There’s a pivotal scene in University of Death where the muso-technology geek at the heart of the story struggles to persuade the venal record industry boss to buy-in to a groundbreaking new scheme that will change the industry forever. To accomplish this, the geek plays the boss a new composition, which has been engineered to […]
Future of Music
Fighting cultural surplus: a review of Bill Drummond’s 17
When Brian Eno released his Generative Music 1 album — music that is created ‘on the fly’ by a computer following a set of rules that Eno programmed, released on floppy disk, and now virtually unplayable on any current hardware — he wrote “I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at […]
The Age of the Free MP3 Player
This is the season where many bloggers are providing their predictions for the year ahead. I tend to opt out of these because a year is both too long and too short to foresee many types of change, which are like rainstorms or earthquakes: you know one’s coming, but you don’t know quite when or […]
Net, Blogs and Rock’n’Roll is published
My book is out in the UK. If you buy it from Amazon.co.uk, you’ll make me happy. If you can add to the reviews for the book, you’ll make me even happier. I believe the book is out imminently, if not already, in the US as well — based on the Amazon.com page, where you […]
Just what the world needs: another music wiki
I checked the Alexa traffic ranking for this site last week, and it’s down 60% in the last three months… I will be emerging properly from hibernation in a couple of weeks, and livening things up around here. In the meantime, does anyone know what happened (or is happening) to Napster’s Narchive (this link doesn’t […]
Soundflavor moves into music recommendation client software
Soundflavor is the latest playlist sharing service to move beyond just their sharing community (see my review) to offer a software download that plugs into iTunes to recommend playlists. The download is called Soundflavor DJ™, and you can download it here. I haven’t been able to try the software yet as it’s only available for […]
UK survey of digital music and discovery
I’m posting here a duplicate of something that first appeared on my Net, Blogs and Rock’n’Roll book blog, just as a reminder to regular readers that, if postings here appear to be thin on the ground, it’s worth checking there as well. What I’d like to do is provide an RSS feed for the two […]
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 […]
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 […]