[This was just posted on GigaOm.  One of the comments cited Last.fm and Pandora as other 'radio 2.0' stalwarts.  I agree with that however they have more to do with personal enjoyment than 'breaking' new bands and artists.  I haven't heard about a high profile artist debuting their record on Pandora or Last.fm, and it would be a bit weird if it happened.  Anyways...]

For decades radio and later, MTV, were the dominant and proven
marketing channels for the music industry. The symbiosis was, on its
face, an elegant one: Radio and video promoted the product for free/fee,
retail outlets sold it, and everyone made gobs of money. Radio, while
still powerful, is no longer perceived as the vibrant marketing channel
for music it once was. MTV certainly isn’t.

They’ve been replaced by the web — in particular, by social
networking communities and blogs. This is Radio 2.0. While I don’t blog
about music as much as I’d like, I still get pitched very regularly by
music promotion companies on new music. I can only imagine how much
music blogs like Pitchfork, Brooklyn Vegan and bloggers like Fred Wilson get pitched.  Moreover, the labels are embracing social networks as a new channel — the EMI/Sigur Ros/YouTube and Warner Bros/REM/iMeemiLike
tie-ups are cases in point. Of course Clear Channel and MTV (outside of
the U.S, at least) will still get plenty of world premieres, but I
suspect this will decrease as MP3 blogs and social networks continue to
gain relevance and audiences.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” you may sigh. Well, it’s unclear
that these sites actually generate commerce revenue the way traditional
marketing channels have. If that continues to be the case, then the
artists and labels will have to figure out how to get a big enough
piece of advertising and other revenue streams to warrant “giving”
their content to these new channels. Regardless, we are seeing a
changing of the guard: Maybe Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber is the
new Jann Wenner; Ali Partovi or Dalton Caldwell, the new Bob Pittman.

On rotation in the iPod:

The National, Boxer.  My bro got me into them and each listen does indeed make me like them more.  Definitely worth getting.

Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend.  They’ve taken the indie world by storm with accompanying backlash.  I like their sound and have yet to tire of it.

I’ve also got Jens Lekman and Yeasayer cued up but they’ve yet to hit the rotation.

Recently purchased tix to gigs:

Mayra Andrade this Sunday at the Barbican

Vampire Weekend in May

YoYo Ma in December

Neill Dixon and Verle Hobbs at Canadian Music Week had kindly invited me to speak on the Social Networking panel last Friday.  Alas, I woke up that morning with my throat all scratchy and was in no shape to make the 8 hr flight to Toronto let alone pontificate on social networking!  I was very sorry to miss what seems like a great show, made all the more intimate by the blizzard that hit Toronto over the weekend.  I’ve been catching up on what I missed by reading the synopses found here.  Hope to make it next year.

A provocative speech by Seth Godin on the music industry by way of Lefsetz.  Well worth a read if you’re interested in the business.  Some choice passages:

It was a perfect industry. And I want to tell you why. Each one of these factors is important.

Number one: An entire medium and entire section of the spectrum
devoted to promoting the stuff you make…thats great right…for free!
An entire thing built around helping you sell more stuff.

Number two: An oligopoly. For those who didn’t grab an MBA [an
oligopoly] is where there is a small number of people competing against
each other. If you are a band hoping to break out in 1974, 1984, 1993,
you didn’t have a lot of choices, and since you didn’t have a lot of
choices guess who had a lot of power, a few companies.  And, those
companies could demand certain things that they needed from the world.

The third thing that made it perfect is it was a key part of out
lives. Look up senior prom on the internet and all you’ll see are
stupid pictures, ugly dresses, and people remembering the songs they
were listening to. It was the soundtrack for generation after
generation. The people in the shoe business don’t have this advantage.
The people at almost every business aren’t featured on the prom pages,
you guys are.

The next thing, entire chains of retailers devoted to selling your
product. In malls they’re paying the rent, not you, Sure they’re
extracting shelf space allowances from you, but isn’t that really cool?
Whole stores you don’t even have to own, devoted to promoting what you
sell.

…

So if the model that we loved about the record business in 1968 was
A&R, taking care of artists, finding artists who people will love,
and the model that we hated was brand management, I want to argue that
the next model is tribal management. That the next model is to say,
what you do for a living is manage a tribe…many tribes…silos of
tribes. That your job is to make the people in that tribe delighted to
know each other and trust you to go find music for them. And, in
exchange, it could be way out on the long tail, no one wants to be on
the long tail by themselves, the polka lovers like the polka lovers,
they want to be together. But that you, maybe it is only one person,
technology makes this really easy, your job is to curate for that
tribe, like the curators upstairs [at the museum]. There is a museum of
modern art tribe, you can see them here every Thursday. And if you can
curate for them guess what the [musical] artists need…you! Guess what
the tribe needs…you! You add an enormous amount of value by becoming
a new kind of middleman.