Small Fish, Big Pond

I’m famous!!!

I was looking up the Street Dogs entry in last.fm and keyed the entry into Bing. Front page bottom of the page links to my Last.fm tag directory (which happens to contain Street Dogs).

Although it’s the German version It seems my opinion of punk music is closely related enough to Street Dogs and Last.fm that Bing’s algorithms tie the pages together.

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I frankly find this hard to believe (I’m awesome but not that awesome) and suspect that Bing must have some tracker cookie influencing their results to make them a bit more customized to the place I goto. But even if THAT is true it’s still amazing that Bing could make such an amazing connection.

Still maybe I am influential enough that I’m front page news for Bing’s search.

Last.fm is going to get a FM HD broadcast presence in the US starting with 4 cities. That means more Coldplay and Radiohead than you can shake a stick at! Seriously they’re pretty good with getting a feel for new up and coming artists although the overall charts logically closely resemble a top 40 list.

Unfortunately that means that Ensiferum, The Tossers, and Street Dogs will probably not make an appearance. But it’s still good to have a terrestrial radio station that has music crowd sourced from millions of worldwide listeners rather than a pair of cocaine addled Clear Channel DJ’s playing whatever the recording industry pays them to.

Obviously the radio goes one way so you can’t scrobble your listens so I personally stick with my WM Phone playing music I like and scrobbling it real time over 3G. But it’s good news for normal radio users to at least be able to listen to the overall stream.

However I would still rather they be spending all their time and money getting access to Avex, Universal J, and Sony Music’s catalogs but I know I’m in the minority there.

Disclosure:
I’m a moderator at last.fm so I’m obviously biased in my opinion, ironically
I’m even wearing my last.fm shirt today (sorry, they don’t sell them, it was a gift from the staff). But my enthusiasm isn’t because I was paid or given a shirt, it’s because it’s a really great site for tracking your music habits and discovering new music.

The Hype Machine…

A music chart where your vote is stronger if you have more twitter followers? Even when it’s not being “Rick Rolled” this is a bad idea. One person, one vote has its flaws but its still light years better than this.

Another plug for my friends at Last.fm where you can get less biased charts and charts that adapt based upon what artist you’re looking at.

Since I love music and I love tech it seems that it would be the perfect story, but if the last.fm plugins on the left of the page or my moderator status at last.fm didn’t clue you in I’m not exactly a user of Pandora.

Backstory: At the behest of the fatcats that control music the government began enforcing new royalty laws that significantly raised the price of internet music streaming in the US. The rates were much higher than previously and many US internet radio stations feared they wouldn’t be able to stay afloat so they protested by taking themselves off the air, akin to “You can’t fire me. I QUIT!” Last.fm was criticized for not participating but as they said, they had been paying higher fees all along since they were dealing with global distribution. i.e. We’ve been paying this much all along and we’re alright, suck it up now that you have to play by the taught rules we had to play by.

The protest of course was useless and it seemed that US internet radio was doomed (or at least the heydays of cheap royalties was gone). But now a deal has been cut with SoundExchange that will lower the fees. Hooray, but don’t be fooled, SoundExchange is still sitting pretty with this deal. It’s all pretty sick considering how arbitrary their method of “reimbursing” their artists is. My friend was an independent musician with one limited CD release but never sees a dime.

SoundExchange divies up their royalties by percentage; polling radios (and any other transmission format) on what they played and figuring out who gets what based on who was played the most. So if I play my friends music 24/7 on my radio but play all Metallica on the day that SoundEx polls my listening, Metallica gets 100% of the royalties. Considering how draconian SoundEx is on collecting royalties this kind of inaccuracy is absurd in the age of computers where you can track music plays in real time.

The point is internet radio shouldn’t be adjusting their business models to fit the modern industry, SoundExchange and there other music controllers need to update their business model to fit the new modern music industry.

Via TechCrunch and everywhere else on the techno-blogosphere.