heute:pop:blog.  

If you read my blog or you follow me on twitter you might have noticed that the transmission: GLOBAL SUMMIT in Victoria last week has not only been taking up a lot of my time but also a large part of my ‘mental capacity’ since late last year. And this is a good thing.

Last week we got 150 leaders and thinker from the Creative Industries together and managed to produced an event that seems to have been not only inspiring also highly enjoyable. Even though I have attended and spoken at many conferences over the years I had never been involved so closely in organizing one. So I can honestly say that I’m not used the the sense of achievment I feel when I watch the video below. All this was taking on the 10th and 11th February in Victoria and I think it speaks for itself.

Next up: Beijing.

transmission: GLOBAL SUMMIT 2011 from transmitNOW on Vimeo.

Only a few weeks left until the transmission event in Victoria, BC and for everyone who is joining us (or thinking about coming over) we put together this short video to provide a snapshot of what’s going to happen in February. I’m really looking forward to this event, we already have a lot of great companies attending and amazing speakers confirmed. Hope to see you there!

transmission: GLOBAL SUMMIT 2011 from transmitNOW on Vimeo.

Full disclosure (in case it’s not obvious): transmission and transmitNOW are a client of mine.

After talking all day about digital content consumption I find these kind of videos very inspirational. Reminds me that the delivery technology is not important but just the experience itself:

Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer – Public Reactions from Visual Editions on Vimeo.

A lot of the work I am doing right now is around digital books so this video is very inspiring. Reading a text such as a book is a very simple, linear and engaging user experience so many of the ideas mentioned below cannot be called a book any more. “Text-based information and entertainment apps” maybe?

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

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.

I’m happy to announce my involvement with the start-up Gigulate, a music news aggregator based in London, UK. I will help them with Business Development out of North America.

The full music experience is more than about recordings. Although the actual ‘audio’ part is often the focus point, music as an art-form is much more complex: only by adding up things like the social experience of music, the relationship with the artist, visuals around the music and live gigs you can make music complete. One of the other aspects that are important is news about artists you like. Being a fan is about enjoying the music as much as observing the musicians and following the journey that leads to the audio output and live performances.

With the amount of user-generated and professional journalistic work on the web there currently isn’t shortage of news. Unfortunately this increased choice of stories leads to an exponentially increased difficulty to find the items you’re after and services that manage the information on the web have not only been hugely successful but vital for our daily online life.

Many music fans will have a few trusted sources for their music related news but I always felt that finding stories about my favourite artists was a lot of work, especially with my diverse music taste. There are too many sites to check if I want to be up-to-date on what’s happening around the musicians I follow and tools like RSS and Twitter only increased the amount of information I would have to go through.

Gigulate solves this problem for me. Not only will Gigulate check thousands of sources for music related news but it personalises this for me based on my Last.fm profile or artists in my iTunes library. This feature might be in its infancy right now but has already been proven very useful for me.

I’m also very impressed with Gigulate’s ability to recognize that a piece of news is related to a certain artist and to work out that two separate news-pieces are about the same story by just analyzing the content.

Without a doubt, Gigulate still has a long way to go and I’m excited to be part of it. I will mainly be working on developing partnerships, both commercial and strategical, which help music fans as well as the music industry to navigate through the large amounts of music news on the internet.

I’m excited to be in New York for our next OpenMusicMedia night on the 7th July. We will be joined by Alex White from Next Big Sound to talk about music related metrics. This is a copy of my post on the OpenMusicMedia blog:

The recording industry has always been more obsessive about metrics than other entertainment areas: music charts have been a vital tool not only to measure success of songs and albums but also to act as a marketing tool for record sales.

Over the last few years we see a lot of new services that focus their business on collecting and aggregating more accurate and detailed music data. The internet has enabled those services to get access to richer data sets than the pre-web sales driven charts such as popularity and discussion around artists.

In the second OpenMusicMedia NYC we want to discuss how those companies can (or maybe cannot) help the music industry to make better decision. Questions we want to address include:

• How important is more detailed data for the music industry?
• Does an obsession with numbers and statistics stop companies from taking risks and therefore stop innovation?
• Collecting data from different websites and displaying those seems straight forward – but what about interpreting them?

We have invited Alex White from Next Big Sound to lead the conversation and guide us through some of the issues of music related data aggregation. As always, this will not be a presentation but an open conversation between everyone in the room with Alex leading what could almost be called a round table discussion.

Moderating for the event will be Jonas Woost, co-founder of OpenMusicMedia as well as the former Head of Music at Last.fm. Jonas joins us from from his new home in Vancouver, where he is setting up a media consultancy business. Our co-moderator is Steve Savoca, global head of digital business for Domino Records and producer of OpenMusicMedia NYC.

We will meet on the 7th July at reRun and the event is free and open to everyone. However we would appreciate if you could RSVP on our facebook page. We look forward to seeing you there!

OpenMusicMedia NYC
Wednesday, July 7
at reRun (part of reBar, 147 Front St, 2nd Fl in DUMBO, 11201, New York, NY)
7-9 PM
Map: http://bit.ly/9VqMoh

Please RSVP on our facebook group.