Upcoming Events

The fall travel season will soon be upon me and I am hard at work preparing talks. On October 16th I'm going to be visiting Microsoft Research, giving a talk called "I Heard it on the Net: Recent Transformations in Online Music Fandom." Here is the abstract:

Music fans …

Soulja Boy's Not Ashamed

Usually when MySpace plays a major role in breaking musicians, they are eager to back away from it -- "oh no, it wasn't MySpace. Well, maybe a little, but WE TOURED! HONEST!" It's as though making it through MySpace cuts your credibility. So in light of that, it's …

Radiohead=Buzz of the Week

So blink and you're behind the times. Radiohead have surprised us all and done something that isn't boring announced that not only is their new surprise record coming out IN A FEW DAYS, it will be self-released, and -- here's the buzzworthy part -- if you choose to buy …

Indie Labels on Sharing, Streaming and Giving It Away

I've been interviewing people involved in the Swedish indie music scene these last few months. Today I thought I'd dive into them a little and share a few quotes from people running labels that I think represent a real shift in the way indies are doing business as well …

Swedish Pop Invades Facebook!

In the last few weeks, the Swedish indie music scene has come on to Facebook in droves. When I started writing about how distributed this scene was across various spots on the internet last March, there was nothing going on on Facebook. When I did the final proofread of …

Spreading the Wealth with Widgets

Reverbnation has been consistently ahead of the curve on thinking about how online band promotion needs to be easily distributable amongst different sites and platforms. I've written about their "spread and track" philosophy here, their street team organizing tools

Does CBS get it?

First they go and buy Last.fm, and have the sense to leave it in London with the current crew still in charge, and now their CBS Interactive president, Quincy Smith, is talking major sense about how CBS tv and the web ought to get along, as seen in a recent article in …

About that Camping Trip

Well, the night weather did not cooperate too well with last weekend's camping trip, but I thought you regular readers might enjoy some pictures from the glorious days.

We woke up after a tremendous all-night downpour that seeped into the inside of our tent to find a …

How People Discover Music

I missed it in July, but today The Listenerd drew my attention to a survey conducted by mp3 blog aggregator, the Hype Machine which asked people: How Do You Discover Music?

It doesn't take a Ph.D. in social sciences (I hope!) to spot some immediate reasons to question …

Assessing the Internet's Credibility

An article in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend had some very interesting points to make about how shifts toward the internet in the music industry are impacting non-American bands' ability to get visas to tour in the US. They spend much of the article on Lily …

I'm becoming my own reality

Ever have the feeling you're becoming the butt of a joke you started?

Like when you start posting about Facebook fakesters and come home from a camping weekend to find a friends request from a fictional creation? You fanfic fandom people are going to have to clue me in …

Going Camping

Gimme a few days before I start thinking about fandom again, because I'm going back here:

Kansas is prettier than you think!

Took my sons to see the Arctic Monkeys and Voxtrot last night. Very fun, but I sure am glad I invested in ear plugs. Yowza! The Arctic Monkeys …

Who are the Facebook Fakesters?

Last week I wrote about Facebook Fakesters, or at least a couple of them. And now I'm noticing them everywhere. Some are really easy to spot. For instance, Jacques Derrida has several profiles despite his being dead, as does Michel Foucault. I'm guessing none of

Football and Politics Mix about as well as Rock and Politics

Evidently there is controversy in Seattle, where 2 members of the Seattle Seahawks went to a Republican fundraiser where they met President Bush, presented him with a Seahawks jersey and declared him "an honorary Seahawk." As the Seattle Post Intelligence reports:

The …

Who knew Dylan was so much fun?

When they make lists of iconic music videos, if they do that (how could they not?), it would be remiss not to include Bob Dylan's classic Subterranean Homesick Blues - you know, the one where he holds us the words on the signs and tosses them into the street?

To promote …

Facebook Fakesters

As some of you know, long before -- decades before -- I was a Madrugada obsessive, I was an R.E.M. obsessive. We're talking pile in the van and spend countless hours tooling around the midwest to see them. Now I did manage to stay in college and get good grades, so I …

A Social Network just for Redskins Fans, and iPod Touch Kvetching

So it took a while, but it looks like the big leagues might be catching up to where David Bowie has been for years -- giving fans a way to brand themselves as fans with their email addresses.

Perhaps trying to make themselves more relevant, AOL and the Washington …

Hooray for Charitable Fans!

I've been known to rant before about people assuming that others who spend time online being enthusiastic about a TV show can't possibly also be active forces for good in the world (see the Slashdot reaction to the Jericho fans' efforts to save the show). Fans are quite …

MySpace: Where Authors Meet Fans

Over the weekend, the NYTimes had a reflective piece by author Pagan Kennedy about using MySpace to discover her fans. She talks about the usual isolation of writers from their readers and compares them to musicians:

Usually, writers don't interact much with their …

TIME offers some fanfic search stats

Bill Tancer of Hitwise has a brief article just up at TIME that has some interesting stats about fan fiction on the net. Hitwise tracks over 700 Books and Writing sites. Fanfiction.net gets 34.7% of visits to the ENTIRE category, making it first by the longshot, doing …