Picky blog

Recently I’ve had great adrenaline kicks when thinking about and listening to the future. For a long while I didn’t got those kicks. I thought that the idealistic era of love of good thoughts and music was forever replaced with a cynical era of A gives B that always gives C. But happily I was wrong. The forecast for the future looks great and it will be possible to take a leap from A to L in one exciting moment. Here are some final notes and thoughts of 2007 and promises for 2008.

It seems that for me 2007 was a year of software and web solutions. And yesterday I finally had the time to check out the new music player from Mozilla – Songbird. It look quite much like iTunes but its open source base enables developers to make great add-ons. And that’s what make it good. For example there is an add-on that integrates Hype machine with the regular interface. Another one shows the Wikipedia site of the artist you are listening to at the moment. I like that Songbird combine the old ways of storing and organizing songs on a hard drive with the power of the collective amount of music and information on the web. It’a a modern mash up platform that is great for people that want to explore vast amount of new music.

Universal music ended the year in a way that was a big surprise to me. After the interview with CEO Doug Morris in Wired my hope for the major labels were almost out. Then they suddenly made a ground breaking deal with Nokia and shortly after joined the other majors at Imeem. It made me glad and a little bit more hopeful that an all access streaming service might be more than a wet beta dream.

So what will 2008 bring to the discussion of the future of music?
I think that it’s about time to carefully explore and learn from other areas of business that recently have had the same kind of paradigm shift as the music scene is undergoing. I am talking about areas like media and environment. I will at least intvite people that are involved in those to come and explain how they are cooping with profound changes of conditions.

Even more we have to get inspiration from places like China, Brazil and India. We in the West are obviously bad at adjusting to the “new” era. Let’s listen to those who never had what we are trying to escape from. I am sure that there are loads of good ideas and angles of approaches in parts of the world we have ignored for way to long.

I will continue to listen carefully to Chris Anderson’s reasoning on “Free“. I will continue to listen to interesting debates like these. Most of all I will continue to talk to everyone I meet about the future of music. I will continue to talk and share ideas about interesting topics like context, filter and emotions.

I very much look forward to spread the songs of Moto boy and Gentle touch. They’re the ones that created most of the adrenaline kicks I mentioned. Take a look at this amazing Dusty Springfield interpretation by Moto boy recorded last week and this mind setting teaser of the darker sides of Gentle touch. I think you will understand what I mean.

I hope that 2008 will produce the same kind of feeling and response that a change of parting does to your hair and approach. You feel fresh and you are amused that something so simple can make such a profound change to your appearance. You notice that everyone around can see that something is different, they like what they see but in the beginning they just can’t put a finger on what it is.

A profound change is indeed coming up. It’s very lovable. And it will change the way in which we enjoy music. See you next year.

Det här inlägget publicerades måndag 31 december, 2007 kl. 4:18 e m i Music future. Du kan följa kommentarer genom RSS 2.0. Kommentarer är avstängda just nu, men du kan trackbacka från din egen webbplats.