HIGH FIDELITY

The post serves no more than an excuse to post a track from the great new TV on the Radio album, “Dear Science,”:

Halfway Home

01-halfway-home

One of my favorite bands, for sentimental reasons, is Brooklyn’s Beirut (ok, the reasons are that I was born in Beirut, and spent a long time in Central and Eastern Europe, which their music reminds me of). Here’s a nice live version of one of their best, “Elephant Gun”, recorded during the Studio 104, Masion de Radio sessions:

Elephant Gun

Like 5,000 other people at this very moment, I am trying out the new wordpress app for the iPhone. This is something wordpress users have been eagerly waiting for, as there was no real mobile publishing support for wordpress up until now.
So far, so good….

Great Otis Redding take on the Beatles’ classic:

Day Tripper, alternate take (Otis Redding)

JC firenukes, originally uploaded by Josh Engroff.

Lots of sound, not much vision, and David Bowie was nowhere to be seen. But it was a great 4th on the Hudson, and the humidity provided some cool visual effects, like this celebratory nuclear attack.

Thought I’d post an update on Jango and the social music front. The May Comscore data ranking the top 520 music sites in the US reveals some interesting things:

• Jango is now at spot 32, up 10 slots from the March ‘08 version of this report
• we moved ahead of MP3.com, ilike.com, Audible.com, RollingStone.com, eMusic, Zune.net, and Disney Music
• we will soon pass Billboard.com and Spiralfrog in monthly uniques
• we are more than half the size of Last.fm in the US (bought last year by CBS for $280 million)
• we are #9 of all 520 sites in terms of average minutes per visit (an important measure of user satisfaction), beating AOL Music, Yahoo Music, Pandora, playlist.com, last.fm

And we got here only 7 months after public launch; Last.fm, by comparison, has been around since 2002.

I am estimating our July numbers to be much higher than May and June.

Here’s an excerpt of the Comscore chart, in order of US monthly uniques (in 000s):

Great old ad from I’m guessing the 60s; need to find the exact year:

the-best-part-of-wakin-up-is-folgers-in-your-cup

Two nights ago, we had a bomb scare in our building. Someone called 911 earlier in the day and said that, around 8 pm, a “bomb may go off in Liberty Towers.” Police were here, and the bomb squad, and everyone else in the neighborhood with a badge.

And so–making the bizarre assumption that if the bomber was serious, he was also very punctual–my wife, unborn child, and I trundled out of the building at 7:50 pm. We carried the following:
1) cash and jewelry
2) our dog Gaius
3) a hard drive

Behind us we left the usual household items such as computers, pictures, stereo equipment, cameras, TV and, oh yeah, two cats.

Does that make us bad parents, or very efficient parents?

The production and consumption of music is different than other forms of entertainment, like movies, books, games or TV. A great deal of high quality music is being produced at any given time for a relatively low cost. Therefore, there is a huge, and ever-growing, supply of music. At the same time, an individual can consume music more quickly than he can other forms of entertainment, about 12-15 songs per hour, compared to a one TV show per half hour, one movie per two hours, or one game or movie per 5+ hours.

This creates an information gap between supply and demand, which, until now, has been (inefficiently) filled by critics, magazines, and the music cos themselves. The dilemma is this: given so much music choice on the one hand, and an insatiable demand on the other, how does a regular person easily find new music? Subscribe to every music magazine available? Expensive and time-consuming. Get it from the radio? Terrestrial radio (other than college radio) is pretty much dead as a source of discovery; the same artists circulate ad infinitum. Get it from TV? Some shows, such as the OC, have been effective at promoting new music talent, but given an endless supply music available digitally, this is just a drop in the bucket.

The Interent, of course, offers the perfect mean of filling this gap. Enter music discovery services like Jango.