service. Currently in free beta, it is a wonderful way to discover all kinds of stuff you couldn’t even hope to find in most music service catalogues – what a great idea. Anything that scales blogs is most clever. I’ll need to consider its commercial potential for a later post.

Submitting to Digital

I’ve finally gone and done it. On Friday, I bought my last CD (arrived today, I am Kloot new album “Sky at Night” – along with the new Janelle Monae and Dark Night Of The Soul albums). And I picked up my final ever PAPER Guardian, with the ever brilliant and to me (previously) essential, “Film and Music” supplement.

This has been a long time coming of course, especially since, in theory anyway – I have been living & breathing digital music since the turn of the century. It’s my job to know about these things, so why haven’t I fully bought in yet as a consumer? Mostly during that time I have been horribly hedged between the two mediums – the physical and the digital.

I’ve become fed up with the physical side of physical – the constant rattling around in the cupboard or shed looking for that old gem I need to hear again, or even finger-searching down the spines of the ‘current play list’ only to open the jewel box (yuk) and find the CD is of course, in the car or somewhere or just plain gone. Plus it’s taking up too much space. As for my 'newspaper', too much of it goes unread and straight-to-recycling, which just seems ridiculous.

Mostly though, it all just seems so out-of-step with the times, technologically and environmentally.
So that’s me. I’ve officially ‘Gone Digital’.

I do however, harbour several anxieties about this decision. As I pour over the cover of Sky At Night, (fascinated to find Guy Garvey and Craig Potter of Elbow are co-producers) I’m already missing the tactile experience of having ‘record cover’ in hand while the music’s on. I’m doubtful that the digital metadata industry can deliver anything like the simple pleasures of this experience.

Also – since physical media plays a big part in my music discovery process (particularly aforementioned Guardian ‘Film & Music’) – I’m concerned I’ll actually start to miss some key album reviews. I love the Guardian iPhone App, but I’m not sure if the App has the complete content that the paper supplement has. Somewhat ironically, since digital has a reputation as a great discovery platform, I’ve never experienced it as such – not as a passionate and active music obsessive.

I’m also concerned about the system of managing my music digitally. My CD shelves are not particularly well ordered, but like a mechanic with his tools, I have a photographic memory of where I left each CD. I know which pile my previous I Am Kloot albums sit in. My CDs are taking up too much space for sure, but at least I know they are there, because I can see them. By quickly scanning any one of the ‘most recent’ piles I can easily remind myself I still need to listen to Paul Weller or Joanna Newsome. But I recently realised just how many downloaded albums I’ve yet to listen to – some from last year. I’d literally forgotten about these, buried as they are into my iTunes library.

I love how smoothly Amazon downloads now embed straight to that library, but almost preferred the old way, when I could at least check my Amazon (or 7 Digital) folders to look at recent or not so recent, purchases. I’d like iTunes to make the ‘recently added’ list both more accessible and more present either online or on the device.

Nevertheless, I’m still going digital. It has to be one way or the other. I will just have to get over my digital discovery issues (with the great help of Spotify, MFlow, the Genius bar and of course, my beloved US indie goldmine ‘Daytrotter’.com).

I’ll do my best to get over my physical needs too, since I’m literally running out of shelf & cupboard space. I’ll undertake to make an effort to improve my digital file management.  I’m still nervous that my digital music collection will evaporate somewhere, but perhaps I’ll put my faith in the cloud (if I can get over my ‘ownership’ issues) or a digital locker service, as it looks like I’ll have a good choice of those next year.

However, this all leaves me with one overriding issue and that’s listening. Actually taking the time to enjoy what I’ve worked hard to discover, access, acquire and manage. I just love playing music back through my (pride and joy) Bowers & Wilkins 806’s. They sound great.

Also, the recently acquired new family Renault came with an integral Bose sound system which rocks. Both have iPod docks, but both have CD trays too. Somehow – the CD – once I’ve got it to hand – goes into the tray with – well – with a more satisfying feeling – than plugging the iPod into the dock. It also encourages me to become more familiar with that particular record, not snack like a junkie on the 6000 tracks in my device. 

Mmm, perhaps I’m not quite through the hedge yet, but still on the fence.

Apologies for not posting much lately. I've been busy, working on some great music industry projects, looking after my kids, and sitting in the sun for five-minute spells of peace & quiet (when I could probably be twittering). The JB blog will be out for the rest of the summer, but you might want to read my post on Google & music on the midemnet blog and also look out for some pieces in the various trusted Music Industry publications over the coming months...all exciting stuff. JB will resume as & when...

A funny thing happened on the way to The National

Mflow’s tagline ‘Discovery is the best thing in music’ may or may not true, but I’ve just made a discovery myself – that the best sort of music discovery can be discovering the music that you already know. That’s a lot of discoveries in one sentence, so let me explain.

I was all set to skip the new National album. I was just going to let it pass, on account of having too much currently stacked up in the ‘recently acquired’ CD pile-up - and the download equivalent (a queue?).

Then I succumbed, having read too many glowing reviews, and put it on order from Amazon, but with self-calibrated expectations. I say this because, though I am a fan of The National (having first discovered them via their wonderful track “About Today” on an Uncut magazine cover-mount) I’ve found them to be a band of great promise if not quite the accomplished article on delivery.

I bought their previous two records “Alligator” and “Boxer” and found them both to contain great moments (notably on Boxer – “Guest Room”, “Fake Empire” and “Mistaken For Strangers”) but overall, patchy (but, aggrieved National fans, read on). I also once bought three tickets to one of the band’s shows at The Astoria on the “Boxer” tour and coaxed two friends along, eulogising about this great new band I’d discovered.

When they opened that gig with “Guest Room” I felt vindicated and all like the great “A&R” man (it sounded absolutely splendid), but the rest of the gig was somewhat marred by singer Matt Berninger’s apparent discomfort on stage. You can actually hear more about his stage-fright issues via a Guardian podcast here (small aside – what do you do when an artist on the cusp of mainstream success and potentially huge live shows – suffers from lack of stage presence? - I can’t see many artists taking much to a suggestion of stagecraft ‘coaching’).

So, I thought I’d skip ‘High Violet’. Thank god I didn’t. I only really got to play it properly because I was travelling (back from the South West) and was in a bit ‘phased out’ (after a disappointing business meeting). For those reasons, I set the album to play on repeat – and just let it run & run (four-five times over maybe) until it kind of got inside my head.

Three weeks later and it’s still there, rattling around. In fact I only really came up for air by re-visiting their previous two albums – both of which now suddenly connect with me much more than they did originally. Alligator especially, is a real treat, as it turns out.

Somehow I now ‘get’ The National. I’ve got beyond the moody baritone ‘miserabilists’ stage and moved on to appreciate the tightly-wound core of fine drumming, bass and guitar, the finely detailed, layered, textured sounds (including wonderfully understated use of piano, strings and brass), the oddly-affecting, existential lyrics and at last, the strained emotional delivery of Matt Berninger’s vocals. And more than that, his superb phrasing.

It all makes sense – and on High Violet manages to exceed the sum of all these wonderful parts – through having better tunes, with better songs – Berninger’s lyrics now more effective in connecting real-life stories with the weird inner-dialogues – effectively making him a fully-paid up member of the Genuine Pop Music Poets Society.

“Someone send a runner for the weather that I’m under for the feeling that I lost today”, for example, from ‘England’ (for me the album’s pinnacle track, and my self-adopted national world cup theme. Was that really ‘England’ playing in background on some recent world cup BBC coverage? I think it was). Or perhaps take this one, from single Bloodbuzz Ohio: “I still owe money, to the money, to the money I owe” – that’s a clever commentary on the recent financial crisis if you want my opinion. My favourite though is from Lemonworld, where that songs protagonist declares he “left my heart to the army, the only sentimental thing I could think of”. It rouses.

But why am I telling you this on Juggernaut, without due consideration for the industry? Well it actually did get me pondering on both the demand side and the supply side of things actually.

On the demand side, as with Mflow for example – we’ve become somewhat absorbed, perhaps even obsessed with, ‘discovering’ new music, with gaining ‘access’ to it, and with the ‘acquisition’ of it. It strikes me these experiences all pale with actually listening, and forming a deeper relationship with the music than you thought might be possible initially. It’s like discovering a new author and then revisiting all his or her other books, with a renewed, re-ignited pleasure. You can find yourself thanking your lucky stars, just for the serendipity of it all. Besides, the album would never have entered my consciousness in the way that it has, without that first bought of repeated listening.

On the supply side, The National’s story amounts to the way it should be for music artists and their development, does it not? ‘High Violet’ is the Band’s fifth album and represents a sure, steady growth creatively and now commercially as well. It’s refreshing, re-assuring even, that we can still witness artists in a steady ascendancy like this. Isn’t this how it used to be? I would wish the same on The Local Natives, or The Temper Trap – or any other type of band with the apparent talent and capability to arrive where The National has.

Has it got something to do with being on an indie label rather than a major labels? Perhaps, except there are plenty of indie bands on majors with what seems like longevity and ascendancy too. Most notably Elbow (though a partial 'rescue' job was done there), Kings of Leon (now so big it's hard to think of them as 'indie' but they are essentially) and others.

But The National's success seems partly down to the fact that the band didn’t get too popular too soon - that they had time to become this good. With ‘High Violet’, The National has indeed been allowed to bloom.

Are we living too fast for slow pop?

Couple of years back I was at a music conference featuring a panel of ‘new millennial’s (young people to you and me) discussing their music listening habits. One explained in all seriousness, that he had “tried putting a CD and just listening, but it didn’t really work for me”. Older members of the audience, including me, sighed out an involuntary laugh.

I intended then, to write something about some of the albums that I grew up with when I was a young adult, reflecting on just how different the experience was then – as a child of the 80’s, musically speaking. Putting on a CD and ‘just listening’ was exactly what we all did. Habitually, frequently, repetitively.

It’s rapidly becoming a lost art in itself though – and this fascinates me. It does so partly because I’m convinced the industry is missing a trick commercially by not promoting more pure enjoyment from music – instead becoming obsessed with access, discovery and acquisition. The most recent example of course is latest ‘buzz’ music service mflow, which has the tagline ‘Discovery it’s the greatest thrill in music’. Nothing wrong with it I suppose, yet there really is something wrong. However, that’s something for another post.

The other fascination for me with modern music consumption is not commercial, but cultural. I think the millennial guy who couldn’t get through full album session is missing out on one of life’s simple, exceptional pleasures. And it worries me that it’s going this way for the majority. When Observer Music Monthly surveyed the UK’s listening habits back in 2005 it found one third of music fans claimed they did still play albums from start to finish ‘occasionally’. I wonder what the proportion is now.

What brought this subject back to me was reading La Roux’s ‘Soundtrack of my life’ in this Sunday’s Observer (sadly, now sans its Music Monthly supplement). Elly Jackson observes – on the subject of one of my favourite and prime examples of slow-pop – Tear For Fears’ ‘Songs From The Big Chair’ that:

“The way it’s recorded and produced is incredible. People don’t take that much time over music any more. And if you did, all your fans would fuck off somewhere else, ‘cause they’re so fickle nowadays”.

I like this quote because it captures both the cultural and commercial trends in music production and consumption. We simply lack the attention spans, as well as the time, and the market responds to that by not supplying such demanding product.

That said, I for one am still trying to create the time and clear the headspace to listen to Joanna Newsome’s latest 3-disc magnum opus. What was she thinking?

For me, the classic slow-pop albums of my formative years are a unique thing, largely of the past. They are unique in that these records tended to contain a mixture of both massive hits, but more experimental, almost sub-classical tracks, either in-between – or sometimes given their own ‘side’ (Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds of Love’ being perhaps the most complete example, with its ‘The Ninth Wave’ second half). These records were made by artists at their commercial peak, coinciding with their creative urge to experiment and move forward.

Sequencing was massively important in creating an impression of vast depth for these records, which sucked the listener in – making a more immersive experience than any 3D film or website I can think of. Both ‘Big Chair’ and ‘Hounds’ are superlative examples. Another would be OMD’s ‘Architecture and Morality’ (the latter two albums curiously and perhaps rightly, not featured on Spotify et al.).

Other examples? Perhaps the masters of this whole process were Talk Talk. Perhaps the best example of such a work is Dark Side Of The Moon.

There are probably endless examples from days past. But where are the modern slow-pop masterpieces? They hardly exist – partly because the culture we live in leaves them little space in which to thrive. We are no longer connected by this type of cultural experience – too busy discovering, accessing or sharing what we haven’t really listened to that much!

I’ve previously argued that Radiohead’s ‘OK Computer’ might well be the last example of this particular ‘genre’ – a popular but experimental album. Since Radiohead have ‘moved on’ from albums, they may not supply any more of the same. U2’s experimental side and commercial peak seems long since past. Can we look to Elbow, or even Coldplay to do something a bit old-fashioned – namely connect massive popularity with a risky but ultimately successful creative formula? Or even La Roux per chance.

I hope they do and I hope it sparks a renaissance for slow-pop, for the sake of the new millennials.

My top five slow-pop records then, which I would not dream of mflow-ing you, but would advise you to get on to Amazon now...

1. Kate Bush: Hounds of Love.

2. Tears For Fears: Songs From The Big Chair.

3. OMD: Architecture and Morality.

4. Talk Talk: The Colour of Spring.

5. U2: Zooropa.

Ps. For the record, I like mflow – both its current execution and its possibilities, but for me it still isn’t quite the answer to the faltering music industry model.


I’m on mflow as ‘keithj’ if you can find some slow pop for me!

2009: The year of music not necessarily from 2009

This will be one of a few year-end round-up posts, just for fun really, nothing too serious. If you want to catch more ‘business-like’ music related writings then keep an eye on my guest posts on the MIDEMNET blog, with the next one through in a week or so. If you’ve enjoyed the JB blog’s insights into the music business throughout this year look out for a series of insight-led pieces I will be writing from next year on the wider media sectors and beyond...for now it’s about the music...

It’s coming up to that time again, reflecting back on the musical year. All the papers and music magazines have had double debriefs to contend with as we wind up both 2009 and of course the decade. My reading pile is substantial, which does not sit too well with my first resolution for 2010 to ‘read less, listen more’.

As ever, music itself played a central role in my year both in terms of consulting projects but of course in terms of music itself. I can’t help but feel compelled to round-up each year – I think I have done this more or less for as long as I can recall. But here’s the thing – this will be the last year in which I do this.

The reason is simple: I’ve stopped defining my music consumption and experiences by time, certainly by year. In 2009, I found myself discovering (I use the term ‘discovery’ to embrace not just the practice of finding music, but connecting with it) music that could be from anytime.

Most notably, the record I played most this year was GaGaGaGaGa by Spoon, which was released last year. I have also just being enjoying Martha Wainwright’s album from last year ‘I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too’, which is a really rich collection of songs. I’ve been much more tardy though, in discovering I Am Kloot’s ‘Natural History’, a wonderful album that I actually did buy the year it came out – 2001 – but have played to death only this year. I will definitely pounce on their new record next year, not least as it is being produced by Elbow’s Guy Garvey who is a patron of the band – context that might have provided some glue for my connection to them after all this time.

I also just discovered Gil Scott Heron following news items about his ‘reappearance’ this year. And I’ve re-discovered Grace Jones, Talk Talk and The Beatles for the umpteenth time. Much of this of course is related to events in 2009, so the context is contemporary, but the music itself is from way back.

As for music released this year there are plenty of records I’ve acquired but have yet to connect with, somewhat disappointingly. This includes, to my surprise, the new albums by The Arctic Monkeys, Wilco and Metric – three artists I have absolutely loved, previously. Slightly disturbed by this, since I can’t tell when the opportunity will come to hear these records in a new light. I was also disappointed with quite a few records that came strongly recommended or anticipated, including The Duke & The King (it's just a bit dull, no?), Doves and even The Hours’ ‘ See The Light’, which lacked the intensity and staying power of ‘Narcissus Road’. The latter is one of my records of the decade by the way, which I will post on later.

From the year itself, I more immediately connected with the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s ‘It’s Blitz’; EG White’s ‘Adventure Man’; Adela Diane’s ‘To Be Still’ and bona fide ‘return to form’ albums by Madness, Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains.

Pride of place in the CD player and on the iPod however were Portico Quartet’s ‘Isla’ – a genuine ‘grower’ that gets richer with familiarity; John Vanderslice’s ‘Romanian Names’ - he defines the genre 'interesting pop'; Spiro’s wonderfully uplifting ‘Lightbox’; Pink Martini’s ‘Splendour in The Grass’ and Bill Callaghan’s wistful ‘Sometimes I Wish I Were An Eagle’ which has marvellous arrangements.

The surprise of the year for me was Starsailor’s ‘All The Plans’ which I was moved to blog about back in March. There is always delight in discovering music accidentally, but that’s sometimes even greater when you really didn’t like the previous work of an artist. I didn’t previously like anything about Starsailor – suspecting them of being a bit run of the mill – but they completely won me over with such a superbly written, performed and heartfelt record that really doesn’t contain a single filler track. Put away your preconceptions is the lesson there I suppose.

I did not get around to Animal Collective and any number of other ‘buzz’ bands, but that’s not untypical for me. I discovered Arctic Monkeys on the second album, not the over-hyped first. I’m in no hurry. And that’s our divine right as music fans isn’t it? I’m really not interested in having music rammed down my throat – that’s the old way. I don’t really listen to music radio (with the exception of Guy Garvey, Gideon Coe and occasional KCRW) so I have no idea what’s being pushed. I’m very much on the pull side – actively using the reviews and taking in other contexts.

I know what I’m ready to like and when I'm good and ready. As Daniel Levitin says in his fascinating book 'This Is Your Brain On Music': "Trying to appreciate new music can be like contemplating a friendship in that it takes time, and sometimes there is nothing you can do to speed it up".

But the era of lists and end notes on a year may well be over. As music fans, it’s increasingly unimportant what week, quarter or even year, we discover the music, but how we discover it, enjoy it and pass on the good word about it. I wonder however, if I can resist the urge to list.

Unpop.com – the music store that’s different

Before I launch into my solution for ‘music that’s different’ it’s worth pausing first to consider something amazing about 2009 (a year of otherwise distinctly gloomy trappings – a real annus horribilis as The Queen might put it) and it’s this:

2009 is the 20th anniversary year for Real World Records and the 20th anniversary year for Warp Records. It is also the 40th anniversary year for (dare I say the word ‘iconic’) jazz label ECM. And it is the 70th anniversary year for legendary folk label Topic. Of course, joining this label anniversary bonanza are Island Records (50), Bella Union (10) and Transgressive (5).

So one way or the other – music that’s different and/or eclectic is thriving. Though who knows what the bottom line looks like in these labels, there’s no denying their individual and collective endurance – as both commercial and cultural entities.

This is some ten years after Napster of course, when the first declarations were being made on the ‘death of the record label’. What a time for Simon Raymonde to launch Bella Union – a label that has since blossomed as a home for indie music with a twist. The label is home once again to my favourite recording artist of the moment – the wonderful Laura Veirs – her new album July Flame will no doubt welcome in 2010 with a refreshing air of optimism and loveliness.

It’s worth paying some dues also, to a bunch of music services – many already mentioned previously on this blog – that are making a concerted effort to serve natural niches in the marketplace, rather than aim to serve the homogenous mass that are ‘music consumers’. These would include Calabash/Mondomix (world), Bleep (dance), Lost Tunes (heritage pop), Society of Sound (lossless downloads) e-music (indie, mostly) and Boomkat (indie) among a few others. I also think it’s interesting that Naxos seems to have quietly cracked the problem of how to make music subscription model work commercially – did anyone notice?

Still, as analysed in the previous post – niche genres that so often appeal to older, wealthier and more committed music buyers – have yet to reach more than the sum of their parts. As the digital market has developed, the global long tail aggregators for niche music have yet to arrive in any way that scales beyond say, those services mentioned above. Meanwhile in the great fire of brick & mortar music retail, the ‘jazz, classical and world’ sections seem to be the first ones to shrink then disappear.

So here’s my suggestion – there for the taking for any major music retail brand currently in existence – or for any brave new music venture willing to use peripheral vision – as opposed to another vain attempt to ‘own the digital music space’ by way of a more radical pricing model.

Let’s call it ‘Unpop.com’ (though you wouldn’t actually call it that of course – that would be commercial suicide). Unpop.com stacks up as follows: for £4.99 per month (an established ‘sweet spot’ subscription price according to the surveys I read) you get access to all the niche music you want to stream + the option to buy high-quality MP3 or CD albums at a decent discount – knock a pound or two off the Amazon retail price, say. You get ‘Unpop’ quarterly – a feature catalogue with high quality editorial about classic recordings and forthcoming releases – this makes you feel special. You get one featured free MP3 download each and every week day – nicely manageable, delivered through your in-box, if you want it. A few pre-programmed or socially programmed radio channels wouldn’t hurt.

Thus the market secures a minimum of £60 per year and probably a good deal more for a-la-carte purchases on top. Offering this sort of value proposition for this market doesn’t hurt mainstream music at all – no cannibalisation. ‘Unpop’ is differentiated from mainstream ‘pop’ stuff, so the overall music market economics are unaffected – ‘Unpop.com’ customers don’t care how much standard music prices are – the mainstream can go on being mainstream.

Meanwhile ‘Unpop’ opens up a whole new world of discovery while obtaining underlying revenue from subscriptions. Now that would be different...

Music is a different business – it should do more for music that’s different

A week or so ago, I made five recommendations of music that’s a bit different to my (& maybe your) usual tastes, as part of my strategy to prioritise my music consumption – as set out in this previous post.

Those records were new or recent releases by Portico Quartet, Spiro, Steve Martin, Bill Frisell, The Unthanks and Pink Martini. None of them are ‘popular’ – but each album does fall into a category of sorts – one the many hundreds of music genres or sub-genres. Even Pink Martini – a blend of just about everything except pop, is described on Wikipedia as ‘vintage music’ – a sub genre probably, of ‘easy listening’.

As an industry – if you can really refer to the distribution of commercial music as an industry (a worthy post-grad paper perhaps) – the incredible, bewildering variety of products is what makes the music business totally unique. No other business that I know of puts full-blown produced products out there on the market without any prior knowledge of what will happen next. Sure, if you have a major pop artist with a known commercial track record and the whole dashboard of modern demand metrics, you might be able to put together a half-decent sales forecast – but you’d still be pushing it to be within + or – 100%.

But forget those, if you have any one of the above records – in niche genres – how on earth do you know if you can even hope to break even on releasing the record commercially – i.e. having funded its discovery, production, marketing and distribution? Because the one thing you do know is that you will not have a global hit on your hands.

In this sense, the music business is also unique – in that there are few genuinely ‘independent’ or ‘alternative genre’ records that become global smash hits. The movie business is different – it produces - even if it’s just a couple - of real indie smashes each year, pretty consistently. Be it Blair Witch, The March Of The Penguins, Slumdog, or the very latest example - Paranormal Activity – the small guys can make it really, really big in film.

It happens less so in music – if you look at the top fifty selling albums each year they are dominated by pop records released by majors. Neither small independent’s or niche genre artists get a look in. There are clear reasons based on industry structure. Film has an established independent film network that is supported by major festivals around the world – many of which are celebrated as significant cultural events. It has an ‘art-house’ cinema distribution network too. Film also gets significant government support on the investment side.

The music industry doesn’t have the equivalents. Yes there are numerous small venues that cater to the alternative – but they are not effectively networked and so do not make up more than the sum of their parts. Same for independent labels, really – hence there have been recent initiatives to give the sector a much needed leg-up – such as independent charts. But these often confuse ‘independence’ between source – i.e. label and actual musical style. As for retail, well we can see what’s happened there and it is almost too painful to keep watching.

Music that’s genuinely different, alternative or niche must simply submit to being commercially second-rate. The only global phenomenon of the same nature I can recall is the success of the Buena Vista Social Club Cuban music movement – and that all started with – an independent movie!

I applaud initiatives that try up the ante for the ‘movement’ that is niche music – such as the upcoming January 2010 Reverb festival of concerts at the Roundhouse, which has some support from the Arts Council of England and local Camden Council – though only small commercial sponsors.

However, I’m absolutely convinced this music can scale better than it does, if only it had the right platform. After all, this is the digital age where niche content was in fact supposed to have become the heir to the Blockbuster King, by now according to the uber-thinking-journalists.

Take this simple insight. I have three Pink Martini CDs so I like them – they have grown on me over the years without necessarily becoming an act I would recommend to others regularly. But I know I could name maybe 20-30 other people in my life who would like them as much as me if not more so – but who have never even heard of them. My feeling is that Portico Quartet could achieve the same sort of crossover potential in the UK that Jazz trio E.S.T. achieved in their native Sweden – where they regularly made the mainstream charts.

While I wouldn’t say the same for Spiro or The Unthanks – I’m am pretty convinced that they could probably triple whatever little they do sell - easily – if only they could get some effective, targeted exposure to their receptive audiences, and that could well be the difference between loss & profit.

Steve Martin, well, he doesn’t exactly need to have a hit – and has in fact spent extravagant amounts of his own money on making and touring his ‘The Crow’. But it is such a good record it deserves success in its own right, not just as some kind of vanity project. As for Bill Frisell – at least he is on exactly the right label to connect with his audience – Nonesuch – which specialises in route-to-market for eclectic, different music aimed at the more mature, discerning ear.

And here is the second insight for today. I’m a mature and enthusiastic music fan who has listened to so much stuff that I am receptive – in a state of absolute readiness – to hear more music that’s different. Where do I connect with my fellow audience? I’ve no doubt that audience is large (huge globally); fairly well-off and fairly uninterested in piracy – probably even pro-actively disposed to paying top whack for music - as the rich cultural good that it is. The reason we don’t buy much these days is we are uninspired and ill-informed. No one is putting this music in front of us.

Now I know there is the BBC and in the US, ‘public radio’ – and this is great. Programmes like ‘Late Junction’ are the equivalent of splendid cuisine for the ears – even if you sometimes have to work at it to acquire the taste first. But I don’t really do radio. I want to check this stuff out on demand and then buy it and keep playing it until I love it.

Also, I know these artists could get greater exposure in a number of ways – like what if Portico could get a support slot for Radiohead, or if Spiro got a great synch opportunity? That could break ground, but only as a one-off, transient thing – it might serve those artists well if they are lucky – but it’s not reaching that huge global audience of un-served, unlucky listeners.

And finally here’s the irony. In the UK we are about to get bombarded with new music services (again) – each one upping the ante on the ‘business model’ – more & more music for less & less cash. But the music is always the same stuff. The front-line recommendations are the big artists about to assault the radio networks, the TV and press. Spotify this week has the exclusive with Robbie Williams (do they really need each other?). Sky Songs has launched – in a promotion with The Sun newspaper. It’s like daytime radio all over again - the same music to the broadest audience possible.

Even out of those six million songs in the impressively large catalogues, there’s nothing for we-who-want-different, since we don’t know what we’re looking for, or if we do and hit search, it will not be there more than half the time.

Why don’t we do something different for those people who want something different? I’m on the case...the next post will show us the way...

The new way to listen to music – self-imposed scarcity

This week I finally received my copy of Spoon’s GaGaGaGaGa (snappy title guys) from Amazon. It was one of those where Amazon undertakes to get it for you not from its own warehouse, but from some tiny shop in a small mid-west American town what has one of the two last remaining copies on the planet (why is this album so unavailable?). Subsequently it’s taken about eight weeks to arrive.

In fact, I ordered it shortly after writing the ‘Music Discovery, Spoon Fed’ post back in mid-April. Have I minded? Yes I have, a bit. Of course I wanted to hear it, was dying to. But I’m a patient guy. I dipped into Spotify of course, as one does. Not there. Spotify has ‘Gimme Fiction’ by Spoon and I streamed that. (Quick aside: Spotify has got approximately one in every three albums I search for – are my tastes becoming so obscure?). Last.fm didn’t have GaGa either (let’s use the short version). At this point I can’t get to hear it, basically, and I’m thinking, that’s a savvy move by Spoon. Maybe they know I’m a fan since I connected with them on Daytrotter.com. More chance of me becoming a lifelong fan if I buy rather than stream GaGa. If I’d streamed it, like I did with Gimme Fiction, maybe I’d still be considering buying it, in a somewhat non-committal fashion, like I am with Gimme Fiction. Yes I realize I could easily get it from Bit Torrent etc. but I’m not that kind of music fan.

As it is, not only have I bought it, but patiently waited for two whole months to finally hear it. Now here’s the punchline though (no it’s not that the record was released in 2007, though that’s true). It was well worth the wait. It’s sooooo gogogogogood. This album is the best thing I’ve heard in about three weeks – only because I’ve been listening to a very high standard recently – stay with me.

Having been denied GaGa during the overlong Amazon source-pick-pack-ship process, I subjected the album to the 'New Way I Listen to Albums' treatment. This is basically what music journalists used to call ‘heavy rotation’. I first gave it an initial late-night spin on the CD player, through headphones. I was immediately impressed. Next morning I ripped it into iTunes and played it back over & over for at least 2-3 days. I was commuting into town and so I got through the record from start to finish at least 6-7 times in this initial period, becoming familiar with the sequencing, certain lyrical couplets starting to connect with me in a very relevant sort of way.

Then as the week progressed I had the chance to get it on the stereo through the speakers (B&W 686’s, I love ‘em). It sounded ACE. The opening track blew me away, just the sound of it. Spoon can play, no question, but it was more the production that blew my mind. Whoever produced this record knew exactly what they were about. The second track is 'The Ghost Of You Lingers' and you might already know how I feel about that track from the earlier post. This was the first time I’d heard the studio version, properly. It is one of the best things I’ve ever heard. I will keep coming back to this track forever.

But here’s the thing – the album just gets better and better from there. After ‘Ghost’ which is a really heavy, almost disorientating listen, the mood lightens wonderfully with ‘Cherry Bomb’ which is just a great, great pop song. Pop, pure & simple, with a nice brass ensemble – lovely touch. Very uplifting. I can’t exactly go on like this track for track, so to cut a long story short, it dawned on me that the album format will never die, ever, thanks to records like this. Because what takes a great album is much more than a collection of songs.

The songs have to be good of course. There isn’t a single filler track on GaGa, it simply ebbs & flows brilliance throughout. So songs, tick. Production, tick. The playing is phenomenal – great musicianship. The rhythm section especially. Tick. The track sequencing is just great, so you don’t skip tracks or shuffle or even want to turn it off until it ends. Each song amplifies the next and when you become familiar with it, you simply look forward to hearing the next song. Even the album sleeve is intriguing – some artist at work on a major ‘installation’ and a collage of burlesque-like ladies on the back. Good shot of the band on the inside (I still don’t like it when you don’t get a band portrait, which is common on indie releases for some reason). It’s all just a fabulous ‘in the zone’ thing. And it’s not even a concept album! (I’m partial to concept albums, future post coming).

Now on the business side, who knows? I know I couldn’t get hold of it here, but my understanding is that in the US, Spoon have slow-burned their way to a reasonably successful commercial career. All their previous records have got very decent reviews and Spoon's Wikipedia entry seems to describe a nicely escalating commercial success with each successive release. Damn right too.

So how come it’s only the best album I’ve heard in three weeks. Well, it’s because I’ve had a really good run lately. This is down to good taste (sorry to be modest), good choices and luck I guess. But I recently bought John Vanderslice latest album Romanian Names. Don’t get me started with this one. Also brilliant. Why did this record get ignored by the UK music press? I didn’t see one single review. It’s awesome, ticking every box like the Spoon record, and with Vanderslice’s talent for evoking mysterious little stories within his songs.

The track ‘Too Much Time’ has become my theme tune. The lyrics are the best I’ve heard in ages ("freedom is overrated" etc.). Again, I subjected it to the new listening method, finding that I didn’t want to listen to anything else that week I was enjoying Romanian Names so much, just wasn’t interested in anything else. And the production on that record is amazing. The acoustic guitar ‘solo’ on ‘Fetal Horses’ says it all.

Finally, the exact same thing happened with another recent catalogue purchase (part of 2 for £10 in HMV this time) – Death Cab For Cutie’s ‘Plans’. The most recent record was in my top ten last year anyhow, but Plans is better. Again, it’s a completely successful album, creatively speaking. Songs (those fabulous Ben Gibbard lyrics), musicianship (bassline & drum combo on 'Summer Skin'), production, sound, sequence. Once again, it’s all there, meticulously and beautifully executed, for our listening pleasure.

Give it a try. Put the temptation to stream every new over-hyped record-of-the-day on Spotify to one side for a week or so and try my new method. Make one album the soundtrack to your life for at least one week and see what happens. It’s addictive actually.

I’ve spent my whole listening career basically searching for the next breakthrough record for me – the next life-affirming set of songs that you can call on and rely on as a resource – come rain or shine. But I reckon they’re harder to find these days, what with the sheer number of releases (of pretty good sounding records, mind). You just have to pick them out, buy them (even if you have to wait a while for them to arrive) and then ignore everything else for a while. Create your own scarcity, basically. It works.


Footnote: Now it’s obvious I’m a fan of a certain genre here - American Indie I suppose, though I prefer to call it ‘sophisticated pop’. In a discussion with Conrad Lambert last week (just about my favourite European artist, aka Merz) we talked about why this sophisticated pop genre is so dominated by American bands. For example I also love Wilco, Laura Viers and Sparklehorse. I like Nada Surf, Silversun Pickups and The National. And there are really strong new bands like The Local Natives et al. – this music in abundant in America. Basically, it’s the size of the country I guess. There doesn’t seem to be a UK equivalent scene, unless I’m missing something. The best UK record I’ve heard this year so far has been Madness’s Liberty Of Norton Folgate! Blur is back though, and of course, our National Treasures The Arctic Monkeys. Make do I suppose.

The future of music is: Filtered

[this post is featured as the comment editorial in this week's indespensible UK-based Record of the Day http://www.recordoftheday.com weekly magazine and is part 1 of 2 posts on innovation in music. Next week's focuses on music the product].



If the music industry is changing so much, how come the biggest promotional platforms for bands are still mainstream media - radio, press, TV and The Charts? It might be tempting to think that it’s because music label marketing is so steeped in the tradition of radio, press, TV and The Charts that they know not much else. But this is no longer true, especially in labels where digital specialists beaver away on this or that initiative for new music campaigns via apps platforms, social networks, e-tailers and blogs.

The simple fact is that radio (followed by TV) is still where the majority of consumers say they discover new music – at least it is when you look at research tracking by the likes of NPD, Viacom etc. I find that remarkable in this day & age, but the point where this changes is when it gets really interesting for music and for the way music is marketed.

It might even be the point where the business itself finally tips into a new paradigm where radio and TV matters less than digital media, or even doesn’t matter much at all. Some artists have already reached that point, such as Ingrid Michaelson, with 250k album sales and 800k downloads with barely a mainstream murmur. Indie band Metric has had recent similar success.



The reason is that many fans have reached that point too. Forward moving artists will concern themselves less with a radio-led charm offensive and more with a fan-base-building digital campaign along the lines of Michaelson.

It is in many ways surprising that mainstream media is still seen as the golden ticket to success, when we’ve had some ten years of development in digital. But then, since digital only represents just one fifth of industry revenues, perhaps it isn’t surprising at all. The business will still focus supply and marketing activities firmly towards where consumers discover the product and spend the cash.

However, over the next year or so, there are some clear signs of a more full-tilt transition to digital. An obvious one is the increasingly moribund physical retail space – you can’t buy CDs if there’s nowhere left to shop for them. Another is breakthrough digital only applications including of course, Spotify and applications platforms like the iPhone.

But what could make a greater single impact than these factors combined is if music discovery really came on leaps & bounds, digitally. It has been threatening to for a while of course, with numerous recommendation engines (most notably Last.fm) and music social networks emerging as more effective music discovery platforms than radio and retail for a sizeable segment of music fans. Such services have certainly improved upon the basic search capabilities that drove earlier generations of music services, including of course P2P.

But for all their clever functionality, no recommendation engine or social network has become the music discovery standard in the way radio has. This is for a variety of reasons: algorithms are yet to work perfectly as filters for music (if they ever will); recommendation results are still a bit hit & miss; social networks like last.fm are a bit too cluttered for mainstream use. Blog aggregators and blogs are too specialist.

But there are a number of ways in which music discovery will change in the next year or two that will collectively make a huge difference:

1. Music crawlers and mega-charts. Going beyond the boundaries of any one social network or just crawling blogs, combined web crawler services that cover all the major metrics of play-counts, profile views, search-terms, twitters etc. – for both bands and songs – will aggregate everything and provide constantly refreshed mega charts to replace the traditional charts as we know them. The BBC’s Sound Index was pioneering for band buzz, but for a more focused application of the concept take a look at We Are Hunted (wearehunted.com). Fresh out of Australia this web crawler amasses all into the 99 most popular tracks of each day, presented in a simple 9-track-a-page format with a stream & buy button on each & every track.
   
2. Social programming. So-called fourth generation discovery after the first three generations: 1. The EPG; 2. Search and 3. Recommendation. Go Fish and You Tube already pioneered social programming to some extent, allowing individual users to programme & broadcast very simple personal video channels. Now iLike & Facebook have really opened up social programming in audio. I’ve been sceptical about this - who wants to discover content through a multitude of individually programmed channels? I wasn’t sure until I tried Peoples Music Store (peoplesmusicstore.com), which I think is a fun and very social way to discover (and even shop for) new music. Judging by this week’s news, Universal music agrees, licensing some 300,000 songs to the service.
   
3. People, places & lifestyle. Geo-location technologies will allow users to use their mobiles to filter all sorts of content by location, timing and lifestyle preferences. Imagine a playlisting application that can give you a playlist relevant to a business trip you are taking today, or the mood you’re in as you are stuck in your tinderbox on the M1 on a hot sunny day.
   
4. Personalised home pages. This one is for the ISP’s to crack, although iTunes really should have done it ages ago as well. The BBC and Google are masters of it. You really don’t have to bother going anywhere for discovery other than your own personalised homepage of your preferred access provider. The likes of Sky, Virgin & BT are developing it as the holy-grail for their multi-platform customers.
   
5. New content brands. In many ways the antidote to all that goes above, new content brands are old fashioned, trusted editorial brands that thrive digitally due to their expertise in exploiting long-tail content, reduced barriers to entry and targeting of audiences previously underserved by mainstream media platforms. Think Lost Tunes, Mondomix, Pitchfork, eMusic, Daytrotter et al. Established Blogs and even Brands that do it well can create new preferred destination services for digital users.

With all this space for music discovery to develop it keeps me optimistic for generating new opportunities to drive more immediate consumption – transactional as well as streaming. Current discovery platforms like YouTube, Pandora, Last.fm & Spotify aren’t necessarily good purchase drivers for music, but that doesn’t mean new ones won’t in the future.

Music discovery Spoon fed, courtesy Daytrotter

Do you ever become utterly gripped by just one song? This one song becomes your adopted theme tune of choice, pushing aside all other songs in your current consciousness. More than that, the song seems to be a perfectly apt soundtrack – a response, to just about everything that happens to be going on in your life. You literally can’t get the song out of your head and don’t want to, necessarily.

That’s happened to me very occasionally and it happened all last week. The song is by Spoon and it’s called “The Ghost of You Lingers”. It’s from their last album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, though I only just came across it.

This track has infected me. There’s something strangely compelling about it – the way it pulses nervously, urgently along (the keyboard on the track is used as a rhythm instrument, which is a sound I have always been attracted to). It’s experimental in structure, but melodic too – nearly all of the melody supplied by the vocal. I don’t think I could ever get bored of listening to this track. It is however, a bit menacing – it’s an anxiety trip – especially with some weird interference sound buzzing towards the end (this is what first caught me ear with the track).

The lyrics and the music could not be any more together. And the lyrics are to a pop song what Pinter prose is to a play. There’s something mysterious going on with this song. The singer’s voice is concerned, reflective. The lyrics are a riddle:

Put on a clinic till we hit the wall
Just like a sailor with his wounds being salted
Come on
I had a nightmare nothing could be put back together
Would you settle the score?
If you were here
Would you calm me down?
The ghost of you lingers
It lingers
And I always think about it

A little detailed so far I know, but stay with me. A little cursory interweb research unveils the impact on the world of “Ghost of You Lingers” and it is not insignificant. A (what looks like an unofficial art) video for the track is approaching 111k views on YouTube. But on the band’s current Myspace page, the track clocks up over 635k plays – and has over 470k on Last.fm - so plenty of web activity around this track.


Daytrotter - new music, timeless values

But I didn’t discover the track on these titans of web music real estate. I found it on Daytrotter.com. And Daytrotter has amazed me these past few weeks I can tell you. I first came across it after reading about it in Chris Salmon’s ‘Click-to-Download’ column in the Guardian’s Music & Film supplement.

The concept is beautifully simple. Band’s drop by The Horseshack studios in Rock Island, Illinois (while passing through on US tours) and record a 4-5 track session – usually new or recent material – sometimes un-released songs. The session tracks are offered as free MP3 downloads and the site itself is funded through banner advertising (it wouldn’t be right somehow for audio ads to be part of this set up).

Now I’m pretty late to this party. Daytrotter has been going since 2006 and with the frequency of one band every day, has amassed an impressive session archive – all of which is still available for download. I have been like a kid let loose at the pick ‘n mix counter the past couple of weeks raiding this archive. It’s hard to distinguish which sessions are best – that depends on your tastes. But if it’s any help at all, I have listed below my favourite ten songs I’ve been living with lately from the Daytrotter sessions, including the Spoon song.

[Btw, you'll have finished with the YouTube Spoon clip now, so click on the Daytrotter radio player on the right to stream Lonely Dear - number 2 in my Daytrotter session top ten].

I don’t often gush about individual music services on the JB blog so now to the justification to do so with Daytrotter. Daytrotter isn’t just another music blog. It’s done with such care, and so nicely wrapped in its own indie music ethos, it’s immediately attractive for fans of this type of music. And it’s sticky as hell - I just can’t stop dropping by on the site to see who has recorded a new session. It’s marvellous for real, lasting discovery and connection – I’ve found Spoon, Ingrid Michaelson and The Local Natives on there and I suspect I will listen to a lot more by each of them and many others.

The sessions themselves are quite something. I’m not really one for live session content, but something about the setting or the atmosphere or something definitely rubs off on the artists who record for Daytrotter. They seem to put in real performances and the sessions sound great – warm and capturing plenty of subtleties in the music – credit to both the artists and to the studio's sound engineers. These are so much better than your run-of-the-mill promo-circuit radio show sessions where the artist just shows up and plays with half their usual players or equipment and then have to suffer the DJ concluding with a cringe-worthy “that was just fantastic” (awkward moment of radio silence follows).

In short, the recordings made here are well worth the effort in downloading, listening and keeping. I’ve talked a lot in this blog about how the music industry desperately needs new content brands – nicely curated, edited and presented – in a way we the fans come to know, love and trust. I can think of very few that have so far emerged in the digital music space so far.

I wrote about Lost Tunes last month (which won a Music Week award last week, congratulations). I’ve featured Calabash-Mondomix as well. Pitchfork certainly qualifies these days as do a number of the more established music blogs (though these lack a substantial archive). Such music editorial brands are so few and far between however.

But Daytrotter is my new favourite music brand. I can’t see me getting bored of something so lovingly put together and superbly well executed. It’s so simple. Not only is the music great, but the editorial features written by founder Sean Moeller are briefly diverting and fun to read. A strong voice that’s never dull, and sure does justice to its quirky and individual subjects. The other aspects to the site work fine too – a radio player, some video, a cartoon strip, a merch shop. And it’s all beautifully signatured by Johnie Cluney’s highly attractive artwork. Everything about it smacks of an effortless (and perhaps even accidental) focus.

And in this focus is a great model for all of the endless technology-driven music services that show up week in week out and mostly, depart quietly sometime later by the rear exit. Being a valid, lasting contributor to the changing face of music discovery doesn’t have to mean a gargantuan library with all the music ever made, or the latest whizz bang recommendation engine that can rip that library apart with an algorithm.

Put some thought into it. Think about your audience, think about your artists, and think about how you can add real value to their needs in connecting. Word of mouth will do much of the rest.

I’d love to see Daytrotter move up to a gallop, perhaps syndicating its content onto the bigger music or ISP platforms so desperate for character development. But the Daytrotter crew aren’t as consumed by ambition as I am. By e-mail I asked Sean Moeller what his longer-term ambitions for the service are. His response was “long term goals are just to continue doing what we're doing really”. Once again, focus.

My top ten digital tracks from the sizeable archive:

1. Spoon. “The Ghost of You Lingers”.
2. Lonely Dear. “I Was Only Going Out”. (embedded for your listening pleasure).
3. The Maccabees. “Precious Time”.
4. The Local Natives. “Airplanes”.
5. Aimee Mann. “Little Tornadoes”.
6. Spanish Prisoners. “Mantequilla”.
7. Ingrid Michaelson. “Breakable”.
8. Death Cab For Cutie. “Styrofoam Cup”.
9. Foals. “Jam (Figure#3)”.
10. Deerhunter. “Dr. Glass”.