2008 was a different type of musical watershed year. more about disruptive behavioral shifts and new forms of interacting with music than about life changing sounds.

buying music. or not.
when my bank issued a new credit card to me for ‘my own security’ i didn’t bother updating my emusic account details realizing that the monthly pressure to download 50 or 75 new tracks had gone from incentive to chore (the otherwise excellent service’s fatal flaw is that inflexibility imho – why not roll over the downloads? i also wished their catalog was being more aggressively updated with new content or that the recommendation algorithms had continued to surprise me rather than dishing out the same artists and albums each month). the emusic dead sub combined with amazon’s lack of international mp3 support and my record low earnings in 2008 meant I didn’t really buy much music this year for the first time since my debut cassette purchase (pet shop boys i think) a couple of decades ago.

music consumption. new forms.
instead i turned to podcasts (fader and RCRDLBL in particular), free and legal mp3 downloads (last.fm, RCRDLBL, dublab etc), online radio (bbc, wkcr, kcrw, wnyc), last.fm player, muxtape while it lasted, imeem and blip.fm more recently and, of course, myspace.

more and more bands streamed their records online, mainly for pre-release hype-ing but that’s how i listened to eno + byrne, tv on the radio, metallica, g’n'r, etc.

editors and streams.
one consequence of this shift was the effectual transfer of my (carefully guarded in the past) musical editor status on to trusted blog / radio / podcast programmers. another was the reduced repeated listening of artists / albums and the decreasing importance of my ipods and to a lesser degree itunes with the web (online streaming, youtube) becoming increasingly central to my music listening.

my take-aways: increased importance of trusted editors (for all creative media). new musical formats will flourish- albums are still important but the variety of competing listening formats is much broader now and inevitably albums make up less of the pie as podcasts, youtube, playlists etc are incorporated into music lifestyles. streaming over owning as we near the always-on panacea, playlists and social sharing increasingly influential. the coming death of the unconnected ipod.

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