Posts from My Music

When Josh showed me Pocket Guitar on his iPhone a few months back, I said "when will we go to a concert and the band will come out playing iPhones?"

Looks like it's happening even sooner than I thought. Thanks to Jen Robinson for the tip.

Last night Jessica showed me an essay she wrote after reading DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little. In the opening paragraph she wrote:

It was a proud moment for me, because if there is one thing I hope to pass onto my children, it's the notion that there is no singular truth.

I was at a dinner last week where much of the NYC digerati (young and old) were assembled in a lovely apartment on the upper east side. After dinner but before dessert, the hosts initiated a discussion of the obsession of the moment: whither media. At one point, the argument came out that we need journalism to surface the truth. At which point, I sort of lost my composure and argued loudly that there is no truth.

There used to be a mantra at the upper right of this blog. I can't remember what it said exactly, but the gist of it was that there is no absolute truth, just your truth and my truth. I post my truth here everyday and I hope you'll drop by and share your truth with me.

This is the promise of social media. It's revolutionary. When you give every citizen in the world a printing press, you ought to expect revolution. And it is upon us.

I loved this paragraph in NY Mag's piece on Twitter which is in the current issue:

"His is a culture of sharing information" No, that is not his culture. That is our culture. That's where we are because every single one of us has a printing press in our hands at all times. I do understand that not everyone on this planet has a cell phone with a camera and an internet connection, but you get my point.

We've moved past the time when big institutions controlled what we read, what we thought, and what we believed. And we are arriving at a new place where each and everyone of us will report on our world and share it with others. Sharing is the new truth.

Sunday night the Grammys told us that Robert Plant and Allison Krauss made the record of the year. That's fine. That's their opinion. Mine is different. I believe that Okkervil River made the record of the year last year. But you know that because I published that opinion on this very blog in December of last year. Compare the Grammys to the Hype Machine's Music Zeitgest and you'll see what the old world looks like and what the new world looks like.

If you want to hear some good new music, it's hard to find it on radio. I just went to KRock's website and looked at the most recent songs they played. There's not one new song (that came out in the past year) in the most recent ten songs. It's all stuff that was popular years ago. Compare that to fredwilson.fm. On my radio station, we play new music. In fact, the music is so new on fredwilson.fm that I should be getting take down notices because half of the most recent ten songs have not even been released yet. And of the other half of the most recent ten, only one song is old and one more is a live cover.

How does fredwilson.fm get programmed? Sharing, of course. Each day I share one mp3 on my tumblog. fredwilson.fm just pulls all those posts together and plays them in a stream in reverse chronological order. Today, I'm sharing a track from a new band of teenagers from NYC called Care Bears On Fire. This brings me to my next point. I've got a vested interest in Care Bears' success (which I disclose in that post I linked to).

We all have vested interests and social media allows us to promote them to each other. That vested interest could be economic (like my interest in Care Bears) or it could be political (like my posts in support of Obama last fall) or it could be familial (like my reblogs of Gotham Gal's recipes or Jessica's photography).

My partner Brad once asked his nephew why he preferred sports blogs to the sports sections in the newspaper. His nephew said "everyone has a point of view but with blogs, they are upfront about it". Indeed. I'm a Jets, Mets, and Knicks fan. That's the lens through which I view the sports world, sadly.

This culture of sharing is not limited to the written word. Log into Boxee and you'll see a screen that looks like this.

 

The very first thing you see when you log into Boxee are the recommendations from your friends on Boxee. Facebook's user interface is coming to your TV sometime soon. It's not going to be about what NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, or anyone else wants you to watch. It's going to be about what your friends are watching. It always has been about that but we just haven't had the TV interfaces that recognize that.

There I go again, talking about my vested interests (our firm has an investment in Boxee). That's my truth.

I've got to end this post because I need to turn it into a presentation I can deliver at SocComm in about three hours. So I'll end this post by linking out to a couple of other truths out there on the issues I've covered here.

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I posted a few weeks back about a great music blogging experience with a new band called The Rural Alberta Advantage. The band is from Canada and had never been in the US until this week. Last night they played their first show in the states, here in NYC at Pianos. I was there and the cool thing is so were about half dozen (maybe more) members of this community. I met a bunch of readers for the first time last night. Thanks everyone for coming up and introducing yourself.

For those readers who came out, we got to hang out with the band before and after the show and were treated to a fantastic set. The only bummer was Fraser did not get to hear his favorite track off the new record, called In The Summertime. The band promised to play it when they are back in NYC next friday in Brooklyn at Union Hall.

Here’s a shot of the band at work.


There’s just three of them, Nils is the lead singer/guitar/piano, Amy (who emailed me to start this whole thing off) plays a bunch of fun instruments and sings backup, and Paul is a crazy good drummer. They make a much bigger sound than you’d think. Here’s the first song of theirs I ever heard. Click on the first play button, not the second one.

The Ballad of the RAA – The Rural Alberta Advantage

At the end of the show, instead of an encore, the band walked out into the middle of the audience and sang a song called Goodbye. You’ll probably see a few AVC community members in this photo. Too bad we can’t all tag ourselves in it.

There are a lot of playlist services on the web these days. Muxtape got shut down, but imeem, playlist.com, and 8tracks are all alive and kicking. And I am sure there a bunch of others too. All of these services let one person create a playlist. But yesterday, I wanted to do something a bit different.

It all started when I was coming back from getting bagels in the morning and listening to Animal Collective's For Reverend Green

I thought to myself that Animal Collective's lead singer Avey Tare is pretty good at the primal scream and then I started to think about other great primal screamers, like Caleb Followill of Kings Of Leon, and of course, John Lennon. So I twittered the thought:

i love lead singers who've mastered the primal scream like caleb followhill, avey tare and john lennon. any others?

And I literally got dozens of replies which you can see in this set of search results going back to yesterday morning.

So I decided to make a "primal scream" playlist on 8tracks which I did yesterday afternoon and this morning. I wish I could embed it, but I can't. If you click on this link, you'll be taken to 8tracks where you can listen to it.

During the process of building the primal scream playlist, I suggested to all the people sending me suggestions on twitter that they go to fredwilson.fm and upload additional tracks for the playlist to the soundcloud dropbox that I have on fredwilson.fm. A bunch of people did that and I've included two tracks so far that I got that way.

So basically we collaborated on this playlist and are still doing so because I am still getting suggestions of tracks to add. The best ones are going to get added to the playlist.

But this collaboration required a lot of "overhead" and three different web services, twitter, 8tracks, and soundcloud.

It would be great if we could use one or more of these playlisting services in "group" mode and easily collaborate on playlists. Sharing music is one of the great uses of the internet but sharing can work two ways and I'd love to see someone enable that.

For as long as I’ve been blogging (5+ years), I’ve been posting mp3s to the Internet. I do all of that now at fredwilson.vc but you can always click on the black banner at the bottom of this blog page and listen to the latest tracks I’ve posted.

I mainly blog music to share it with the people who read this blog and my tumblog. I love new music and discovering it and sharing it. And there are a ton of people I know who share this love of music blogging and they are constantly turning me onto new music. It’s like we’ve recreated the dynamic we had in our college dorms when we would take turns putting vinyl records on the turntable.

But there’s another reason I love music blogging. From time to time, I actually hear from the artists themselves. I’ve never stopped being a fan. When I get to meet musicians, I am always like the little kid pinching themselves wtih disbelief. I’m a groupie and proud of it.

Back at the end of last year, I was tipped off by a blog reader named Luke to a band called The Rural Alberta Advantage. I blogged some of their music at fredwilson.vc and you can listen to a bunch more of it at the Hype Machine. And I gave the record honorable mention on my top ten records of 2008 post.

This morning I picked up an email from Amy, one of the three band members:

Hi Fred,

It’s Amy from the Rural Alberta Advantage here…I just wanted to send a belated THANK YOU for putting us on your Honourable Mention list for your Top Records of 2008!  We received an email out of the blue from someone saying "just a heads-up that one of the most popular websites on the internet gave you a shout-out"!  and directing us to your site. So awesome! We really can’t believe how many people have heard our record now. It’s a pretty exciting feeling to know that almost every day we’re going to be hearing from someone else, from a place we’ve never played, talking about our songs. So thank you for helping us get our record out there!

I also wanted to invite you to come see us play in New York City (our first time out of Canada!) – we’re playing at a place called Piano’s NYC (on the lower east side of Manhattan) on Tuesday, January 27th. Then we are 99% for sure playing again in Brooklyn at Union Hall on Friday, February 6th.

Thanks again for listening Fred, and hope to see you on the 27th! (or the 6th!)

Cheers,
–AMY

Now how freakin awesome is that? A thank you note and an invitation to come see them play their first gig in NYC. Of course, I’ll be there at the Piano’s show, along with the Gotham Gal. Tickets are $8, so if you like their music as much as I do and you live in NYC, you should come too. And while you are at it, get the record, called Hometowns.

As a bonus, I am doing something I rarely do these days. Here’s an mp3 of my favorite track on the record:

Edmonton – Rural Alberta Advantage – Hometowns

Josh Stylman sent out a tweet yesterday that I agree with:

The Hype Machine is the Rolling Stone of our time – defining, interpreting and pushing culture. http://bit.ly/xuJt

I don’t want to belittle what Rolling Stone was in terms of defining and interpreting culture. It’s impact was much greater than music. In fact, I think it’s political work in the age of Hunter Thompson and Richard Nixon was among its finest moments. And I don’t mean to insult Rolling Stone by writing this in the past tense, but honestly it stopped meaning anything to me about 25 years ago.

But in this day and age, when you want to know what’s happening in the music scene, you log onto the Hype Machine and see what’s going down. It’s participatory culture at it’s finest. The Hype Machine is not programmed, it’s a smart aggregator, like Techmeme or Real Clear Politics. The Hype Machine goes out and crawls the music blogs and figures out what’s getting blogged the most and then pulls that together onto a single page so you can listen and link out and go check things out.

I’ve been obsessed with the Hype Machine for years and readers of this blog will certainly be well aware of my fondness for the service. I check it every day to see what’s happening. But it’s greatest strength is when I am tired of what I am listening to and want something new. Pat McCarthy said it yesterday on twitter:

Yes, Hype Machine is great.  Anytime I’m tired of whatever I’m listening to I go to the popular page
to find something new.

The cool thing is that’s how the Hype Machine was formed. Anthony was tired of what he was listening to and wanted to find something new. So he built a crawler of music blogs and the rest is history. Like many of the best web services, the Hype Machine is a low cost lean and mean operation. It’s built and maintained by just four people; Anthony, Taylor, Zoya, and Scott.

There are many web music services with more users than the Hype Machine.

But none of the other web music services (imeem, playlist, pandora, last.fm, jango, blip.fm, lala, 8tracks, myspace music, fredwilson.fm, …..) do what Josh so nicely articulated. The Hype Machine defines music culture.

And I’m telling you all this as a prelude to the big point. Team Hype Machine has launched The Music Blog Zeitgeist 2008. Each day this week, they’ll release the names of ten artists and ten albums that collectively make up the top 50. And they are also showcasing the top 50 songs by month.

They’ve also teamed up with Blog Fresh Radio to produce a radio show featuring all of this music. I’m listening now and so can you.

The Hype Machine is small, influential, and profitable. It doesn’t take a lot of revenue to cover their costs and they are the model of a bootstrapped, scrappy, and useful web service. I love the Hype Machine and think they killed it with the music blog zeitgeist this year.

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Andrew and I met with David Porter, founder of 8tracks, the "legal muxtape", yesterday. David offered to let me try their new uploader (not yet available) that lets you drag and drop iTunes playlists into 8tracks. It’s killer.

Here’s what I did with it in about 2 minutes. I hope you like it.

And here’s my 8tracks page, where my other mix is also listed.

One of the big changes on this blog in the past year is the departure of music posts. I moved my music posts to my tumblog in late 2007, where I post a new song everyday. You can experience them here by clicking on the "radio" link in the upper nav links or by clicking on the black banner at the bottom of the page. I haven’t stopped blogging about music, in fact I am doing it more than ever, but I have changed the way I do it. I like it better and I hope you do too.

Every year since I started this blog, I have listed my top 10 records of the year on this blog and this year will be no different. But I am not going to generate a new post every day for ten days like I’ve done in the past. I’ve actually been doing that on my tumblog for the past two weeks and if you are an active reader of that or an active listener of fredwilson.fm, then you already know what is on the list.

This year, I’ll do a single blog post with all the selections in it. So without further ado, here’s the list:

1) The Stand-Ins – Okkervil River. This record is the back end of a two part effort that started with The Stage Names last year. Many people feel they should have released them both as a double album. You might ask,"why is this your number one record this year and yet The Stage Names didn’t even make your list last year?" Well like Kings Of Leon last year, this band snuck up on me and I got into them a bit late. I like both records equally but this is a 2008 release and so it gets on the list. Okkervil is the band of the year for me and this is the record of the year even though my personal favorite of everything they’ve done is the Golden Opportunities Mixtape that they’ve never really even released commercially. If you don’t get this band, you are like I was until this year, you just aren’t trying hard enough.

2). Oracular Spectacular – MGMT. From the opening of Time To Pretend to the line 15 seconds later about going to paris shooting heroin and fucking stars, you know this is going to be a fun ride. And it is. This record got more play in our family than any other this year. I am not sure who loves it most, but its likely to be my younger daughter or my son. Its not a family record by any means, its not even age appropriate for my son. But that has never gotten in the way of appreciating art in our family and this record is art, created by two young kids just out of Wesleyan. Listening to it makes me feel their age and that’s a good thing.

3) Here’s To Being Here – Jason Collett. The first of two solo projects on this list. Jason’s from Broken Social Scene, a personal favorite of mine, but honestly this record is better than anything they’ve ever done. Jason’s put out something that sounds like what a late 60s/early 70s folk-rock record would sound like if it was made today. I listened to this record non-stop this summer. Its not in heavy rotation anymore but when I do put it back on, I can sing along to the entire record and I probably always will be able to do that. Its a fun, easy, rocking record and its great.

4) For Emma Forever Ago – Bon Iver. If Jason Collett got me through the summer, Bon Iver got me through last winter. This record was made in a cabin in the northern woods the previous winter and it sounds like its still coming from there. Its getting cold again in NYC, and its time to make a hot cup of tea, curl up on the couch under a blanket, and put Bon Iver on.

5) We Brave Bee Stings And All – Thao. I discovered Thao as I was coming out of my Bon Iver phase and she literally pulled me out of it. Thao is a young asian woman with a wonderful voice and light quirky songs. The Gotham Gal bought into Thao bigtime and this record was a constant in our family room/kitchen for most of this year.

6) Little Joy – Little Joy. The second solo project on my top 10 list. This comes from Fabrizio Moretti, the Strokes’ drummer. I haven’t really loved anything the Strokes have done since their first record but I sure do love this record. It is a little joy. And its not as much a solo project as a collaboration between three friends. I can imagine them sitting around the porch playing these songs and deciding to record them. It reminds me a lot of Ry Cooder’s Paradise and Lunch and David Lindley’s El Rayo Ex, two other little joys of mine

7) Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend. I remember late last year my oldest daughter played me a few Vampire Weekend tracks she’d found on hype machine. She said ‘this is my new favorite band’. And so it was and it became our family’s favorite band for a good while. One of the musical highlights of the year was going with the whole family to see Vampire Weekend at an outdoor music festival in Paris this summer. We knew all the songs and could sing all the words. So did all the parisian kids too

8) Only By The Night – Kings Of Leon. Another musical highlight from our time in Paris was the KOL show we saw at Le Zenith. MGMT opened but I got everyone on the wrong metro train and we ended up only seeing KOL. Oh well. I think I’ve finally lived that down. They were playing a few songs from the new record this summer but I didn’t hear it in its full incarnation until this fall. This record has been trashed by Pitchfork and others as a sellout. Its clearly an attempt to reach a mainstream audience and inherit U2’s throne at the top of anthem rock. I don’t like it as much as Aha Shake Heartbreak but then I don’t think any record made this decade beats Aha Shake Heartbreak. Only By The Night features the best singing of Caleb’s short but brilliant career and the songs are catchy and good. It may be mainstream but I still like it better than most of what I heard this year.

9) Volume One – She and Him. M Ward is one of my favorite musicians working today. When I heard he’d teamed up with the beautiful and sweet Zoe Deschanel to make a record, I was curious and a bit baffled. But the result came out great. The gruff Matt and the sweet Zoe made a perfect pairing and like Jack White did a few years back with Loretta Lynn, M Ward made sure the songs came out great. This one’s a real gem.

10) Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust – Sigur Ros. This was a late bloomer for me. The record came out late summer but I didn’t get into it until the past month. Sigur Ros is mood music and I guess I needed to get into the right mood. I did and this record delivered more Sigur Ros wonderfulness. If you like them, get this record.

There are six other records that I seriously considered for the top 10. So here’s the Honorable Mention list:

Conor Oberst – Conor Oberst. Really tough call. Deserved to be on the top 10 list but couldn’t figure out who to cut to get it there.

Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes Will absolutely be on Gotham Gal’s list. It would easily be on our "most listens in our family room/kitchen list". Great record.

Konk – Kooks. My son’s favorite band. I am very partial to them too. This one has great songs but isn’t as good as their debut. The lead singer Luke is one of the most talented songwriters out there right now.

Consolers Of The Lonely – Raconteurs. Three or four great songs. If it were more consistent, it would have made top 10. Jack White is a guitar god.

Hometowns – The Rural Alberta Advantage. This one was suggested to me by a fellow tumbler who saw I was putting a top 10 list together last week. I bought the record that very day (on emusic, not on Amazon yet) and have been obsessed with it since. If I had more time with it, it might have made the list. My oldest daughter describes them as Decemberists meet Neutral Milk Hotel. I describe them as awesome.

That’s it. I hope you like the list and I also hope that you click on those links and buy some music. And if you’d like to listen first, go to fredwilson.fm. I’ve been posting nothing but songs from these records for the past week and a half and you can listen to this list there. I just did while I was posting this and it’s great.

Yesterday, on the VC panel at LeWeb, Ouriel asked all of us "how should an entrepreneur pitch you?"

I replied, "they should send me a link to their web service and if I like it, I’ll follow up and meet with them"

That has happened so many times and I am convinced its the best way to get my attention.

Back when I launched fredwilson.fm, I got an email from an entrepreneur asking me to put a soundcloud drop box on it so emerging artists could send me music to consider for my personal internet radio station. I thought "good idea" and put it up. You can see the soundcloud drop box if you visit fredwilson.fm.

Since I put up the soundcloud drop box, I’ve gotten 14 submissions. A few of them are very good and I plan on posting at least one or two of them to tumblr/fredwilson.fm before year end.

This experience opened my eyes to what soundcloud represents. It’s a new way to get music out there. Bands and artists are using it (roughly 40,000 so far I’ve heard) to share music among themselves in rough form while they work on the final product, and then they use it to submit their music to various record labels, music bloggers, and other promotional outlets.

The company is based in Berlin and from what I can tell much of the user base is european to date. But music is a global experience and there is no reason why soundcloud can’t take off in the US and other parts of the world.

Just to be clear, soundcloud is not for sharing licensed music. Of course, it can be used for that, but the company is working on tools like audio fingerprinting so they can police the service and make sure it’s used by real musicians to share their work, not by fans looking to share music with friends.

After using soundcloud for a couple months, I finally got the opportunity to meet the founders yesterday at Le Web. We only had about 20 minutes, but we got right into the opportunity and they didn’t have to spend most of the meeting explaining what soundcloud is. Because I’m already a user and a fan. That’s the way to do it.

Of course, just because I like the service and enjoyed meeting the founders, it doesn’t mean our firm wil invest. But we certainly are going to pay attention to what they are doing. By blogging about them, I’ll get more feedback. I’d love it if all of you who are into music would check it out and let me know what you think.

As Eric Archambeau of Wellington Partners said on the panel yesterday, "the first step is I’ve got to like it, but I can’t make an investment just because I like it. I’ve got to make sure that the market at large is going to like it too" [that’s a paraphrase not a quote].

So please check out soundcloud and let me know what you think.