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The Future of Music – Roland’s Rabble podcast, Show 6

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Roland Tanglao, Roland's Rabble podcast
Roland Tanglao, Roland’s Rabble podcast, photo by KK on Flickr

Note: This episode of Roland’s Rabble podcast show (by Roland Tanglao) is re-posted here for posterity as it discusses advances in what was then-sorta-know-as “Web 2.0” in a nascent state and pre-sages many technologies and practices which came to fruition in coming years.

Specifically this episode discusses music culture changes in light of emerging distribution channels, creation methods and evolving cultural norms, plus Yahoo’s acquisition of delicious and other related topics. I (DaveO) appear briefly towards end). Backdated to original recording date for archival context. The show is also archived at Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Listen to: Roland’s Rabble podcast, Show 6 – The Future of Music (25MB, mp3, 50:33) recorded Friday December 9, 2005

Original (verbatim, links not corrected) show notes: 

  • Roland’s Rabble Show 6, a show loosely about Web 2.0 with four Vancouver based regulars and special guests David Gratton (ProjectOpus and others), Bryan Rieger and Colin Brumelle on the future of music or Music 2.0 as I like call it much to the chagrin of Silicon Valley hipsters who hate any term with 2.0 in it: Michael Tippett of Now Public, Susannah Gardner, author and designer from Hop Studios, Will Pate of Raincity Studios and Alex Samuel(who couldn’t make it but hopefully will be able to make more 2006 shows) of Social Signal. This week with special assistance from Dave Olson and his awesome M-Audio Microtrack 24/96We spoke about the future of music, Yahoo’s del.icio.us acquisition and many other thingsShow notes and Links:
    • The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution – Music flows like water. Music as utility and service.
    • Lucas Gonze coined the term lightnet
    • flickr
    • del.icio.us
    • Some Music 2.0 like things – Last.fm, Pandora, Sub Pop Podcast, Magnatune
    • Collapse of old model of music distribution and creation – from creation to distribution in minutes
    • Genre is not an indication of preference of music – kids listen to many, many “genres”
    • Categories have fallen apart – what is “rock”?
    • XM and Sirius don’t make sense because the channels are all one “genre”
    • DRM (Copy Protection) doesn’t belong in new model. It’s a gate.
    • Genre and tagging are great for self categorization but not great for sharing or discovery. – David Gratton
    • Nettwerk Records gets it – released music on a USB drive, first label on MySpace and to use it as a marketing tool
    • Linken Park – released on the Internet
    • Wilco – released their album on the internet
    • Traditional newspapers see themselves as filter and gatekeeper like Record Label
    • Now Public’s focus groups – Women from a farm in Georgia, USA gets her news from flickr !?! New Paradigm of trust is what are your buddies saying is important.
    • Your buddy is your genre.
    • Last.fm has your ‘music attention’ data. i.e. what you listen to and what others who listened to the same thing listened to. Good in combination with trusted source what I call trusted human filters.
    • Average human being keeps/purchases less than 100,000 tunes in a lifetime and stops listening to new music after the age of 35.
    • Labels and Radio used to be trusted sources.
    • Behaviour becomes content. Attention is content. You don’t need to get paid to behave. You just listen to music. Not doing it professionally – Michael Tippett
    • Tagging is re-engineering human beings’ behaviour; might be better to capture this stuff more automatically.
    • Technology changes our behaviour. i.e. hitting skip button in our playlist, using random or shuffle. No longer listen to albums
    • Colin – playing a record is physical and a performance. It’s about intention. Playing a record is something you intend to do and listen to. MP3s encourage aural wallpaper.
    • CFNY 102.1 in Toronto – Dave Marsden, Live Earl Jive – the reason I have an “eclectic” music taste plus my eclectic mind :-)
    • Users want access, discovery, the ability to “own” or control the piece of media (music and video) and portablility. Address these concerns and the economic model will fall out.
    • Doesn’t cost Apple one cent more (well almost) to offer an extra song
    • The more your stuff gets out there, the more valuable it becomes because it becomes more familiar so you might actually want to give away stuff like music (or at least some of it).
    • New economic models: touring, swag, patrons, actual sale of music, licensing to corporations, videogames, etc.
    • People are tired of changing formats – David bought London Calling five times
    • The new album is a playlist but since you can hit ‘skip’, the album concept is destroyed.
    • Remixing takes music out of the context that the original artist intended.
    • Music is an extension of your sense: both intimate and muzak i.e. something you can ignore
    • Yahoo bought del.icio.us, VC investment from Fred Wilson of AVC – bought for users and the team.
    • Yahoo don’t be evil with del.icio.us
    • Flickr’s tagging inspired by delicious
    • friendster – user backlash and people left
    • Users are liquid and moody (e.g. MySpace people are leaving and moving to facebook because of spam and they were bought by “the man”)
    • Trillian – chat that works with AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, etc. Response to lock-in with proprietary IM services. Maybe people will switch to open standards now that Google has used the open standard Jabber.
    • Blogs n Dogs: Takeaways – we need to evangelize and contextualize the tools we use to real people’s personal and business lives. Photos, video and music are much more appealing on ramps. Blogs, podcasts, videoblogs are “digital paper”. Specialized tools that use the same infrastructure (i.e.. RSS and microformats and structured blogging) will be bigger than “digital paper” e.g. recipes, restaurant reviews, band reviews, etc.
    • HopStudios launched truthdig.com (not digg.com!) – journalists who want to break away from traditional media, politically minded, mostly LA based journalists
    • Digg.com in Alexa ratings this month is larger than NBC and CBC
    • digg = Now Public without footage – people post links and vote on it (i.e. digg it)
    • Greenroomrecords.ca – Colin’s band
    • The Grateful Dead kerfuffle about taking their music off the Internet Archive

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