There’s no WalMart in my neighborhood, but there is a Limewire, so that’s where I’ll be shopping.

Idiots.

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I don't think the multimedia in this post needs much explanation, other than the fact that, while I enjoy the music, I just want to make it clear that I do not condone all of the behavior that the music of the artist describes or inspires. :)

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Saturday night I went to go see Ozzy Osbourne and Rob Zombie at the Garden.  It was a pretty good show and certainly the most animated I've ever seen Ozzy.  Clearly there are some invisible cattle prods going on there.  

Seeing Ozzy wasn't so much about the performance as it was just being able to get to see him, so I'm giving him a lot of leeway on the quality there.  Whatever energy he lacked, the crowd certainly made up for.

Rob Zombie, however, was an animal.  Here's a clip of one of my favorite songs, "Dragula":

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I caught this band Kilsy on TV last night...  so I checked out their site this morning. Admittedly, I don't know too much about indie music, so must of the stuff I listen to, if purchased, would like the pockets of music publishers, not the band.  That's why I'd rather actually go to show to be supportive instead.  But that wasn't the case here, so I decided to buy some tracks. Headed over to their MySpace page first:

Yeah, um, not so much.   

Ok, how about this PayPlay thing?

No, thanks.  I don't want to register or join anything...  I just want to buy music.

Hmm...  I wonder if they have a last.fm page.

They do.

That led me to Amazon, where the album was actually cheaper..  a 1-click buy... until....

Jeezus... No wonder they've only got 103 total plays on Last.fm. Folks, you gotta make your stuff easier to get.   Are you even making any money from online album sales??    Seems it would be easier to just give the stuff away and play more and bigger venues.

I wound up downloading the Amazon thing, but I don't trust it.  I think its watching me.

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"Feuer Frei" - Rammstein

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Tags: Rammstein

So where did the inspiration for the dancing guy... Ben?

The inspiration was we were friends and we were a group of kids that hung out all around Boston going to shows, and we met going to shows. So we came up with, "what's the easiest way to get into a club? Well, that's to be in a band; and not only will we get in but they'll give us free beer." It's as simple as that. We never expected it to go very far. We had fun doing it and we put alot into it, and having no talent wasn't really an issue because if that was the case then I sure wouldn't have been in. I think Ben was still young at the time and he couldn't just be a roadie. We tried that trick and we're like "no," 'cause you have to be in the band to get in these clubs. We just got him on stage and put a microphone up there and had him dance, and it's always been part of that. I think it's at least some representation of the type of friends we are.

It gives you that "big party" feel, too...

I think so, and half the time I don't even know what he's doing. I'll run into him on stage, say hello, you know, dance with him or whatever, and he'll fill me in later on what's going on in the band. He's there and I love him, and I'm glad he's gone through it with us.

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It's really interesting to see how Arbitron is positioning the statistics on digital radio it just came out with, specific to the effect of portable media devices.

So here's the first stat:

Fewer than one in ten report less over-the-air radio listening specifically due to time spent with their iPod/portable MP3 player.

Phew!  Ok radio execs... you can all rest easy and breath a collective sigh of relief... oh... wait...

While 70 percent of Americans age 12 and older do not own an iPod/portable MP3 player, and an additional 15 percent report the device has had no impact on radio listening, nine percent say they are listening to less over-the-air radio...  Radio sees the most impact on listening from iPod/digital audio player owners age 12-24.

Ok, hold on a sec.  So, if I'm reading this correctly, 30% of the people who own portable devices are listening to the radio less, and that impact is largest among the 12-24 crowd?

Well, that's kind of a different animal isn't it?  What happens when these 12-24 year olds grow up and get replaced by  another generation listening to the radio less?

To me, this represents a clear trend that should make radio execs worry.

Terrestrial radio is that it isn't net native, and frankly, neither is the iPod.  In other words, neither really takes advantage of all the things the web enables you to do...  discover music, connect to others with the same interest, observe, remember, and publish your own interests.  That's what creates the opportunity for services like last.fm.

The big advantage that the iPod/iTunes combo has is that iTunes gets right in the stream of your consumption with monetization.  You're listening on iTunes, you want more music, and its just a click away.  Have you ever heard a song on the radio and wanted to own it.  It's nearly impossible.  You either need to wait for the DJ to come on to tell you what was playing or you start playing "guess that tune" with your friends.  Clearly, radio needs a compelling reason to bring you to their site to do more than just listen to a webcast...  There's a really interesting opportunity for radio stations to leverage the brand they have created on air, the personalities they promote, and their ability to monetize music to encourage music related engagement on their sites... but what does that look like? 

I'd be interested to hear from anyone involved with the broadcast radio industry on this.

Last night, I went to the Jaegermeister Tour at Roseland to see Lacuna Coil...  I discovered them last year on last.fm and they've quickly become one of my favorite bands.  They're a bit like Evanescence, with a powerful lead  female  singer in Christina Scabbia.    Great show, but they were unfortunately followed up by Shadows Fall, which was just a bunch of noise.  Total crap. 

Anyway... I took a few videos of Lacuna Coil... here you go:

I'm a big Pink Floyd fan and on the right day, I'll happily reenact the whole Wall album for you, including marching around like a crowd full of hammers.

So today, I've got the first minute of The Trial for your amusement.  Trust me, though, it doesn't have the same effect as when I do the visuals to go with it.

I guess its one of those things you have to amortize over a lifetime of just being able to say that I saw them, though...   like when Sting dies 30 years from how or whenever... I can tell my kids that I saw the Police play live.   I'll also be able to tell them that I saw the Stones, too, but that would be that big a deal b/c they'll still be touring then. 

This song has been featured on a Gears of War commercial and it's hard not to stop and listen.  I found the video for it on YouTube.

Hey, if anyone else uses Last.fm, please feel free to add me as a friend.  I'm curious as to what everyone else is out there listening to.

Of course, I'm ceonyc on it.

Here's a problem:

I listen to my iPod on the way into work and at the gym.

I listen to Last.fm at work.

The iTunes that is connected to my iPod is the one at home, where all my music is.

Last.fm will not accept submissions earlier than the last submitted song.

So, what happens is that I listen at the gym, listen at work, but when I sync my iPod at home, none of my gym songs, which occurred before my work listening, get added to Last.fm. 

But, I can't link the iPod to two computers and sync when I get into work and get my recently played data into the system before I start listening at work.

Very frustrating.

Any ideas?

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 uses the example of the music industry to show why content needs to be controlled to be monetized and I just wanted to share something I learned a while ago.

"As for ceding control of your content, look at what happened to the music industry. Illegal file sharing crippled music sales, and the only saving grace has been the iTune platform, which functions by rigidly controlling distribution."

This actually isn’t true. I thought it was for a long time, being a college student when Napster was big, but I worked on a co-investment in the buyout of Warner Music and studied this hard. There were two much larger factors at play.  First, you have a supply issue.  Big box retail started killing off mom and pop record shops and music-only stores to a much greater degree than the web. Even the demographics that weren’t web savvy and into downloading music weren’t buying music anymore, because people shopped at Walmart and Best Buy and they hardly carried any of the catalogue that the music only stores did. More focus was put on DVDs and video games which were a much higher profit margin per inch of shelf space compared to CDs.  So, if my dad wanted to go buy the Moody Blues first album, he simply wasn't going to find it...  but he could find lots of copies of Madden Football or maybe even a DVD of a live concert.

Then, you have competition for finite entertainment dollars.  Mobile revenues went up… $5-7 a month in text messaging and another $5-7 a month in ring tones… that’s a CD a month when you consider the limited budget of teens.  Mobile revenues and gaming revenues skyrocketed during this time, not because music was free, but because they offered a much more compeling product.  Eight songs for $16 simply wasn't going to cut it when, for ten bucks more, you could get a movie, and for the price of three CDs, you could get a video game to play with your friends for hundreds and hundreds of hours.  Interaction.  Socializing.  Music, at that price, just didn't seem so interesting anymore.  Napster didn't tank the industry... it just proved there was demand for the CD format to get broken up and for music to be obtained over the web.  Apple is taking advantage of that, and they would take better advantage of it if they offered more pricing schemes and less DRM. 

Personally, I don't know if Apple is ever going to relinquish their stranglehold on portable music. Their penchant for cool design and easy of use is difficult to match. However, if history tells us anything, hardware has always been a bad bet for maintaining margins and competitive advantages. The further up the stack you go, the higher the margins and more difficult it is to unseat you.

And in today's world, data is at the top of the stack, not software like iTunes. iTunes may have made it really easy to get people set up on the iPod, but its not what keeps them there. The critical mass of artists in the music store keeps them coming, but it seems to me that its only going to get easier to buy music from more sources in the future, not harder. There's nothing really that sticky about it, actually. No data, no network. I've been switching players a lot, actually.

So I thought to myself, why doesn't Apple buy last.fm and really ramp up the social network features? Scrobble everyone and provide social music functionality right there in iTunes. It would b like when AOL announced that they were building a social network on top of AIM. They already had all my friends and I didn't even have to do anything.

Imagine a MySpace competiter that already knows what music you listen to and on day one tells you who has similar tastes, on top of recommending who you should listen to. Plus, because iTunes is actually selling a ton of music, the company has the leaverage to actually get bands to start setting up camp on their last.fm artist pages. iTunes and the iPod spit out a ton of data that their software doesn't use effectively at all, and last.fm has a really neat application to make the most of that data. What if Apple made all of those little last.fm widgets their own little try and buy mini iTunes stores? I think they could get last.fm at a reasonable price relative to the kind of value they could add to it by integrating it with their hardware and software. Seems to me like a natural fit.

I don't talk about music a ton on this blog, but I do like music...   just never really been that good at discovering new music.  Plus, I could never tie together all of the different ways I listen to music.  I used to have XM in my car from GM, and really liked it, but let the subscription slip after I changed addresses on my credit card.  I guess I didn't really like it that much. 

I like Pandora, but never really listen when I'm sitting in front of the computer, so that's pretty much out.   I've found some cool bands on MySpace, like Deep Metal Mechanic, but I can't do anything with them except put them on my page...   can't stream them anywhere... can't even pop the player out of the page.  Kind of useless for really empowering my music discovery.

Breaking my music free from the computer is important to me, so I bought two Netgear MP-101 routers and have been really happy with them considering how much I paid (less than $100 each).   That's been nice, but the real break is that all of the great discovery services out there don't work well off the computer.

If you visit my site, you'll notice I now have a Last.fm badge on the right sidebar.  It contains the last ten songs I listened to, plus after it has enough data, I guess, my most popular artists of the week.   Think of it like del.icio.us and Google.   Google is run by a machine that eats data as is Pandora.  The results are certainly good, but people powered stuff like del.icio.us has the potential to be even better.   That's what last.fm is.  If someone out there listents to similar stuff, it recommends the things that they listen to that I haven't found yet.  Last.fm promises to be a great discovery tool for me, except for the fact that I listen to my stuff through the Netgear routers and my iPod...never on the computer itself.  So, getting it my music listening data isn't easy.

Jscrob solved the iPod issue, which is why you can now see what I listen to when I ride my bike and go to the gym.  It sucks all the data off my iPod when I sync/charge, so you'll be sure to see lots of dark techno, industrial, and movie themes... but don't think that I turn on Rammstein when I get home at the end of a long day... this is only half of my music story, lest you think I'm peculiar.

I need to solve the apartment problem.  Enter UPnP.   Universal plug and play compatability promises to allow me to stream my music to other devices... so I just needed a UPnP server that was compatible with Last.fm and I was good to go.  I tried Tvedia and that looked really promising.  It works with Last.fm just by getting me to enter my Last.fm id/pw, but I haven't gotten it streaming to the routers yet.  The company keeps telling me its something on my end, but I can easily switch back to the Netgear server and that works just peachy.  I'll keep plugging away... hopefully, I can get it working.   I also tried Winamp+this plugin but the plugin didn't seem to install properly.  I wasn't sure if it was on, installed, working... whatever... nothing happened.

So that's where I am... hopefully, I'll be able to get the music I play in my apt into Last.fm through one of these UPnP solutions, and also get Streampad working as well.  Then I can get some better music recommendations than what I get from these Arctic Monkeyheads.  Bring on the hard stuff!

Last Wednesday, I went to the Nokia Theatre in Times Square to see Prodigy.  They've been around quite a while, but gave a really powerful, exciting show.

At one point, Keith Flint went into the crowd about 10 feet away from me...  which makes for some great video.

The first video is Keith...  it gets really scary when they turn the lights on by him.  The next two videos are Firestarter and my favorite Prodigy song, Breathe.

I was at MSG for Depeche Mode last night...    Great concert.  Took some phone videos:

View this clip on Vimeo

View this clip on Vimeo