DP is an old friend; I've been following his career since he was, er, 16, and have watched him grow into one the UK's most prolific and successful  TV composers - and certainly its most consistently adventurous. Anyway, I wouldn't mention such things here normally; that's what Don't Get Me Started is for. But I thought it worth drawing attention to this audio interview with Daniel, conducted by Paul Morley for his "Showing Off" show on the Guardian's website. I bring it up not especially for the content - although it's an insightful interview and there's plainly a rapport there - but more for its format and, well, that it exists at all:

- It's 37.34 long - give or take the audio stings; how would that fit into scheduled, linear output?
- Yet it's exactly the length it is and the platform requires no editing.
- It's conversational, really conversation, and perhaps therefore not as slick as you'd expect from the usual broadcasting subjects... and as a result, of course, infinitely more authentic.
- It's an interview with a TV composer; where else in the mainstream media are you going to come across a 40 minute interview with such a category of artisan?!
- And it's one which references Krautrock and Jerry Goldsmith and Stockhausen and The Orb and Debussy... with not the slightest attempt to talk down to the listener or dumb down in the name of some spurious "mission to explain".

So in short this is a great example of what the new media bring us: smartness, insight, subjects outside the glare of the mainstream media (and I'm including our own allegedly high-brow public service broadcasters in there, should you be tempted to think otherwise), and a format - that is, a length - which fits the content. Not the other way round.
Simon

OK, OK,  this is going to be something of an I-was-wrong. (There must be an elegant word for that, but it escapes me, unsurprisingly.) About Spotify, that is. If not here, then at least in person I've been less than enthusiastic about it, and given that I'm something of a contrarian, the great press it's picked up almost from inception has hardly endeared it to me. And if I've had one beef about all that coverage - and I'm talking coverage in the most mainstream of places here - it's probably summed up in the question "Er, haven't you heard of Last.fm? Where have you been?" OK, that's two questions, but you catch my drift.

Now I'm  going to get round to that wrong-ness admission (still can't think of the word for it ) shortly, but first let me reiterate my Spotify gripes.

From the get-go I've found its slickness a little offputting. Like I say, I'm a contrarian. Of course, in truth, the first time I used it I was impressed with its UX, the ease of use, the robustness of the streaming, and even if I naturally favour the web-based, Spotify's manifestation as a desktop app made a lot of sense. 

Oh, and it had a lot of pretty decent catalogue in there. Plainly not as extensive as Last's, but then again, unlike the latter, with Spotify you could request specific tracks. The cloud jukebox of theory rendered, well, real.

Oh, hold up, this is the gripes bit. Thing is, yes, it was plainly good at the start, but there was just something... The ads, of course, were annoying, but that's the Freemium model for you. I could always, well, pay. But they - the ads, that is -  spoke of something else, of a business model a little too easy to see, a little too surface. But as I say, I understood why the ads were there, and could live with them.

Then the emails started. Emails so un-targetted as to be an intrusion. Let's call 'em what they are: SPAM. Oh I know, not technically. No doubt  I'd ticked - or not ticked - the right - or wrong - boxes, somewhere. But for all that, if I get an email telling me about  Paul Rodgers with Queen  or Blur or La Roux or... well you get the picture... if I get an email like that I'm thinking SPAM, right? And then there's the offers: join now and get two free downloads. Wow, sign up for a tenner-a-month service and get a couple of MP3s on the house. The largesse is overwhelming.

And then... there was the customer survey. Call me a freak but I tend to do surveys. OK, not the telephone insurance survey which woke me up on Sunday morning, but most online consumer surveys I do tend to fill in. It's partly a confessional need, but mostly - I hope - it's driven by inquisitiveness. You can tell a lot about what a company thinks by the questions it asks... about what you think. And I certainly wanted to know what Spotify wanted to know about what I thought.

So I did it. With Justin. I thought we'd find it revealing, but I don't think either of us had any idea how revealing. I'll do no more here than bullet our observations, but I think they stand...

a. It was too long, way too long! It took us 25 - twenty-five -  minutes to complete. Who has that kind of time spare? Apart from us. And it was work for us, right? Seriously - that is utter lunacy. The worst of it was that the survey had a progress bar; after the first couple of "rounds" we were getting seriously traumatised. (It's what a friend of mine refers to as the "Drowning by Numbers moment", although I do feel honour-bound to say he'd felt it during one of mine and J's presentations. Everyone's a critic, apparently.)

b. OK, this is the school teacher bit (and probably a dangerous thing to mention, in type) but it was full of real stinker typos. I don't have an essential problem with this - we're all guilty - but in a document which had, presumably, passed under many eyes, it struck us both as, well, lazy. (As opposed to "well lazy". Eats, shoots, leaves, up with which I will not put, etc.)

c. The questions were, at times, logical nonsense. You know the kind of questions, the ones where the answer you want to give - should give if you're being in any way honest or accurate - just aren't an option. Where the options haven't really been thought about. Where the answers, in all truth, display...

d. Utter transparency. This was surely the worst of it. Seriously, doing the survey I felt like I could see the case being built for a combination of advertisers and record labels in front of my very eyes. Which is like being used, if you think about it. 

e. I said that was the worst of it; I didn't say the last. But I'll make this it. The reward for filling the damn thing in was pretty pitiful: to go into a draw for a bunch of CDs drawn at random from the Top 40.

And there it is again: the Top 40. The email ads for Queen and Blur. It just feels too, too... industry.

And yet, and yet... I'm starting to feel very foolish for all that. 

First up, I start to get not a few friends talk - no rave - about it. Not credulous friends, either, nor techtopians. Skeptics, you might think. But raving Spotify for all that.

Then Joe, my oldest son gets back from University and, well, it's all about Spotify. Joe's a 70s soul fanatic. It happens. And he's building one bastard soul music playlist on Spotify. iTunes? Forget it. The next thing I know, the cooking time kitchen iPod-off between me, him and younger brother Franck has become a Spotify-off, and Faith No More is up against The Temptations, and Foreign Beggars are facing off The Drifters. You get the picture. 

So I'm there already, to be honest, then only this morning, I get the final confirmation. I'm probably the last to realise that you can Scrobble from Spotify, and officially. It hadn't even occurred that you'd be able to do it with anything other than a hack (and there was one: Scobblify). After all, when J and I filled in that survey a few months back, Last hadn't even been mentioned as a competitor. Just goes to show that coders think differently to marketeers. Thank Christ.

Here's what the Spotifly blog had to say on the matter:

Almost immediately after launch we started getting heaps of requests from people who wanted to be able to scrobble the music they were playing on Spotify to Last.fm (Last.fm is a cool music recommendation site for those of you who don’t know). The demand was so high that people started creating their own solutions to scrobble, which were cool but a little hard to install and run for the average user.
So today we are really excited to announce that we’ve added scobbling support directly into Spotify, no more need to install any other software. To setup scrobbling just open the user preferences in Spotify and enter your Last.fm username and password and you’re ready to scrobble.

(I'm ashamed to say that post's from December by the way.)

Now this is how it should work: it's an ecosystem after all!
(It's also how it should work in terms of companies listening to their customers, too, but that;s a different matter.) This morning I was recommended a new release by my favourite neo-surf band, The Mermen... by Amazon. I checked it on Spotify - and there it was! Listened to it all the way through, it scrobbling all the way of course (turns out it just needs a prefs tweak). Then Last starts recommending other neo-surf acts. By the end of the morning, I've not only gone and ordered the the new Mermen CD, but one by the fabulously-monickered Man or Asro-Man as well. Cool.

None of which is to say that there's not a long way to go: Spotify's inventory needs a major boost to satisfy our more perverse tastes. But like I say, this IS how it should work. iTunes, I have to say, is looking very sorry indeed.

How's that for an apology, then?
Simon

It's all music and IPR today...

Yes, we go on a lot here about Trent Reznor (amusingly, we're not even especially big fans) but for good reason: no-one else in contemporary popular music is quite as vocal (and articulate), visible and imaginative in their engaging with the new recorded - and, increasingly, live - music business. In this intelligent and honest post on the NIN forum, Reznor explains his take on the whole practice of ticket scalping (or, for the UK, touting) - and the somewhat furtive role of promoters and artists in it.

At the other end of the, er, hard rock spectrum, meanwhile, it looks as though a Guns N' Roses/Chinese Democracy uploader may well go to jail for his misdemeanors. The interesting thing in this Register articleis the disparity between the RIAA's calculation of lost revenue and the CIA's, the latter coming in at a third of the former. (We're sure NN Taleb would have something to say about either calculation. We're also pretty sure that whatever the true figure, Chinese Democracy's poor sales are the result of several phenomena, among them an audience which has moved on and an media environment which has rather more distractions than in the late 80s. Oh, and that it's a piss poor piece of work.)

The World Service's excellent Business Daily took an appreciative and intelligent look at Spotify this morning.

We are loving ThuYou, Israeli collage artist & musician-composer Kutiman's video project, essentially an EP of pieces made entirely from (utterly unrelated) clips on YouTube. It's a thrilling piece of appropriation-art, an essay in creative IPR-abuse... but, perhaps rather more significantly,  a collection of joyful funk pieces and soul ballads. Check the CREDITS link to see a creative attribution at work. Lovely.

This excellent and clear-thinking/straight-talking editorial in the Telegraph takes apart the push from the European record industry to extend the copyright term in sound recordings from 50 to 95 years.

Wall Street Journal Europe reports that Guy Hands has stepped down as CEO of Terra Firma in the face of investors' anger over the EMI, well, fiasco.

And finally, a bit after the fact, I'm afraid, but here's Norman Lebrecht reflecting on Dutch station Radio 4's free Bernard Haitink downloads and how they rather show up the BBC's "capitulation" to the UK record industry in the wake of Radio 3's Beethoven downloads success/scandal (delete as your standpoint dictates... you know where we probably stand).
Simon

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!

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

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