Talk about zeitgeist. About half a dozen friends have  effectively yelled 'Spotify" at me over the course of the last week. Then I got an invitation to join this rather nifty little P2P-based streaming service, and, well yes, it's pretty fabulous on first look. Lovely, intuitive drag-and-drop interface, easy-to-build playlists, recommendations radio and a lot of music in there. The free version plays you the odd ad, but nothing too intrusive - and not that often. Tonight it's all been about metal and jazz rock: Mahavishnu, Perfect Circle, Opeth, Weather Report, Can and Meshuggah. Couldn't get hold of any Benea Reach or Fell Silent, but still... It's pretty fun toggling between a specialist show on the BBC iPlayer and checking out Spotify to see if they have stuff you liked on said show.

My hunch? It's going to be massive.

I think I'll largely avoid downturn stories here; they're pretty much ubiquitous, after all. Still, Google shedding staff seems to be, well, something.

It seems the iTMS has already shifted 500 million iPhone apps, a staggering 2 million a day. They don't say how many are paid for or free, but still... We particularly like the look of synthpod. Lovely.

Various bits of news came out of MidemNet, a lot of it a bit ho-hum, I thought. We were taken with the notion of the Isle of Man being a testing ground for a broadband "tax" to reimburse downloaded copyright owners. Not entirely sure it's going to get offf the ground though...

I'm the Brighton-based bit of DS, so feel duty-bound to point out these two bits of, er, Silicon Beach coverage in New Media Knowledge. Our good friend Daniel Nathan of, well, everything (but especially of totallyradio) talks about radio and web. And in a more general article the mag talks to some other South Coast notables.

One thing Daniel certainly wouldn't be surprised by is the news that DAB sales are properly flatlining, despite the DRDB's best efforts to obscure the fact.

Uh oh, big hair metaller in not-getting-the-new-world alert: Skid Row's Sebastain Bach is apparently well pissed off with being downloaded for free. To be fair, he's a pretty cogent interviewee, but he does seem to be missing the point here: if the kids really are downloading shitloads of your music for free (and really, Seb, are they?) can't you figure out a way to take advantage? File under "The Metallica approach to the web,".

Oh and one last mention for The Reg's Andrew Orlowski. Orlowski's no free-for-aller, but he points out that Virgin Media's proposed monetised P2P approach had a lot going for it and that the UK record industry's (sadly successful) assault on it before it even had chance to launch is a missed opportunity.
Simon

We are proud to announce that our good friends AVCO have soft launched a bright, new and rather beautiful website for one of the UK's most exciting ensembles - the London Sinfonietta. We worked with both teams to devlelop some of the core ideas for the site and we feel extremely proud of the amazing work they have done.

This is how AVCO describe the project -

'With London Sinfonietta we set out to build a website that closely represented the dynamic performances of the ensemble, inspiring and involving the public in a wider context for each event. As well as providing details of upcoming events, the website plays host to a community of associated artists and a public who engage with London Sinfonietta through listening, participation and dialogue.'

Justin

What's going on?!

I've been a Last.fm user for five years or so now; I can't call myself an especially early adopter any more with it than anything else, but with nearly 90,000 scrobbles and counting  I'd certainly claim to be a heavy user. More to the point I've been an especially vocal fan - a proselytizer, I guess. In workshop after workshop, panel discussion after presentation I've held Last up to be a paragon of algorithm-driven, stats-based personalisation. I've patiently explained why they trump, say, Pandora, with the latter's recommendations ultimately driven by essentially editorial decisions.

I've illustrated my enthusiasm with a pretty straightforward  look at some of my own personal tastes. I like metal. So that's Iron Maiden or Judas Priest, right? Well, no, I'd rather chew my own face off than listen to a whole album by either of them (although I should point out my personal, ie. non-musical admiration for both Halford and Dickinson, but won't go into that now... ) Similarly, I'd say I love classical music... but that two thirds of the standard nineteenth century repertoire leave me cold at best - retching at worst.

Now the old ways of making recommendations very often run on genre, so an assumption that I might want to listen to 'Hell Bent for Leather' or Turandot based on a very basic understanding of my generic tastes wouldn't be unreasonable. But it would, to repeat myself, be wrong.

The power of Last.fm has been that no-one's making any decisions about genre, or about mood or really about anything. There's just an awful lot of computation drawing an awful amount of inference from an awfully large amount of information.

Which is why I've been more than happy (if always a little trepidatous) to get Last up in front of an audience at, say, a workshop, and see what its Recommendations Radio service would bung my way. I have an especially fond memory of doing this at Music Learning Live! at the Sage in Gateshead last year. I'd already primed the audience by pillorying my own tastes: extreme metal, dodgy prog, navel-gazing 20th century classical and wiffly psych jazz. What does Last go and play me? In quick succession, if memory serves: Van Der Graaf Generator, Mompou, something from Miles' Big Fun and Mastodon. Priceless.

So what the fuck has happened to it lately? Over the last few weeks I've noticed  - well, hardly "noticed", rather been appalled by - a massive deterioration in service, with recommendations further and further "off".

Now I can see how some things happen. Partly it's down to my machine being left scrobbling when others use it. My oldest son is Joe is a curiously diehard 70s soul fan; it's down to him that Stevie Wonder is in my most listened-to artists (and, of course, I have no problem with this). Joe's younger brother Franck, on the other hand listens to a shitload of undergound hip hop, d'n'b and dubstep. Meanwhile, I spent quite a bit of time over Christmas prepp'ing a NYE playlist which, the average age of attendees at said party being, er, early-40s, was pretty heavily early 80s: ZTT, post-punk, electro, and, yes, New Romantic.

So I would expect some weirdness in Last's recent recommendations, a bit too much hip hop say, or the odd bit of 80s naffery. But the number of misses has been off the scale. Really. And there's other oddness as well. Why do I keep getting the exact same Pete Rock track? Why is every third track (at least!) Björk-related (a solo piece, or something by KUKL or the Sugarcubes), why so much Brazilian MPB (yes, yes, I love bossa and tropicalia - so play me some of that).

Now I am not for one minute suggesting this is the case, but were I a cynic I'd have say that the brutal truth of the CBS takeover had finally trickled down, that promotionally-driven choices were being made for me, that algorithms were being tweaked to allow certain material to float to the top. Like I say, I genuinely don't believe this is the case... but something is very seriously wrong. And I certainly won't be using it in a live presentation any time soon.

It's funny, about this time last year I was pretty dismissive of Idiomag. To their credit they responded intelligently, and although it's taken a while, their recommendations have gone from strength to strength in terms of relevance. This morning brought news of Sonic Youth working on a new album, D'Angelo collaborating with Prince and Lamb of God up to something or other. I'm not an especially big LoG fan, but nonetheless that's pretty good going.

So it feels a strange moment to be getting pissy about Last, the poster child of the collab.filt recommendations age. But I leave you with this: I  needed to hear Judas Priest's 'Breaking the Law' precisely never again in my life. Something, apparently, unrealised by the Last maths.

I can't tell you how much I hope this is some temporary algorithmic weirdness; I want my Last back!

There's not a little fuss being made about the joint announcement from Google and the Prado in Madrid that some of the masterpieces in the latter's collection are going to be viewable in ultra-hi-res on Google Earth.

Matador Records' Patrick Amory tells Hypebot what is working for the label in marketing terms right now. We were especially taken with his approach to running a label blog:
"Our own label blog. Filling it with as much interesting stuff, non-musical as well as musical, non-Matador as well as Matador, has doubled our website traffic in the past year and vastly increased business on our webstore. It is also a highly effective method of syndicating promo content."

Of course, the record industry isn't always that smart... and often seems to bring others down to its own level. In a move which uncannily echoes the opening anecdote of Lessig's Remix, YouTube have announced that they'll be muting any UGC clips which feature un-licenced third party music. That'll definitely save the industry then.

And in a move (similarly) by turns desperate and, well, somewhat too late, New Labour has apparently opened an "office" in Second Life. Again: that'll do the trick.

Ahead of his upcoming report on digital Britain, Lord Carter has hinted that he'll be pushing for 100% broadband penetration as vital for the UK economy. Apparently he's also considering the merger of Channels 4 & 5 into a larger public service commercial broadcaster:

Over at Google, they've launched an addition to their maps of dozens of cities: public transport routes, but meanwhile have announced that they're ending the ability to upload to (the perpetually beta) Google Videos, one assumes in favour of YouTube.

On the BBC Audio & Music Our Radio Labs blog, our former BBC colleague Michael Smethurst writes with typical insight about the difficulties in creating unique idenitifiers for "works", be they books, records or radio shows.

The inexorable transition from physical to virtual product is demonstrated nicely by the announcement that Blockbuster will be working with Sonic Solutions' CinemaNow to deliver a Blockbuster-branded online and mobile video service.

The upcoming trial of Joel Tannenbaum, who's apparently being sued by the RIAA for a million dollars for illegally downloading, er, seven songs, is going to be webcast, a US courtroom first.

The convergence of the internet and the games console continues apace with YouTube optimising its content for the PS3 and Wii.

The World Service's great finance & industry correspondent Peter Day this week interviewed Wired's Chris Anderson about his "Free" theories and upcoming book.

Talking of free stuff... Andrew Dubber maintains the excellent New Music Strategies blog. This week he discusses the whys and wherefores of giving away recorded music. I've not read anything quite as succinct as his riposte to a musican asking why they should "give their music away":
"1) You’re not giving away music, you’re giving away RECORDINGS of your music; 2) Don’t try to make money from your music, make money BECAUSE of your music; 3) Economics works differently for bits than it does for atoms."

Oh, and one more Anderson-related nugget. There's a big old Long Tail backlash going on at the moment, but it seems eMusic's consumption figures still bear him out...

Finally, The Independent's web offering has never really stood up against the competition - especially the Guardian (and I write this as an Indy, rather than Guardian loyalist). The inclusion of Al Jazeera video content, however, is a significant enhancement.
Simon

As Simon was saying below, I have been doing some thinking about how the classical music world has been making use of the web recently, but perhaps more importantly how everyone seems to have come up with a different answer to the same question. What do our users want?  

Is it to get involved? Is it to get access to the impossible? Is it Hi-Def? Experience or product? Do classical music fans want to be part of a community with other classical music fans?  

Is it to be part of Tan Dun's...'first collaborative online orchestra' a global talent search developed by Google? Or, perhaps for most users, an opportunity to vote who's in and who's out of the world's first collaborative online orchestra.  

Yo-Yo Ma is thinking of an even deeper level of participation than simply watching videos and voting - he is thinking remix, collaboration, music making. As the website says - users can now 'Collaborate virtually with Yo-Yo by adding your own counter-melody or record an entirely new set of variations.' Of course this is also has to be a competition and the winner will get to record a piece with Yo-Yo Ma 'in a special one-on-one collaboration!'.  

So these two classical big hitters are firmly in the Web 2.0 mode when they are thinking about what users want. They want to do stuff, they want to be seen, they want to join in.   What about the users that just want to sit back and soak it all in? Those that want quality broadcasting, but on the web. Well yes there are quite a few 'answers' for that kind of user too. The main fault lines seem to be 'live' vs 'on-demand', 'free' vs 'quite expensive' and 'available forever' vs 'one time only spectacular'. So on the one hand our good friends at the Royal Opera House offer the opportunity to watch Don Giovanni, whenever you want, with director commentary and online notes for free. Or the quite different calculation that the Bayreuth Festival 2008 made - watch Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg live, once, for about £50. Or perhaps something all encompassing in the middle with the Berlin Philharmoniker's flash based and flashy Digital Concert Hall. This is for the user who wants everything, live-ness, on-demand-ness, high quality concerts at around 10 Euros a pop or splash out for the season ticket.  

These examples are just a few of the responses that have been created in response to the question - 'what do users want?', but already we can see that this is a spread betting game. I think this is great news - the fact that there is still a game, that the market hasn't collapsed around one overriding business model and that there is so much willingness to test ideas, learn from them and refine them.  Just take a look at the mindblowing medici.tv website to get a sense of the unbridled ambition that seems to be awash in the classical media world right now.
Justin

A busy few days on the news front, not least with CES in Vegas, so here's a quick trawl through some stuff which caught our eyes over the weekend.

Copyright thinker-reformer-activist Lawrence Lessing is something of a hero around here. Here he is on the Colbert Report talking about his latest treatise, Remix. Colbert does his usual "whatever" schtick, but Lessig holds his own.

Oh, and here's Gladwell at AIGA Business and Design Conference walking us through his 10,000 hours thesis, cutely using the history of Fleetwood Mac to illustrate his central tenet. (Apologies - this is a couple of months old, but I've only just caught up with it...)

The Guardian report that Eidos have lost a further 28% of their share price principally as a result of disappointing sales of Underworld, the eighth installment of that poster child of the British games industry, Tomb Raider.

Justin's getting a post together about the high end classical music world's engagement with comms tech, but here's a couple of bits of news we've come across in brief. The Berlin Philharmonic have announced the launch of their "Digital Concert Hall", essentially a paid-for, high-res live video streaming service. And Wired report that cellist Yo Yo Ma's posting of a solo performance on music community site Indaba has received a pretty staggering 125,000 accompaniment contributions.

Mind you, for that Berlin Phil business you're going to need a pretty fast connection, and according to Ofcom, the speeds many of us are getting at home are somewhat less than advertised.

We've mentioned tilt shift photography here before - the manipulation of photos to look like close-up pics of models. Tilt Shift Maker is an online app that allows users to upload pics from their library and tilt shift them  - with remarkable ease. Here's a pic I took in Rio a year back, before- and after-tilt shifting...

Hours of fun.

Urban modernist style bible Monocle has launched a new online radio programme,  The Monocle Weekly, hosted by the magazine's founder Tyler Brûlé.

Over at CES...  Sony CEO Howard Stringer announced that by the end of 2011, 90% of its products will be internet connected.

Meantime, Apple have finally announced a variable price structure for songs in the iTMS and that they're gradually dropping DRM. (Like most of us, I can't say this has happened soon enough: for no apparent good reason I discovered mid-set on NYE that I couldn't use any iTMS-acquired songs on DJay until I'd downloaded the latest Quicktime update. Not stressful at all.)

But it seems Palm really stole the show (much to everyone's surprise?) with the launch of the Palm Pre. I have to say, as an (inevitable) iPhone user that I have some serious envy going on...

We've been thinking a lot about the relative merits of Guitar Hero and Singstar for some time; it strikes us that a much better case can be made for the latter as a music teaching tool, as you've got to improve your actual singing to progress. Plainly progressing on the former is only going to make users better at, well, Guitar Hero. But we've felt it's only a matter of time before someone brought together GH-like game play with playing an actual guitar. Seems Disney have got in there first with a tie-up with Washburn guitars: Star Guitarist.

And ending on a sombre note, but stressing that it's not all toys-for-boys, increased convenience for tragically time-poor first worlders or vanity-driven social networking... Here's a Facebook campaign to raise awareness about the devastation in Gaza right now. The real world...
Simon

Over on DGMS I was moaning pitifully only a couple of days back about feeling overwhelmed by online music services: Last, iMeem, Blip, 14 Tracks, Hype Machine, Muse Bin...

So is Twones to be the answer? In private beta currently it claims to be the ultimate aggregator/tracker of all these services, a sort of Meebo for music. Will it work? Hard to say until the beta goes public. In the meantime, here's a little promo video about the proposed service.
Simon

I've finally got round to posting on my more, er, personal blog, Don't Get Me Started. It's a bit of a rambling catch up, but there's be some DS-related stuff in there, including thoughts on Web 2 music apps and services, the pitfalls of search- or metadata-driven advertising and a moan about crappy online journalism.
Simon

We took a couple of days off over Christmas, naturally... but we didn't turn the radar off, so here are a few things I've picked up on recently, with a bit of an emphasis on end-of-08 round-ups and predictions for 09.

There's been quite a bit of hoopla about the RIAA giving up on prosecuting file sharers and apparently working more closely with ISPs. Bob Lefsetz takes  a typically sceptical look at the announcement.

Web Pro News's Chris Crum has posted three hugely well-informed 08 retrospectives, looking in turn at the year in social media, music and video.

There's been widespread reporting of China's crackdowns on both Google and homegrown search engine Baidu. It's all about porn, allegedly; the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the Tianamen Square massacre is purely coincidental, of course.

As a parent of teenagers who keeps in touch with the little darlings as much through  Messenger, Facebook and the mobile as, well, in person, I was unsurprised to read this article in the Guardian about the increasing number of parents using Web 2 tech to keep an eye on their offspring (and recall with wry amusement an argument with a Somethin' Else colleague a couple of years back in which I held fast to this being a paradigm shift in inter-generational relationships... something I maintain.)

I was as puzzled by ITV's acquistion of Friends Reunited as I was about CBS's purchase of Last... as good as the services were I couldn't see what these particular companies would do with them. Anyway, according to the Times, ITV have fessed up to FR being worth less than they paid for it.

John Naughton has written a typically insightful set of predictions for the upcoming year in tech and comms. We certainly concur with his claims for cloud-based working, "small apps and the rise and rise of the netbook.

And on a related and slightly tongue-in-cheek note, The Reg points to the increased use of online services by larger and larger companies being accelerated by the recess/depression and speculates on the attendant  devastating impact on traditional IT departments.

Wired rounds up its ten favourite iphone Apps of 08; I have to get the ocarina!

Justin has been thinking and writing a lot about cognitive surplus projects... about the notion that there are millions of smart people out there who businesses and governments can tap into for ideas and problem-solving effort. I'm not sure Google's call for ideas from the public fits Justin's definition exactly, any more than Facebook's translation project, but they're both impressive approaches to crowdsourcing.
Simon

On December 16th We delivered the second in our series of social media workshops for the BBC at the organisation's Marylebone High Street offices: Putting the Social into Social Media.

Jem Stone led the day for us, kicking off with a genuinely rivetting 50 minute overview presentation using this Mitchell and Webb clip as his opening gambit:

The second half of the session consisted of a panel discussion again chaired by Jem. The Word's David Hepworth, Radio 1's Hugh Garry and Panorama's Derren Lawford gave a diverse yet remarkably consensual set of views on the use of social media in a broadcasting and publishing context.

We were particularly taken with David Hepworth's insistance that you could never know more than "the nutters in their bedrooms" so had better show them some respect, and we liked his HEP acronym:

H - humility
E - economy
P - personality

Anyway, we're back in February for the next session. In the meantime, here are som pics from the event.

Simon