Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

The social life of a playlist

Last November Patrick Dax of ORF, Austria's public service broadcaster, interviewed me in Vienna about Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll. It was the best set of interview questions I've ever had (taking nothing away from Patrick here, but I have to admit it's not like I've done hundreds of interviews) and a great discussion on a miserably rainy day — if you read German, here's the interview.

Yesterday Patrick sent me a handful of questions about online playlist service in general and muxtape in particular. Here's the article he's written (in German). And here, for non German readers, are my full responses to his questions:

How do you like muxtape?

I think muxtape did for playlist sharing what the original Google did for search: it seems to strip away all the complexity and just focus on doing the core things really well. In the case of playlists that means letting people easily hear full-track versions of all the songs on the list.

Muxtape doesn't have social networking features or anything else built in (apart from being able to 'scrobble' to Last.fm) — it relies on the users to supply their own social context, just by passing around muxtape URLs in emails and twitterfeeds etc.

Some people might wish it were possible to embed their muxtapes in their MySpace profile/blog/etc.

Three strikes struck off?

Four months ago lots of people were getting worked up about the possibility that the UK Government might somehow enforce a "three strikes and you're out" policy for Internet filesharers. I was asked to write an opinion piece about it myself, but more about that in a bit. At that time, the BPI — the organisation that represents major record labels in the UK — was quoted as favouring a "we do the policing, you send the letters" deal with ISPs, and as saying "we've been asking ISPs for more than 18 months to introduce a system to warn their customers (twice) before pulling the plug on them. But we haven't had much success and our faith in negotiations is running thin."

Four months on, and it's interesting to see how a BPI deal with the Virgin Media ISP is being reported. The deal is for an "education campaign" that will see users who share files illegally receive, not a warning or a disconnection notice, but "practical advice on how to prevent internet account misuse, links to legitimate sites and the potential dangers… of viruses and spyware." This last quote is from Music Week coverage [subscription required], which hails it as "a giant leap forward in [the BPI's] efforts to stop illegal file-sharing on the internet by signing a landmark deal" (my emphasis). I don't know about you, but after all that sabre-rattling, sending out letters politely informing criminals (in heavy quote marks) that there are alternatives to crime seems like quite a comedown.

Clearly the game isn't over yet, and — to mix my metaphors — one creates hostages to fortune by projecting that the winner of a battle will be the winner of the war. But that's perhaps my main point, because there is a lot of pressure both in mainstream media and in blogs to get worked up into a lather and over-react to minor or short-term skirmishes. I wrote about this under the title of slow blogging on my DJ Alchemi blog recently. As with the Radiohead hoo-ha that I referenced there, I suspect that the whole three-strikes ruckus will, with hindsight, seem like a minor skirmish in the broader sweep of events. (The fuss was whipped up over the implication that the Government, not just the BPI, was in favour of regulating for three-strikes — but firm evidence of this support didn't exist then, and hasn't appeared since.)

With that preface, here is what I wrote on 12 February, trying to anticipate the different ways the scenario might play out, and to analyse the deeper trends that this skirmish brought to the surface. It was commissioned by the Daily Telegraph though they didn't run it in the end.

Read more of Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll on Amazon.com

The Amazon.com page for Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll now has Amazon's Search Inside features enabled. This means you can see the full Table of Contents and Index of the book. Perhaps more interestingly, you can also read the first six pages of Chapter 1 of the book (it stops very suddenly after six pages, but don't ask me, I don't control these things!) So add that to the Preface which is already freely and fully available on this site, and you've got the first 15 pages of the book. Search Inside is not available on the Amazon.co.uk page or other Amazon sites yet.

Fans will be the most comprehensive curators

There's a section in my book called "Creating and Curating the Archive" where I wrote,

In future, if they’re not already, fan communities will quickly become the most authoritative archivists for the artists they follow. They collect memorabilia and ephemera — from ticket stubs to magazine interviews and amateur bootleg recordings — that most people would dismiss as tat… As well as memorabilia, these items will include what are currently rare and hard-to-find audio and video recordings, which will be collected by both human foraging and automated 'sweeping' of the Net. Expert fans will catalogue them and record their digital fingerprints, to help identify whether further discoveries are duplicates or new additions to the archive.

Many of my projections in this area were based on observing the way Andy Aldridge has developed the Head Full of Wishes fansite for Galaxie 500 and associated 'downstream' acts. I profiled Andy in the book and also in this interview.

Yesterday Andy posted to the Head Full of Wishes mailing list about a new tagging framework he's created for the site. This enables him to ensure that his site is able firstly to collect details of everything that's out there on the Net and is connected to Galaxie 500, and secondly to organise and present that information in a coherent way. As he wrote,

I did this because I was finding interesting stuff "out there", tagging it in delicious and it was quietly getting lost now I can "catalogue" everything — if I find a video on youtube of Dean & Britta doing Tugboat [a Galaxie 500 song] in London (I wish) I can tag it with the relevant show and track tags and it will always be available of the page of that show (and that track)…

Rough notes: two recent music events

There are a few rules of thumb I use to filter what I write on this site. The first is that it must have some bearing on the themes of digital discovery in Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll, the book. The second is that I don't really do 'news' items here, unless I come across something that I believe deserves higher profile than it's likely to get from other channels. If you want news, you're better off going to a site that specialises: I use mediaor (built by Jason Herskowitz), which aggregates material from about a hundred music news and discovery sites (including this one!). Thirdly, I always try and add something new to the 'raw data' in terms of analysis or insight — or, when I'm lacking insight, attitude.

But often I don't have time to digest what I take in, or to compose my thoughts. That's life, and we all probably feel that way, so no complaints. But I'm always experimenting with ways to make something useful out of the undigested stuff, to provide a 'light touch' way of passing things on. The 'recently noted elsewhere' stream on the right of this page is one example of that, based on a subset of my Furl archive. Another thing I do is take rough notes at the conferences, lectures and other events I attend. I'm trying out using my Vox blog to make these available in unedited form. The notes are rough, messy and come with health warnings about accuracy. But have a peek and see if you find these two examples useful:

• Music Connected — AIM independent label event last week, including Paul Brindley's state-of-the-digital-industry review and a panel on ad-supported models;
• Celestial Jukebox: free streams or pipe dreams? — Music Tank event yesterday, with keynote from Last.fm and responses from labels, rights organisations and technologists.

If you're feeling nosey, there's also a mix of other personal stuff on the same blog (and if you become a friend of mine on Vox, there's even more embarrassing stuff).