Futurelab, the Brussels-based marketing and strategy innovation company (not to be confused with NESTA Futurelab in the UK), are now syndicating some of the articles from this blog on their site — see their announcement today. Futurelab’s blog assembles the best articles from a group of fifteen bloggers (so far; I am the most recent […]
Month: May 2006
Groups and behaviour patterns among music listeners
Not all music listeners and digital consumers are the same. It’s an obvious thing to say, but in what ways do they differ? Are there any groups or patterns of behaviour among them? Youth subcultures are well known. Is it just my London perspective, or do people in the UK revel in the finer points […]
A clutch of future-gazing events to plug
First is the b.TWEEN 06 forum of future entertainment, coming at the end of this week (25 and 26 May) in Bradford. The programme covers pioneering cross-platform work that straddles art and commerce. Sadly I can’t make it this year, but I enjoed the 02002 event, and aim to be there next year. I will […]
Behaviour patterns in collecting music and video
I’m looking at patterns in how people collect different media, and how collecting relates to repeat listening/viewing/using. In the UK, estimates of the average number of CDs in a collection vary between 126 and 178 for men, 135 for women. Are there any similar figures for DVDs or games, or for US markets? I’m still […]
Book announcement: Net, Blogs and Rock’n’Roll
People have access to vastly more music, video and other entertainment than ten years ago. In the case of music, record companies are releasing twice as many new albums per year. Not only that, but some are ‘rescuing’ old and deleted tracks for release in the digital marketplace. So how do people find out about […]
Aggregating the non-music stuff about music
The MusicStrands Labs seem to have a good head of steam at the moment: it’s worth keeping an eye on their blog. The recent announcement that caught my eye was their music-related content discovery (we need a better term for this!) mash-up. The thumbnail on the right (click it to enlarge) shows the Wikipedia entry, […]
Spoofing music recommendation services and personalised radio
Music recommendation services and personalised radio stations like Last.FM depend on tracking the behaviour and preferences of their users, and building personal profiles on the basis of this. So what happens if the data you feed into these services isn’t a human’s preferences, but something else, like the programming of a traditional radio station or […]
Experimental prototype of BBC Programme Catalogue
I missed this at first in the slew of announcements about the BBC Creative Future initiative, but last week the BBC launched an ‘experimental prototype’ of its programme catalogue, comprising details of nearly a million programmes (here’s the relevant press release). Tom Loosemore from the Beeb spoke about this at an event I attended last […]
Celestial jukebox moves a little closer?
It’s supported by ads, you can only play tracks five times, the tracks are streamed (not downloaded) and of modest quality, and (most significantly for me) it only works in the US, but apart from that, the free Napster service — launched today — is the closest thing yet to the vision of a ‘celestial […]