A VC

Neil Young on Stage at Java One

I am going to get every one of his "dumps"

It's A Blog, No It's A Radio Station, Wait It's Something Altogther New

CBS Radio re-launched their legendary NY rock radio station WNEW recently. It's a group blog about music, it's a last.fm group (built by the combined scrobbling history of all of the group members), it's an internet radio station, and it's available over the air on HD2 at 102.7 (you need an HD radio to get it).

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.

Mike Doughty - I Wrote A Song About You Car

Shine A Light

  Keith and Buddy KM•079.jpg   Kevin Mazur / Paramount Classics 
  Originally uploaded by Doctor Noe.

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.

Jens Lekman At Webster Hall

  fuck new york 
  Originally uploaded by stentorsrevenge.

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.

Lyric of The Day - Some Stats

It looks like the Lyric of The Day club on twitter has been fun for more than just me, although I may be enjoying it more than anyone.

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.

Something Important Is On The Horizon In The Music Business

Having ceded the file based music opportunity (mp3s and drm’d file formats) to Apple, the recorded labels are now getting hip to the much bigger opportunity, streaming music.

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.

Lyric Of The Day - Ready For Prime Time

The lyric of the day group on twitter is now ready for prime time thanks to the quick work of Whitney McNamara on tuesday night. Whitney wrote the twitter bot that makes all of this work.

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.

Lyric Of The Day - Update

I got a lot of feedback on my concept for the lyric of the day club on twitter that I posted yesterday. Here's a reminder of the basic concept. If you have a twitter account, you simply post to twitter a short lyric that you think everyone will enjoy, along with song name and artist. Based on the feedback we got yesterday, here's the way you do it:

1) send a twitter post that starts with @lotd   Leave out the : at the end that I had suggested yesterday. then include a short lyric (we only have 140 characters to work with) and then end with a song name and artist. Here's what I am going to post to twitter soon as my lyric of the day:

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

If you want and have room, it might be nice to add the album name (in this case, it's Useless Trinkets).

2) that's all you have to do. I am going to find someone to write a twitter bot over the next couple days. If you want to volunteer, @ message me on twitter, i am fredwilson. I see all @fredwilson messages because I track my account name.

3) once we get the twitter bot written, you'll follow lotd and lotd will follow you back and you'll see all the @lotd messages in your timeline.

That's it for now. While we get the twitter bot written, please keep posting the lyrics using @lotd. Here's what we've done to date. Something like 40 lyric posts from about 30 people playing along. Pretty great.

Here's a couple of my favorites:

What's so great about this one from Jason Yan is this song hasn't even been released yet. The new Kooks record, Konk, is out on tax day. But I've got it so you can hear it right here. I just love the way the song starts out like a Billy Bragg folk song, and then about 35 seconds in, the guitars come in, first acoustic than electric and it turns into a kick ass rock song.

See The Sun - The Kooks - Kronk

Here's another gem:

When I read this one from Jen, I thought "has to be talking heads". But no, it's from the wonderful Mike Doughty, at the time fronting Soul Coughing and the link takes you to a live video of Soul Coughing (long defunct) doing True Dreams Of Wichita. Thanks Jen. I've never seen that done live.

The best thing of all. I've didn't follow Jason or Jen. I do now.

Little Jackie

Full disclosure: My wife and I are investors in S-Curve Records, an indie label run by our friend Steve Greenberg. Little Jackie is an S-Curve artist.

OK, now that I am done with that, Little Jackie is a cool new act from Brooklyn. It's a partnership between singer/songwriter Imani Coppola and programmer Adam Pallin. Last month, Steve told me that Little Jackie went up on one of those "zero gravity" flights to make a music video to their single, The World Revolves Around Me - Little Jackie

Here's the video. Pretty cool.

Mixtapes - A Hobby That Just Won't Quit

Back in the day of the cassette tape, making mixtapes was one of my favorite pastimes. I made them for friends. Friends made them for me. The Gotham Gal and I still have a whole drawer full of tapes we made for each other. We keep them at our house at the beach and every now and then we go on a nostalgia binge and play them all day to our kids dismay.

Then the age the CD arrived and the cassette deck got used less and less. Sure you could rip the songs off the CD and burn them onto a mix CD. I've done that a bunch as have my kids, but honestly it never was as much fun for me.

The web is the new mixtape medium. There have been widgets for some time now that allow people to build mixes. The most successful have been imeem and project playlist. Both seem to have gotten a bit tired as of late but still have large audiences as this compete chart shows

I've made several imeem playlists and posted them on this blog. I made one projectplaylist mix when Lindsay told me I had to give Bjork a chance. But neither of these services really made it into my routine music habits the way last.fm, hypemachine, and tumblr have.

Now we have a new wave of mixtape services hitting the scene. I played around with two in the past day called muxtape and mixwit. Muxtape is like imeem in that you have to upload songs from your library to create your mix. Mixwit is like projectplaylist in that you search the internet for the tracks you want and add them. I vastly prefer the latter approach. It's faster and more fun.

Muxtape, however, makes up for the harder work with its elegance and simplicity. Here's a link to my muxtape. Muxtape takes it's inspiration from services like tumblr. It's a minimlaist music blogging service that just happens to function as a playlist, like tumblr's audio only dashboard should.

Mixwit is much more like imeem and projectplaylist. It creates widgets you can post anywhere you like. Here's my first mixwit widget which I built in about 30 seconds.

Of course the question is what is the business model for all of these mixtape services. imeem and projectplaylist have been forced to license the music from the rights holders and now face large royalty costs which they are funding with advertising, largely banner and CPA for now. I suspect (and hope because of our investment in targetspot) that they will also try an occasional 15 or 30 second audio ad in their streams.

If muxtape or mixwit get big, like imeem and projectplaylist have, they'll have to face the same issues. For now, it's just about building out the service and letting us all share music. Which continues to be one of my favorite pastimes and the web has certainly made it so much easier.

Moving The Goalposts

I love Billy Bragg, his attitude, his on the sleeves politics, his music, everything about him. So I read his op-ed in today's Times with interest.

In it he argues that Bebo, which may or may not have built it's audience on the backs of artists who uploaded their music for free consumption, should have shared some of their $850mm payday with those artists.

I think that specific suggestion is not workable for a host of reasons, but his basic point - that creative artists  (whether they be musicians, filmmakers, screenwriters, painters, poets, etc, etc) need a way to make money online and they don't have one - is directionally correct.

Some of my favorite bloggers have already weighed in on the discussion. Arrington in his classic in your face fashion feels no sympathy and argues that online is the best promotion that an artist can find in today's world. Mike is right, but the problem is "promoting what?" Merch and touring hardly cuts it and the loss of music sales hurts everyone, including the artist.

Nick Carr, predictably, takes the opposing view and says:

arguments to the contrary are ultimately specious and self-serving. Exploitation is exploitation, no matter how lovingly it's wrapped in neo-hippie technobabble about virtual communities, social production, and the gift economy.

I am tired of the arguments, no matter who is making them. It's time to help these artists get paid. There is a royalty structure in place for streaming music. It's a penny per listen for on demand and about a tenth of that for something less than "on demand".

These rates aren't right and need some tweaking, but I am firmly in the camp that royalties can and should be paid to artists for the streaming of their music on the Internet. I'd pay them if it were easy to do so. I stream artist's music all the time on this blog and my tumblog. But I don't know how many streams are played, I don't know how much I owe, there's no easy way for me to pay it, there's no easy way for me to share my ad revenue with them, etc, etc. As far as I know, if I wanted to pay $1000 right now to the artists, there isn't even anyone to take my money and send it to the artists.

Who is going to build the infrastructure the artists and the web services need? Who is going to deploy it at the micro-scale that most mp3 blogging happens? The music industry is all about demanding to get paid, but I don't see them building the systems to make it happen easily and within the constraints of what an online business model can pay.

I know one thing for sure. Artists, particularly musicians, are entertaining people more and more every day because of the Internet. Entrepreneurs are building a host of great ways to discover and listen online. And if there were an easy and affordable way to cut the artists in for a piece of the action, most would do it in a heartbeat. It shouldn't be necessary to wait for the $850mm payday to get paid.

The Targetspot Value Proposition

Doug Perlson, CEO of our portfolio company Targetspot, has penned an opinion piece in Forbes about monetizing online audio that does a great job of explaining what Targetspot is and why it matters.

I particularly like this paragraph:

Yet, ironically, this is exactly the type of high-quality online inventory that advertisers are asking for--it is associated with major media companies with respected brands in their own right. Furthermore, with all the ad clutter on a given Web site (display, video and text--sometimes all on the same page), Internet radio advertising offers a unique ability to cut through the noise and deliver a message that is both literally and figuratively heard. It's a high-impact medium that has only recently opened up to the advertising masses through advanced technology solutions.

For Emma, Forever Ago

If you follow my tumblog, you'll know that I've been obsessed by this record since discovering it on Daryn's tumblog on thursday.

For Emma, Forever Ago is by Bon Iver, but that's just a name chosen by Justin Vernon who is the amazing artist behind this record. Bon Iver is sort of french for "good winter' and reflects the fact that Justin recorded this record in "a remote cabin in the woods of Northwestern Wisconsin" over the course of last winter.

This record has the sound of a warm fire burning in the house with the snow and wind swirling outside. The vocals are wonderful. And at times, it has an intensity that is shocking.

The first song to get me was Flume which I linked to above on Daryn's tumblog. You can hear the "single" called Skinny Love on my tumblog as well as the ending track called Re: Stacks.

For those who aren't into clicking around, here's one more track called Blindsided.

Blindsided - Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

Soul Patch

Soul Patch is a blues/rock band out of Boulder Colorado featuring two VCs, Ryan McIntyre and Jason Mendelson, both of Foundry Group.

As many of you know, I am a big fan of the team at Foundry, mostly because they are great investors who I love working with. But now I get to enjoy their music too. That's pretty sweet.

I've been listening to Soul Patch's record, Sooner or Later, a bunch this week. I posted my favorite track, called Big Time, on my tumblog this morning. Give it a listen.

Awesome: Hype Machine Scrobbles!

I was making my way through my tumblr dashboard this morning and came across this post from Anthony of the Hype Machine.

I have been waiting and wanting this feature since the day I started using the Hype Machine two years ago. Thanks Anthony and Taylor.

It's quite simple, just go to your settings in the Hype Machine and click on the last.fm tab. You'll get this screen.

Connecting two of my favorite music services makes them both a lot better. Since the hype machine is already connected to twitter, that means that three of my favorite web services are now connected. Awesome.

Three Records I Am Into Right Now

Sorry for the lack of music posts here at AVC. I am going to make it up to you with three for the price of one.

Nada Surf - Lucky - These guys, Matt, Ira, and Daniel, are fantastic individuals who make great music.

Their past three records, including the current one, have been family favorites. After they played a fundraiser gig in our old backyard, Josh listened to The Weight Is A Gift non-stop for months.

The new record is not as edgy as the prior two, with more acoustic guitar and melodies. But they write great songs and this is so listenable.

Whose Authority - Nada Surf - Lucky (thanks Butter Team for the mp3)

Oracular Spectacular - MGMT - Fred Graver turned me on to this band with his year end mix which featured the awesome track called Kids.

I've been listening to them on hype machine since then and finally succumbed and bought the record. To be honest, it's not consistently great, but there are five or six killer songs on it.

Their music is described as "electronic indie dance rock". I guess that's a good description. I call it fun.

Time To Pretend - MGMT - Oracular Spectacular (thanks to Instrumental Analysis for the mp3)

Made In The Dark - Hot Chip - While we are on the subject of electronic music, I have been into the remixes that Hot Chip does for the past year. They are often featured on the Hype Machine. My all time favorite is this remix of the Stone's I'm Free.

I got the new studio album and like the MGMT record, I feel that it's mixed but brilliant in parts. The diversity of style and sound is simply amazing.

I can't find an mp3 on the web right now, so click thru to my tumblog and listen to Touch Too Much, a ween-sounding track that is my current obsession.

My Song Circle

Daryn told me about this cool trick with his tumblr player. You can type in as many tumblr urls as you want (separated by commas) into his script and get a player that plays a whole song circle's playlist. Here's my song circle in action. Enjoy.

warning - the load time is long if you put about ten blogs in it like i did.

Comment Of The Day

We will be seeing a version of this play out in Turkey. It's an interesting market. Piracy has all but killed physical CD sales and, online, people just don't seem to be convinced to pay for music (i am excluding mobile here). So far, online sales have largely been subsidized by FMCG companies as promotions. Now TTNet, the Turkish broadband monopoly, has cut a deal with all turkish labels (turkish market is 90% local music) to offer the entire digital Turkish music catalog through a subscription. Then, they went ahead and included the subscription in their higher-end pricing, and are offering it at a nominal rate to other subscribers (nominal meaning $3-5/mo.) So it is now a utility. Supporting your last paragraph, Fred, I am watching to see how progressive they will get with this. The smart game is building a robust API and let tothers get creative.

posted by Cem Sertoglu to David's Got It Right

David's Got It Right

David Hyman's been around online music for about as long as anyone I know. He's the founder and CEO of Mog, the blogging service for music lovers. He has a post about the future of music up on his mog that I completely agree with. Here's the meat of the post in case you don't want to click thru and read the whole thing.

Here's what the labels need to do: drop that penny per track per stream rate to about 10% of what it is today (that's right - 1/10 of a penny per stream). When that happens, the labels are meeting the market and giving away music becomes lucrative; everybody and their brother starts doing it. The labels turn all of online music consumption into a revenue stream - every site with all-you-can-eat, on-demand music. Thousands of sites innovate and create new value around how to discover and consume music. By my estimate, that's a $250 million per year market for online ad spending alone.

Next, ensure that every streaming track links to the opportunity to download the track in mp3 (with Amazon or whomever) and the labels have created the ultimate promotional machine for mp3 purchasing (for the next 10 years, people will still need to download for their portables and their car). Then slap on a tempting upsell: offer users an ad-free, higher-bitrate subscription service for a reasonable fee (say $5 per month). Suddenly the labels have a shot at staying alive.

I'll go one step further and suggest that while they are at it, they agree on an open api standard that allows connected devices (like sonos and squeezebox) in our homes to connect to these services. That's a big opportunity just waiting to happen.

Smart Playlists In iTunes

A month or so ago, I wrote a post called "Why I Don't Like The iPod Touch" in which I described the shortcomings of the current iPod I am using.

I still find this thing annoying to use but one thing has made it vastly better - iTunes Smart Playlists. I've always had an iPod with more space on it than my iTunes library so I've never needed to filter my library.

Ewan left the first comment to that post about the iPod touch and said:

For the space limited Touch, couldn't you create a smart playlist in iTunes (ctrl-alt-n in windows), to say "Date added is in the last 4 weeks" as your options, and that way the iPod touch would always have your newest added tunes on it, even if you don't have time to manually add them? That way running out of space will be less of an issue.

I finally got around to doing just that. And while I was at it, I created a whole bunch more smart playlists and I sync them too.

My iPod Touch is so much more fun now. Thanks Ewan and thanks Apple for smart playlists!

Song Circles

Sometimes the best things on the internet are not intentional. Over the past several months, I've developed a song circle with a small group of friends on tumblr. They include Rach, Bijan, JoeLaz, Daryn, and Lindsay. I know a few of these people and plan to meet a couple more shortly. But we never planned this song circle. And this is my song circle. Each of them has a different song circle.

I just started posting a song every day on tumblr. You can listen to my songs on this blog on the upper right (check autoplay to make it a playlist).

Then I noticed others were doing the same. I started to follow them in my dashboard. Then I found the filter button in the tumblr dashboard and started filtering for audio. That gives you this:

Now every day I try to listen to the song circles we create. It's not that we share exactly the same tastes in music. But it's close enough. It's like going back to college and hanging out with friends and playing music for each other. It's wonderful.

Happy Valentines Day

Happy Valentines Day Everyone. 

My gift to you is my loved tracks on Hype Machine. 

Everyone can use a little love today. 

Umair On Digital Music

Fundamentally, I'm going to argue that consumers download music, as much to derive extra value from getting something for free, as they do because they want insurance against buying something they didn't want in the first place. File-sharing is as much about risk-sharing as it is about the 'theft' of value. Technological changes have made this possible - but the way the business model of the music industry is at odds with the implicit contract it signs with listeners is what makes it probable.

If you want to read the whole thing, click here.

 

MP3 Of The Week

I used to do this all the time, but I've moved most of my mp3 posting to my tumblog at fredwilson.vc

The player on the upper right of this blog has the mp3s I've posted to tumblr in it. So if you want to hear what's going on at fredwilson.vc, just check autoplay and hit the play button.

Anyway, one of my favorite bands, Nada Surf, has a new record out called Lucky.

Here's an acoustic version of one of my favorite tracks, called I Like What You Say:

I Like What You Say - Nada Surf - Lucky

PS - There's a new version of the Yahoo music player and you'll notice that they've simplified and clean things up. Very well done.

Yahoo! Gets Behind Rhapsody

It had been rumored for months that Yahoo! was going to get out of the subscription music business. Yesterday, they announced that they were shutting down Yahoo! Unlimited and turning over the subscriber base to Rhapsody. Yahoo! also announced that they are buying the Firefox plugin called FoxyTunes. The coolest thing about FoxyTunes is their web service called FoxyTunes Planet which is like a netvibes for music. Here's the FoxyTunes Planet page on the Magnetic Fields.

I see this as a recognition by Yahoo! Music that the subscription business is tough and that's its easier to build a business on top of the music and other music related services that are already out there on the web.

The most interesting thing to me is Yahoo!'s new blog music player which is an acknowledgement that mp3 blogging is a big deal. Imagine if that were the first step in building a music service on top of the blogs? Like Hype Machine? Of course, the best thing for them to do is buy the Hype Machine.

But all of this assumes that Yahoo! is going to continue as a stand alone entity which doesn't seem that likely right now.

Lefsetz Didn't Like Vampire Weekend On Letterman

I can't link to this because Bob doesn't have it up on the web yet. He sends it via email and then posts it? Whatever.

Anyway here's what he says about Vampire Weekend on Letterman:

Last night I caught Vampire Weekend on the Letterman show.  They were awful.

and

Vampire Weekend's album might be better than their live show.  But last night on Letterman, I just saw more white boys playing thin rock.  I laughed to myself, wondering why everybody was wasting so much time on this evanescent act.  I switched the channel.

I saw them twice last week at Bowery and thought they were great.

Here's the youtube of them on letterman. Let me know what you think.

Vampire Weekend Is Most The Blogged Band Right Now

This week I saw Vampire Weekend twice at the Bowery Ballroom and blogged about the release of their debut record.

I wasn't the only blogger to be talking about this cool new band. They are the most blogged band on Hype Machine right now.

Very cool.

Vampire Weekend

What would happen if the 1977 vintage Talking Heads covered Paul Simon's Graceland? You'd get the sound of a new band called Vampire Weekend. Yesterday they released their debut record, called Vampire Weekend.

I first heard of Vampire Weekend from my daughter Jessica who connected to the band on Facebook and myspace. The band came out of Columbia University and she befriended them on the social nets and became a big fan. Then I did something (can't remember what) and somebody (i can't remember who, please identify yourself in the comments) gave me the mp3s of the record.

I took them home and put them on the music server and quickly everyone had them on their iPods and we were all digging Vampire Weekend. It's been playing non-stop in the house lately.

Last night Jessica and I went to see their record launch show at Bowery Ballroom. They gave a strong performance, particularly the ending number Walcott, which the crowd knew was coming and was calling for. There were people there last night who had been at their first live gig, not so long ago.

The record is great. I urge anyone who likes indie rock and enjoyed Graceland to get it. You will not be let down.

Here's another song to leave you with:

Oxford Comma - Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

Qtrax Doesn't Sound Very Good To Me

Qtrax announced at Midem in Cannes that it is launching a free ad supported P2P service with 5mm tracks initially and 25mm tracks very soon.

I like the idea that you take all the files that are out there on the P2P networks and build a legal service on top of them. And I like the idea that its free and ad supported.

But Qtrax isn't for me, at least yet.

I want to be able to play the music in any device (sonos, pc, mac, iPod, Blackberry, etc, etc). Qtrax requires the use of a proprietary player built on top of Songbird.

But worse, it requires the files to have DRM on them so they can't be played elswhere.

What's the point of having files in the first place if you can't play them everywhere?

I'd rather use a streaming service like last.fm, rhapsody, or hype machine than this thing. At least some of those services are turning up on connected devices and mobile phones.

My gut tells me that files should be paid for and streaming should be free and ad supported. Curious what you all think.

Sweet

Daryn must have changed the tumblr player I blogged about last night because when I loaded this page this morning the player in the upper right of the blog now fits squarely in the sidebar and we can autoplay the songs.

Thanks Daryn. That was sweet.

Do me a favor, open this blog in a tab on your browser, click autoplay, and then hit play and let me DJ for you this morning. And let me know what you think.

Last.fm Jumps On The On-Demand Streaming Bandwagon

I've been saying for as long as anyone would listen to me that one day all the music ever recorded is going to be on the Internet and we are going to have sufficient bandwidth and connections on every possible listening device and at that point file based music is going to be history. I'd go back and find all the posts I've written on this topic but it would fill up the whole front page of this blog. I believe this with all my mind, heart, and soul.

We'll have a bunch of ways we can listen to this music.

We can listen in "radio" mode where we tune into some kind of DJ and we let them play music for us. This largely exists already. You can listen to Radio Paradise which is exactly what it sounds like, you can listen to last.fm neighbor radio (here's mine), and you can listen to hype machine's popular list. The services I've listed here and many others pay the compulsory streaming radio license to soundexchange or directly to the various rights holders.

Or we can listen on-demand meaning we pick the music we want to play, either song by song, album by album, or via building playlists. These services pay a royalty to the rights holders of $0.01 per song and to date have funded those payments by charging a monthly subscription of between $5/month and $15/month. The leading on-demand streaming service has been Rhapsody which I've advocated for years, particularly when combined with an in-home device like Sonos. There are others in this market like Yahoo! Unlimited (which is rumored to be leaving the subscription music business) and Napster (the new Napster). I have heard that none of these services is profitable, but I could be wrong about that.

Last.fm announced today that they are offering their own on demand service. They are pushing the envelope with this service in two important ways. First, they are allowing anyone to listen to three free plays of any song before they have to become a subscriber. Second, the monthly subscription is $3, much lower than anyone else (at least to my knowledge).

Will I switch from Rhapsopdy? Not yet. I'll probably add a subscription to last.fm's service for two reasons. First, I believe in paying for music. This money will go to the artists (at least for unsigned artists who put their music on last.fm). Second I might want to listen to a song more than three times on last.fm and I'll need a subscription to do that.

But right now Rhapsody works on Sonos and last.fm doesn't. Since we do most of our Rhapsody listening on Sonos, that's a good reason to stay on Rhapsody even though it's 3-4x as much as last.fm.

It appears that last.fm is planning on paying for the on-demand royalties through a combination of advertising and subscriptions (that's why the subscription is lower). That's certainly a step in the right direction.

In my vision of a pure streaming world (which I outlined in the opening paragraph of this post), we'd have a third option. Which is fully ad supported on-demand listening. It's too bad that last.fm can't go all the way to free (they are getting close). Because until on-demand listening can be supported entirely by ads, I don't think it will be a mainstream service. It's still possible to get music for free and many people choose to do that instead of paying for a streaming subscription service.

I do think that paid and ad-supported/free can co-exist in the market. It works in radio where some are willing to pay for XM and Sirius while most are happy to get some ads and not have to pay for their radio.

I hope last.fm will consider offering a totally free on-demand service supported by in stream advertising (supplied by targetspot of course!). I think that's something that the market would really respond to.

I've been beta testing a service called Spotify that I can't talk much about other than to say it's another on-demand streaming service and it's very good. I hope they'll have the courage to try the free/ad-supported model in addition to the subscription model.

Back to last.fm's announcement today, there's one thing I really wish they'd have done. I'd like them to offer embedding an on-demand player on blogs and social net profiles. If you click on this link to last.fm, you can listen to Vampire Weekend's song, Cape Code Kwassa Kwassa, which I like very much. But I don't really want to force you off this page to hear the song. Instead I could upload the mp3, like this - Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa - Vampire Weekend. If they offered an embeddable player, that allowed anyone to listen to a song, monetized by audio ads after the song and before the next song, I would stop uploading mp3s and start embedding the last.fm player.

If they don't do it, someone will. Because it's the logical next step in the streaming audio game.

MP3 Blogging - Tying Things Back Together

I mentioned recently that I had moved my daily mp3 posting from this blog to fredwilson.vc.

A bunch of commenters said that was too bad because they weren't going to read two blogs.

But one commenter, Daryn, did something about it.

He gave me (and anyone else who wants it) some javascript that creates a portable tumblr music player. Here's daryn's comment along with the code.

you just need to add the following two lines of javascript whereever you want the widget to appear, replacing the dn_tmblr value with your own tumblr url ( http://fredwilson.vc )

<script>var dn_tmblr="http://daryn.tumblr.com";</script>
<script src="http://s3.daryn.net/js/tumblrmusic.js"></script>

Example: http://s3.daryn.net/tumblrtest.html

Here's the player it creates.

 

In honor of Daryn's work, I have replaced my avatar on the upper right of this blog with the tumblr player for a little while.

You can forward and rewind through the various songs I've posted on tumblr and you can play them with the play button at the botttom.

I've got two requests for Daryn:

1) can you make the player a little thinner (175px would be ideal) so it fits better in my sidebar?
2) can you give us an option to play the entire playlist in reverse chronological order instead of just one song?

In any case, this is a big improvement. It ties everything back together nicely. It brings a daily source of new music to this blog. Thanks Daryn!

Why I Don't Like The iPod Touch

I mentioned in my thoughts from the eliptical trainer post yesterday that I don't like my iPod Touch. Several commenters asked why. Here's why:

1) It's 16gb. My former iPod was 60gb and you can now get 160gb iPod classic for $349 whereas the 16gb iPod Touch is $399.

2) My iTunes library is around 50gb. So when I synch the iPod Touch, I have to synch a single playlist. When I find new music, rip CDs, buy music on Amazon MP3, etc, I often forget to add it to my iPod Touch synch playlist. So I walk out the door and the music I want isn't on it.

2) The user interface is completely different than iPod classic. It mirrors the iPhone music interface. Which I hate. Sometimes I get stuck in the screen listening to a song and can't figure out how to get out. The buttons across the bottom for artists, songs, albums are so small that I often select the wrong one.  It took me days to figure out that you had to click on the screen a second time to see how much time was left on the song or change the setting from shuffle to regular play. And those shuffle buttons are so small it takes me forever to change them. The audio volume slider is not granular enough so I am always fussing with it for 15 or 20 seconds to get it right and I often blow out my ears as I make that selection.

3) I never use the wifi or browswer on it because I have a wifi blackberry curve and that is so much more useful because it has email, sms and google maps on it. I know that for a $20 upgrade you can put additional apps on your iPod Touch, but I don't really care to do that anyway.

4) I find it hard to pause the music and lock the screen. I've been in meetings when my iPod Touch started playing through the earbuds because I leaned on it through my jacket.

The bottom line is that the iPod Touch suffers from not being a very good iPod and not being a iPhone. If you want an iPhone, get one. If you want an iPod, get an iPod Classic.

Thoughts from the eliptical trainer

1) Wall street is in fear mode while silicon valley is still is greed mode. Can the two coexist peacefully?

2a) I have to get tickets to the magnetic fields sold out show at town hall on feb 24th. If you've got xtras, send me an email please

2b) The new magnetic fields record, distortion, is awesome

3) The ipod touch is a shitty product. Gotta get back to a real ipod not a toy

4) I am not sure the other social nets efforts to be a platform ala facebook will work. I tried bebo's new platform and was underwhelmed with the integration of third party apps. I can't even imagine what myspace platform would be like

5) If you have a web app that gets millions of uniques a month with 80pcnt plus from google and an avg time spent on site of less than 1 minute, do you have an audience? I think not. It might be a business though.

6) I hope mysql's sale for 1bn puts an end to the question over whether open source is a good business model

7) Why am I not twittering these?

8) That workout was too short

Top 10 Records of 2007 Playlist

I hear that the hypemachine is working on something cool with year end top 10 lists. But it has to be a single post. So here is a single post of my top 10 (actually closer to 20) records of 2007 with an mp3 selection for each. This post shows off the awesomeness of the new Yahoo! player which I installed yesterday. If you click play next to any of these tracks you'll launch a player that lets you listen to the entire list and you can fast forward through any you don't like (but that's not gonna happen!)

Number 1 - Because Of The Times - Kings Of Leon. Selected Track: Fans

Number 2 -  Hissing Fauna - Of Montreal. Selected Track: A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger

Number 3 - Night Falls Over Kortedala - Jens Lekman. Selected Track: Postcard To Nina

Number 4 - Favourite Worst Nightmare - Arctic Monkeys. Selected Track: Fluorescent Adolescent

Number 5 -  Panic Prevention - Jamie T. Selected Track: Operation

Number 6 -  Neon Bible - Arcade Fire. Selected Track: Antichrist Television Blues

Number 7 - The Magic Position - Patrick Wolf. Selected Track: The Magic Position

Number 8 -  Our Ill Wills - Shout Out Louds. Selected Track: Hard Rain

Number 9 - Challengers - New Pornographers. Selected Track: Myriad Harbour

Number 10 - Nux Vomica - The Veils. Selected Track: Night Thoughts Of A Tired Surgeon

Honorable Mention - The Broken String - Bishop Allen. Selected Track: Rain

Actually, there are a bunch more honorable mentions, but I got tired of cut and pasting. If you want to see the rest of my honorable mentions and the entire set of top 10 records posts, here's the entire list.

Flight Of The Conchords At CES

This is so awesome that I really am speechless.

I found this song on the hype machine, then clicked over to Stereogum where I found the video.

Flight Of The Conchords - Business Time

The Nun's Litany

I am testing out the new Yahoo! music player that I swapped in for the delicious playtagger.

This song is called The Nun's Litany. It's on the new Magnetic Fields record, Distortion, that is due out this coming week. I love the Magnetic Fields and this song is terrific. It's about a nun who secretly wants to be the opposite of what she is. Enjoy.

The Nun's Litany - The Magnetic Fields - Distortion

Ian Roger's Aspen Music Talk

So I am going to blog about something that happened a month ago. In the world of tech blogging, that's like talking about ancient history. This won't get on Techmeme because all the linking to Ian's talk happened a month ago. But honestly I didn't get around to reading Ian's talk until the flight out to SF earlier this week.

I have never met Ian Rogers. That must change. He's made the same mistakes I've made. He loves music as much as I do. He sees the path forward pretty much the same way that I do. And he enjoys skiing the cat on the backside of Aspen as much as I do.

Almost two years ago, I wrote a post called Abundance in which I argued that scarcity is not possible in digital media and abundance is the dimension you must play on if you want to succeed. In that post, I talked about how my friend Steve Greenberg was trying to break a band called The Jonas Brothers using embedded videos on MySpace. That tricked worked out pretty well and the Jonas Brothers are now a huge act for Disney.

Ian makes that same point in his Aspen talk.

Winners leverage scale. That's right. There's only one way I've ever seen to win big on the web and it's to leverage scale. I honestly can't think of a big Internet company built on the concept of scarcity. If you can, please leave it in the comments and I'll try to get my head around a scarcity model.

Ian also talks about Umair's snowball vs. blockbuster meme. This is really important. Elf Yourself may have been the web blockbuster of 2007. 31mm unique visitors in December alone. But would you rather be Elf Yourself or Addicting Games? You choose.

But possibly the most important point Ian made in his talk was about the lack of native audio (and video) support in the web. As Ian says:

While there’s an image tag in HTML, there isn’t an audio or a video tag

Flash makes this a but less of a problem. But Flash isn't a standard. It's a proprietary standard owned by Adobe. Just yesterday I heard of a major radio company that is standardizing on silverlight for its web music player. What are they thinking? We need audio and video to play anywhere and everywhere on the web no matter what device and operating system you are using. And it doesn't look like that's going to happen anytime soon.

So this past week Yahoo!, where Ian runs the music business (at least I think he does), introduced a browser based music player. As most of you know, I use the delicious playtagger to play mp3s on this blog. That uses flash and I think most everyone has flash and is able to use it. And since Yahoo! bought delicious, they own that tool too.

I'll add the new Yahoo! music player code to this blog, replacing the delicious playtagger. Let me know what you think. I really love the simplicity and elegance of the delicious playtagger so if the new Yahoo! player isn't univerally loved, I may well go back to the playtagger.

Google may be the Internet company with the most mojo, but they've never done anything interesting with music. Yahoo!, on the other hand, seems to be up to some really interesting stuff and Ian's Aspen talk has me rooting for them.

My MP3 Blogging

All you music fans who are used to getting several mp3 posts a week may be wondering what's going on.

I've moved most of my mp3 blogging to fredwilson.vc

I am looking for a way to bring those posts back to this blog (via RSS or a widget or something) but haven't found the right solution yet.

So if you are looking for music from me, best to visit fredwilson.vc

Seth On The Music Business

Seth Godin listed 14 rules to live by in the music business on his blog yesterday. It's a topic you all have heard me rant on endlessly for years. I am passionate about this issue because I love music and hate to see how messed up the business of music is. Taken together, Seth's 14 rules are are great recipe for how to fix the music business.

Rhapsody: An Apology Of Sorts

Last week I wrote an annoyed post on the demise of one of my favorite music web services, Yottamusic.

I let Rhapsody have it for shutting down Yotta, which was an alternative web client for subscribers of Rhapsody. Here's what I said:

Rhapsody should be like dial tone. You subscribe to it and use it wherever you want

The fact that they've shut down yotta shows that they are old school luddites without a clue.

Screw them. I am so off of Rhapsody as soon as someone like spotify comes along with the right model.

Ben Rotholtz, who is GM Web Services & Syndication at Rhapsody, left several well written comments to the post and he and I have been trying to schedule some time to talk which hasn't happened due to my vacation and his trip to CES.

The story here is that Rhapsody's API is governed by the terms of their content licenses with the record labels. Yottamusic was doing some things outside of their API and outside of their terms of service in order to fully replicate the Rhapsody experience for their users. Rhapsody had no choice to shut them down or be in violation of its deals with the labels.

So I guess I owe Rhapsody an apology here. It's not entirely their fault. They are not luddites. They are in bed with luddites.

As one of my mentors in the venture business used to say all the time - "when you lie down with dogs, you come up with fleas."

Top 10 Records of 2007 - Number Two

When I first put pen to paper and listed my top 10 records of 2007, this record was in the bottom half of the list. But over the past couple weeks, as I have been listening almost exclusively to my top 10 list, I've moved this up, and up, and up. The reason is simple. Hissing Fauna is the most complete record on the list. It is a record that works best listened start to finish. Sure there are standout tracks, like Suffer For Fashion, She's A Rejector, Faberge, Heimdalsgate, and several more. But when I listen to any of the tracks solo, I expect and want to hear the next track at the end of the song. That's a record.

For those who don't know, Of Montreal is based in Athens Georgia and is the handiwork of a talented musician named Kevin Barnes. He's the front man for the band and he did all of the songwriting on this record. Maybe that's why it flows so well from start to finish.

The music is neo-psychedelic pop. Think Beach Boys meet Sgt Pepper with a bit of George Clinton and techo thrown in for good measure.

Here's one of my favorite tracks, called A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger

A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger - Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer

Top 10 Records of 2007 – Number 3

Every year it seems we find at least one new musical force that stays with us for years. One year it's Josh Rouse, another year its Ben Kweller. This year it was Jens Lekman. I put a Jens track, The Opposite Of Hallelujah, on the post that kicked off this top 10 series and someone commented that it "just might be the gayest song I've ever heard in my life :)" Well that's the thing with Jens, it's an acquired taste. Like scotch, hip hop, uni, and other great things in life that I hated at first.

Jens Lekman is a crooner, but one who adds all kinds of cool samples, and the best quirky lyrics since Jonathan Richman. In fact, I think you might need to go through a Jonathan phase to truly appreciate Jens.

My friend Steve Greenberg turned me onto all sorts of great music when I met him in grad school. Steve went on to be one of the best new talent guys in the music business with his label, S-Curve Records. Steve's got great taste in music. So when I was sitting in the subway one day with my headphones on laughing out loud to Jens' Postcard To Nina, I just had to send it to Steve. He told me at our christmas party that it was his favorite single of the year. I knew Steve would love Jens as much as I do.

Jens is most compared to Jonathan Richman, Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields, and Morrisey. Great company if you ask me. And this record, called Night Falls Over Kortedala, is the best thing he's done so far. Although his prior record, Oh You're So Silent Jens, is pretty great as well.

If you want to hear something new and old at the same time, that's a bit cheesy and also a bit out there, get both records. You'll either thing it's the gayest thing ever or one of the best records of the year. And either one is cool with me.

Top 10 Records of 2007 – Number 4

We were watching the girls wait in line for the ferris wheel today at Luna Park and we heard the oh so familiar voice of Alex Turners sing, "you used to get it in your fishnets ..." and Josh and I started singing along to our favourite song of 2007, Fluorescent Adolescent.

The Arctic Monkeys put out my top record of last year and they may well have put out my top record of this year as well. But after thinking about it, I decided that Favourite Worst Nightmare is number four. Why? Because there are three records I like more, of course.

Alex Turner's going to be a crooner before his career is up and this record gives glimpses of it. The amazing last minute of Flourescent Adolescent, the singing he delivers on Only Ones Who Know, and If You Were There Beware, once the requisite Arctic Monkeys opening is finished.

This record rocks too. The opening number, Brianstorms, sets the pace and the first four songs pick right up from the debut record. But Fluorescent Adolescent marks the departure point and from there the record goes in several directions, all fantastic.

I know that there are many who think the Arctic Monkeys are a flash in the pan, including the band themselves - "in five years time, will it be who the fuck are Arctic Monkeys?". But not me. I love this band and Alex Turner in particular. He's the real deal, with his amazing songwriting, acid lyrics, and fantastic voice. In five years time, they'll more likely have five top 10 records on this blog.

Do Me A Favour - Arctic Monkeys - Favourite Worst Nightmare

Top 10 Records of 2007 – Number 5

So much great music is coming from the UK these days, but the best new thing out of the UK this year was this record, Panic Prevention, from a young brit who calls himself Jamie T.

Corey, who I know from the UBO days, gave me this record early this year and it’s been a mainstay all year.

Josh and I dig this record big time. He likes the opening song, Bass Guitar. We’d get in the car, connect the iPod, and Josh would blast that song all summer long.

Like many debut records, there are so many great tracks on this record, including the single Sheila, the thumping bass line of Salvador, the two songs the Gotham Gal can take, Calm Down Dearest and So Lonely The Ballad, and my favorite, If You Got The Money. I also like Ike and Tina and Operation. Hell, all the tracks on this record are great.

The comparisons to Mike Skinner/The Streets is obvious, but Jamie T is something a bit different. The live performances I’ve seen on YouTube make him out to be more of a singer than a rapper.

If you want a record that will make you laugh, dance, and sing along, get this one. It’s a gem.

Operation - Jamie T - Panic Prevention