FreshNetworks Blog

Cover of Mix Tape

As is the way with epiphanies, someone has probably got there first.

I drove home on Friday night, pondering the car stereo as everything clicked into place. I had no idea that someone had already had a very similar idea, expanded it into a book and got it in the shelves.

And a cooler someone too: Thurston Moore. Yes, that Thurston Moore, the one from Sonic Youth.

Anyway, his book, Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, deals with the aesthetics, the nostalgia, the life-affirming, self-indulgent nature and the optimistic kindness of pouring your musical taste into 60 minutes of delicate black tangley tape, and passing it on to someone special, hoping they understand that all your Smiths and Joy Division tracks mean you’re cool, interesting and in need of a little kiss, rather than terribly depressed and socially awkward…

But expanding on the cassette culture that Generation Y and Generation X grew up surrounded by, you start to see very clear patterns, parallels and even direct copying of the cassette approach in the current explosion of social media, mashups and distribution models.

I give you, C60 = web2.0.

Playlists

Where the mix-tape dominated the 80s and 90s teen experience, now you can demonstrate everything you need to display about yourself and your selection skills with your last.fm playlist. You can use iLike to broadcast your landscape of tastes and find new tastes, and you can use these playlists and tastes to navigate the swathes of potential new friends, and find whole new lists of playmates.

Or, just like tape enabled you to press play and record at exactly the right moment during the Top 40 countdown, now you have Spotify, where a little bit of effort (listening to some ads once every few songs) easily makes up for really handy access to a better back catalogue than yours.

DIY

With the advent of tape, came new possibilities for wannabes of all walks to showcase their stuff. From demos to bedroom-produced ‘radio shows’, the tape removed the financial barriers and opened up possibilities of reaching influencers (DJs, record execs, agents) with proof of talent (or not, as the case often was).

And now we have podcasts. We have blogs. We have online communities and social networks. We have online CVs and online ‘magazines’ that are produced at a fraction of the cost of old media production – even at a fraction of the cost of DIY Xeroxed fanzines.

And as with tape, sometimes the online DIY projects are for the sheer joy of themselves, of the doing, the making, the sharing, and not a platform for promotion at all – something once made possible by the low entry price of tape, and latterly by free open-source platforms and tools.

Creating for free and sharing gratis comes naturally to our generation, because this is how we have behaved musically for decades.

Distribution and copyright

As with VHS to the adult industry, the arrival of tape immediately democratised music distribution. And with the ability to replicate and share, came copyright fear and loathing. Those with the copyright, of course, were very nervous – downright angry in many cases – that a kid with a tape-to-tape stereo could make copies and distribute the originator’s work with no financial benefit ever reaching the original copyright holder – and the middlemen.

Fast forward 20 years, and you have a recording industry very late to the web party because it spent most of the early web days eye-bulgingly and vein-poppingly angry.

Control and opportunity

With tape before, and then with online file-sharing (starting with Shawn Fanning‘s Napster in 1999), those who previously held all the cards (licensees, controllers of hardware, controllers of radio waves etc) saw the challenges and panicked. And they got angry.

They didn’t want to relinquish control, and this anger clouded their vision so they didn’t see this expansion of distribution as an opportunity. They started to sue their customers. Yet here was a technical development that could turn fans into free sources of promotion; amateur bootleggers becoming ambassadors, spreading the word.

Since the latter half of the decade, we’ve started to see a tipping point in the music industry’s approach to online. It’s less of a curiosity, with the canniest players seeing iTunes and last.fm as they should be seen: a distribution network and a promotional platform that helps to push people into a state of discovery.

Thanks to the humble cassette, the general public was shown how to be generous, creative and innovative, expecting anything less in the digital age is trying to shove a cork in a bottle that’s already way out at sea.

It’s been a while since I discovered a new web service that I immediately fell in love with. There are so many things to try, but so few hit me as a massive winner from the start. Spotify just did.

A friend sent me an invite to their Beta and I was sceptical at first. Anything that asks me to download an application makes me hesitate. Moreover, the information on their site was sparse. It wasn’t until I googled and read a Guardian article that I decide to have a go.

Within 60 seconds I’d signed up and downloaded and was ready to start listening. I clicked on one of their “new” singles – Royksopp, Happy to Hear, and immediately found myself with a smile on my face. A great process, free music and best of all I’d discovered a new song that I immediately loved. Although, to be fair, that was mostly because the sample was taken from an album I’d almost forgotten: The Clones of Dr.Funkenstein by Parliament.

So how does it work?

Spotify is just like iTunes. It has a vast database of music. Probably 90% of what most people might ever want to listen to (I checked and they had the original Parliament track) . After a quick download you have instant access to all this music. You can browse by track or listen to a play list.

What’s cool about Spotify is the business model. For years people have predicted a move by consumers away from owning music to paying a monthly fee for unlimited streaming. Whilst I’ve been happy to believe this might be destination, I’ve never understood how consumers would move from today’s habits to monthly fees. After all it took Sky years and very expensive sporting rights to entice people to pay for TV on a monthly basis. I have a large music collection – whenever I hear music I like, I buy it. So the idea of paying a monthly fee when it would take me over a year of listening all day every day to my own music before having to repeat a track, seemed unnecessary.

Spotify are offering the endpoint (all the music you want for a monthly fee) but more improtantly they are also offering two routes to help get you there. There’s a good old fashioned freemiumservice – you can listen to all the music you want for free, but you’ll be forced to hear a 30-second ad every 25 minutes (just like commercial radio, with less advertising). Alternatively you can pay for one day’s free music for 99c.

This is exactly the sort of kick that’s needed to change the way I listen to music. You can get an invite here

Could it be any better?

Yes. There is one problem. The developers have clearly focused their efforts on the listening experience and securing music rights. Clearly that’s the right place to start. But what they need next is a better way to find new music.

I’ve always been a fan of iLike (which got even better after the Facebook masses were introduced to it back in May 2007) and have also used Last.fm and iTunes to find new music. I find the online community aspects of these services are the best way to discover “songs you might like”. I remember listening to Pandora before the arrival of the Web2.0 music sites. Despite a sophisticated algorithms that attempted to judge what I liked in the music I listened to, it’s ability to correctly predict what I’d enjoy was poor.

Forget the clever maths, the best way to recommend me music is to find what people with similar tastes also listen to. And that’s what’s great about iLike and the others. Every couple of months I spend a few hours listening to the “music that I don’t own” which ”people like me” listen to on a regular basis. To date that’s been the best way for me to uncover new artists.

Spotify is crying out for a similar online community angle. Despite the service being less than a week old, the online community is already organising itself. There’s a user-created Facebook app for sharing Spotify playlists and around 10 websites that users have created for the same purpose.

Good luck with the development. This is an excellent idea, well executed.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Ten Social Music Sites that Let You Listen, Share and Enjoy Music
• Pandora vs Mufin: A Head to Head Music Melee
• Audio here, there, but not quite everywhere
• Music streaming service Spotify wins early fans
• Music recommendation, based on sound