new job, not like the old job

Many key moments of my career have soundtracks.

• Deciding to leave Lockheed Sanders, move to California, and help start Acclaim Coin-Op? Jane’s Addiction’s live album.
• Finally crushing Armageddon’s game object memory leak? Veruca Salt’s "8 Arms to Hold You."
• Road Rash’s threading crash bug and final Nintendo approval? Hole’s "Celebrity Skin."
• Adding lists into Second Life’s scripting language? Rush’s "Vapor Trails."

I listen to music riding BART, walking to work, on airplanes, and while I write. I’ve spent countless hours programming with headphones on.

Despite this, I neither buy nor hear much new music. Since 2000, I’ve only purchased 5 albums. Three by Rush (enough of my friends are Rush fans, so somebody reminds me when they release a new album), Pearl Jam’s "Pearl Jam" (I read a Rolling Stone review in an airport), and REM’s Accelerate (best Terry Gross interview on "Fresh Air" in months.)

Why not? I hear lots of new music I like – anything from the first couple seasons of Alias would work – but I never hear new music in the right context to buy it. When I listen to radio, I’m listening to NPR to catch up on the news. The good local music stores are all gone. When I’m working, I want to hear music I like, so I have a very low threshold for experimentation. Coworker’s iTunes shares provide a hint at something new, but DRM and the hassles of being on the wrong computer – working on a desktop when my music is on my phone and laptop – keep me from jumping onto the iTunes Music Store to make a purchase.

Note that none of this lack of purchasing is because I’m just torrenting stuff. The problem is that connecting discovery of new music to the ability to own the music is completely jacked. Even when I knew I wanted something – Accelerate – I had the problem that I was traveling with my MacBook Air, so buying a CD was useless. I had never setup the iTMS on that computer and you would be amazed at how hard Apple has made that process. It’s like they don’t want to sell me music. Then, once I did remember all the passwords I needed, I couldn’t figure out whether the iTunes download was DRM free. So I went to Amazon, which was slightly easier and made it clear the download wasn’t broken via DRM.

It is incredibly frustrating. I want to be able to find new music. When I find new music, I’m happy to pay the artists for it. Once I own music, I want to be able to listen to it wherever I am. How hard can this be?

I’m about to find out. Two weeks ago, I joined EMI Music as SVP of Digital Strategy.

Why EMI? By hiring Douglas Merrill, EMI has demonstrated a commitment to capitalize on all the technology available to make the music experience better for artists and fans. At Linden, the most important changes I drove were blends of technology and licensing, so when Douglas asked me to join him at EMI, I jumped at the chance. Music touches everyone in the world and is uniquely part of our lives -- how could I not take this challenge?

Obviously, I have a lot to learn about music and EMI, so I’ll be spending time in London and Los Angeles. Moreover, I'll be reaching out to many of you for help as I figure out how to build the right team to generate sustained, ongoing innovation around music. (Want to work on these challenges? Let me know!)

And, yes, I will be definitely be blogging about it.

Oh, and what was I listening to when I decided to join EMI? REM’s Accelerate.

(OK, go back to waiting for Jobs' keynote now)

good luck, douglas!

Douglas Merrill, Google's CIO until yesterday, is heading to EMI. Douglas and I shared a stage in Singapore about a year ago -- you can watch the video here -- and after realizing we were neighbors, stayed in touch. We each tried to recruit the other -- ironic, given the events that followed -- and ended up as friends. Douglas is one the sharpest people I know, so I'm sure whatever he does at EMI will be exciting to watch.

He is not one to simply rearrange deck chairs.

Congratulations on the new role, Douglas, and good luck.

qtrax

I was getting ready to do a post about Qtrax, a new p2p music service. They seemed about half smart, using peer-to-peer to reduce their bandwidth requirements, but still stupidly DRMing the content. In theory, they do this to allow download tracking, but it's still stupid. You don't need DRM to track downloads, since you can just as easily generated a hash from non-DRMed content, and by DRMing they lost the iPod market -- in a similar way to how Netflix is currently not supporting Mac with their streaming service. So, half smart.

Except, it turns out Qtrax may still be all the way stupid. They claimed to have all the major labels on board, but today the majors denied having deals with Qtrax. Oops.

rock stars and business models

Last.fm, the excellent online music site recently acquired by CBS, made just announced that they were going to allow full track streaming from their web page. This is very cool, as Last.fm has one of the best search and recommendation engines around. I met their cofounder and CEO Felix Miller in Japan a year ago -- we were on Joi Ito's BlogTV together -- and thought he was a very thoughtful individual. Now that they have CBS' backing, it is exciting to see them expanding how they bring music to their members. 3.5 million tracks are now available for listening and you can hear them three times before you are prompted to buy them from iTunes or Amazon. I think this is a fantastic move, since -- much like my discussion on movies -- the content is already out on the web, only now you can offer listeners an easy way to pay for the music they like. Now, they're still paying for bandwidth -- although music is two orders of magnitude less data than video -- and I suspect the Rhapsody model of a flat subscription eliminates the hassles around per track purchases, but it is still a very good step toward doing what consumers want: make it easy for us to get -- and pay for -- content! Not all tracks by an artist are available, but enough are to give you a good flavor of a particular act. For example, my friend Salman Ahmad has a lot of his music available to stream or download.

However, what made my morning was the discovery that I could listen to Ryan Downe's music. Ryan runs the program management team at Linden Lab and I was lucky to work with him for over five years. However, I had foolishly never listened to his music until this morning when I was surfing last.fm. Holy crap is it good! So, if you are fan of 80's prog rock, you should take advantage of last.fm and give it a listen now!