A few nights ago I started thinking about some of my favorite concerts from earlier in the 2000s.  I started searching for some of them and came up with this gem flier from an early 2000 concert.  Hunting down band and concert info from 10 years ago made me realize how much the web has changed music since 2000.  Ten years ago I would spend hours in front of my computer with a slow internet connection hunting for new music and favorite band tidbits.  I used AltaVista to hunt down most of this info, and the other night found myself going back to this search engine as it produced the same page results I remember seeing a decade ago in their GeoCities like glory.

Concert recordings stopped at the guy with the recorder and mic taped to his chest.  (A note to any bootlegger with a tape of this Sleater-Kinney concert, it is on the top of my want list).  In short, if a band wasn’t a big name act, there isn’t usually a ton of info out there that has been preserved.  Flash forward to 2009, I was out of town when Corin Tucker, singer from above said defunct band was played a mid-week solo show in Portland.  I considered going to some great lengths to fly in, but had to let it go.  A week later I was elated to find someone had posted the entire set on YouTube.  Wasn’t the same as being there, but definitely was a happy find.

The findability, quantity, and relevance of content generated by both artist and user is continuing to increase.  A personal experience is also increasingly needed to offset the standardization of content on cookie cutter MySpace pages and search results.  Don’t get me wrong, standardization has brought a lot of value.  When I discover a band, the time to preview tracks, purchase, and sync to my devices is seconds to minutes.  Looking into the 2010 and beyond, availability of music across platforms will continue to be increasingly important.  Much has been written and speculated on how this will happen as netbooks become more popular and more content moves to the cloud.

However, I find initial discovery of music still difficult.  I listen to a lot of new releases and it is just a small fraction of the music available in genres that I am interested in.  Similar to the news industry which has seen content begin to spread out from traditional news sources due to real-time services, I see music discovery heading towards a transition.  Some glimpses of this trend have been seen in the last couple years.  Muxtape started as a site to share user generated digital mix tapes until the RIAA stomped it out.  The site is in the process of reemerging as a platforms for bands to share music.  Blip.fm is another Twitter-like site to discover new music and follow stations of friends.  As services like these continue to expand over this decade several opportunities will be realized:

1) More content experts will emerge leading to an increased number of trusted sources of discovering music.  In the 2000s I discovered new music using recommendations from local radio station KEXP, a few blogs I follow, and suggestions from friends.  Music services attempted to recommend content, but only generated picks cramming Coldplay down my throat, provided genius content I already knew about, or related content reducing music to a shopping cart item.  Two of the most successful experts of the 2000s were Dave Fridmann, and Alexandra Patsavas.  Fridmann created indie hits by producing a broad range of brilliant albums from Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips, Sleater-Kinney, and others.  As the music supervisor for shows like The O.C., and Grey’s Anatomy, Patsavas helped launch bands like Death Cab for Cutie and The Fray into the big-time.  My prediction is more genre specific experts will add value over the coming decade, some promoting the tops of genres and others making sense of the noise within a genre’s depths.

2) Deeper content will be found in every genre that you want to listen to.  Increased efficiency in discovery will lead to the ability to digest more content in a genre.  A lot of this content is there now, but it still takes a lot of effort to listen through what is good and what isn’t (some of which is interpretation).  Also, with studio equipment costs decreasing and the increasing ease of distributing content online, many bands starting out may ask themselves what benefit they get out of a label.  If more good to great artists were to strike out on their own innovation could increase faster by weakening the influence of the RIAA.

3) More content will be available around an artist.  As I mentioned in the starting example, the amount of content around your favorite artist will continue to increase.  Part of this will be user driven as the lone bootlegger morphs into a entire concert venue of video enabled devices.  Artists and services however will create this content as well.  As content trends towards free there will be a need to differentiate from other services and torrents.  Some of this has already started with special deals when purchasing through iTunes or Amazon on album release dates.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with my “Best Of” lists for the 2000s and 2009 ordered by release date.

BrookBuchanan.com Best Albums of the Decade

Radiohead – Kid A (2000)
The White Stripes – White Blood Cells (2001)
Death Cab for Cutie – The Photo Album (2001)
The Flaming Lips – Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002)
Beck – Sea Change (2002)
Bright Eyes – I’m Wide Awake Its Morning (2005)
Sleater-Kinney – The Woods (2005)
Cloud Cult – Meaning of 8 (2007)
Sigur Rós – Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (2008)
Sons and Daughters – This Gift (2008)

BrookBuchanan.com Best Albums of 2009

Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
Death Cab for Cutie – The Open Door EP
Conor Oberst – Outer South + Gentleman’s Pact EP
The Horrors – Primary Colours
Girls – Album
Monsters of Folk – Monsters of Folk
The Gossip – Music for Men
The XX – The XX
Flaming Lips – Embryonic
Boat – Setting the Paces