Net, blogs and rock 'n' roll

As I mentioned last week in So much music, so little time, I've been reading David Jennings' new book Net, Blog and Rock 'n' Roll, a look at "how digital discovery works and what it means for consumers, creators and culture". My contact with David has been in his role as an e-learning consultant, so this work shows another side to his activities of which I have up until now been only feintly aware.

First of all, let me confess that I'm not particularly qualified to review this book. After all, (1) I don't work in the music business, (2) while I am what David calls an 'enthusiast' ("music is a key part of my life but is balanced by other interests"), I am certainly not a 'savant' ("someone for whom everything in life seems to be tied up with music"), and (3) I am of an age when I really do have to concede I have no future as a rock star (although readers of this blog may recall that my ambitions were somewhat satisfied by the discovery, 35 years late, that an album I recorded at the age of 19 with a band called Five Day Rain, never released at the time, had established a dubious reputation as a psychedelic curiousity and had sold as many as 100,000 copies, unfortunately all on the black market - see Oh my God, I'm a star).

Qualified or not, I must recommend David's book as a fascinating insight into myriad of ways in which technology is changing the way that new artists are discovered and these discoveries shared, with the effect that the 'long tail' really is wagging the (major label) dog.

I found it interesting to catalogue the various ways that I have discovered new music in the last ten years or so:

• hearing great songs while watching movies;
• taking a punt and buying albums that the newspaper critics rave about (average hit rate here is about 50%, i.e. I hate half of them and throw them away, really like the other half);
• listening to Last.fm, setting it to play tracks 'in the style of', and finding new artists as a result;
• asking friends what their favourite albums are of all time, with the guarantee that I will then buy the albums and give them a fair listen (average hit rate again about 50% - it's unbelieveable how much tastes vary).

I must confess that about eight years or so ago I had become a real old fogey when it came to music - I honestly believed that no-one made good stuff anymore. My conversion came about, quite accidentally, as a result of watching a TV series called Trigger Happy TV, which had a fantastic musical soundtrack chosen by the show's creator Dom Joly. Here was a person with taste like mine, but much more up-to-date. I bought the CD compilations for each of the three series and liked just about everything I heard. I bought albums from many of the artists featured on the compilations and expanded my listening considerably. I now believe this to be a 'silver age' for music - I'm afraid I still have to reserve the gold tag for the sixties!