I add one new song each day and so when you listen to fredwilson.fm, you are listening to my favorite songs (mostly new stuff that I find on the web) in reverse chronological order. That's it. Pretty simple and very easy for me to program.

As Internet radio services go, fredwilson.fm is tiny. It averages around sixty listeners per day and gets around 1,300 visitors per month.

Fredwilson.fm is a perfect example of nanomedia. The service has a tiny audience and will never amount to anything other than a hobby of mine. There may be some hardcore fans of fredwilson.fm, but they are measured in the tens, certainly less than a hundred. It will never be a commercial property. It will never run advertising.

So it's easy to ignore services like this. And many do. But those who do miss a very important point about nanomedia. Each service in its own right is borderline meaningless. But the aggregation of all of these nanomedia services are a big deal.

My friend John Borthwick and I were interviewed by Seth Goldstein a few weeks back at his social media bootcamp. The video of that interview is here. I asserted then that "the aggregation of all of this social media is the greatest media that has ever been created."

Let's keep looking at music blogging (which is what powers fredwilson.fm). My stream and your stream and your friend's stream might not get much of an audience. But when you combine them all together as the Hype Machine, elbo.ws, and We Are Hunted have done, you get music services which start to amass sizeable audiences.

On the open web, services get built on top of services. Fredwilson.fm is built on top of Tumblr and Streampad. Hype Machine and Elbo.ws are built on top of services like fredwilson.fm. As we move up the aggregation stack, we start to assemble larger audiences. And then a song like the Velvet Underground song, Pale Blue Eyes, I posted to fredwilson.fm a while back can get more plays (1505 as of right now) than the total number of visits fredwilson.fm gets each month.

The new media is a disaggregated medium, where the channels themselves may be small but the microchunks that flow out of them can be very large. And that's why nanomedia is important.

Since then, the RAA have taken off, signed a label deal, and are touring around the US and Canada this summer. I am so glad to see it. They write great songs and deserve this success.

As part of the re-release of their record Hometowns on Saddle Creek (their new label), the band also wants to make a vinyl 7" re-recording of two of their songs; Frank AB and Deadroads.

Frank, AB

The Deadroads

So they turned to a cool new website called Kickstarter, where anyone can go and request help funding a project they are passionate about. Kind of like Donors Choose for everything.

The RAA is raising $5,000 to fund the production of the 7". Here's the Kickstarter widget explaining why they want to do this and soliciting your contribution to help them make it a reality. I've given $50 and hope all you RAA fans out there join me in making this happen for them and for us.

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There's some debate about whether this is "real". I hope it is because I see a new art form emerging here.

Looks like it's happening even sooner than I thought. Thanks to Jen Robinson for the tip.

It was a proud moment for me, because if there is one thing I hope to pass onto my children, it's the notion that there is no singular truth.

I was at a dinner last week where much of the NYC digerati (young and old) were assembled in a lovely apartment on the upper east side. After dinner but before dessert, the hosts initiated a discussion of the obsession of the moment: whither media. At one point, the argument came out that we need journalism to surface the truth. At which point, I sort of lost my composure and argued loudly that there is no truth.

There used to be a mantra at the upper right of this blog. I can't remember what it said exactly, but the gist of it was that there is no absolute truth, just your truth and my truth. I post my truth here everyday and I hope you'll drop by and share your truth with me.

This is the promise of social media. It's revolutionary. When you give every citizen in the world a printing press, you ought to expect revolution. And it is upon us.

I loved this paragraph in NY Mag's piece on Twitter which is in the current issue:

"His is a culture of sharing information" No, that is not his culture. That is our culture. That's where we are because every single one of us has a printing press in our hands at all times. I do understand that not everyone on this planet has a cell phone with a camera and an internet connection, but you get my point.

We've moved past the time when big institutions controlled what we read, what we thought, and what we believed. And we are arriving at a new place where each and everyone of us will report on our world and share it with others. Sharing is the new truth.

Sunday night the Grammys told us that Robert Plant and Allison Krauss made the record of the year. That's fine. That's their opinion. Mine is different. I believe that Okkervil River made the record of the year last year. But you know that because I published that opinion on this very blog in December of last year. Compare the Grammys to the Hype Machine's Music Zeitgest and you'll see what the old world looks like and what the new world looks like.

If you want to hear some good new music, it's hard to find it on radio. I just went to KRock's website and looked at the most recent songs they played. There's not one new song (that came out in the past year) in the most recent ten songs. It's all stuff that was popular years ago. Compare that to fredwilson.fm. On my radio station, we play new music. In fact, the music is so new on fredwilson.fm that I should be getting take down notices because half of the most recent ten songs have not even been released yet. And of the other half of the most recent ten, only one song is old and one more is a live cover.

How does fredwilson.fm get programmed? Sharing, of course. Each day I share one mp3 on my tumblog. fredwilson.fm just pulls all those posts together and plays them in a stream in reverse chronological order. Today, I'm sharing a track from a new band of teenagers from NYC called Care Bears On Fire. This brings me to my next point. I've got a vested interest in Care Bears' success (which I disclose in that post I linked to).

We all have vested interests and social media allows us to promote them to each other. That vested interest could be economic (like my interest in Care Bears) or it could be political (like my posts in support of Obama last fall) or it could be familial (like my reblogs of Gotham Gal's recipes or Jessica's photography).

My partner Brad once asked his nephew why he preferred sports blogs to the sports sections in the newspaper. His nephew said "everyone has a point of view but with blogs, they are upfront about it". Indeed. I'm a Jets, Mets, and Knicks fan. That's the lens through which I view the sports world, sadly.

This culture of sharing is not limited to the written word. Log into Boxee and you'll see a screen that looks like this.

The very first thing you see when you log into Boxee are the recommendations from your friends on Boxee. Facebook's user interface is coming to your TV sometime soon. It's not going to be about what NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, or anyone else wants you to watch. It's going to be about what your friends are watching. It always has been about that but we just haven't had the TV interfaces that recognize that.

There I go again, talking about my vested interests (our firm has an investment in Boxee). That's my truth.

I've got to end this post because I need to turn it into a presentation I can deliver at SocComm in about three hours. So I'll end this post by linking out to a couple of other truths out there on the issues I've covered here.

For those readers who came out, we got to hang out with the band before and after the show and were treated to a fantastic set. The only bummer was Fraser did not get to hear his favorite track off the new record, called In The Summertime. The band promised to play it when they are back in NYC next friday in Brooklyn at Union Hall.

Here's a shot of the band at work.

There's just three of them, Nils is the lead singer/guitar/piano, Amy (who emailed me to start this whole thing off) plays a bunch of fun instruments and sings backup, and Paul is a crazy good drummer. They make a much bigger sound than you'd think. Here's the first song of theirs I ever heard. Click on the first play button, not the second one.

The Ballad of the RAA - The Rural Alberta Advantage

At the end of the show, instead of an encore, the band walked out into the middle of the audience and sang a song called Goodbye. You'll probably see a few AVC community members in this photo. Too bad we can't all tag ourselves in it.

It all started when I was coming back from getting bagels in the morning and listening to Animal Collective's For Reverend Green

I thought to myself that Animal Collective's lead singer Avey Tare is pretty good at the primal scream and then I started to think about other great primal screamers, like Caleb Followill of Kings Of Leon, and of course, John Lennon. So I twittered the thought:

i love lead singers who've mastered the primal scream like caleb followhill, avey tare and john lennon. any others?

And I literally got dozens of replies which you can see in this set of search results going back to yesterday morning.

So I decided to make a "primal scream" playlist on 8tracks which I did yesterday afternoon and this morning. I wish I could embed it, but I can't. If you click on this link, you'll be taken to 8tracks where you can listen to it.

During the process of building the primal scream playlist, I suggested to all the people sending me suggestions on twitter that they go to fredwilson.fm and upload additional tracks for the playlist to the soundcloud dropbox that I have on fredwilson.fm. A bunch of people did that and I've included two tracks so far that I got that way.

So basically we collaborated on this playlist and are still doing so because I am still getting suggestions of tracks to add. The best ones are going to get added to the playlist.

But this collaboration required a lot of "overhead" and three different web services, twitter, 8tracks, and soundcloud.

It would be great if we could use one or more of these playlisting services in "group" mode and easily collaborate on playlists. Sharing music is one of the great uses of the internet but sharing can work two ways and I'd love to see someone enable that.

I mainly blog music to share it with the people who read this blog and my tumblog. I love new music and discovering it and sharing it. And there are a ton of people I know who share this love of music blogging and they are constantly turning me onto new music. It's like we've recreated the dynamic we had in our college dorms when we would take turns putting vinyl records on the turntable.

But there's another reason I love music blogging. From time to time, I actually hear from the artists themselves. I've never stopped being a fan. When I get to meet musicians, I am always like the little kid pinching themselves wtih disbelief. I'm a groupie and proud of it.

Back at the end of last year, I was tipped off by a blog reader named Luke to a band called The Rural Alberta Advantage. I blogged some of their music at fredwilson.vc and you can listen to a bunch more of it at the Hype Machine. And I gave the record honorable mention on my top ten records of 2008 post.

This morning I picked up an email from Amy, one of the three band members:

Hi Fred,

It's Amy from the Rural Alberta Advantage here...I just wanted to send a belated THANK YOU for putting us on your Honourable Mention list for your Top Records of 2008!  We received an email out of the blue from someone saying "just a heads-up that one of the most popular websites on the internet gave you a shout-out"!  and directing us to your site. So awesome! We really can't believe how many people have heard our record now. It's a pretty exciting feeling to know that almost every day we're going to be hearing from someone else, from a place we've never played, talking about our songs. So thank you for helping us get our record out there!

I also wanted to invite you to come see us play in New York City (our first time out of Canada!) - we're playing at a place called Piano's NYC (on the lower east side of Manhattan) on Tuesday, January 27th. Then we are 99% for sure playing again in Brooklyn at Union Hall on Friday, February 6th.

Thanks again for listening Fred, and hope to see you on the 27th! (or the 6th!)

Cheers,
--AMY

Now how freakin awesome is that? A thank you note and an invitation to come see them play their first gig in NYC. Of course, I'll be there at the Piano's show, along with the Gotham Gal. Tickets are $8, so if you like their music as much as I do and you live in NYC, you should come too. And while you are at it, get the record, called Hometowns.

As a bonus, I am doing something I rarely do these days. Here's an mp3 of my favorite track on the record:

Edmonton - Rural Alberta Advantage - Hometowns

The Hype Machine is the Rolling Stone of our time - defining, interpreting and pushing culture. http://bit.ly/xuJt

I don't want to belittle what Rolling Stone was in terms of defining and interpreting culture. It's impact was much greater than music. In fact, I think it's political work in the age of Hunter Thompson and Richard Nixon was among its finest moments. And I don't mean to insult Rolling Stone by writing this in the past tense, but honestly it stopped meaning anything to me about 25 years ago.

But in this day and age, when you want to know what's happening in the music scene, you log onto the Hype Machine and see what's going down. It's participatory culture at it's finest. The Hype Machine is not programmed, it's a smart aggregator, like Techmeme or Real Clear Politics. The Hype Machine goes out and crawls the music blogs and figures out what's getting blogged the most and then pulls that together onto a single page so you can listen and link out and go check things out.

I've been obsessed with the Hype Machine for years and readers of this blog will certainly be well aware of my fondness for the service. I check it every day to see what's happening. But it's greatest strength is when I am tired of what I am listening to and want something new. Pat McCarthy said it yesterday on twitter:

Yes, Hype Machine is great.  Anytime I'm tired of whatever I'm listening to I go to the popular page to find something new.

The cool thing is that's how the Hype Machine was formed. Anthony was tired of what he was listening to and wanted to find something new. So he built a crawler of music blogs and the rest is history. Like many of the best web services, the Hype Machine is a low cost lean and mean operation. It's built and maintained by just four people; Anthony, Taylor, Zoya, and Scott.

There are many web music services with more users than the Hype Machine.

But none of the other web music services (imeem, playlist, pandora, last.fm, jango, blip.fm, lala, 8tracks, myspace music, fredwilson.fm, .....) do what Josh so nicely articulated. The Hype Machine defines music culture.

And I'm telling you all this as a prelude to the big point. Team Hype Machine has launched The Music Blog Zeitgeist 2008. Each day this week, they'll release the names of ten artists and ten albums that collectively make up the top 50. And they are also showcasing the top 50 songs by month.

They've also teamed up with Blog Fresh Radio to produce a radio show featuring all of this music. I'm listening now and so can you.

The Hype Machine is small, influential, and profitable. It doesn't take a lot of revenue to cover their costs and they are the model of a bootstrapped, scrappy, and useful web service. I love the Hype Machine and think they killed it with the music blog zeitgeist this year.

Here's what I did with it in about 2 minutes. I hope you like it.

And here's my 8tracks page, where my other mix is also listed.

Every year since I started this blog, I have listed my top 10 records of the year on this blog and this year will be no different. But I am not going to generate a new post every day for ten days like I've done in the past. I've actually been doing that on my tumblog for the past two weeks and if you are an active reader of that or an active listener of fredwilson.fm, then you already know what is on the list.

This year, I'll do a single blog post with all the selections in it. So without further ado, here's the list:

1) The Stand-Ins - Okkervil River. This record is the back end of a two part effort that started with The Stage Names last year. Many people feel they should have released them both as a double album. You might ask,"why is this your number one record this year and yet The Stage Names didn't even make your list last year?" Well like Kings Of Leon last year, this band snuck up on me and I got into them a bit late. I like both records equally but this is a 2008 release and so it gets on the list. Okkervil is the band of the year for me and this is the record of the year even though my personal favorite of everything they've done is the Golden Opportunities Mixtape that they've never really even released commercially. If you don't get this band, you are like I was until this year, you just aren't trying hard enough.

2). Oracular Spectacular - MGMT. From the opening of Time To Pretend to the line 15 seconds later about going to paris shooting heroin and fucking stars, you know this is going to be a fun ride. And it is. This record got more play in our family than any other this year. I am not sure who loves it most, but its likely to be my younger daughter or my son. Its not a family record by any means, its not even age appropriate for my son. But that has never gotten in the way of appreciating art in our family and this record is art, created by two young kids just out of Wesleyan. Listening to it makes me feel their age and that's a good thing.

3) Here's To Being Here - Jason Collett. The first of two solo projects on this list. Jason's from Broken Social Scene, a personal favorite of mine, but honestly this record is better than anything they've ever done. Jason's put out something that sounds like what a late 60s/early 70s folk-rock record would sound like if it was made today. I listened to this record non-stop this summer. Its not in heavy rotation anymore but when I do put it back on, I can sing along to the entire record and I probably always will be able to do that. Its a fun, easy, rocking record and its great.

4) For Emma Forever Ago - Bon Iver. If Jason Collett got me through the summer, Bon Iver got me through last winter. This record was made in a cabin in the northern woods the previous winter and it sounds like its still coming from there. Its getting cold again in NYC, and its time to make a hot cup of tea, curl up on the couch under a blanket, and put Bon Iver on.

5) We Brave Bee Stings And All - Thao. I discovered Thao as I was coming out of my Bon Iver phase and she literally pulled me out of it. Thao is a young asian woman with a wonderful voice and light quirky songs. The Gotham Gal bought into Thao bigtime and this record was a constant in our family room/kitchen for most of this year.

6) Little Joy - Little Joy. The second solo project on my top 10 list. This comes from Fabrizio Moretti, the Strokes' drummer. I haven't really loved anything the Strokes have done since their first record but I sure do love this record. It is a little joy. And its not as much a solo project as a collaboration between three friends. I can imagine them sitting around the porch playing these songs and deciding to record them. It reminds me a lot of Ry Cooder's Paradise and Lunch and David Lindley's El Rayo Ex, two other little joys of mine

7) Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend. I remember late last year my oldest daughter played me a few Vampire Weekend tracks she'd found on hype machine. She said 'this is my new favorite band'. And so it was and it became our family's favorite band for a good while. One of the musical highlights of the year was going with the whole family to see Vampire Weekend at an outdoor music festival in Paris this summer. We knew all the songs and could sing all the words. So did all the parisian kids too

8) Only By The Night - Kings Of Leon. Another musical highlight from our time in Paris was the KOL show we saw at Le Zenith. MGMT opened but I got everyone on the wrong metro train and we ended up only seeing KOL. Oh well. I think I've finally lived that down. They were playing a few songs from the new record this summer but I didn't hear it in its full incarnation until this fall. This record has been trashed by Pitchfork and others as a sellout. Its clearly an attempt to reach a mainstream audience and inherit U2's throne at the top of anthem rock. I don't like it as much as Aha Shake Heartbreak but then I don't think any record made this decade beats Aha Shake Heartbreak. Only By The Night features the best singing of Caleb's short but brilliant career and the songs are catchy and good. It may be mainstream but I still like it better than most of what I heard this year.

9) Volume One - She and Him. M Ward is one of my favorite musicians working today. When I heard he'd teamed up with the beautiful and sweet Zoe Deschanel to make a record, I was curious and a bit baffled. But the result came out great. The gruff Matt and the sweet Zoe made a perfect pairing and like Jack White did a few years back with Loretta Lynn, M Ward made sure the songs came out great. This one's a real gem.

10) Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust - Sigur Ros. This was a late bloomer for me. The record came out late summer but I didn't get into it until the past month. Sigur Ros is mood music and I guess I needed to get into the right mood. I did and this record delivered more Sigur Ros wonderfulness. If you like them, get this record.

There are six other records that I seriously considered for the top 10. So here's the Honorable Mention list:

Conor Oberst – Conor Oberst. Really tough call. Deserved to be on the top 10 list but couldn't figure out who to cut to get it there.

Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes Will absolutely be on Gotham Gal's list. It would easily be on our "most listens in our family room/kitchen list". Great record.

Konk - Kooks. My son's favorite band. I am very partial to them too. This one has great songs but isn't as good as their debut. The lead singer Luke is one of the most talented songwriters out there right now.

Consolers Of The Lonely - Raconteurs. Three or four great songs. If it were more consistent, it would have made top 10. Jack White is a guitar god.

Hometowns - The Rural Alberta Advantage. This one was suggested to me by a fellow tumbler who saw I was putting a top 10 list together last week. I bought the record that very day (on emusic, not on Amazon yet) and have been obsessed with it since. If I had more time with it, it might have made the list. My oldest daughter describes them as Decemberists meet Neutral Milk Hotel. I describe them as awesome.

That's it. I hope you like the list and I also hope that you click on those links and buy some music. And if you'd like to listen first, go to fredwilson.fm. I've been posting nothing but songs from these records for the past week and a half and you can listen to this list there. I just did while I was posting this and it's great.

I replied, "they should send me a link to their web service and if I like it, I'll follow up and meet with them"

That has happened so many times and I am convinced its the best way to get my attention.

Back when I launched fredwilson.fm, I got an email from an entrepreneur asking me to put a soundcloud drop box on it so emerging artists could send me music to consider for my personal internet radio station. I thought "good idea" and put it up. You can see the soundcloud drop box if you visit fredwilson.fm.

Since I put up the soundcloud drop box, I've gotten 14 submissions. A few of them are very good and I plan on posting at least one or two of them to tumblr/fredwilson.fm before year end.

This experience opened my eyes to what soundcloud represents. It's a new way to get music out there. Bands and artists are using it (roughly 40,000 so far I've heard) to share music among themselves in rough form while they work on the final product, and then they use it to submit their music to various record labels, music bloggers, and other promotional outlets.

The company is based in Berlin and from what I can tell much of the user base is european to date. But music is a global experience and there is no reason why soundcloud can't take off in the US and other parts of the world.

Just to be clear, soundcloud is not for sharing licensed music. Of course, it can be used for that, but the company is working on tools like audio fingerprinting so they can police the service and make sure it's used by real musicians to share their work, not by fans looking to share music with friends.

After using soundcloud for a couple months, I finally got the opportunity to meet the founders yesterday at Le Web. We only had about 20 minutes, but we got right into the opportunity and they didn't have to spend most of the meeting explaining what soundcloud is. Because I'm already a user and a fan. That's the way to do it.

Of course, just because I like the service and enjoyed meeting the founders, it doesn't mean our firm wil invest. But we certainly are going to pay attention to what they are doing. By blogging about them, I'll get more feedback. I'd love it if all of you who are into music would check it out and let me know what you think.

As Eric Archambeau of Wellington Partners said on the panel yesterday, "the first step is I've got to like it, but I can't make an investment just because I like it. I've got to make sure that the market at large is going to like it too" [that's a paraphrase not a quote].

So please check out soundcloud and let me know what you think.

So with the help of Nathan Bowers who did the redesign of this blog during the summer, we've now got it up and live. It autoplays, which I would not ordinarily recommend, but since the only purpose of that page is to listen to music, I think it's appropriate.

This was pretty simple to do. We used the tumblr api, the streampad player, and a web server. I'd love to see tumblr and streampad work together to make it even easier to do. Everyone who posts music to the web should have their own radio station.

Let me know what you think.

As I am writing this, I am listening to music of my choice on streamed to me via MySpace. That's progress. I agree with Mike Arrington who wrote last night:

MySpace Music goes a long way towards music’s inevitable future where all recorded music will be free.  They, along with services like iMeem, are now giving on demand streaming music at a zero price point to users, which was inconceivable even a couple of years ago.

But there's a lot that they need to do to get me to listen to music on MySpace instead of dozens of other locations on the web where I can get a similar experience.

The first thing about MySpace Music that turns me off is the start page. It's not really about music, it's like an entertainment website or something.

Compare that to my favorite free streaming music website, the Hype Machine:

The music is front and center at the Hype Machine. At MySpace Music, you have to search or click or browse to get to the music, unless you want to listen to the Jonas Brother's playlist, which I do not want to do. It would be so much better to land me on the "my music" page once I have one.

Creating a playlist is more difficult than it needs to be. They should take a look at some of the other playlist services out there to see how it's generally done on the web. To add a song to a playlist at MySpace Music, you need to search, then browse, then select, then click add, then pick a playlist, then save. They could cut three or four steps out of that process with a better user interface (copied from the competition no less).

The player is ok. I don't mind the advertising on the page. The player pops out and you can minimize and listen, which is what most players let you do. Here's a screen shot of the player with my Arthur Russell playlist in it.

If they had more data on Arthur Russell (it's remarkable they have anything on him actually), the artist update window would include all new activity on that artist's myspace page.

I wish MySpace Music were more social and this service comes from a social net. There's not a single social interaction on the music player that I could find. I should be able to share, add to my profile, send to a friend, etc, etc. I am sure that's coming but it's shocking that it's not there day one.

And for the life of me I could not figure out how to link to my Arthur Russell/Jens Lekman and Kings Of Leon playlists. Although they are public for anyone to listen to, I have no idea how anyone would ever find them. I could not even figure out how to add them to my MySpace profile. I spent about ten minutes this morning creating them and I'd like to share them with all of you. I guess not.

The bottom line for me is having all the music someone would want to listen to on demand is important, and MySpace Music has that. But the user interface and the social interactions are equally important, possibly more important. And in that regard they have a long way to go. I'm headed back to the Hype Machine, Last.fm, Tumblr and the other places on the web that allow me to listen to streamed music the way I want to. But I'll be back from time to time to see how MySpace Music improves as I am sure it will.

Anyone can go to Targetspot, record a 15 or 30 second radio spot, and run the campaign immediately on a large network of internet radio streams. Targetspot has been offering that service since the start of this year.

What Doug proposes in his column is something more. In addition to submitting a 15 or 30 second spot, bands, labels, managers, and other music industry participants could submit a full song to a system like Targetspot and that song would run as "paid inclusion". As Doug points out, this is not very different from how keyword marketing services work today:

We have seen a similar arrangement -- of course not denigrated with the term payola -- work well in the financially successful and user-friendly online advertising search field. In that case, advertisers can easily place bids on search results, and target their message directly to a discrete and highly specific audience. An Internet radio “pay to play” advertising service could accomplish a similar goal.

I'm curious to see what the reaction of the music industry is to an idea like this.

Revolver is a genius work of art. ... It is terrifically well balanced and consistent, giving the listener a taste of all the Beatles have to offer. Revolver is by far the Beatles strongest and most impressive album.

There's a lot more including the opportunity to leave a comment and join the endless debate.

When I went to Ticketmaster to purchase tickets, I got two free downloads on iTunes. Combine that with the free downloads I got earlier this week from purchasing Ben Kweller tickets (yes, Ben is coming to town on Oct 16th!!), and I have 8 free downloads.

So I went to iTunes and bought the eight most popular Tilly and the Wall tracks on iTunes and will listen all day on my iPhone. When you go to a show, it's helpful to know the music. Ticketmaster and iTunes are doing their part to make that happen and it's a very smart move.

The ISPs have agreed to send warning letters to thousands of their customers who are the most active downloaders of music and films. The UK government will do their part by discussing legislating regulations on the ISPs if the warning letters don't work.

The most commonly discussed legislation would be a "download fee" applied to every ISP bill which would be paid to the music and film companies.

All of that is well and good, but I read nothing in the FT piece and heard nothing in the BBC interview about regulating the music and film industries to force them to make their content easily and readily available over the Internet.

Of course there are people who don't want to pay for their music and films, but I believe that vast majority of downloaders are people like me who would gladly pay if the content was available to purchase when I wanted it in the format I want it.

Let's take The Dark Night. Let's say that I'd really rather watch it at home on my big screen. I know I can get it on bit torrent so I do that. If it was available to be purchased the same day it went live in the theaters, I'd be happy to pay $20 for the right to watch it at home. But the film companies want to maintain their release windows so it's not available. So its to bit torrent that I and thousands of others go.

Last month I wanted to purchase a new music album from a band I like. I went to emusic and amazon mp3. It wasn't available. It was available exclusively on iTunes in DRM format. Screw that. I can't play DRM'd music on my Sonos or Request systems. It's of little to no use to me in DRM format. So I bought the CD on Amazon but also downloaded it on limewire so I could listen while I waited for the CD to show up.

The solution to the downloading promblem is not simply to plug the hole at the ISP level. First, its not fair to impose a fee on every ISP customer when not everyone downloads. It would be fair to impose a downloading fee for those who want to download, and maybe it will come to that. But we all know that it will be very easy to hack around that technology.

The real solution is to give the customers what they want which is simple, easy, affordable, instant access to the content they want at a reasonable price. When and if the content owners do that, they will be on their way to solving the download problem. If they don't do it themselves, we should regulate them and force them to do it.

The Hype Machine and Tumblr are two different takes on the same idea. Build a music service around the music people blog about.

At the Hype Machine, they crawl blogs that are known music blogs and pull the songs onto their service and showcase them. I am constantly finding new music via the Hype Machine.

Tumblr is not a music service per se. It's a blogging service and our firm has an investment in it so I have a vested interest in its success. Tumblr does three important things with it's service that makes it unique in the market;

1) it encourages short posts (not twitter short, but shorter than what you'd find on wordpress or typepad)
2) the blogger categorizes the post by media type (audio, video, photos, quotes, links, text, etc)
3) it encourages reblogging which is autoposting another's post to your blog

I think the act of reblogging media (audio, video, photos, quotes, links) is a very powerful form of curation and you can find all sorts of amazing curated blogs on tumblr.

All that said, Tumblr is a few features short of being a killer music blogging service. For start, if you go to Tuneage or The Music, two of my favorite music reblogs on Tumblr, you can't "play" the blog. What I want is the ability to simply launch a player and listen to the blog in reverse chronological order with skip and reblog built into the player.

One of the great things about Tumblr music, and something I've mentioned in the past, is you can only post one mp3 per day to Tumblr. The one a day thing is really a big time quality filter and is one of the main reasons I like to listen on Tumblr so much.

Another thing I'd like is the ability to create curation pages on Tumblr, one for music, one for photos, one for videos, one for links, one for quotes. I don't want to reblog every thing I find on Tumblr to my main page but I would like to reblog to these themed pages. It would be like my "loved page on hype machine".

I hope that David and Marco add these features soon. It will make listening on Tumblr even better than it is already.

Image via Wikipedia

I don't post as much about music and digital technology as I used to. I have come to the conclusion that most artists and their managers get it these days. And the ones who don't are a lost cause. So better to move on and start thinking and writing about something else.

But this post by Bob Lefsetz on AC/DC doing an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart was too good to pass up. Here are some choice lines by Bob on the subject:

To limit AC/DC sales exclusively to Wal-Mart is akin to limiting bubblegum sales to Tiffany.

and

AC/DC is the biggest band still alive in the minds of teenagers.

and

But AC/DC cares not a whit about all this, about the new generation. It’s like they’re having a fire sale, trying to get everybody’s dough one last time. They don’t understand what they MEAN TO PEOPLE!

and

What kind of crazy fucked up world do we live in where a band won’t let its fans buy its record? One where the only thing that matters is money? Where music takes not even a back seat, but rides in the trunk?

and

The closest Wal-Mart to me is almost twenty miles away! Assuming there’s no traffic, that’s an eight dollar fuel surcharge on the disc. But at least I’ve got wheels… Kids, home from school, music addicts, but without their driver’s licenses, are inured to getting their music online. And if you won’t sell it track by track, they’ll steal it that way. If you don’t know this, you’re still living in the twentieth century, still waiting for Napster to come along and blow your mind.

My son Josh loves AC/DC but if it's not on iTunes, it's not going to get on his iPod. Clearly AC/DC and/or their manager is in the category of clueless.

Then this morning I saw this twitter post by Jen Robinson:

          I love it!  Search results for my favorite band on muxfind.  http://muxfind.com/search/?...

Jen was linking to muxfind, a new search tool for muxtapes. This turns me on bigtime.

Ever since delicious and flickr, I've loved the idea of searching "user generated content". Not because user generated content is universally good. But because it takes time and effort to post something to the web. Be it a link/url in delicious, a photo to flickr, a video to youtube, a twitter update, or a song. Better yet a playlist. And so that effort in and of itself is a bit of a quality filter. I think of hundreds of things a day. But only a few get to my twitter stream.

Speaking of searching a twitter stream, I watched the Chelsea/Manu match on Summize, a real-time twitter search engine. That was a pretty great way to follow the big match while working on three other things at my office.

The idea of searching user generated audio content is not new. We can listen to the Beatles on HypeMachine. The Hype Machine aggregates music blogs and the mp3s that are uploaded to them. So listening to the Beatles on the Hype Machine is one kind of Beatles playlist.

Now we can listen to the Beatles on muxtape. Since you don't have to be a music blogger to make a muxtape (you just need to be a playlist maker), it may well be the case that muxtape will get a larger base of users uploading audio content. That will create a different kind of Beatles playlist. Better than the Hype Machine? I don't know. But certainly different. Right now the muxfind search result page is not a playlist the way a muxtape is. I hope they change that.

We are entering into a new world, where the search engine result page is a media experience in its own right. And that's an exciting thing to think about.

Let's start with the music. I've been listening for the past 20 minutes and this is what I've heard so far.

Cowboy Junkies covering Sweet Jane
Van Morrison live at the Bottom Line in 1970
Jack Johnson - Upside Down
B52s - Love Shack
Led Zepplin - Kashmir
more live Van Morrison
John Mayer
Talking Heads - Naive Melody (i love that song)

One cool thing is this station is going to play lots of their live archives:

Perhaps the most unique aspect of WNEW.com is our incredible audio archives, featuring historic concerts and live performances from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, as well as timeless interviews with a remarkable roster of rock immortals. We’ve gathered and digitized hundreds of amazing moments from the airwaves of some of America’s great rock radio stations, most notably our namesake WNEW-FM, which ruled the airwaves in New York City for four decades. On-air visits were commonplace by members of the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Dead and virtually every superstar you could imagine.

I've talked at length about radio on this blog over the years and I always get comments from readers who think that radio is clueless and will never get it's magic back. Maybe the golden years of the 70s and 80s are long over, due to the iPod and other forms of portable music and the changing dynamics of the music industry. But I think radio does understand what it has to do in order to hang onto its audience and bring new listeners (younger more technologically inclined) into the fold.

Full disclosure, I know the team at CBS Radio who launched the new WNEW and I am big fans of them. I am also an investor in iBiquity, the company that makes the underlying technology for HD Radio. I am also an investor in Targetspot, the company that will sell a lot of the audio spots that run on WNEW. So I am vested in the radio industry and it's future. And stuff like this new WNEW makes me quite bullish on it.

The Gotham Gal and I went to see Shine A Light last night. I've been wanting to see this Scorsese concert film of the Rolling Stones' Beacon Theater show from the last tour since I first heard about it.

The Stones are my all time favorite rock band but they've been a shadow of their former selves since the  mid 80s. So I wasn't sure what to expect.

I am not sure if it's Scorsese, the Beacon, playing in front of the former President of the United States, or just their incredible showmanship, but they pulled this one off. It' not The Last Waltz, but it's certainly one of the best concert films I've seen.

Like the Last Waltz, the best parts are when the Stones are joined by others. It happens three times in the film, Buddy Guy joins them for the Muddy Watters classic Champagne and Reefer, Jack White joins them for the Exile stomp Loving Cup, and Christina Aquilera joins Mick for a duet on the always fun Live With Me. I also loved Keith's rendition of You Got The Silver, and the killer version they did of Imagination. The whole set list is on the film's wikipedia page.

I really dug the Champagne and Reefer part (pictured above). There is something really satisfying about watching Jagger and Buddy Guy delivering this line to the former President of the United States:

Well you know there should be no law on people that want to smoke a little dope.

But the Jack White/Jagger duet on Loving Cup is probably the highlight of the film for me. It was a passing the torch moment in some ways and they all played their roles perfectly.

So here's my bottom line, every Stones fan should see this film. And if you like concert films, get this one for your DVD or bittorrent collection.

Last night The Gotham Gal and I met some friends at Webster Hall and saw Jens Lekman put on a great show. As my friend Steve said, "Jens is this generation's Jonathan Richman", which is very true. And part of why I love Jens so much.

But Jens is way more than a Jonathan clone. He has a wonderful voice and uses lots of samples which Jojo never did. He has created his own sound and it's wonderful.

I got turned onto Jens by the songkick team last summer and since then I have listened to everything he's put out. Jens was certainly the musical best discovery of 2007 for me.

Last night was the first time I've seen Jens live. He's very funny. A Jens show is part stand up comedy, part Jens solo, and part full band with strings and horns.

This photo comes from the show last night but I didn't take it. Instead of saying the typical "we love NYC" thing you get from the acts on tour, he raised his arm and said "fuck new york, connecticut is better". Which got some good laughs.

The highlight of the night and my favorite Jens song is Postcard To Nina. He doesn't really play the song, he tells it as a joke, with great timing. I don't have a video from last night, but here's Jens playing it in Melbourne (his new home) in late 2006. Please put up with the first 30 seconds of tuning, I promise its worth it.

It was launched on Wednesday and we almost have 200 members (I consider anyone who follows lotd to be a member). We've had 298 updates to lotd in the past three days so about 100 per day.

Here's a chart of the activity so far.

That chart was built by a reader of this blog on a cool new service called Trendrr where you can "track, compare and share data freely and identify trends across social graphs and networks, realize the potential of p2p, track engagement metrics, and look at what is really happening, in real time."

Now you know I have a soft spot for services that start with a t and end with an r (twitter and tumblr) so I suspect you'll see a lot more trendrr charts on this blog in the coming months.

Yes, it’s true that listeners will still want to own files for a few more years. There are places and devices that can’t get high bandwidth wireless Internet access, like my macbook pro which I am writing this on the plane ride home to NYC. I am listening to mp3s (no drm for me) in iTunes all the way home.

But over the next five years, the number of places and devices where you can’t get a speedy wireless connection is going to dwindle to maybe the car. And you’ve always got radio in the car which is going to get better and better because it has to in order to survive.

Like everything that has happened in digital music, the rights holders have been once again been forced into dealing with an emerging technology. Companies like last.fm and imeem and others have, over the past year, have done deals with the leading rights holders to give them permission to stream pretty much any song they want to listeners over the Internet. They can do this “on-demand”, meaning you want to listen to the new Jack Johnson song, you tell your favorite web music service that and it plays. They can also stream music in various forms of smart playlists, either the tracks you have marked as your favorites, or the tracks your friends have suggested to you, or the tracks that people who like the same music as you like. Each and every service has a different take on these playlists. I happen to like last.fm and hypemachine. You may like Pandora. Someone else might like Jango. Your kid’s myspace page might have an imeem playlist on it.

And because of all this innovation in streaming music over the past year, the number of people actively listening to music streamed over the Internet is rising quickly. It’s becoming a mainstream activity, particularly among the younger set.

I think of these web services as the new radio stations. Everyone of my generation has had their favorite radio stations. Everyone of my kid’s generation will have their favorite web music services. There will be hundreds of them. All supported by advertising, just like traditional radio stations, and all of them licensed by rights holders (eventually), and all of them paying the rights holders a little coin every time their song is played. And because these services will be free to anyone who wants to listen, they will be very popular. Never before have you been able to decide you want to listen to something you don’t currently own and then just play it. No searching on Limewire or bittorrent, no waiting for the download, you type in the name of the song you want to play and you hit play.

These services are coming to mobile phones, probably in the next year we’ll all be listening to pandora or last.fm in the gym on our phone instead of our limited library on our iPod. That’s when this new form of listening is going to explode. And that’s when Apple is going to wish it had thought more about streaming and less about file based music. But you can’t feel too badly about Apple because a good number of people will be listening to pandora or last.fm on their iPhones.

Two things happened this past week that may be important to this emerging market. First, MySpace got in the game. They cut deals with most of the major labels to allow them to offer their own streaming service. It’s MySpace, and as Bob Lefsetz points out, they have their own set of challenges with technology and user experience. But music is a HUGE part of the MySpace experience and they have over 100 million people a month coming to MySpace, often for music, and that’s a much bigger audience than anyone else has for a streaming service. And they’ve been in the business of streaming for a long time, not in a particularly easy to use way, but they play a lot of music to a lot of people every day. So I think MySpace will be a meaningful player in the emerging streaming music business.

The other thing that happened is Ian Rogers left Yahoo Music where he had been leading the charge for the past couple years and joined a small startup in LA that has some ideas about this emerging market. Ian is a super smart guy, one of the few people I’ve met in the web music business who really gets where this is all going.

What Ian knows is that the fans are the most powerful distribution points for music. He gets the power of mp3 blogging. He understands that the Hype Machine has built a terrific new age radio station by aggregating all the music that is being posted onto mp3 blogs and he understands that further enabling that kind of behavior, where the fans are the ultimate arbiters of what gets played and what gets popular, is the end game for all of this.

I don’t know much about what the company Ian joined does. And I haven’t been told about any of their plans. So this is all just conjecture on my part. But watch what they are going to do closely. I think something important may come of out that development.

Here’s what we need. We need someone to create an easy to search streamable library of all the recorded music in the world. We need to be able to grab a track and embed it on our blog. We need to be able to see how many people played it. We need others to be able to crawl these user pages with the embedded music and create algorithms based on who posted it, how often it was played, and how often it was reblogged and linked to. The services that do all of that need to be able to play the music that flows out of these social algorithms in the same way. This all has to be licensed and legal and it has to result in money flowing to the artists. If you put the music on your blog, you should have two choices. Allow the ads to be served into your music or your page or both by the service you got the music from. Or deal with the monetization yourself and pay the royalties you owe. Most people will do the former but some will do that latter.

When this platform is built and served up, a million flowers will bloom. Everyone who wants to be a radio station will be one. And it will be simple to do it. And it will be legal. And we’ll be able to listen in our homes on our home stereos, at the gym, at work, at the library, and some day in the car.

That’s the future of the music business. And we’ve made a lot of progress in the past year getting there. I am excited as a fan, a listener, a technogeek, and an investor.

Note: Sorry for the absence of links in this post. I wrote it on the plane home last night and didn't have time this morning to fix it up.

So, here are the rules of the game:

1) join twitter if you aren't already a member. you can do that by going to twitter and signing up or you can simply send a text message on your phone to 40404 that says   follow lotd    and then follow the instructions that will be text messaged to you

2) if you are already a member of twitter, just go to the lotd page and hit the follow button. You can also send an update on your phone to 40404 (save that number as twitter on your phone) that says  follow lotd. if you do that, you'll get the updates delivered on your phone too which some like and some don't. I do.

3) whenever you hear a lyric you like (it has to be short, less than 140 characters), simply post an update to twitter that looks like this:

@lotd "lyric" song name, artist name

here's an example from my lotd post yesterday

@lotd "I don't want you to add me to your long list of estranged friends" Estranged Friends, The Eels

That's all there is to it. We will all be sharing lyrics with each other.

There are some variants on the @lotd post that are already cropping up that I like.

Some people don't put song and artist name in their post. They want people to guess. That's fine with me, but I think they should put the word guess at the end of the post if they want people to guess.

Bijan has started to post the song to tumblr and post the tumblr link at the end of the post instead of song name and artist name. That's a nice trick and I copied him today with this post:

          @lotd "i need all the friends i can get" the social networking industry theme song. http://fredwilson.vc/post/30672175

That works pretty well because if you want to guess, you can, and if you want the answer you can click thru and find it (and listen too).

I expect we'll get a bunch of variants on the basic idea and I am looking forward to that. Right now we have 63 followers and 72 total updates since Whitney turned on the bot. I think we might have something like 150 lyrics posted to twitter in the past three days since we started this whole thing. I am having fun with this and I think a bunch of others are too.

Finally, here's a portion of a note Whitney wrote me last night with some details on how he did this:

- How It Works --
The main thing to note is that this is (a) possible, and (b) pretty damn
easy only because Twitter allows you to do pretty much everything via
its API.  Dave Winer's "Twitter is a coral reef" idea totally applies
here: having the API means that the hardest part of making something
like the @lotd bot is just having the idea -- once you've got the idea,
Twitter makes it easy to build what you've got in your head.  The bot
basically takes three steps:

1. Every 15 minutes, call the Twitter API to get recent @replies that
have been sent to lotd.
2. Check whether any of those replies are new, and if so load them into
a database, noting that we haven't reposted them yet.
3. Pull any unposted replies from the DB, reformat them a little, and
then call the Twitter API to repost them one by one.