The new way of discovering music through people. – Where music comes recommended. -Sit back and listen in full as your friends, dj’s and artists flow you the tunes they really rate flow music to your own friends and followers and earn 20% of the price when they buy.

mFlow. Uh. Yeah. So it’s Spotify plus Twitter with some way to make some money if people buy what you recommend to them. It’s quite confusing.

So lets see if it’s any good. I’m downloading it now.

Setup is utterly painless. Not sure why it wants my whole name but hey. To them my name is Optimus Motherfucker. The login screen also looks like a laynyard. That’s a nice touch.

Lets see how it works. Nicely done tutorial – no  video. Just some screens. OK, so I have to follow people to get ‘flows.’ That’s the music I can listen to. I refuse to make a joke about ‘flow’. I’m above it. Really. If I ‘flow’ music and someone buys it I get a few pence.

Ok. So who can I follow?

Fuck. Zane Lowe. I hate that guy. NME? Bah. I’m not sure they fit my taste. Bit too, well, NME. Popjustice? Love the man’s writing, but can’t say I agree with what he says is AMAZING.

I’ve heard Metal Hammer is on here, so I might as well take a punt and follow them . How do I find them? Ah, they’re featured. If they weren’t I’d have no idea.

Followd. They’ve flowed some Bon Jovi. Way metal guys. But I can take a listen to the track. To be honest nothing they flowed is ‘new music’ though. Anyone who has even stood close to a metalhead knows the bands they’re recommending.

Let’s recommend something. Clutch? Clutch. More people need to know about them.

Search Clutch. One song. From The Crobar album. Strange. Let’s listen to it first so I know what I’m talking about.

Also, 90% of searches came up bad. Not much choice. Yes, the service is new so I’m going to be uncharacteristic nice and forgive them – but they better get a shit-ton of songs in there soon.

I only get a 30 second sample. Well, that blows.

What do I do with 30 second samples? I send them to people so they can hear the whole song. I’m comfused. And a bit angry. This makes no sense.

Can someone explain this to me? I want to listen to music, but I can’t. I’m going back to Spotify and Grooveshark until someone explains why this is a good idea. I like listening to whole songs. I like listening to new songs. I don’t like having to wait til someone sends me something so I can listen.

So, yeah, if you like your music taste dictated to you – go for it!

We are currently loving GrooveShark in the Downtuned office – it may well replace Spotify in our hearts as ‘most favouritist music service ever’.

And rather than banging on about how good it is ourself, we talked to GrooveShark’s CEO Sam Tarantino to ask him a few questions about his wonderful app.

Can you let us know the differences between Spotify and your service? Do you have more (or different) artists?

Although there are many similarities there are very key differences. We are a Web app vs their desktop app. They focus very heavily on the consumer while we have put a significant effort and resources towards pushing artists and the back-end. Our fundamental goal is to be able to play any song anywhere from any device. We also have long tail content so anyone in the world can upload their song that they wrote in their garage or the mountains of nepal, get it heard worldwide, and use our promo network to build a fan base around it.

How do artists, especially unsigned, make money from your service?

The key is building their fan base. At the end of the day an artist makes money by building their fan base because it is this fan base that pays for their key sources of revenue (tours, merch, etc). Of course artists and labels are getting a share of our revenue but it is the fans that are the drivers of all those revenue sources. Without fans the artist has nothing.

By treating themselves like a small business and growing their fan base organically, artists can grow their revenues themselves, especially with great tools like ReverbNation and Topspin. We’ve built a system for promoting artist’s music effectively where we’ve seen what is the equivalent of 15%-30% click-thru/action rates. This has been a huge focus of ours as most of our company consists of musicians and we know how difficult is to build a music career.

Where do you see the music industry in the next 5 years? Will it still be an ‘industry?’

The industry will morph drastically especially over the next 2-3 years. In 5 years I see this industry being 90% digital revenues. It is inevitable as what this recession has done is force not just the music industry but ALL industries to innovate and cut costs. The problems that the auto industry, news industry, and movie industry are just the same thing the music industry has been dealing with for the past 10 years, their problems have just been accelerated by the constriction of credit and cash.

The decline in demand for physical content cannot sustain the costs of delivery. This is a reality all these business have in common and the beauty of technology is it can cut costs and gives the consumer what they want. Everyone wants music (or any content for that matter) everywhere at anytime. This has been the elephant in the room for the past 10 years since Napster. The thing about elephants is that it takes a mouse to move them.

Another nail in the coffin for ‘traditional’ music release methods as GrooveShark (think an in-browser Spotify with a slightly different catalogue) has signed a deal with EMI to offer their music to GrooveShark users. Grooveshark is free to users, but a $3 per month premium gets rid of all that. Grooveshark CEO Sam Tarantino says…

EMI Music and EMI Music Publishing have collaborated with us to create a mutually sustainable deal which represents the future of digital music, we will continue to deliver the best music service on the Internet to our users, and we will expand our capacity to strengthen fan-to-artist connections through our technology.

Blah blah – what this really means is the Labels are running scared of the really good streaming services and rather than bury their heads in the sand or take them on in the courts they are actually doing a clever thing and working with them.

About bloody time.

Also – GrooveShark is ace.

Either way, to have it you have to sign up to Spotify Premium, which costs a tenner a month, and removes those pesky, if endearingly amateur adverts from you listening experience.

I’m going to try it out for a month and see what happens…

Great news for music loving gadget dorks (me included) as Spotify – the music streaming service, and best friend to the deskbound antisocial headphone sporting types (me again) comes to the iPhone. It basically means that for £10 a month, roughly, you can listen to whatever you want. Which is pretty decent.

Rather than take the time to explain how it all works – check out this handy video…

Pretty, swanky eh?

Hey you kids! Get the hell off my lawn! With your gameboys and iPods and knife crime. You don’t know you’re born. Back in my day we’d walk seven miles to pick up a CD from our local record store. Uphill. Both ways. The guy there would look down at us from behind the counter and we’d feel small. And we LIKED IT…

etc…

But seriously, over the last few years, the way we consume music has changed beyond recognition. The so called ‘iPod generation’ (a horrible, if functional turn of phrase) get their musical kicks in ways – 10 years ago – I would never have imagined. They’re both lucky and unlucky, as they will never experience the things on the list that follows…

1. Spending inordinate amounts of time with CD inserts / Sleeve notes

It’s amazing, the human eye. I would never imagine I could read text as small as I did on some ‘thanks’ lists… Endlessly pouring over the reams of band names, roadie and friends for advice on future purchases. And then spending further hours with the lyrics, reading them along with the songs until you have them word perfect. What he hell do teenagers do with their time now?

2. Lending an album to a friend, and hoping to get it back

It’s the greatest thing you’ve ever heard. The soaring majesty of the music and the depth and poetry of the lyrics. This album speaks to you. If only you had someone to talk about it with! Someone to share the experience. What about your mate, Dave? He’d love this! And he’d be well impressed that you found it first. Now Dave’s got the album and he thinks it’s ‘OK.’ When you ask for it back, he tells you he left it in his mum’s car. You never get that album back. Shit.

3. Broken CD case teeth

They’re designed to hold the CD safely. Designed to protect it. But, damn it, at least 25% of the time – when you open the freshly purchased CD and removed the impossibly snug shrink wrap – there’s that tell-tale rattle telling you that the centre section of teeth has broken apart, rendering the case useless.

4. Walls Of Neatly Stacked CDs

I feel sorry for manufacturers of CD storage solutions. They had no part in the demise of music as a physical medium. They just built furniture. Furniture that is becoming obsolete. It was always a yardstick music fans would use to scope each other out – the amount of wall coved by CDs – sometimes alphabetised by the truly faithful. What now? Check the amount of drive space used by MP3s? Not so easy.

5. Mixtapes with EFFORT

Ok, yes, you can burn a CD, put together a Spotify playlist or just mail over a bunch of MP3s. But that doesn’t count. To put together a proper mix tape you must experience the songs yourself, hit the buttons at the right time and put some effort into the selection. You don’t want the last song to cut out in the middle, so you have to scout song lengths. It’s also a tape, so there will be no skipping. The songs must flow together properly. It’s an art form, really. Sadly a lost one.

6. Putting together CD Wallets For Trips

Twenty minutes before you leave on a two week trip with your family and, although you’ve packed your Discman and headphones, you’ve forgotten to pack your CDs. Shit! What do you do? Grab the first few from the rack or make some tough decisions? This is all you’re going to have for two whole weeks. Your only respite from deadly-dull chit-chat. Greatest hits albums? New albums? Take a risk on the one Dave lent you? Old favorites? The stress is KILLING you.

7. Waiting For Albums To Come Out

Not just waiting – but waiting. Outside of the shop waiting. This shows true commitment to the cause. The shop would open, you would rush in, all excited, and the dude behind the counter would clock you by your clothes, hair and demeanor and have the album ready. Maybe there would be a few of you, huddled in the shop doorway like very well dressed hobos (or if it was a metal album – hobos) awaiting the magic moment when the album could be yours…

8. Tape Trading

When you can’t just Google, Scrob or Lazyweb it, how do you discover new music? By exchanging tapes by post! Underground music was once fueled by the Royal Mail and the C90 tape. Often second or third generation recordings and, quite often, awful. It was the best way of doing business, purely for the surprise factor. What the hell would be on the next one from that strange grindcore fan in the eastern bloc?

9. Skinning Up On An Album Cover

The absolutely perfect place to do it. Plenty of room, no grooves, easy to clean and looks damn good. You can’t skin up on an iPod.

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10 The Secret Track

See what I did there?
Clever eh?
Remember when you’d listen to an album going to sleep and just as you are about to nod off KRAAGGGGGHHHHHSSSSSS! SECRET TRACK!!!
Terrifying. Sometimes it’d be the band goofing about in the studio. Sometimes an acoustic track. Sometimes just another track… It was an Easter egg for the committed fan and now, sadly consigned to history.

Over the 20 years of its existence, you could accuse Warp Records of being many things – singular, bloody-minded, wilful, arrogant even – but populist is definitely not something that you could have leveled at the influential indie.

As a label, Warp has always ploughed its own furrow, danced to the beat of its own 808 etc… Which is why the label founder (I presume it was he) Steve Beckett’s decision to open up the choice of the tracklisting for the label’s 20th anniversary retrospective album to something as mundane and populist as a public vote was so baffling – I wouldn’t even trust the general public to decide what trousers I was going to wear on a night out. The Warp of old would have just chosen 20 tracks, slapped them on a CD (exquisitely-packaged, naturally), lovingly flicked its fans the V-sign and been done with it.

But you reap what you sow, and in allowing us to choose the tracklisting we end up with an album representing the past 20 years of one of the most important record labels on the planet that has got I Wanna Be Your STD by Jimmy Edgar on it. OK, not an awful song, but the best of Warp? Nowhere near. It’s not even the best Jimmy Edgar song.

And what about the rest of the tracks? Well, Warp struck it lucky – we didn’t all vote for anything from Beans’s solo album (dreadful) like we all voted for John Sergeant because having somebody who couldn’t dance in a dance contest was funny (though having a Beans track on here would have been a similar act of destructive mischief). But we do end up with the rather bland and forgettable Eyen by Plaid (they have made far better tracks), the ear-throbbing Gantz Graf by Autechre (not their finest hour) and I Love Acid by Luke Vibert does nowt for me (but it does have a grrrrreat video). And I will be struck down by the all powerful (and frankly insane) hardcore worshippers at the temple of the Hexagon Sun, but Roygbiv is NOT the best track by Boards of Canada. Its twee cloying melodies are instantly accessible and I’ve enjoyed them for many years, but over time you start to realise it’s BoC by numbers. Give me Pete Standing Alone or Alpha and Omega any day.

Some you just can’t argue with – at the top of the pile was Windowlicker by Aphex Twin – again, not his best track (for me, that is the marvellous Fingerbib) but it is the weirdest, most wonderful song to ever grace the top 20, with the best video ever made; LFO (Leeds Warehouse Mix) is seminal and fucking brilliant; Squarepusher’s My Red Hot Car is utter genius pop music and Battles by Atlas somehow mixes math rock, the Glitter Band’s glam-stomp and vocals by the Smurfs. It’s a shame Growl’s Garden by Clark has only just been released as it is light years ahead of Herzog (chosen here), which is good, but not great.

And herein lies the point – what we are left with is a good but not a great album. Of course Beckett left himself with a get-out clause – the Warp20 retrospective would be a double CD and he would choose the tracks on the second CD himself. And thank fuck for that – Beckett rights some of the wrongs by choosing a track from Black Dog Production’s phenomenal album Bytes, some early Nightmares on Wax and Drane by Autechre – for my money, the finest song ever to be released on Warp. And before I’m accused of being an old-school Warp head that threw a wobbly when they signed Maxïmo Park, I’d have dearly loved to see Graffiti by said band on the album.

I suppose it could have been worse – they could have let the public vote decide the whole tracklisting (and then Pivot, a band who have only been on Warp for about five seconds, in at #12, would have made it on) or even worse still – been populist and hipster, and got Thom Yorke to decide the tracklisting.

Sure, we can all go on Spotify or iTunes and knock up our own Warp20 playlist, no bother. But as an artefact (and one so lovingly packaged as this is going to be – it’s a box-set that as well as the Warp20 (Chosen) 2xCD also features a 192-page book of label artwork, three 10-inches of unreleased material, a CD of reinterpretations, two 10-inches of locked grooves and an hour-long piece by re-edit master Osymyso - phew!) it seems a shame that this isn’t the definitive retrospective album it should have been.

And if Rephlex decides to follow suit and go down the populist route, let’s all vote for I Farted by Freakwincey…

A recent Guardian article drew the attention to this.

A comprehensive guide to the Britpop years. Hey, everybody! Remember ‘Britpop’? Crap, wasn’t it?

“Well, that depends”, you may respond, “on whether you construct a picture of an era from various sell-through compilations and poorly-recalled media events or whether you maintain a vivid, quasi-synesthetic recollection of the era in your own imagination.”

Growing up in small country town in an unfashionable corner of England and clowning through a poorly-rehearsed adolescence at the time, music was more of a balm than a lifestyle choice. I fall into that latter group. Glancing over the track listing of Common People, then, two things leap forth:

1. The era does not require a three-disc retrospective.
2. Despite having moments, the track listing is terrifying.

So, how can such a period of musical history be boiled down into a disappointing Ragu of nothing?

“Because it was crap”, so the footnote goes. “Besides, I was heavily into Bark Psychosis and Autcehre at the time.”

In fact, it was great. But great in spite of, not because of, Echobelly. All manner of strange and joyful things were taking place. There was every kind of exciting, forward-looking music, the kind which would manage to remain gleefully entertaining and which, while perhaps being less commercially successful as other times could, at the very least, have expected to find itself on a three-disc compilation in 2009.

Recently, I read somewhere of John Peel’s negative influence during the punk years. How essentially what began as a DIY explosion of enthusiasm became one man’s idea of what was and was not cool. Likewise, would Ocean Colour Scene’s ‘The Riverboat Song’ still be licensed for a compilation in 2009 were it not for Chris Evans? Whatever the probable outcome, there’s little arguing that a certain template was set and media coverage duly granted to the bands, labels and writers who elected to, in the words of Lester Freamon, follow the money.

History therefore records that popular British music of the 1990s was, for the most part, fairly derivative guitar music, derived if not from some distant iconic touchstone, then from one another. Your scene leaders – your Blur, Pulp, Elastica, Suede, Oasis – clearly distinguish themselves from this, but what of the supporting cast, the seething mass of pond life in the garden of the Britpop house party? Why are Geneva, Powder and Shed Seven considered representatives of a decade, even on a three-CD set? Nobody EVER listened to Shed Seven. Even Shed Seven probably preferred Gene.

Let us apportion blame. Let us lay it at the door of the long defunct Melody Maker who, in July 1995, decided that standardisation was in order.

Up to around that point, it was anyone’s guess where things were going. It’s well documented that British folk were buying home grown British music again after a period of American domination, (though this in itself is clearly another fallacy, but that’s another story for another time). The fact is, all kinds of British music was shifting. Stern-faced crusties The Levellers and electro-boffins Orbital were playing to as many people as Suede, Tricky and Tindersticks and were on as many magazine covers. And the music was duly cross-pollinating. Remix work for the Chemical Brothers, guitars lurking on dance floor tunes by Underworld or FSOL. Everyone was on Top Of The Pops, whether they wanted to be or not.

Melody Maker called time on this. Publishing that cover feature on Britpop gave a name to something which previously had been an amorphous groundswell, and the feature itself divided the then current welter of artists into three tiers; those to watch, those to tolerate and those that were shit. Those not included were definitely not Britpop. One magazine’s idea of what was and was not cool, set in stone. ‘One poorly selling magazine’s idea’, you may retort, but an idea which has nonetheless endured.

Everything else that happened has been covered in great depth. What it all adds up to is, even with 54 tracks and five or six years to cast a net over, that the end result bears little or no resemblance to the period as I remember it. The net, apparently, is full of holes.

So with the aid of Spotify I have constructed a (one-disc) playlist which I think resets the balance a little bit and maybe captures a little bit of the unpredictability. If you were too young for it, or if you’ve somehow forgotten everything, the actual period was far more fun than Commerical Marketing, Melody Maker of Kula fucking Shaker would have you believe.

So – please enjoy British music of a specific period in the 1990s