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Year end goes together with the usual Top 100 of the year (or all times). You can check my most played music of 2006 and a lot more here at MyStrands.com. You can do all this also on your cell going to m.mystrands.com. And check what’s happening around on New Years’ Eve on your mobile phone at m-partystrands.com, including live partyStrands parties going on at the partyStrands blog.

Now isn’t this cool to start a New Year?

If you haven’t heard it yet, James Brown died of congestive heart failure on Christmas morning in Atlanta. He was 73. He indelibly transformed 20th-century music re-inventing existing R&B and Soul rhythms to create Funk.

I like to remember him in his most creative period, from the mid sixties to the early seventies. I saw him the first time live at the now legendary Jazz Bilzen Festival in Belgium in 1978 in an edition with other artists such as Blondie, Japan (w. David Sylvain), The Jam, The Boomtown Rats and Lou Reed. I’d never heard about ‘The Godfather of Soul’ before that time, but I remember the impression he and his band left on me when arriving at the festival and he started to do his thing: no-one came ever closer on stage creating such an energy and positive vibe. Get a feeling of that period here in this video I found on YouTube (excerpt from a Dutch TV program on VPRO channel where Iggy Pop is asked about his favourite - recorded - memories)

James Brown’s body returned one more time to the historic Apollo Theater in New York City where his epic “Live at the Apollo” album streamed from the marquee speakers yesterday at his funeral.

Check out how he sounded in 1967 in this “Out Of Sight” excerpt, live from the Olympia in Paris.

If you’re not so familiar with his music, I recommend “Foundations of Funk: A Brand New Bag,1964-1969“.

There are several worthy James Brown compilations, but this is the one, more than any other, presents his most fertile and innovative soul and funk material. From 1964’s “Out of Sight” through 1969’s “Mother Popcorn,” this was Brown at the apex of his creativity, turning soul into funk in the mid-’60s, then pushing the rhythm even more to the forefront. Songs such as “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”, “Cold Sweat”, “I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)” , “I Got The Feelin’”, “Licking Stick - Licking Stick”, “Say it Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud”, “Ain’t It Funky Now”, “Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose”, “Mother Popcorn”, “Super Bad”, “Make It Funky”, “Soul Power”, not to forget “King Heroin” mark a whole period of intense creativity linked to the social changes of that time in the US.

The BBC has a great documentary of that period, called “Dancing in The Streets“, a must see if you get the chance; it includes some remarkable footage and interviews with James Brown and many other unforgettable artists of that time. Check also the Ed Sullivan’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Classics DVD compilations for some of James’ early works.

Another extremely important and influential phase of Brown’s career in the early seventies is compiled on “Funk Power 1970: A Brand New Thang“, when he moved from soul-funk to hard funk, stretching out the grooves and putting more stress on the bottom than ever before (with Bootsie Collins).

TIP: dig up those old vinyls and take them with you for your next parties!

Rest in Peace, brother.

Why I blog this here? The relationship between music and society, relation of music as a cultural expression within a social context and also just because I’m a big fan

NOTE: James Brown Apollo image © Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

The Nokia Music Mixer has been launched last week, it’s available as part of the XpressMusic campaign that accompanies the launch of the Nokia 5300 phone. I’m particularly interested in the music mixer. Nokia once again sets the tone for youngsters enjoying the remix culture.

Anyone can remix tracks to their taste by adding new sound clips and effects in the Nokia Music Mixer. You can start by choosing the loop set of your choice, move clips with drag and drop function to create your own unique mixes and add effects to it. There are R’n'B, Dancehall, HipHop, Reggae, Elektro, Chill, Trance, House, Techno, Disco, Funk, Beatbox and more loop sets to choose from with basic rhythm/bass/guitar/keyboard melody lines and effects to play with. The quality of the loop sets is great, I’m sure anyone can create a cool tune or mix according their taste.

Now the fun starts People who own a Nokia phone model supporting AAC can download their mixed ring tones to their phone. The mixes are sent directly to your mobile phone via WAP link (works international). Three mixes a day, free-of-charge can be downloaded per user.

Nokia Club members can take part in the Mix competition and win a new Nokia 5300 XpressMusic phone. More info at the Music Mixer website.

Here below an interactive screen demo of partyStrands application taken at La Botellita - Serrano in Madrid last Thursday.

1. see who/what is playing
2. incoming user request (through SMS) influencing music with artist (x)
3. recommendations of similar style music
4. users in the waiting queue
5. another incoming influencing music request
6. user chat screen (cut)

Below a screenshot of the BAR page at the partyStrands web-app. NOTE that everything is completely LIVE (at partystrands.com)

An easy URL is created for every BAR member within the partyStrands network.

The BAR page includes:

• bar logo
• contact details
• location info
• news from the bar/club
• a partygoers FORUM
• pictures from the club and its’ parties
• a list of users currently present in the club (and online)
• recently played songs
• most played artists

To me it looks like an excellent blog-page for bars with an interactive jukebox included

BAR owners and affiliates can now easily subscribe, create their partyStrands page and signup to tryout the partyStrands application in their bar. Currently only available in Spain, partyStrands will become available in other countries soon.

As you might know, I’m organising and programming the Mobile Monday Barcelona events together with Cristina Meló, and Carles Fereiro from Barcelona Media. Martin Tantow, who initiated the event with me, left to Madrid for a new job so we’ll be missing him as of now.

After a summer break it’s time to announce the next Mobile Monday Barcelona event. The next topic is set to “The Future of Mobile Music“, the event will take place on Monday, October 2, 2006 at the Auditorium of the University of Pompeu Fabra in the Estació de França.

For this event, we invited some of the most experienced people in the Mobile Music area to bring together an interesting mix of experienced people with future visions on this topic.

Scott Cohen - co-founder and VicePresident, The Orchard (UK) leading distributor of independent music in the world, representing over 3.500 labels from 73 countries and more than 1 million songs in catalogue. Artist manager and a recognized expert in new media, Scott has done consulting for different governments, mobile phone operators, and record companies on such topics as developing new business models using the Internet and the creation of new platforms for delivering content.

Bill Houghton - MyStrands (Spain/USA), a leader and innovator in new consumer products and consumer-based business strategies for the Internet. MyStrands develops social recommendation and discovery technologies to help people discover and organize digital content, and share tastes with others, through Internet connected devices. MyStrands is providing the mobile industry with new ways to build mobile communities around music, and develops the technology to offer personalized mobile radios (and video content) to mobile users.

Nandi Gurprasad - VP Global Alliances, Bango Ltd. (UK) Bango operates in the mobile internet where internet connectivity converges with mobile phones. The mobile internet is opening up a huge potential market for content providers and using our open, global platform, you can take advantage of this opportunity immediately. A seasoned executive and entrepreneur in high-technology, Nandi has been in mobile Mobile and Internet industries from the early days. Prior to joining Bango, Nandi was Sales Director for PocketThis, a Silicon Valley provider of mobile contextualization technology, where he managed tier one operator and partner relationships across the EU.

Timing:

19h30 Registration and Pre-Networking
20h00 The Future of Mobile Music - speaker sessions
21h00 Cocktail and Networking Party
22h00 End

This event is sponsored by Bango Ltd. and Barcelona Media.

To attend the event “The Future of Mobile Music” on October 2, 2006, you need to register and confirm your presence here. The event is free of charge.

Note also that MobileMonday Ukraine is opening next week in Kiev, this chapter has been initiated by the remarkable Julia Palatovska together with Qarea. Kudos to friend Julia who has done a great job setting up an opening event with an interesting program from scratch. Nice!

Nokia takes the lead in bringing podcasts to mobile and I think that’s great news!

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the Nokia Podcasting Application for S60 at gotomobile.com, now the beta application for the Nokia N91 is available for download here. Thanks for the tip, Steven!

Steven at Nokia informs me that this version is compatible with other S60 3rd edition devices, but not optimized for them yet. The beta is English only with the multilanguage version expected late Fall 2006. So for the ones out there with an N91, go out there and try it. For the ones who don’t know me yet, mobile podcasting (also called mobcasting) is one of my favourite mobile applications.

The Nokia Podcasting application allows you to find, subscribe to and download podcasts over the air with your Nokia N91. After downloading a podcast, you can listen to or watch it when you want.

You can choose whether the Podcasting application uses Wireless LAN (requires WLAN network access) or GPRS/WCDMA packet data (requires a packet data plan) to download podcasts to your Nokia N91.

These are the kind of applications that make the difference as to which phone I’m going to buy next, especially since my iPod broke (yes they do!) some time ago.

Now some music recognition and recommendation service (Musicstrands?) build around those radio podcasts and I’m all set to buy mobile music as I would like to… Actually not really, I still need that flat rate data plan from my operator - guys, what are you waiting for?

This morning I received a box from a friend with some new released cd’s of my favourite artists. Pretty old skool this may seem, and it definately is to us people used to watch trends daily surrounded by the latest mobile tech. But this present brought me a particular pleasure I haven’t felt for a while - think music discovery coming from a friend who knows your personal taste better than yourself

I don’t know about your climate but here in Barcelona summer has started since a while and the package happened to contain my coming summertune that made my day: “Throw It All Away” from Zero 7. The tune has everything a summertune should have: instantly regognisable, infectuous fresh up-beat tempo bringing you in an immediate summer feeling mood. This tune has the voice of Sia Furler’s (picture) to make it perfect.

I beamed it immediately to my mobile memory stick to hit the streets with it and go and enjoy the newly discovered tune and share this nice music with some friends - good music just initiates to be shared, isn’t it?

While on my way, I started thinking of it as my mobile summertune, since I’m going to carry the song with me and listen to it while on the move and share it with my friends in different places on different devices. This reminded me I needed to check how we can enjoy this kind of pleasures in a mobile music distribution environment.

I checked the Mobile Jukebox from T-Mobile this time (see image above) and ra-ra-ra (Flemish expression to express surprise). Just watch the little icons… unlimited play (got it?), 10 x burn and 8 x copy to mobile… Now that’s nicely packaged but frankly is this a solution to put numbers on the copies and put the accent to “unlimited play”?

I think I’m going to buy the vinyl of “The Garden” (whole album), share the price with my friends if needed and make as many copies as we like to copy to our devices, and I think this is what smart youngsters are doing these days and use their mobile to sms eachother the place of the party!

BTW: the whole story above of beaming to my mobile was just imagined… In real I got restricted by DRM!

But for the fans, do check the video, it’s great!

* Picture of Zero 7’s Sia Furler © Bilboard

It has been a while since I wrote on mobile music applications; not the ones as we know of them now - simple OTA downloads of ring-, real- and mp3 tones, but the ones that are just coming to the mobile market and are using new, innovative technology to create different business models for the mobile music scene. In a few years from here, buying music will be a complete digital process and the mobile is going to play a crucial part in this. For the readers missing this point, feel free to browse my archives, category mobile music.

One of the companies I discovered last year was Musicstrands. At first that time, I thought another social music service like Last.fm and Pandora, build on collaborative filtering and recommendation technologies to make you discover new music. An sich, to me, the way to go if you’re considering digital music distribution for the coming years. But MusicStrands is different in the way they choose resolutely for Mobile. I got really interested in what they do when I saw their Music Guru demo-presentation during 3GSM, a conceptual prototype of a next generation 3G/PC music player, developed jointly by Vodafone Group R&D, MusicStrands and Adobe. I wrote about that in my 3GSM Afterwrap.

Last weeks’ article from Carlo in Business 2.0 “Your Wireless Future” mentioned them again so I went to visit Musicstrands‘ website for an update. I must admit, I liked the progress and the new stuff I could do with it on my cell phone.

You can download the MyStrands plugin for iTunes, join the community, create your own playlists (or upload existing ones), tag your music and share it with others and receive recommendations form others. A lot of new stuff has been added lately like Playlist builder, tagcloud, m-charts, world map. Check it out!

Check also their MusicStrands Labs and discover their experiments with Music Discovery through Web 2.0 Mashups:

“With these collections of mashups, you are able to discover multi-media content related to your favourite artist/s. Just write down an artist name and click Go. We will fetch the artist biography from Wikipedia, photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube, posts from Technorati, personal goals from 43things, and events from Upcoming. You can then use recommended artists from MusicStrands to continue the experience and enjoy more multi-media content for those suggested artists.”

Way to go!

Discover MyStrands Mobile, it works on Symbian, Windows Mobile, Smartphones, Java phones, and soon, BREW. You can download the Windows or Java client versions here or visit mobile.musicstrands.com directly from your mobile. Here’s what you get once you created your profile. I leave the discovery process for you to discover

MuscStrands created OpenStrands Public API, a set of web services for developers interested in adding MusicStrands functionality to their non-commercial applications, the obligatory smart move for every self-respecting software development company.

I tried out probably everything I could during a weekend and got all excited about the progress, specifically in the mobile field, everything run smoothly. What MusicStrands offers the mobile industry is desktop, website, and mobile discovery solutions, that work synchronised, and work independently.

After having tried all the goodies, I wondered how MusicStrands positions itself against the ones as last.fm and Pandora including iTunes - they recommend tunes nowadays too, so I asked the guys behind MusicStrands and got in touch with Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria, Vice President, Communication at Musicstrands, he was very helpful giving feedback on my curiosity.

On the question how MusicStrands differs from VisualRadio he answered: “Visual Radio is not a personalized service. MusicStrands builds the technology to provide personalized mobile radios, based on the specific tastes of individuals and groups (plus other functionalities). So I would say these are two different services.”

Asking Gabriel about the key differences with services like last.fm and Pandora, he says:

“last-fm — offers weekly artist recommendations, based on the entire profile of a user; - last.fm does not understand the context of users, most of us have eclectic tastes in music (we may like both Mozart and AC/DC, but never listen to them together) and listen to specific artists or songs at specific moments. Last.fm fails to understand this, and contextual recommendations are critical for the mobile industry (recommend me what I want to listen to NOW, although I like AC/DC, I may not feel like listening to them now). MusicStrands recommends songs, artists and albums. Last.fm recommends artists. And they can only do that weekly. We do that instantly, whenever a recommendation is needed.

Pandora offers currently 400,000 songs and we offer today 6Million and are growing rapidly thanks to our Indy project. Pandora is a group of experts defining similarity; at MusicStrands, it is the community that decides that 2 songs are similar. Their approach is not scalable (because it requires “expert” intervention), MusicStrands’ technology has been designed to scale, to be able to recommend millions of different items to millions of different individuals.”

More on his vision of MusicStrands, as opposed to other technologies:

“It’s all about discovering music and rediscovering your own music library and manage your content.

The idea is to provide contextual music recommendations. Additionally, MusicStrands wants not just to push music, but to help people pull, decide what they may like, and therefore we provide people with tools to dig into the long tail, allowing people to guide the recommender towards the music that each of us might enjoy most. If you don’t like what you get, you can keep digging into the music universe. (by playing with “My recommendations” at the website). Additionally, any independent artist can upload their music, or information about their music, for free to MusicStrands and get discovered!

Many people have told us that their problem is not to find new music, but to manage and rediscover all the music that they already have. And that is why we have the playlist builder, as a way to help people dig into their own music library, as an easy way to fill their iPods.”

In relation if MusicStrands should consider iTunes as a ‘mobile competitor’, Gabriel was pretty straightforward:

“Our technology is scalable, reflects tastes of people, understands context, mobile+online+desktop synchronized solutions work together and independently, and is designed to facilitate the creation of mobile communities around music. I believe social recommendation and discovery technologies will become critical differentiators for online and mobile services. With regard to iTunes mobile presence, there is in fact a lot of room for improvement by building more intelligent mp3 players, with and without connectivity.”

“I truly believe we are approaching a uniquely wonderful age to be a music fan”, I believe so too!

One last thing: the first thing I did - and I normally do - when opening iTunes (now with MyStrands plugin) was playing one of my favourite podcasts in iTunes. This functionality currently doesn’t exist with MusciStrands but I think it would be great to recognise the tunes from a radio podcast and getrecommendations and find out immediately about the tunes playing. I’m sure I would buy immediately some of the weekly tunes played at the Basic Soul podcasts from Simon Harrisson.

BTW: have you noticed that a lot of the great tunes these days are available ONLY on vinyl?

… but that’s for another post!

Yesterday evening I had the pleasure to see Cibelle with her 4-piece band presenting her new album The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves in Theatre Zorrilla in Barcelona (Badalona).

Her new album will be released in April 2006 on Crammed/Ziriguiboom. Cibelle will be performing all around Europe and North America throughout the rest of the year so don’t miss her if you have a chance to see her live.

Like no one else we can think of, Cibelle makes use of a variety of elements to create unique, imaginative and enchanting pieces of music. Lets not mince our words : her second album is a genuine masterpiece ! It combines rootsy acoustic instrumentation & electronic processing, noise guitars & childrens toys, captivating textural soundscapes & pure melodies carried by her unmistakable, moving voice.

Matthew Herbert is currently finishing two remixes of Cibelle’s “Noite de Carnaval”, a track which was included in the limited-edition dualdisc “About a Girl EP“, and which has enjoyed quite a bit of specialist airplay in the UK. The remixes will be released on a vinyl 12″, along with two tracks off Cibelle’s upcoming second album.

Rewind: Cibelle self-titled debut album came out in 2003 and immediately established her as one of the most imaginative and original young artists to come out of Brazil.

Check some of the UK press quotes on Cibelle’s debut album of that year:

“A very special talent. Music of no particular origin”
(Blues & Soul)

“More interesting that Morcheeba, more curious than Beth Orton” (Mojo)

“A superb debut … An audacious record… adding elements of nu-jazz and pop psychedelia to the dazzling mix…” (The Times)

“Thrilling: light and easy on the ear, but full of ideas… It’s simultaneously like nothing on earth and everything you’ve heard before. This summer, the sound of Cibelle will be percolating out of every hip coffe bar, lounge and clothes shop” (The Independent)

“Cibelle’s glittering voice oozes sweet seduction and signals the arrival of a major new star.” (HMV Choice)

“One of the most talked-about world records of the year” (Daily Telegraph).

Watch her steps…

Read on BBC NEWS:

“According to figures from the Recording Industry Association of America, digital sales accounted for slightly more than 4% of the market during the first half of 2005, up from about 1.5% during the first half of 2004.More than seven out of 10 US digital music sales through PCs are through iTunes, a figure which grows when Apple Mac users are taken into account, NPD said.”

Digital sales are still small compared to overal music sales but Apple has such a comfortable startegic position towards the future of digital music distribution; now just think how this position will look when iTunes will really go mobile - and I don’t mean ROKR…