John Gruber comments in his usual incisive way on the claims that Universal Music are looking to start their own subscription service called Total Music. For a variety of reasons, not only the technical and financial ones that John details, the plan seems like the flailing about we’ve become used to hearing from an industry staring into an abyss and refusing to acknowledge the numerous bridges all around.

The original Business Week piece contains an amusing quote from Irving Azoff, who says:

Doug is doing the right thing taking on Steve Jobs,” says ex-MCA Records Chairman Irving Azoff, whose Azoff Music Management Group represents the Eagles, Journey, Christina Aguilera, and others. “The artists are behind him.

Sure, the Eagles, Journey and Christina Aguilera may be behind such a plan, and they may sell a lot of records, but they’re hardly a representative sample. Most likely they were picked because they’re the lowest common denominator for the Business Week readership but even if you add in a few of their peers, the vast majority of artists are going to be opposed to such an offering because it will either lock them out entirely or require them to sign the sorts of horrific deals major labels are known for.

Even if the major labels do get such a programme to market (about which I’m sceptical) and become uncharacteristically inclusive and giving, they’ve shown over the past few years that they are less and less capable of breaking new acts beyond one-hit-wonders. A subscription service might make that easier as less commitment is required to check out new acts, but that’s not much of a long-term strategy.

Music as a commodity may work that way, but artists need commitment from fans and support structure in order to attain longevity. A subscription service from the major labels would make it easier for us all to have a “free” supply of wallpaper music for background listening, but a more fundamental change of approach is needed from the major labels if they actually want to build up artists who might in the long-term bring them more profits. If the labels won’t do it under their own power, other people will step up who can help artists get the funding to do it themselves.

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A little blogging inertia seems to have set in over the past few months and it seems a bit late to comment on Radiohead’s approach to releasing their new album. Instead, now that the dust is settling, it seems a good time to connect it up with some commentary my friend Steve has been offering over on his blog.

Steve has been doing a lot of thinking about things like the emotional connections people make with music and what the change of experience from queuing outside a record shop to freely downloading means for how people value music something that, as an independent musician, is of quite immediate importance to him. When we have a constant flow of free or nearly-free new music washing over us, it suffers from some of the same attention problem that many of us have faced since RSS allowed us to theoretically track many hundreds of web sites but we didn’t have the tools to work out how to prioritise that and what could simply be left behind.

What I find most interesting about Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows is that they made an album release feel like an event for the first time in years. With no promotional copies sent out, there were no leaks, and everyone who wanted to hear the record could do so within a few hours of each other. Some people stayed up all night to be the first to download, others of us were just specially eager to get to our email the next morning, but either way there was a definite buzz around the web on October 10th.

Waiting for the email with download instructions to come in isn’t quite the same as queuing outside a record shop with other fans, but sharing comments on twitter had a little of the same feel. The band aren’t sharing sales statistics, but there’s little doubt they’ll be charting pretty high at last.fm this week even by Radiohead’s usual standards (they’re consistently in the top 5 in the artists’ chart). For musicians who don’t have to worry about exposure and/or are more interested in people connecting with the records than buying them, a high last.fm ranking says a lot more than competing with the latest ringtone-friendly tunes in the sales charts.

That experience/event aspect of Radiohead’s approach seems to me far more important than what they’re doing with pricing. Their adoption of downloads is only unprecedented because Radiohead operate on an entirely different scale from all but a handful of bands; bands have been giving records away for years. Stars beat them to the punch this summer by offering their new album as a “download-only promo”, and there are plenty of other examples. Because of the ‘event’, because the album was the thing of the moment, a thing to connect through, and not just because it was by Radiohead, a lot of people listened to it a lot more than if it had simply slipped out as promo after promo got leaked.

Obviously few bands can make a release quite as much of an event as Radiohead, with their legions of fans amongst music buyers and critics alike. This experiment has been done now and won’t work the same way again, but the band have shown that the cat isn’t entirely out of the bag and that it is still possible for an album release to be a major event for someone other than retailers or a select few able to make it to a launch party. The open question is whether other artists can manage a similar feat without Radiohead’s resources or the aid of what seems like novelty.

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One of the numerous side projects that’s been keeping me from blogging (alongside working full time and preparing for a round-the-world trip and an international move) made a quiet launch yesterday. You can find it over at shop.georgiamusicstore.com.

The site is a component of a wider online presence for the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, providing e-commerce facilities for their gift shop. It went through numerous iterations as they refined how they wanted to manage stock, and now takes stock updates uploaded from CSV files for easy integration with their other back-office systems. Payments are handled through the excellent Active Merchant which makes the payment side of e-commerce development a breeze. Search come from ferret, and a little reassurance is provided by the wonderful exception_notification.

I also took the table-based HTML of the main site and reworked it as XHTML and CSS. It may have saved time to just work with the existing templates, but after all these years of avoiding tables for everything but tabular content, it hurt too much not to have a validating front page.

There have already been a few changes made as we load more data in and hit it with real requests, and thanks to the flexibility of rails and capistrano it will remain nice and easy to keep revising as we go along.

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iConcertCal is an iTunes plugin that scans your library and produces a list of upcoming concerts that you may be interested in. It attempts to detect your city from your IP address, but that can be overridden, and the calendar itself is provided as an iTunes visualiser. The iConcertCal installer has been sitting on my desktop for a few days now, awaiting a chance to be used, so it was finally time to give it a whirl.

For what it is, it’s a pretty neat implementation, though it could definitely do with some more UI niceties, such as using native text widgets so double-clicking on the city name will highlight it (I had to use the delete key to remove the default city name and replace it), and a more attractive default view. I also found the default set of dates a little disappointing, given that I know that there are more shows listed at last.fm and upcoming.org, both of which are using hCalendar and so are easy to scrape.

Indexing my small local library was quick, so there’s none of the delay that put me off after my first experience using MOG, but it still falls into the trap that system had of presuming that I’ll be getting all my music from a local library. We use one central iTunes library at home and most listening is over the network, and I know many other people whose primary listening is over an office or campus network. It is possible to feed in a list of other artists, but having to do that manually is likely to prove frustrating as tastes develop.

But what I’m really not sure about is whether iTunes is the place for this information. Personally I’d much rather have this data in my calendar software than hidden away in an itunes visualiser, particularly as I usually want access to the library browser when I have the iTunes window open. In my calendar software I can quickly see how concert dates fit with other events, and sync the data to my phone so I have the information even on those rare occasions when my laptop stays at home. Apparently calendar integration is in the works but it’s a feature I’d like to have seen in the 1.0 release.

As the plugin is lightweight I’ll be leaving it installed, but without a number of additions I can’t see myself switching to this view all that regularly.

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On Friday I presented a session at Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Music on indications of where the music industry might be headed. The session went well, with a reasonable turnout and some great questions, and seems to have fostered considerable further discussion.

I covered the current state of the industry, subscription/download services, recommendation systems, and a few related concepts. You can find a PDF of my slides, along with a number of links at this location.

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