heute:pop:blog.  

1. Frontier Ruckus ‘Orion Town 2′
2. Tvärvägen ‘September’
3. Sigur Ros ‘Íllgresi’
4. Doi ‘Missing’
5. Jacob Borshard ‘Hello Piero’
6. Antony & The Johnsons ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’
7. Ida Maria ‘Sweet About Me’
8. M83 ‘Kim & Jessie’
9. The Decemberists ‘Shiny’
10. The Antlers ‘Two’
11. Willy Mason ‘Oxygen’
12. Kimya Dawson ‘Tire Swing’
13. Manchester Orchestra ‘I Can Feel A Hot One’

You can listen to all this here.

I would love to play this song on my show but I can find the mp3 so I just post it here instead: be sure to check out the video below - the song is called ‘September’ by Tvärvägen, a “one-man-orchestra, consisting of Henrik Öhberg”.

Just beautiful stuff. You’re suppose to be able to download this track here but it didn’t work for me today.

Tvärvägen - September from Henrik Ohberg on Vimeo.

Even though it’s not my area of expertise, I always follow news from the digital movie industry. I’m very interested in how it is dealing with the change in distribution technologies and viewer habits as they can (hopefully) learn a few things from the digital music industry.

I think it’s safe to say that the movie industry has always been a little bit behind the music industry in regards to digitalization just because the speed of people’s internet connections is still improving with time. When I first downloaded an mp3 on Napster it would have been impossible to download a 600mb movie, it would have taken a week to download.

So I thought this was good news: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is the latest content owners that licensing they catalogue (or parts of it) to YouTube for full length advertising supported streaming.

With advertising funded music streaming being big news in 2008 it just makes sense that the movie owners do deals that allow viewers to watch full length movies online and be exposed to advertising on sites like YouTube.

There is the big difference though between full length audio and video streaming: watching a movie on the computer seems to be much more ‘natural’ than listening to a track in front of the screen. The fact that you sit in front of a monitor to watch a piece of audio/visual content is something you are of course used to; you do the same in front of the TV. So going to YouTube and watch something is in a way like watching a DVD (turn on the machine and press a few buttons).

Listening to music online does not come as natural: it has only been in recent years that you would sit in front of a screen to then listen to a piece of music. There is a disconnect there, why would you want to look at something if you want to listen to a piece of audio?

We are of course all being ‘re-educated’ in regards to how we consume media and the difference mentioned above might not be relevant in a few years but it makes me very optimistic in how advertising supported movie streaming will perform over the next few years. Hang on, ‘ad supported movie streaming’? Sounds like plain old TV…

1. The Decemberists ‘Shiny’
2. The Miserable Rich ‘Over And Over’
3. The Antlers ‘Two‘
4. Blackbird Harmony ‘Hello’
5. Wild Sweet Orange ‘Ten Dead Dogs’
6. Bat For Lashes ‘Sweet Dreams’
7. The Faint ‘The Conductor’ (Thin White Duke Remix)
8. Seelenluft ‘Manila’
9. Dani Siciliano ‘Come As You Are’
10. Guru ‘Trust Me’
11. Manchester Orchestra ‘I Can Feel A Hot One’
12. Daniel Martin Moore ‘By Dream’

You can listen to all this here.

Found this on hypebot and just love it: With Smule you can turn your iPhone into a wind instrument. I don’t have an iPhone (not compatible with our work emails) but things like this will probably not be available for my Blackberry any time soon. The new Storm looks like a great phone but Blackberrys just don’t have that fun element to it - whenever I have the Blackberry Curve in my hand it feels like work.

EDIT: I was just reminded by Muz that this is an ocarina and not a flute. Thanks.

This is a blog post I wrote for the Last.fm blog, head over there if you want to join the discussion:

With the Artist Royalty Program we wanted to solve a crucial problem. Since we started in 2002 we had licensed music from various ‘content owners’ (major and indie labels as well as digital music distribution companies), and we also paid money to collections societies all over the world. But there were certain artists and labels losing out: those who do not have access to all the above, or chose not to be part of this traditional music industry network.

The process to solve this started with two goals. First, we wanted to continue to be an effective promotional platform for all artists, a place where we could connect music makers with new fans. (Our recommendations are key to achieving this: an artist on Last.fm doesn’t have to keep reaching out to people, as our system will automatically find new music for everyone based on their existing music taste.) Secondly, we wanted to build a fair system that shared Last.fm’s revenue with those artists. In this way, as Last.fm grows, the commercial success that comes with that will be shared with all music makers, of whatever stripe.

After months of research, discussion and technical development, we launched our Artist Royalty Program at the beginning of July. From then on, artists and labels that opted into the program started accruing royalties (if their music was being played on the site, of course). Last Friday we finished the final part of this work, and have published royalty reports to all artists, and will now automatically do so every three months. And for the first time we could actually see ourselves how our royalties were being distributed between all artists and labels.

First of all, I saw something that was not surprising: there are many labels that will collect a small amount of royalties and some who collect a lot. The Long Tail never fails. Then I was looking through the labels that were the top earners and I made some interesting discoveries: there were plenty of labels in there that I had never heard of. I was surprised but equally pleased that some (what I would call niche) content owners used Last.fm to find their audience through our recommendation system, and were able to do this successfully. We have been saying for years that Last.fm can work very well for less well-known artists – since our recommendation system will find fans even for the most obscure artist – and now we have some very hard proof for that.

There are now 85,000 artists and labels collecting royalties from us directly and this number is rising steadily. And of course I want to mention: if you make music too you can join right now.

1. The Avalanches ‘Since I Left You’
2. Lali Puna ‘Nin-Com-Pop’
3. Frightened Rabbit ‘Old Old Fashioned’
4. The Antlers ‘Two’
5. Daniel Martin Moore ‘Stray Age’
6. Blair ‘Hello Halo’
7. The Chap ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’
8. School Of Seven Bells ‘Connjur’
9. MGMT ‘Kids’ (We Dont Care EP Version)
10. Manchester Orchestra ‘I Can Feel A Hot One’
11. Ivana XL ‘The King’
12. Chad VanGaalen ‘Willow Tree’
13. Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire ‘Voice in Headphones’
14. Sigur Ros ‘Gobbledigook’

You can listen to all this here.

Might be a little bit off-topic but I really wanted to share this video by Reza Dolatabadi. He produced more than 6000 paintings over two years and put them together for this five minute short film. Just great:

Khoda from Reza Dolatabadi on Vimeo.

photo by bungalowbrian

For a few years now ‘ad supported’ have been the big buzz words within the digital music industry and many new companies that are using recorded music have their business model based on the fact that they will become very popular and then ’sell the attention’ of their users to advertisers. This is not a bad business model and for TV and commercial radio this is very sustainable and has been for many years.

The problem is at the moment that the online advertising market is not as developed as the more traditional markets which essentially means that advertisers do not spend enough money online to actually sustain all the new businesses that are starting up. One other thing to keep in mind is that licensing recorded music is a very expensive business and one has to sell a lot of ads to get a profit out of it.

Now we might have something called ‘recession’. Even though it’s impossible to predict what is going to happen next year it now looks like the online ad market might not be growing as much as hoped, in fact it might be getting smaller as big brands cut back on their marketing spending. If you run an online music service right now it might be very tricky for you to make enough money through advertising next year. This makes me think that a lot of businesses might be looking at subscriptions again and to see if this is a better model for them to be able to pay the rent next month.

What we have to keep in mind is that advertising and subscriptions have been the two big income sources for the media sector for many years and just because the medium is going digital this is not going to change. Often media owners combine the two (I have to pay for my magazine subscription and will see ads in there) and this will continue to happen online.

The ‘freemium’ model (where the service is free but you have to pay for extras) seems to be successful for some companies like Flickr whereby others might be focusing on subscription only services. If you know who your audience is that this can make a lot of sense. Looking at the new Soundcloud service for example you can see that they want to focus on professional music makers only and see them as their customers (even though they have a free service too).

I have the feeling that the (potentially) tough advertising market next year will make companies think twice about who they want as their paying customers: advertisers or their users.

1. The Great Northwest ‘Chief John’
2. Her Space Holiday ‘Sleepy Tigers’
3. Horse Feathers ‘Finch On Sunday’
4. Chad VanGaalen ‘Willow Tree’
5. The Dodos ‘Winter’
6. Greg Weeks ‘Borderline’
7. Euros Childs ‘Farm Hand Murder’
8. Manchester Orchestra ‘I Can Feel A Hot One’
9. Ivana XL ‘The King’
10. Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire ‘Voice in Headphones’
11. Nic Bommarito ‘Song For Runner-Up’
12. Boo And Boo Too ‘No Tempo’
13. Maps & Atlases ‘Artichokes’
14. Daft Punk ‘Human After All’ (SebastiAn Remix)
15. Talking Heads ‘Psycho Killer’ (live at Sun Palace, Tokyo 1981)

You can listen to all this here.

As mentioned in my show:

• Find more information on Wichita here: www.wichita-recordings.com
• This is my Twitter feed, follow me to find out what I’m up. You will also get notified when there is a new show online
• Find out more about podcasts and rss.