Endless Flowers has been out for a while now, but I’ve only just gotten around to listening to it in the last week or so. The main reason for my delay is that it isn’t streaming on Rdio in my country (New Zealand). It’s interesting how this factor really influences my listening habits these days – if it’s not available for streaming, I am a lot less likely to give it a spin. It seems so silly in 2012 that regional restrictions are still applied to a fully digital medium – why would you not want every possible person listening to your music?…

It’s impossible to pin down any one album by the great Sam Cooke, and to be honest, the studio albums he released while he was alive did him little justice. His LPs tended to be collections of covers, usually of the showtune or big band variety, and rarely showcased his unique voice and superb songwriting. Nope, he was a singles man through and through, was Sam Cooke.

And boy, what singles they were.

From his first hit single, the beautiful “You Send Me” (consisting of little more than the same three word phrase repeated over and over – the second word swapped out for “thrill” in the second verse) right through the the sublime, posthumously released “A Change Is Gonna Come” (below), Cooke wrote some of the most powerful songs of his generation.…

For the past 7 years, I have made music in the clouds/streaming subscription music services a personal mission. Early on, I was an “early adopter” to Rhapsody, a Real Networks company. Over the years, I’ve had the distinct pleasure to try them all (Rdio, Spotify, Deezer, GrooveShark, MOG, Rhapsody, Napster). Through this affinity and trial, I quickly discerned that this is the way of the future! Exhausting the fan with numerous hurdles to just hear music is futile and I’m super excited that the major labels have woken up to this world of frictionless music discovery and consumption.…

I knew nothing of Echo Lake before discovering them on Rdio this week. I was initially drawn to the beautiful cover – I’m a sucker for brightly colored, psychedelically themed album sleeves: see Tame Impala, or Hot Chip’s new one. It’s a pretty good representation of the music contained within too: ultra shoegazey, with heavy psychedelic elements and just enough pop hooks to keep it interesting. For fans of: A Sunny Day In Glasgow, Slowdive, School Of Seven Bells.

 I can’t tell you how often I hear from a band, label or management company they want to:

• sell more albums
• sell more tickets
• get more listens on Spotify

Of course they do. This is what any business needs to survive, money in the door.

The only problem is these goals are what Paul Adams calls “heavy-weight interactions,” and they can’t live in isolation.

Imagine you’re in a record store and you notice a buyer picking up your LP and flipping it over to read the back.…

So much happens every day in the sea of social media. This is great for research, trend watching and keeping in touch. But reaching your fans is getting harder every day.

Your Facebook wall posts and tweets are messages in bottle that you toss out to sea. You cross your fingers and hope most of your fans are going to see it.

In fact that message bobs around, gets read by a few fans and eventually sinks to the ocean floor.…

I sat down with Wick-It the Instigator for a two part interview on the importance of fans. Without fans…….there is nothing!

I thought I knew all of the great forgotten bands: The Replacements, with their great songs, unpredictable live shows and self-destructive attitude; Big Star, with their perfect tunes at exactly the wrong time; Nick Drake, with his refusal to tour and corresponding failure to sell records, despite their melancholy brilliance. But somehow amongst all of these lost gems I managed to miss The Nerves.

It was Rdio that finally brought them to my attention. A colleague found them through an Rdio playlist resulting in The Nerves’ compilation album One Way Ticket appearing in my Recent Activity feed – a good illustration of the power of streaming media.…

It’s official. The new MusicHype is launching at Music Biz 2012 in LA next week, put on by NARM and digitalmusic.org.

We’ll have a table at App Alley, outside the main ballroom on Wednesday from 11am-6pm and we’ll also be floating around on Tuesday. You’ll also be able to catch Kevin doing a 3-minute overview of MusicHype at the Digital Music LA meetup 7-9pm on Tuesday night. If you’re a label, management company or artist who’s struggling to focus on the fans that matter – you need to talk to us.…

It’s pretty exciting ’round here getting ready for our launch in 2 weeks – crikey! So this is a quick post to show where you can listen to the music we (Kevin, Mike, Jeff & Annabel) love.

Grooveshark
You can find us over with the good folks at Grooveshark. We’ve got a TasteMaker’s Best of 2011 playlist up. And you can check out our monthly playlists – see April’s Revisits (oldies but goodies) and there’s, of course, April’s Hot List (fresh tracks).

Rdio
If you’re an Rdio kind of kid we’ve got all those goodies on there too: The Best of 2011 – Hot List April 2012 – Revisits April 2012