Today Billboard, Nielsen and digitalmusic.org, announced the first ever subscription services On-Demand Songs Chart.  

This new chart tracks all the on-demand streaming activity on Subscription Music services such as Slacker Radio, Spotify, Sony Music Unlimited, Rhapsody, RDIO, Muve Music, Mog, and Zune. Additionally, this streaming play activity will now influence Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, arguably the most definitive ‘Top Songs” chart in the music business.

So, what does this all mean?

Well, let’s start with the fact that I am biased. I work at Slacker Radio, and have a vested interest in seeing Subscription Music models gain traction. I also chair the Music Subscription work group for digitalmusic.org, so I live and breath this stuff.

That said, I think there are three big takeaways:

1- Streaming counts.

2- Listeners, not gatekeepers, control the charts more than ever before.

3- We are entering a golden era for music fans.

Let’s take these ideas one by one. Streaming counts now, literally and figuratively. While the (rightly) respected Big Champagne has long been quantifying streaming activity, both legal and illegal, Billboard’s recognition of the Subscription Music Services certainly signals a milestone in the ascension of streaming music. With nearly 500 million on-demand weekly streams being generated by these nine legal services alone, a new scale of activity has been reached that is undeniable.

Listeners are becoming the new gatekeepers. Traditionally, Billboard song charts like the Hot 100 were comprised around a combination of radio airplay and single sales. Over the last few years, Billboard has done an admirable job of layering in other data to this mix, including song plays on MySpace, Yahoo and the like. With the inclusion of this On-Demand Songs Chart, Billboard has struck another blow for the idea that the end user, the listener and customer, has tremendous impact in shaping what our conception of a “charting” song will look like.

Lastly, for music fans, this really is the start of a golden era.  I grew up in Manhattan in the late 70′s. When I was a kid, every Saturday I would walk from my apartment on 53^rd street and 1^st avenue to the Donnell Library on 53^rd street and 6th avenue to read Billboard.  I especially was focused on pouring over the charts, and spent countless hours discovering songs, artists and trends to pursue based on Billboard’s charts.

During that walk I often made up “dream music” scenarios for myself.

Things like:

I dreamed I had the largest music collection in the world. In my fantasy, I had every song, album and artist at my fingertips. True, in that era, I imagined converting my Mom’s midtown one bedroom apartment, into one enormous record and cassette library, but that’s how childhood dreaming goes…

I wanted my stereo to be able to count every song and artist I played, and tell me truly what my most played songs and artists were. I imagined some kind of song kind of song counter “connected” to my stereo. I wanted the data, even then.

I dreamed of having my own radio station. I wanted to be able to play The Ramones, Smokey Robinson, Grandmaster Flash, Elton John, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, The Grateful Dead, The Talking Heads and Big Daddy Kane all on one station. I wanted no formats. Actually, I wanted my own format. I walked around with reams of paper with all sorts of stations and playlists mapped out, documenting these concepts.

I fantasized about building a Music Clubhouse. I envisioned a cross between a rock club and the perfect mom and pop record store, dominated by a gigantic listening room equiped with a world class stereo and video set-up, so that all my friends could hang out and argue about music all day long.

Naturally, I knew that we would have all the liner notes and lyrics for every album in the world at the Music Clubhouse, as well as an unlimited supply of photos, bio information, and videos — again all at our fingertips.

When I flash back on those music fantasies, and then think about all the experiences available now across these subscription music streaming services, I realize that fantasy has largely become reality. These companies have built these new music experiences from a fan’s perspective.

Think about it  – just about every song, album and artist is available at your fingertips. At certain services, you really do have almost unlimited ability to create your own radio stations. You really can an engage with all your friends online at once, and in ways, thanks to technology, that I couldn’t even imagine in my best childhood music fantasies. Lyrics, liner notes, your most played data — all of these things are available.

And I truly believe this is just the START.

This On-Demand Songs Chart documents what has the potential to be a great era for music fans. There are certainly formidable challenges around label licensing, monetization and building economic ecosystems that subscription services face. So, it’s both the Subscription Service employee AND the music fan in me that works daily to have the industry support and reward continuing this kind of innovation.

I think it is really exciting to know that there will undoubtedly be some kid out there this weekend, who will be reading about all this streaming activity in Billboard. I imagine that he or she will not just try one of these services, but also will start thinking about the innovations and experiences that will reshape the fan experience yet again.

Who knows what the streaming music era will really look like. I imagine we have just started.

Martin Scorcerse’s new documentary, George Harrison: Living In A Material World, is filled to the brim with sacred places.

The Beatles rise is so well known, that most Rock fans over thirty probably can recite the stops by heart. The Cavern Club, Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, St. Peter’s Church, Twickenham Film Studios, India, Blue Jay Way, and of course, Abbey Road.

For a Beatles fan, Scorcerse’s biopic adds one more sacred location to the roadmap – Friar Park.

The documentary suggests that George’s most sacred place was his Friar Park home, which he purchased in 1970. George devotedly tended to his home and its gardens,while also recording and filming there. It is depicted lovingly on the front cover of his first proper solo album, All Things Must Pass, and mythologized in his video “Crackerbox Palace”.

All these images got me to thinking about my own musical sacred places:

1970: Record department at E.J. Korvettes department store, Brooklyn New York.  I made my grandma take me here to buy Beatles records. First 45’s, then albums.

1971-1977: Lebiush Lehrer auditorium Camp Boiberik, Rhinebeck New York. Camp musicals, Friday night services and Gene Lewin & David Vogel “jamming” on Jumping Jack Flash. Yes, Gene and David played that song for six years straight.

1975-1978:  Greenwich Village, NYC. Under the arches of Washington Square Park to be more specific. Walked through the snow on Bleeker street, and made believe I was Dylan on the cover of Freewheeling Bob Dylan.

1975-1979:  Madison Square Garden: Floor Seats for Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, No Nukes, and many more. Don’t fight it; there is nothing as powerful as a arena or stadium-sized sing-a-long.

1975-1979:  Disc-O-Mat record store on 59^th street and Lexington Avenue. $4.99 an album. Great stock, great vibe. It was Tower Records before Tower came east.

1979-1982: Club 57, Tier 3, and the Mudd Club.  Trust me, “Dead Rock Star Night” was the PG rated version. Downtown Club Culture and all that it entailed.

1980-1981: 99 Records at 99 MacDougal Street, Greenwich Village. I actually managed to spend $20 there for an import version of London Calling on New Years Day.  You really had to work to spend that kind of money on an album in 1980.

1979-1982: On-Air studio and record library, WCDB –Albany. Today (10/11/11) is College Radio Day. Remember, If Al Gore really had invented the internet, he would have run a fanzine and programmed a College Radio speciality show in the early 80′s.

1980-1982: JB Scott’s Rock Club, Central Avenue Albany New York: Everybody played JB Scott’s, as Albany routed well with New York and Boston. U2, The Specials, The Jam, Lene Lovich, David Johansen, plus many many more. (Honorable mention should go to The Chateau Lounge, site of R.E.M.’s legendary 11/23/1982 performance)

1983-1987: Maxwell’s, 1039 Washington Street, Hoboken New Jersey. The Bongos, DB’s, Raybeats, The Feelies, Sonic Youth, Husker Du, and a host of others on-stage. Steve Fallon, Glenn Morrow and Peter Buck at the bar.

1983-1987: The Ritz, 11^th Street NYC. The Replacements walk on-stage and ask for Boos. Par for the course. On the great shows, it always felt like that balcony would collapse.

1990: The Melody Ballroom: Portland Oregon, & The Off-Ramp in Seattle Washington. Watching the crowd of teenagers stream out of the Melody after Nirvana’s opening set …with flannel shirts wrapped around their waists, they looked like Children Of The Corn. Watching the Best Kissers In the World bicker on-stage at the Off Ramp. Good times.

1991: First Lollapalooza date in Compton Terrace Arizona. Rollins Band, Butthole Surfers, Ice-T, Nine Inch Nails, Living Colour, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Jane’s Addiction. Who knew?

1997: El Rey Theatre, Los Angeles. As the poster said, Bob Dylan and his band! Tiny room, massive legend. Dylan’s last truly great run?

2000-2001: Howard Blumenthal’s office, Media department CDNOW, Ft. Washington Pennsylvania. Late nights and a too early business model — rich media created before broadband was ready.

2003-2007:  Sessions at AOL. Sigma Sound, Sony Studios, and a few more. AOL Music. Sessions with Kanye West, Paul McCartney, Al Green, Kelly Clarkson, 50 Cent, NAS, David Gilmour, Green Day and many more.

2005: Live 8 Concert, Outside of the Philadelphia Museum Of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia. Hello world, this is live music on the internet.

2007: Smoke Jazz & Supper Club, 2751 Broadway NYC. Jeremy Pelt, Bernard Purdie, Eric Alexander. Quintessential New York City jazz club within spitting distance of Columbia University. It is always happening at Smoke.

2007-2010: Artist Lounge, Warner Bros. Records, Burbank California. Randy Newman, Tom Petty, R.E.M, Jack White  all stop by and ask us to listen to their new albums. Uh, “yes”.

2010-2011: Largo At The Coronet, La Cienga Avenue Los Angeles. A few hundred seats and incredible performances from Loudon Wainwright, Fiona Apple, Rikki Lee Jones, Randy Newman, Aimee Mann and the like. Inside the venue, it’s all about the music — no cell phones, clanking drink glasses, and idle chatter.  Yet, the vibe is always warm, loose, and all about the music.

These places are sacred to me.

What are your musical sacred places?

I thought I knew drinking, and I thought I knew about music, but truth be told — I knew next to nothing. My idea of drinking was a 17 year olds technique of dumping out a third of a quart of Tropicana orange juice and replacing it with cheap vodka. Musically, I was up on the latest New Wave and Punk, but I wouldn’t know a George Jones tearjerker or a vintage STAX side if it sat down next to me on a rickety Frank’s Living Room stool, and bought me a snakebite.

After my first couple of visits, I was pretty sure his name was Leo, not Frank. Leo poured with a heavy hand. I remembered that he sighed and smiled when we called him Frank, serving us another round of Vodkas and Grapefruits, while flipping over a mixed tape. The tapes were Leo’s. He played them loud. Ear-shatteringly loud:

Nervous Breakdown

Get Off My Cloud

The Grand Tour

Holiday in Cambodia

September Gurls

After The Fire Is Gone

Lust For Life

Johnny Hit and Run Pauline (Leo had a thing for X)

Gardening At Night

American Music

Cry Like A Baby

I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry

Mamma Tried

I’ll Take You There

Rise Above

Color Me Impressed

Time of The Season

Pale Blue Eyes

Sex Bomb

One For My Baby

Like I mentioned, at first we thought he was “Frank”. After all, he lorded over the place — Frank’s Living Room – a majestically squalid, 500 square foot, literally underground bar in the greyest city on earth — Albany NY.

Leo was my personal John Peel. Although he was probably barely 30, Leo was my elder statesman. He taught me about life, love and loss all through the power of a perfectly sequenced mixed tape. Leo trafficked in classic Country, Rockabilly, Soul, Garage Rock, and the most cutting edge, and hardest new Punk and New Wave.

Without knowing it, Leo changed our take on music.
All genres mixed together.
All eras counted.
As long as it was pure, it was on the Frank’s Living Room list.

Leo created the model for Hipster Dive Bar Jukebox.
This station is for the Leo in us all.

Classic Country. Vintage Soul. Select Punk, New Wave & Indie:

Hipster Divebar Jukebox: http://bit.ly/qalK1m

Michael Stipe:

A wise man once said–’the skill in attending a party is knowing when it’s time to leave.’ We built something extraordinary together. We did this thing. And now we’re going to walk away from it.
I hope our fans realize this wasn’t an easy decision; but all things must end, and we wanted to do it right, to do it our way.
We have to thank all the people who helped us be R.E.M. for these 31 years; our deepest gratitude to those who allowed us to do this. It’s been amazing.

From my seat, R.E.M is arguably the most important band in the history of Alternative Rock. Part of their importance was certainly the high quality and innovative nature of their music. Their first 4 albums are nothing short of a revelation.

But equally important  was R.E.M’s commitment to community, communication and a sense of shared purpose with their fans.

If you talk to anyone who played a part in the College Radio Era of 1977-1983, they will regail you with tales of fanzines, weak college radio signals, dirty clubs, couch surfing, kids as promoters and inevitably, — transcendent R.E.M. shows that brought a community together.

R.E.M hardly invented alternative rock. Other innovators and brilliant artists shaped the scene before, during and after R.E.M.’s heyday.

But if you were lucky enough to engage with them in their prime, R.E.M. certainly changed music, and being a music fan, for the better.

I’m glad to have known them and played a tiny role in their legacy, and I’m sorry to see them go.

Hello blog.
I’m emerging after a summer respite.

The L.A. Times weighs in on Slacker Radio today:

Slacker’s handcrafted approach sets it apart not just from broadcast radio, but also from some of its online rivals, including Pandora, which relies on an algorithm to determine what song to play next.

Read the full piece here: LA Times

The Final Take: Imagine a radio station that played George Jones, The Clash, Smokey Robinson, Radio Dept. and  Sigur Ros. Sounds kinda like a Hipster Divebar Jukebox, no? Check out what the humans are up to right here.

I have been slacking off from blogging. Time flies by. Here are 11 things I have been doing instead:

11- Understanding & Pricing Out The Cloud: If you are like me, and flit around from site to site streaming and buying — I’ll easily hit iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, RDIO & Rhapsody in a week — then the various cloud-music propositions presented lately will make your head spin. Keeping track of which one is $20 a year for 15GB’s, which one is $25 for a year for 20GB’s, which one rewards you for shopping at their store, which one matches and duplicates your existing content, etc. — is a crazy jumble. Heck, the Amazon, Google, iTunes options alone make the NY Times pay-wall rules seem positively simple. Jon Pareles from the NY Times on The Cloud That Ate Your Music here.

10- Testing Cloud Music Offerings: Wow. Has setting up something geared for convenience , ever been so inconvenient?! I tried Amazon (glacially slow), Google (makes Amazon look nimble) and what iTunes has to offer so far (you try finding the correct preference prompts to set up an iPad, iPod, iTouch & MacBookAir) — it takes the patience of Job to even experiment with the existing library options.

9- Obsessively Listening To A Reclusive Artistic Genius Who Locks Himself Away At Home: If I told you that I was listening non-stop to a morose, funny, poignant, cutting singer-songwriter who refuses to record with a band, make videos or tour — I’m sure you would say “Really, Paul Westerberg again Jack”. Well not this time, mister. FM Coronog is an incredible singer-songwriter, who in between his 9-5 slog at Home Depot, somehow manages to home-record a brilliant album every few years under the moniker of East River Pipe. Check out his page on Merge Records here, and an unofficial, naturally, YouTube clip below.

8- Thelonious Monk: Universal just put out the complete Riverside collection. 16 CD’s for $80 at Amazon. Redundancies and all, it’s just too much to resist. Details here.

7- Fighting with Anthem Blue Cross: Just how incompetent, obstructive and systematically infruriating is our health care system? Ladies and gentleman I submit to you, from the California Watch website – Anthem Blue Cross:

In its own way, Anthem Blue Cross became the Toyota of the news cycle yesterday. The company was credited with reinvigorating the health reform drive, stood accused of violating California law hundreds of times and was found to exhibit a prolific pattern of profit taking.
It was also linked to a denied liver transplant and a plan motivated by its famous 39 percent rate hike that, well, might not work….The Los Angeles Times reported that state insurance commissioner and former gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner accused the company of violating state law 700 times between 2006 and 2009.

I have spent countless hours on hold with Anthem, back-tracking through paperwork, and generally fighting for my families money. Yet I understand, interrupting my blogging is the least of Anthem’s moral offenses.

6- Driving: I live in (East) Los Angeles, work in San Diego, and have friends and business contacts clustered all across the west side of L.A. Have you ever tried to get to Venice Beach from Pasadena after 2pm on a weekday?

5- Turntable FM: If you are over 30, you no doubt remember gathering at a friends house and playing each other music. Chances are the M.O. was a variation on “OK, suckers…can you top THIS?” Turntable FM recreates this by layering a Social Media blanket over a full song streaming interface. God, that sounds like tech-speak gobbley gook. How about – Turntable FM allows you to go online, play songs for your friends, and is crazily addictive fun. They may or may not have a prayer of a business model, but you should check the site out now here.

4- Thinking about the New York Times: Last weekend I thought I could get some blogging in, but on Friday night I went to see Page One, the new movie about the NY Times. The movie covers a lot of territory – Wikileaks, the run up to the Iraq war, the recession, etc. — all unified by the Times’ struggle for economic stability in the age of the internet. It’s a great movie. My excitement about the film, lead to buying the book Hard News, which covers the history of the times through the prisim of the Jason Blair scandal, and reading the book took up much of Saturday. Next thing I knew it was Sunday, which, naturally, means it was time for the Sunday Times…

3- The NY Times iPad App: Back in March, I wrote about the NY Times pay-wall strategy, and theorized that the approach was just too convoluted and expensive to be successful. Now, after experiencing the total brilliance of reading the NY Times daily on my iPad, I am happy to have my Fonzie moment…

I WAS WRONG.

The digital version of the NY Times, with it’s elegant interface, and superb use of interactive elements like photo galleries, is spectacularly good. I find myself gladly paying for the full subscription, and consuming more content in both print and digital form during the course of a normal week. You can read more about how wrong I was here.

2- WFMU’s The Best Show hosted by Tom Scharpling : I came to this show late. It is tough to explain how a program this meandering, could also be this good. The best I can tell you is that if you could imagine a parallel universe where Howard Stern was 15 years younger, magnitudes hipper, and deeply immersed in indie-rock you would start to paint a picture. Add in recurring guests like John Hodgman, Patton Oswalt and Paul F. Tompkins, and a host of faux callers such as “Philly Boy Roy” (an unflinching supporter of all things Philadelphia), “Timmy von Trimble” (a genetically modified, two-inch-tall racist), and “The Gorch” (a senior citizen from York, Pennsylvania, who claims that the character of The Fonz on the TV show Happy Days was based on him) and you start to get the picture. The fact that all these callers are voiced by Superchunk drummer Jon Wuster just adds to the appeal.

Try the Music Scholar call,  here.

1- Working at Slacker Radio: Between the natural arc of learning the intricacies of a new business, and diving into the complexities of music label licensing from the other side, working at Slacker is a time-consuming affair. I consider myself shockingly lucky to be enjoying it as much as I am so far, and can’t wait for everyone to see the things we are working on for the rest of this year. Today’s AOL/Slacker announcement is just the tip of the iceberg, read about that here.

So there you have it. My Spring of non-blogging, cataloged and perhaps a bit rationalized.

Blame the Fonz, Timmy von Trimble, Thelonious Monk, the Times, and gainful employment.

If I can tear myself away from these obsessions, then I’ll talk to you soon.

Do you remember the scene in Almost Famous when pre-teen William flips through his older sister’s vinyl album collection?

I flashed on this great scene as I thought about this week’s events.

Apple’s recent iCloud announcement was warmly received by most digital music proponents. In the first couple of days after the announcement the mainstream press fawned over Apple and the iCloud, and Apple stock gained.

That’s not to say that everybody was impressed – there was grumbling from well informed digerati, as well as Apple competitors, that this was much ado about very little. After all, the dissenters argued, Apple still hadn’t rolled out a subscription music play to obliterate the old model of paying for music track by track, album by album.

This all makes for a fun digital debate, but I think both camps miss the musical mark.

While the Apple cloud integration might be the best we have seen so far, it offers no surprises. Your collection remains your collection. You can simply access your music now much more easily. This makes Apple devices more attractive, and that’s smart business for a company still driven by hardware and design, not software and content.

Think about the biggest music fans you know — the people who call themselves music junkies.  Chances are that while they love their devices of choice (classic 160gb iPods, Sonos systems, vintage turntables and vinyl) they still spend the majority of their waking hours engrossed in discovering music. Talk to them at length and they will tell you that they live for that Oh Wow moment of discovery. The perfect moment of surprise.  Surprise with a capital S. Their favorite music story invariably revolves around “the first time they heard or saw Elvis, The Beatles, Springsteen, Nirvana, Wu-Tang, Arcade Fire, etc.”

Music fanatics live for surprises and discovery above everything else. That’s why they are so loyal to the bands, magazines, fanzines, radio stations, and websites of their youth. They’re constantly trying to recapture that moment that young William has, flipping through those albums, in Almost Famous.

I’ll never forget this comment from a Warner Bros. Records co-worker a couple of years back:

“I go to Best Buy to get the music I know I want to buy, but I go to Amoeba a helluva lot more, to get the music that I didn’t know I wanted to buy”

With the iCloud, Apple has made progress on getting you the music you already know you want. But what about discovery?

The battle for the Oh Wow moment of surprise — for the music you didn’t know you wanted, for that elusive “S Factor” rages on.

Evan Harrison, who lead Clear Channel’s digital effort for the last 5 years, was my boss at AOL Music for a good part of my run there. Evan’s good people, and an excellent executive. He taught me many things, and was especially good at working through complex issues and organisations to get things done. Evan was a terrific boss…whip smart, judicious, disciplined and fiercly loyal.

Admist all the Apple noise today, word spread that Evan had landed a new gig at  Billboard/Outdoor Advertising company Van Wagner Communications.

While I’m happy for Evan, and pleased that he landed a senior position so quickly, it is more than a little troubling to see another really solid music advocate exit our industry. This is a guy who loves music, who made me stay through to the final encore of a magical Paul Westerberg show, the night before we had a 8am breakfast scheduled with a crucial brand client.

I hope Evan has a great run in his new job, learns a lot, gets to be creative, makes good money, and comes back to music and media in a few years.

We can’t afford the brain drain to wish for anything else.

I once worked for a brilliant guy, an artist manager, who when you asked him:  “Should we play Dennver or Salt Lake City?”, would invariably answer: “Yes”.  After a month or so,  I figured out that he wasn’t really distracted, he simply wanted you to figure it out.

So, who exactly had the best day today as Apple announced their iCloud launch?

Was it the labels who finally figured out how to get paid for your whole digital music collection, legally aquired or otherwise?

Was it Apple who patiently slogged their way through the tangled web of major label licensing, and came out the other side with a cloud offering immediately superior to Google’s and Amazon’s, that amplified their iTunes meets Apple device ecosystem?

Or was it the consumer, who for $25 a year instantly upgraded all their IOS devices to stream their music collections without having to tether into their computers, and without the time-suck of sifting through files, device capicity issues, or getting “back” to their devices?

So, the question is — Who was the big winner today?

“Yes”.  Yes, is the answer.

“They come up with storyboards and lines, and I see the process. Then, I do what I do: Buffettizing.” — Jimmy Buffet, singer-songwriter and touring phenomenon, on his role in developing the new Margaritaville social networking game.

“Rickey doesn’t have albums. Rickey has CDs.” —   Rickey Henderson, legendary Major League Baseball outfielder, when asked if he had the Garth Brooks album with the song Friends in Low Places. Henderson, was infamous for talking about himself in the 3rd person.