I read the Google blog post announcing their enhancements to music searches this morning. I think it's terrific that Google has made these enhancements but there's one thing I don't like.
Google says:
Now, when you enter a music-related query — like the name of a song,
artist or album — your search results will include links to an audio
preview of those songs provided by our music search partners MySpace (which just acquired iLike) or Lala.
When you click the result you'll be able to listen to an audio preview
of the song directly from one of those partners. For example, if I
search for [21st century breakdown], the first results provide links to
songs from Green Day's new album. MySpace and Lala also provide links
to purchase the full song.
I really dislike the "audio preview" experience. It's been available for years in the iTunes store and I never use it. A 30 second sample of a song is an awful experience in my opinion.
When I want to search for music, I'll do an mp3 search on the Internet or go to the hype machine and do the search there. I almost always get the result I want with one of those two approaches and I can listen to the entire song.
Of course, it is not Google's fault that they are being limited to an "audio preview", it is the fault of the rights holders who won't let Google offer a full song sample. But as we've seen again and again, this only drives users to the "gray market" where they can get a full song sample which is often just a right click away from an illegal download.
A smarter approach would be to allow Google to offer a full song sample (one play per person based on cookies or some other approach) and then a link to purchase. That would allow Google and the music rights holders to take share back from mp3 search engines and encourage music purchases instead of illegal music downloads.
I have an internet radio station called fredwilson.fm. You can listen by clicking on that link or by clicking on the black banner at the bottom of this blog.
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.
I was meeting with the team at one of our portfolio companies last week and we got to talking about music. I was asked if I ever "broke a band" on this blog. I said, "I don't think so." Then someone suggested that I had in fact "broken" the Rural Alberta Advantage with this post earlier this year. I am not sure that post "broke" the band, but it did get a lot of people to come out and see the band play their first US show at Piano's in late January.
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.
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.
A couple friends sent me links to this youtube mashup video. Apparently the creator Kutiman just mashed up a bunch of youtube videos to create this one.
There's some debate about whether this is "real". I hope it is because I see a new art form emerging here.
Last night Jessica showed me an essay she wrote after reading DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little. In the opening paragraph she wrote:
DBC Pierre explores the effect of media on citizens, and the greater theme of truth, or rather lack of truth, in everyday life.
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.
Now think about that for a second. In the midst of chaos—a plane just
crashed right in front of him!—Krums’s first instinct was to take a
picture and load it to the web. There was nothing capitalistic or
altruistic about it. Something amazing happened, and without thinking,
he sent it out to the world. And let’s say he hadn’t. Let’s say he took
this incredible photo—a photo any journalist would send to the Pulitzer
board—and decided to sell it, said he was hanging onto it for the
highest bidder. He would have been vilified by bloggers and Twitterers
alike. His is a culture of sharing information. This is the culture
Twitter is counting on. Whatever your thoughts on its ability to exist
outside the collapsing economy or its inability (so far) to put a price
tag on its services, that’s a real thing. That’s the instinct Stone was
talking about. If the nation has tens of millions of people like Krums,
that’s a phenomenon. That’s what Twitter is waiting for.
"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.
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.
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.
I posted a few weeks back about a great music blogging experience with a new band called The Rural Alberta Advantage. The band is from Canada and had never been in the US until this week. Last night they played their first show in the states, here in NYC at Pianos. I was there and the cool thing is so were about half dozen (maybe more) members of this community. I met a bunch of readers for the first time last night. Thanks everyone for coming up and introducing yourself.
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.
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.
There are a lot of playlist services on the web these days. Muxtape got shut down, but imeem, playlist.com, and 8tracks are all alive and kicking. And I am sure there a bunch of others too. All of these services let one person create a playlist. But yesterday, I wanted to do something a bit different.
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.
For as long as I've been blogging (5+ years), I've been posting mp3s to the Internet. I do all of that now at fredwilson.vc but you can always click on the black banner at the bottom of this blog page and listen to the latest tracks I've posted.
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.
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:
Josh Stylman sent out a tweet yesterday that I agree with:
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.
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.
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