Diverse artists ranging from Brian Wilson to Martha Wainwright to Amanda Palmer have taken a seat in a black London taxi and performed a song (one song, one take). The recordings have become an internet phenomenon and have garnered major media coverage. Given the unique format and the “you never know when a bump or sudden stop will happen” factor, you would think New Yorkers would welcome the filmmakers with excitement and interest. But, according to this week’s Time Out NY article, that warm welcome occasionally came in the form of a shouts of “Fuck off back to England”, apparently from staunch yellow cab supporters who wanted to drive that black taxi back outta town. Maybe if it had been a hybrid?…

Anyway, they just posted the New York teaser this week (you can view it on their blog) and will likely start posting the sessions in the coming weeks. You can view the sessions on their website, and you may also want to check out their Myspace page for updates.

To give you an idea of what to expect, here’s Death Cab for Cutie:

Another personal favorite of mine is Man Man’s performance. The one thing I’ve felt frustrated about as a piano player is that it’s just not a portable instrument you can take with you and play anywhere. Man Man proved me wrong. See them in action here.

Admittedly, I just recently bought myself my first guitar (my piano comes first) and am still painfully making my way through chord progressions. So performances like these serve as timely inspiration…

Tough call whether to be more in awe of the musical talent of the guitarists on this list (Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Jack White, and more), or of the guitars themselves (Rickenbacker 12-string, Gibson Les Paul Standard, Fender Stratocaster, to name a few) - either way, it’s a must read.

Check it out.

From the site:

Every mp3 you discover on The Free Music Archive is pre-cleared for certain types of uses that would otherwise be prohibited by outdated copyright law. Are you a podcaster looking for pod-safe audio? A radio or video producer searching for instrumental bed music that won’t put your audience to sleep? A remix artist looking for pre-cleared samples? Or are you simply looking for some new sounds to add to your next playlist? The Free Music Archive is a resource for all that and more, and unlike other websites, all of the audio has been hand-picked by established audio curators…

Every artist page will have a bio and links to the artists’ home page for users to learn more about the music they discover via the Free Music Archive. We also seek to compensate artists directly. Artist, album and song profiles will contain links to buy the full album from the artist and/or label’s preferred vendor(s). Users can also “tip” an artist if they like what they hear, sending a donation directly to the artists’ PayPal account. Artist profiles include tourdates, encouraging users to step away from the glowing computer screen and see some real live music.

I attempted to make a playlist and share it but it looks like sharing hasn’t been implemented yet (or at least I couldn’t figure out how to do it). They are still in beta, though, and say they plan to roll out a lot of new features so stay tuned. Artists interested in submitting their tracks for consideration can contact FMA directly.

Below are some of their “Most interesting” tracks. Take a listen or go on over to FMA to peruse the complete library.

Make Music is based on France’s “Fête de la Musique” , a national music holiday that began in 1982.  The event has grown internationally and last year took place across Africa, the Middle East, North & South America, and Europe.

This year, Make Music New York will introduce a new feature - the “Mass Appeal Musical Handshake”.   From the site:

As part of the third annual festival, hundreds of musicians are taking part in “Mass Appeal” performances, playing pieces written for single types of instruments. Huge ensembles of clarinets, crotales, French horns, hub caps, violas, accordions, saxophones, and more will perform across NYCʼs five boroughs.

The “musical handshake” will allow these musicians to greet one another throughout the day, beyond their own bands of instruments, with the hope that momentary handshakes will turn into longer, improvised musical conversations. In the evening, the composition will receive its public premiere at the Mass Appeal afterparty in Central Park. The winning handshake will be selected by a panel of judges and announced in May.

Read the brochure for information about submitting compositions for the musical handshake. Entries are due by midnight on Friday May 1st, 2009.

Get ready for the links:

To participate, register here.

To receive updates about Make Music New York as we get closer to the event, sign up here.

Check out the Make Music New York blog here.

Alternatively you can keep it tuned here, of course, and I will update you as more info is released.

The Guardian music blog alerts us to another celebrity playlist haven hosted by Spotify.   Unfortunately Spotify is not yet available in the U.S. (in fact, it’s still in Beta and by invitation only so even if you’re not in the U.S., you have to be special - or pay - to gain access), but it appears it’s a social music playlist application that they’re trying to get artists on board with.  Since I’m too broke to travel abroad and sign up, I wasn’t able to dig further into the listening habits of some of the artists using Spotify, but The Guardian post highlights a few of interest.

In my opinion, the most entertaining was that of Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead who was foiled by Spotify’s lack of selection when he attempted to create an Arab playlist including artists such as Laila Mourad and Um Kulthum.  That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout, Jonny.  Read more from Jonny on Dead Air Space.  And stay tuned to see if Spotify can get Donny Osmond and R. Kelly to back their U.S. launch.

Never one to let me down, I just noticed they released a new list -  “100 Greatest Indie Rock Albums of all time”.  They point out that “indie rock” isn’t exactly easy to define (what genre is these days?), and the editors’ choices are undoubtedly arguable.  But, nonetheless, they’ve offered up a serious helping of music to be discovered.  And considering I’ve only heard of about one-third of the bands on the list, I have a lot to do today.

Here are the Amazon music editors’ top ten:
1. Bee Thousand by Guided by Voices
2. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel
3. Spiderland by Slint
4. Exile In Guyville by Liz Phair
5. Imperial f.f.r.r. (Deluxe Edition) by Unrest
6. Slanted & Enchanted by Pavement
7. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Belle & Sebastian
8. Surfer Rosa by Pixies
9. Either/Or by Elliott Smith
10. Bakesale by Sebadoh
View the complete list of 100 here.

What do you think?  Anyone missing from the list?  Shout out your unrecognized indies in the comments…

Over the past several months, I’ve decided it’s no longer acceptable to me to live life just getting by. Or, at least, if I am going to just get by, I should at least be passionate about the thing I’m doing that’s bringing in the grocery money.  So began the Self Renaissance - my somewhat neurotic journey to self-actualization.  I’ve got a long way to go, but I’m determined to see this through and see what I’m capable of.  But I have a lot of lost years to make up for unfortunately.  As a youngster, I played the trumpet (1st chair, thank you very much), the piano…I was in all-county chorus in the fifth grade for God’s sake - I mean, who allowed me to throw away that kind of talent to pursue a higher education and social acceptable career?

Anyway, you can read all about that tragedy here if you want.  Or, just keep it tuned to the new Studio UES where I’ll try to present a mixture of music industry news, services and promotional ideas for musicians, some reviews and artist spotlights, and a lot of ramblings from me about how pissed off I am that I still haven’t written a song that will go down in history (in a good way).

Most of us go to our graves with our music still inside of us - Author Unknown

Just wanted to say Thanks, Blogger! This definitely makes up for the times you have accidentally mistaken my blog as spam and locked me out

For those just visiting for the first time, welcome to the studio, and I hope you’ll join us.

To everyone, I hope to continue to provide you with noteworthy content!

Photo via Mag3737

Technorati Tags: blogger,blogsofnote

The article acknowledges that some remain skeptical. A musician from Arcade Fire (whose album happened to receive a fantastic review from Pitchfork) commented that “Putting too much weight in somebody else’s opinion of a piece of art, that is a dangerous thing…It’s just a reaction. It’s the last piece of the cultural puzzle, not the most important part.”

The article got me thinking about the utility of editorial reviews – both expert and user-generated – in music discovery and reminded me of portions of the recent Fireside Chat among Chris Anderson (editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine; author of The Long Tail), Tim Quirk (VP of Music Content and Programming at Rhapsody), Bradley Horowitz (VP of Product Strategy at Yahoo), and Dave Goldberg (GM of Yahoo Music), in which they discussed, among many other things, the role of editorial recommendations. Below is a small excerpt of the conversation relevant to this topic (edited slightly for length and relevant content), but I urge you to check out the entire conversation at Signal vs. Noise for additional context and some great insights.

Chris: Tim, are you going to allow user-generated reviews on Rhapsody?
Tim: Eventually, sure. But probably off in their own area, so anyone who wants to read ’em can, and others can avoid. It’s really tough to prevent things like that from degenerating into “eminem sux!”, “no, you suck!@!!!”
Dave: We think user tags are good for music but we find written music reviews, whether from our editors or from fans, to have little value add
Tim: That’s interesting to me, Dave. In the downsizing days, I saved a lot of my editors’ jobs by demonstrating how much more they did than just write, and actually deprioritized writing for awhile. But users (and even execs) found that they missed the blurbs and wanted more. So we’ve actually wound up *increasing* the amount of typing we do. In a subscription environment, context is supremely important.
Chris: Do you guys think that Amazon’s reviews are also of little value? Or, if not, what are they doing right?
Dave: I think reviews are great for narrative, books, movies, TV. Just doesn’t work for music.
Chris: My concern is that professional reviews don’t scale down to the long tail. There’s just too much music out there to keep up with. Only peer-production can get to all of it.
Dave: Chris, I think even user reviews would become just noise
Chris: “One man’s noise is another man’s signal”
Dave: The only user reviews that are useful to me in music are from people who like exactly the same music I do.
Tim: It’s maybe important to note that we don’t exactly “review” music in Rhapsody – we provide context. Hopefully witty and engaging context, but it’s not a thumbs up/thumbs down approach.

So, all of this begs the question – In a web space where we have access to community/collaborative filtering tools (like Last.fm), content-based analytical recommendation tools (like Pandora), playlists, podcasts, and customizable, shareable radio streams (like Live365), what is the additive value of the professional, editorial reviewer in our discovery of music in the long tail?

Subscription-based service eMusic hosts expert music reviews from more than 150 well-known writers, and Jason Dietz, music editor at Metacritic.com said in the Wired article, “The only way we would be in trouble is if there’s so many people posting their opinions on the Web that people totally stopped caring about what professional critics have to say. Which may have already happened.” Has it?

…which brings me to the other relevant question, based on the skepticism of some on the panel – To what extent are user-generated editorial reviews important in the context of digital music ecosystems. Do we care how users rate a band, or would we give the band a listen regardless if it was on a relevant playlist, streamed on our internet radio, or recommended to us by last.fm based on listeners with similar taste?

I’m curious what you think. Do you pay attention to “expert” reviews? If so, what impact do they have on your willingness to give an artist a chance? Do you think user-generated editorial reviews are an important part of a music community, or do you rely more on collaborative and content-based tools and use your own judgment?

Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments and also answer these two poll questions. I’ll follow up on this post next week with my personal opinions, as well as your comments and poll results.

Technorati Tags: music,digitalmusic,musicdiscovery,musicrecommendation,longtail,pitchfork,rollingstone,
musicreview,rhapsody,tastemaker

“Spiral Frog will offer a desktop downloader for Windows Media Files (no iPods!) that can be listened to on one PC and two portable devices. Here’s the kicker - you must log in to the Spiral Frog service at least once per month, and see their ads, or your files will stop playing! The details aren’t fully set in stone, but it will be something like that. There will be links to third party sites of the record labels’ choosing if you’d like to buy your freedom to at least skip the ads.”

According to Digital Music News, the service is “a retrofitted version of an earlier company called Musicloads, which has apparently ‘been around for years.’” Who knew?

I’ll admit that I was initially at least going to give Universal praise for its willingness to experiment; however, after reading the above passage, I lost respect for the initiative for its apparent coerciveness. In all fairness, there are still many details that have yet to emerge publicly and directly from the horse’s mouth, so I will hold permanent judgment until that day arrives, but right now it smells bad. (Lurkers: if you have any information to suggest otherwise, I’d love to report it here)

What is particularly interesting to me about this story is the manner in which the blogosphere BLEW UP today. To me, what this illustrates is how hungry people are for an innovative idea and how eager they are to embrace it – IF indeed it is for the good of the people. The first label(s) to adopt a creative model that attempts to monetize digital music in the space where consumers already live and on terms that allow them own and flexibly use what they download will surely reap the benefits – certainly in terms of reputation among consumers and ultimately in revenue.

But, back to Spiral Frog for a minute. I say this initiative is the equivalent of baby steps because the notion of an ad-supported model is an intriguing step in the right direction (maybe it’s not the golden ticket, but it’s an experiment, and I can respect that at least); however, they kill its potential by continuing to cling to DRM (even if it is WMA which has been cracked). Consumers want music they can own, not music that expires without a timely login or that does not play on all of their devices.

And, as to the suggestion that the service could be a rival to iTunes, Simon Dyson, senior analyst at Informa Telecoms and Media, sums it up best (Times Online):

“Apple has an established brand and I would think that people who use iTunes are happy to pay for the service,” he said. “Microsoft might be more worried. They’re launching their rival digital music player and store and the last thing they want is someone saying ‘come here and get it free’.”

Looking past the DRM, here are some remaining questions –

●Will Spiral Frog be able to get the support of all the major labels?
●Where will the ads be placed so as not to drive off impatient downloaders who can get it quickly and free (if not legal) elsewhere?
●Will the service attract the key demographic it’s aiming for?
●Is there enough ad revenue to be generated to support the model?
●Will there be a paid-for-premium service?

It will be interesting to see what happens between now and December, when the service is expected to launch. In the meantime, here’s hoping the blogosphere has more excuses to go crazy over a story about a new, experimental business model…

Technorati Tags: music,digitalmusic,copyright,downloads,DRM,windowsmedia,iTunes,iPod,spiralfrog,umg,wma,advertising