Berghain: Adventures in Techno
Over the past few weeks I have situated myself in Berlin on a mandate to take in and absorb all that is the music culture here. On a mission to discover the heartbeat of the European music industry, I...
How to make beautiful music (audibly & visually) without being a musician
Composing and representing music visually has traditionally been through music notation. Using a 5 lined “staff” or “stave” as a framework, black circles with lines are drawn to represent pitch and length of notes with other markings such as...
Visualising music: the problems with genre classification
Want to listen to new music but sick of staring at your old MP3 collection? Streaming applications like Spotify, Last.fm and Pandora (US only) recommend related artists. Sites like The Hype Machine and Elbows aggregate music blogs for instant...
Imogen Heap is crowdsourcing your sounds for new album
Imogen Heap, two-time grammy award winner and known for her innovative online practices... 
Music and Bits and Startups
Last week I attended the Music and Bits conference, which is the pre-conference for Amsterdam Dance Event. The conference touts itself as “an exploration of music and technology” and by all accounts I would say that was accurate. Of...
Dark blog
As the first half of this semester draws to an end, and we all wrap up our compulsory blogging and prepare for the next hurdles of our MA course, I was surprised at not hearing a single word about...
Digital Distribution + Music = Global Divide
A couple of months ago I was sitting at my desk with a friend, going through my iTunes collection and trying to put together a... 
Event review: Music & Bits – day 1 of ADE Conference
The funniest line in the opening speech for Music & Bits was “now for a practical matter – does anyone have an iPad charger?” I loved to hear that, in a room of music geeks, developers and techies, and...
The E-reading Development Compared To Past MP3 Culture
Cheaper Books and Violation of Copyright?
The value added tax (VAT) for a Dutch digital book consists 19% instead of the 6% for a printed one. This results in only a minimal difference...
The value added tax (VAT) for a Dutch digital book consists 19% instead of the 6% for a printed one. This results in only a minimal difference... 
Out with the bookcase: More living space, even more books!
Let me tell you a story about my sister. Isn’t that a good introduction to a blog, share a story with complete strangers online involving private family matters? Though she may not like it, I won’t give her name...
Forums are dead… long live Twitter? – Music artists in a new age of connectivity
If there’s one element of the Web 1.0 era that seems to have survived the age of social networking of today, it must be forums. But for how long? In the world of music, professional musicians seem to have...
The Wiki-Elite
Sitting in class, I had just created my account on Wikipedia. Within minutes somebody had altered my biography on my personal user page. Luckily, it was the person sitting next to me in class who had successfully fooled me,...
Africa Unsigned: the Professionalizing of User Input
In the past years the Internet has been flooded with user generated content. The theory on new media has subsequently been flooded with research into this phenomenon, that is commonly centered around the web 2.0 concept. This theorizing of...
Researching online music networking in the Web 2.0 era: Soundcloud and the demise of MySpace
With the current steady rise of social networking sites, it is by all means an important question to ask how to research these in the field of new media studies. Furthermore, a lot of these sites offer services destined...
Will Wikipedia end the disregarding of Swedish artist?
Swedish singers are often disregarded. They won’t make it out side the Swedish borders. What happened there? Did publicity fall short? Didn’t MTV pick it up? Or is there some other reason why Swedish musicians mostly don’t appear on...
MUSIC: Is MySpace more important than an Official Website?
MySpace Music has become an easy way for musicians (solo artists and bands) to get exposure. Through Web 2.0 and the MySpace community means fans can connect to comment, put your song on their personal profile, and add you...
Paradiso – The Night of the Unexpected
Paradiso is a church building on Weteringschans that serves as a concert hall, club and cultural center since 1968. The “Night of the unexpected” is an one-day music festival which Paradiso hosts for the last 8 years in Amsterdam....
The Leonard Cohen Files: bridging the gap between artist and fans
In 1993, legendary poet, singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen stopped performing and writing. He planned not to perform anymore. In 2008 an official announcement told the world he would return. At Leonard Cohen's personal request, the announcement was not...
Kanye West on Twitter: promotion and PR
A couple of weeks ago, producer and rapper Kanye West joined Twitter. Although this fact alone is not all too remarkable, as Kanye West has been a fervent blogger for some years now, he has found remarkable ways to...
The Wilderness Downtown: When New Media and Music Reinforce Each Other
Musicians are struggling, as they have always been. It seems to have to be part of the deal in one way or another. In the past decade or so however, things have gotten increasingly difficult for artists as the...
RjDj and the rise of ‘reactive’ music.
As our daily interactions are increasingly affected by the use of mobile wireless devices and technologies, new media seems to become more reactive to our actual environment. Is there an attributable value of our environment to the means of...
The Cybraphon, the Baroque, the Embodiment of the Digital
Wunderkammers, literally a ‘cabinet of wonders,’ are generally viewed as the precursor to the natural history museum, although such collections also spanned the breadth of human endeavor from art to anthropological artifacts to religious relics. Wunderkammer embody an approach...
#Picnic09: STEIM, Music, and Training Our Intuition
“Say goodbye to control. Say hello to improvisation,” these were a few of the opening remarks made by STEIM director Dick Rijken. He stressed that in a world of less control we need to concentrate on training our intuition.
What are the ‘Music Industries’?
The term ‘music industry’ is a misnomer. In reality the ‘music industry’ is not one industry, it is several independent industries. This is an important distinction because if we say that there is a “crisis in the music industry”...