Last month Rolling Stone published a revised list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The last version of the list was published in 2004 and, while the update brings the count of 21st century songs from 3 to 28, there have not been too many significant changes. The top ten songs remain the same.

Rolling Stone Top 10 Songs

The Beatles still have more tracks in the list than any other band.

Rolling Stone Top 5 Artists

But what interests me most is what this list has to say about Rolling Stone, its readers and the compilers of the list. A while ago I wrote a post about Triple J’s Hottest 100 of All Time where I noted that the Triple J’s list was heavily skewed to the 1990s. This chart shows the distribution by decade.

So how does the Rolling Stone list compare? Here is its distribution.

The difference between the two should be clear, but just to labour the point, here are the two distributions side by side (and converted to percentages since the Rolling Stone list has five times as many songs in it).

Rolling Stone vs Triple J by Decade

I suppose it should come as no surprise that the baby-boomers love their 60s and 70s music and the Gen-Ys love their 90s music. But, having spent my formative music-listening years in the 80s, I cannot help but feel that decade is under-represented by both charts. Or is that an accurate reflection of the quality of music in the 80s?

And another question: how likely is it that this post will end up in the headlines of Bubblepedia? Fortunately, not very.

Data: the list was obtained from here, a reference obtained from the Wikipedia entry. I fixed some typos, added years and loaded the data into a Google docs spreadsheet. Let me know if you see any remaining errors.

Following on from my post on Visualizing the Hottest 100, I noticed that the UK’s Guardian newspaper has published a list of 1000 songs to hear before you die*. The list was assembled from nominations posted by readers. Even before looking at the list, I suspected that the demographic profile of the Guardian’s readers may be a little different to that of Triple J’s listeners. A look at the distribution of year of release in the two lists bears that out.

Year of Release “Five Number” Statistics

In fact, fully 14% of the tracks in the Guardian’s list were released before the earliest track in the Hottest 100. Interestingly, that track was Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”, which also features in the Guardian’s list.

While the 1000 songs are not presented in any particular rank order, they are grouped by “theme”. The themes are heartbreak, life and death, love, party sonds, people and places, politics and protest and, of course, sex. This allows us to investigate the evolution over time of these different themes.

The chart below is a “box and whisker plot”, also known more prosaically as a “box plot”. It provides a graphical representation of the distribution over songs in each theme by year of release. The box shows the “interquartile range”, from the 1st quartile to the 3rd quartile. This means that half the songs fall inside the box, while a quarter were released in earlier years and a quarter in later years. The solid band shows the median year, which is the year right in the middle of the distribution. The light grey line shows the average year of release. Since most of the distributions are skewed to the left (early years) right (later years) in the interquartile range [see UPDATE below], the mean is a bit higher than the median. The “whiskers” on the plot extend no more than 1.5 times the width of the box. Any outliers beyond the whiskers are shown as points.

Distribution of Year of Release

So what can be made of these distributions? It looks as though love songs are not as popular as they once were and people and places have fared worse still. But while love may be old-fashioned, sex and party songs have become more prevalent and there is still plenty of heartbreak.

And what of the most popular artists? The three most successful artists in Triple J’s Hottest 100 were Nirvana, Jeff Buckley and Radiohead. Nirvana and Radiohead managed one song each in the Guardian’s list: “Lithium” and “Paranoid Android” respectively (both in the life and death theme). Jeff did not make the list, although his father Tim did, with the song “On Top”. The artist with the most entries in the Guardian’s list was Bob Dylan, and the top 12 features a few who did not make it into the Hottest 100 at all, including Randy Newman, Frank Sinatra and The Kinks.

It’s hard to read much more than that into these numbers, but importantly it gave me the opportunity to use a box and whisker plot which this blog has been sorely lacking.

UPDATE: As Mark has commented, this is a bit of a dodgy explanation. There is only so much that can be deduced about a distribution from a box and whisker plot (appealing though they may be). This histogram shows the distribution of the year of release for life and death songs.

Life and Death Theme Histogram

Mark also pointed out that the box and whisker plot does not really show the relative popularity of the different themes over time. I haven’t used pie charts yet, but I am not a fan, so I have come up with a mosaic plot instead.

This confirms the decline in popularity of the love theme, but suggests that, while sex boomed in the 1990s, it has lost ground again in the 21st century. Heartbreak and party songs are the most popular themes of the current decade. The chart also shows that there are more songs in the list from the 60s and 70s than from the 90s, again a departure from the Hottest 100.

I have added this chart to the Guardian Datastore photo pool on flickr.

* To be precise, there are only 988 different songs in the list (and six are duplicated, each appearing in two different categories).

Today radio station Triple J finished broadcasting their Hottest 100 tracks of all time, the first all-time vote since 1998. For those outside Australia and not familiar with the tradition of the Hottest 100, it began back in 1989 and results are determined by listener votes. After two more years the format changed and votes were restricted to tracks released over the previous year, presumably because the top 10 became a list of the usual suspects. Since then 1998 and this year have been the only all-time hottest votes. A traditional favourite, Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division, which was #1 in two of the first three all-time charts only made it to #4 this year, but Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit was #1 in the third and again in 1989 1998 and this year it made it to #1 for a third time.

Thanks to the wonderful collaborative spirit of Web 2.0, this year’s full list is already up on Wikipedia, complete with the year of release of each track. This allows me to indulge in my data mining hobby, which is why I am posting here rather than over on the The Music Blogs. So, inspired by a suggestion from Mark Lauer, a regular Mule reader (and careful sub-editor), here is a look at the distribution of the hottest 100 tracks by year of release.

Hottest 100 Track Ranking by Year of Release

While the density certainly increases after about 1995, reflecting a lot of new entrants since the early charts, there is no clear trend along the 45 degree line (and, for the technically-minded, the R² is about 0.1%). So, while there are not as many oldies in the chart, those oldies that do make it in are just as likely to rank well as the newer entrants. To make the most of the R code I wrote to produce this chart, here is the same thing showing artist name rather than track name.

Hottest 100 Artist Ranking by Year of Release

To get a better sense of the distribution of rank and year, here is a chart that just shows the location of the tracks by year and rank.

Hottest 100 Rank versus Year of Release

Seeing the data just as points like this shows a concentration of tracks released around the mid-90s. A histogram of the year of release confirms this.

Of course, I’m sure this says more about the demographics of voters than the preponderance of true classics in the 90s.

UPDATE: In this tweet, @nicwalmsley suggested an artist scoring system: 100 points for ranking 1st, 1 point for ranking 100th. As he notes, this system puts Radiohead, Jeff Buckley and Nirvana in 1st, 2nd and 3rd place respectively. Here are the top 10 artists by this measure.

FURTHER UPDATE: @Warlach has laboured hard to assemble the full Hottest 100 as a blip.fm playlist.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: In case you are wondering about the geographic mix, as expected the list is dominated by the US and the UK.

The pedants should note that I’ve counted System of a Down in the USA (rather than USA/Armenia) and Crowded House as Australia (rather than Australia/New Zealand). I hope that doesn’t offend our Kiwi cousins!

Over the last few years, I have posted a number of times on the subject of music. These posts have ranged from the subject of Krautrock to a critique of the RIAA. From now on, I have decided to post pieces which are directly about music (concert reviews, genres, etc) over on The Music Blogs, where I am now a guest contributor. Anything about the economics of music or music and web 2.0 may continue to appear here on the Mule.

I have begun this shift with a review of the Lee “Scratch” Perry concert at the Sydney Opera House. Perry, one of the pioneers of dub music, is now 73 so it was a historic occasion, not to be missed. It was a great concert and featured the legendary Adrian Sherwood on the mixing desk, but that’s as much as I’ll say here. To find out more, you’ll have to read the review!

Last year I wrote about the the music/social network combination blip.fm. That post was followed up with one on the demise of muxtape and mixwit in which I said “I hope that blip.fm does not become the next victim of the RIAA”. While blip.fm has survived to date, it may only last by significantly changing its laissez-faire approach to streaming music.

A post on their blog last week opens

In the past few weeks we’ve had to make a few difficult decisions that will change the way some things work on Blip.fm.  For the majority of you the changes will be for the better, for others they might be less than ideal for the time being.

It goes on to note that music will “primarily” be sourced from the music service imeem rather than broad-based searches of the internet. Users will no longer be able to submit urls pointing to mp3s. Instead, a set of “approved” urls will be used.

Blip say they cannot give the reasons for the changes, but it is no surprise that blip.fm is under enormous pressure from the music industry to curtail their service and these steps will certainly help ease that pressure. However, as noted in many of the comments on their blog, the risk is that these changes will undermine the very features of blip.fm that has made it so popular. For example, they are likely to fall foul of the mess that is music “territory” rights. Most “legitimate” music services like imeem restrict music streaming to certain countries, filtering based on IP address (in the case of imeem it only plays 30 second clips, while other services like Pandora are completely blocked). If blip.fm ends up relying exclusively on these services for their content, they will lose much of the international audience that has been a major contributer to their growth in recent months.

So, while blip.fm may survive in a compromised form, it provides yet another example of the extent of mess that is music distribution in the digital age.

UPDATE: In further news, the concert-streaming site fabchannel has been forced to close. Their post explaining the closure makes for very interesting reading.

Back in August, muxtape, a popular music playlist site, was forced to close by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Now mixwit have announced that it is closing too. The only explanation offered was as follows:

We’ve put a year of work into Mixwit so this choice wasn’t taken lightly. I won’t go into the details of our situation but state simply that we boldly marched into in [sic] a position best described as “between a rock and a hard place.”

Reading between the lines, it looks as though they too have fallen at the hands of the RIAA. Under the cover of claims to be protecting artists, claims that do not bear close scrutiny, the RIAA is building an impressive track-record of stifling innovation. While it is possible to take comfort from the fact that attempts to stem the tide of progress always fail in the end, it is nevertheless frustrating to see the suffering of victims of this pernicious organisation in the meantime, whether those victims are single mothers sued for file-sharing or the creators of sites like muxtape and mixwit.

While these sites appeared to be on shaky legal ground from the start, that seems to be a reason to change the rules to fit the new technology, not the other way around. Larry Lessig eloquently summed up the issues years ago in his presentation <free culture>, and the challenges he laid down then are yet to be addressed. I can only hope things begin to change soon and, in the meantime, I hope that blip.fm does not become the next victim of the RIAA.

In my recent post on the future of Microblogging, I expressed concerns about the viability of twitter given that they are yet to find a business model. But perhaps I just wasn’t thinking laterally enough: earlier this week I stumbled across a novel approach to monetising microblogging. The new site Blip.fm brings music to microblogging in a way that initially had me scratching my head, but it is gradually starting to make more sense. Based on a recent post on the Microblogger’s blog, 140char, others are responding in much the same way.

Blip.fm works much like any other microblog, allowing you to post short messages and follow the stream of messages posted by others (if this doesn’t make any sense, have a look at this post on microblogging 101). The difference is that you have to choose a song before every post and you can listen to a stream of posts as well as reading it. Of course, blip.fm also has all the usual microblogging features, with some of the usual tweaking of terminology: you can follow (favorite) other users (DJs), post replies, etc. They also throw in the idea of giving a DJ “props”. Initially this can come across as something of a gimmick, much like “karma” on plurk, but it actually turns out to be an effective way of speeding up the network building process. On other microblogs you decide whether someone is interesting based on what they say. With blip.fm that decision can be based on what they are listening to. I suspect that this is actually a faster track to finding kindred spirits.

Music is not just  blip.fm’s point of differentiation from other microblogs; it is also the way blip hopes to make money. Next to every track there is a “Buy This MP3″ link, which takes you to the Amazon music store. Blip.fm would earn affiliate revenue for any sales generated through these links, although how effective this is remains to be seen. While I suspect that very few people will click though to buy tracks, the plan would be to get the network of users (sorry, DJs) to such a size that even a small percentage of click-throughs would yield a decent income.

Online music can, however, be fraught with danger and getting clicks on the “Buy” links may not be the only challenge blip.fm faces. Back in April, the cnet blog Webware looked at two new music sites for creating online “mix-tapes” and questioned whether they were on solid legal ground. They were right to ask as muxtape has now been shut down, presumably at the hand of the RIAA. Of the two sites, muxtape always seemed to be sailing closest to the wind as they allowed users to upload tracks to share. Becoming popular very quickly would not have helped either.

The other mix-tape site, mixwit, took a different approach and, so far at least, is still up and running. You cannot upload music to mixwit; instead the site provides a user-friendly front end to the music search-engines seeqpod and SkreemR. This creates a protective buffer for mixwit in defending piracy complaints: they would argue that they can not be held any more accountable for infringing material than Google. Of course, the weakness in this argument is that vitually all of the content found on mixwit would be breaching copyright, while most material found on Google would not be.

Judging from the occasionally dodgy track names, I suspect that blip.fm uses the same meta-search approach as mixwit (although it does also allow uploads), so the fates of the two sites are almost certainly linked. I hope that they do both survive so that I can continue to embed my mixes in blog posts and keep blipping.

P.S. I’m a little short on props at the moment, do drop by and click on one of the little stars!

UPDATE: unfortunately mixwit has now been forced to close. I hope that blip.fm is not doomed too.

The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), after taking a look at sales for the first half of 2008, has run crying poor to the Herald Sun. While they have not yet released these figures to the public, they presumably continue the trend evident in published figures for 2006 and 2007.

Australian Music Sales

Nothing here is particularly surprising, but nor should it be particularly alarming. Sales of physical media fell by more than $60 million from 2006 to 2007, driven largely by the fall in CD album sales. In percentage terms, CD singles fell further, but this was more than offset by increased sales of digital tracks. So it appears that Australians are embracing iTunes and other digital music sellers. This is despite the fact that the music industry here seems more focused on combating piracy than promoting digital outlets. Sales of digital music grew by more than 40% and at that rate, if the 2006-07 trends continue, digital sales will exceed physical sales in under five years!

SonyBMG chief, Michael Smellie recently conceded that the Australian music industry has “missed the boat” in the digital age. The result is that Australian music-lovers are missing out on the benefits of innovations in music sales and, I would argue, the industry is forgoing revenue opportunities as well. By way of example, Apple’s challenges with music licensing in Australia were such that the Australian iTunes Store opened a full two and a half years after the US store. Music subscription services such as Pandora and Rhapsody are yet to sort through this licensing mire and are forced to block Australian visitors to their sites. I suspect that the likes of APRA and PPCA are not helping very much with this process, when they really should be embracing initiatives like these. The best way to fight music piracy is to provide decent legitimate options for people who are prepared to spend money on their music.

Rhapsody is a particularly good indicator of where digital music is heading. For a monthly subscription fee of around A$15, users are given on-demand access to an enormous library of music. Combined with a network music player (such as a Squeezebox or Sonos), a service like this can dramatically change the way people listen to music. A band or track comes up in conversation? Fire it up on the stereo, whether you’ve ever owned it on CD or not! There are benefits for the industry too. Subscriptions tend to be sticky: just think about your mobile phone bill. It is estimated that 25% of Australia’s 8 million households subscribe to pay TV. There is no reason that subscription music services should not aim to achieve the same penetration rate, if not higher, particularly since there is no directly comparable free to air competitor. At $15 per month, the resulting revenue would come close to monthly sales of CD albums in 2007. The sooner ARIA and APRA understand this, the better for everyone.

Of course, some of us (particularly of the older generations) will not be able to let go of our fetish for the physical artefact and so the demise of the compact disc will be a long, drawn-out affair. In fact, surprising though it may seem in a declining market, a new CD shop opened in my neck of the woods just last Saturday. Repressed Records joined So, Hum, Fish Records, Stikki Records, Egg Records* and (my favourite) Bravery Repetition & Noise on King St, Newtown alone. So, while shops catering to the latest pop releases will struggle to compete with digital alternatives, the CD will continue to sell in those shops that can command the loyalty of specific niches of music-lovers.

In one form or another, the music business has plenty of life left in it, despite the tales of gloom being peddled by the like of ARIA.

* Well, technically Egg Records is on Wilson Street and Stikki has recently moved to Enmore Road, but they are in what you might call the “greater King St area”.

For many years, Countdown was an institution on Australian television and I was a dedicated fan, never missing an episode. I even made it into the studio audience once in 1980 (I can pinpoint the year as Ghengis Khan’s Olympics theme song, Moscow, was number one on the charts). It was through Countdown that I had my first exposure to Krautrock when “The Model” was released by Kraftwerk in 1978. Of course, purists would argue that by then Kraftwerk had moved beyond their krautrock roots into electro-pop, but it would be another 30 years before I understood that.

So what is Krautrock? It’s a loose term and is defined by time and place rather than a unified musical style. The time was the 1968 to 1975 (give or take a year or two) and the place was West Germany. 1968 saw the climax of French and German student activism and this turbulent political environment fomented a period of intense musical output in Germany. Many artists were inspired by British and US psychedelic and early progressive rock such as Pink Floyd and Jefferson Airplane. Others drew on jazz or contemporary classical influences. As albums by the likes of Faust and Neu! arrived in Britain, they were enthusiastically received by the influential and now legendary BBC Radio 1 DJ, John Peel, who helped popularise these new German sounds. In the process, the Brits latched onto the term “Krautrock”, which at times bemused or annoyed the Krautrockers themselves but, for better or worse, the label has stuck.

One enthusiastic collector of Krautrock was a young Julian Cope. Years later, Cope memorialised his passion in his wildly effusive book Krautrocksampler. The book, emblazoned with this iconic picture from the cover Amon Duul II’s album Yeti, is sadly now out of print but determined searchers are likely to find scanned copies out there on the internet. For some, Krautrocksampler is the definitive guide to Krautrock while for others it is simply the ravings of an uncritical fan who throws the forgettable together with the truly great. Either way, it is an entertaining read.

Probably best-known Krautrock bands, whose careers extended beyond a few intense years, were Can, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk. But perhaps the most definitive Krautrockers were Neu! They released three albums between 1972 and 1975 and, with the help of producer Conny Plank who had a hand in many Krautrock recordings, pioneered a style that came to be known as “Motorik”. Much of Krautrock sounds like a wild form of Progressive Rock—more Mahavishnu Orchestra than Yes—but Motorik is different. Characterised by a steady, driving beat and trance-like repetitive melodies that conjure up images of endless motorway driving, Motorik sounds much more contemporary that other Krautrock styles. “Hallogallo”, the opening track on Neu!’s first album is arguably the best example of the Motorik style and, while they also experimented with noise and heavier rock numbers, if Neu! had recorded nothing other than “Hallogallo”, they would have earned a place in Krautrock history.

The two reclusive experimenters behind, Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter, were classically trained at the Düsseldorf Conservatory. Their first three albums are explorations of electronic noise and soundscapes and are really only for serious collectors. It is with their 1974 album Autobahn that they consolidated their distinctive electronic style. In the pioneering title track, another example of Motorik, Kraftwerk pointed to the future of electronic music. They continued to develop their style over the next few years and when the title track of their 1977 album Trans-Europe Express was sampled 5 years later in Afrika Bambaataa’s seminal rap track Planet Rock, it still sounded new. Over this period, Kraftwerk’s influence can be seen in the likes of David Bowie, Gary Newman, New Order and Art of Noise but by the mid 80s the rest of the world had caught up to them and their sound no longer sounded so distinctive. Their work was done.

Can‘s music is more challenging than Neu! or Kraftwerk. Their bass player, Holger Czukay, had studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen and was a music teacher with no interest in rock until, the story goes, a student played him “I Am the Walrus” by The Beatles. This then led to his discovery of Frank Zappa and The Velvet Underground. With that Czukay’s personal history changed and avant-garde music along with it. More influenced by jazz, particularly free jazz, than many other Krautrockers, Can experimented relentlessly with wild improvisation, heavy drumming, electronics and noise. While they did manage the occasional commercial hit, such as “Spoon”, their real legacy was influence on others, including Coil, The Fall, Stereolab. More recently, when describing their latest album Narrow Stairs, Death Cab for Cutie said “we’ve got a ten minute long Can jam”, so the spirit of Can lives on.

Tangerine Dream is certainly the most prolific band to emerge from the Krautrock era, having released over 100 albums. Their early releases, those favoured by Julian Cope, share an abrasive edge with many of their Krautrock peers, but they quickly evolved towards a more ambient electronic style. Their line-up has changed many times over the years, the only constant being founding member Edgar Froese and unlike other bands, such as Kraftwerk, they have been more successful at adapting their style over time and in recent years have shifted towards electronic dance music. Tangerine Dream have perhaps been the most influential of all of the Krautrockers. Their ideas have reached from fellow electronic experimenters Jean Michel Jarre and Vangelis to more recent artists such as Global Communication, Future Sound of London, DJ Shadow (who samples “Invisible Limits”), Radiohead and Cut Copy. The biggest challenge with Tangerine Dream is knowing how to get started on such an enormous discography. For the TD novice, I would recommend the 1976 Stratosfear.

I have only touched on a few of the bands under the Krautrock banner. Others worth devoting more than a passing listen include Faust, Amon Düül II, Harmonia, Ash Ra Tempel, Cluster and Guru Guru. But rather than just reading about Krautrock, have a listen to some of the the music on my Mixwit Krautrock Sampler. If that inspires you and you happen to live in Sydney, pay a visit Bravery, Repetition & Noise. The proprietors of this fine Newtown music and video shop have helped me feed my Krautrock addiction and in return I inspired them to listen to it again and they now feature Neu! and Can prominently on their display wall. If Sydney is a bit too far to go, there is always the Krautrock & Motorik Desk over at the Music Advice Centre (MAC) virtual store on last.fm.

By the way, “The Model” is still one of my favourite tracks.

When I started this blog, I expected to focus on my personal interests, such as music, technology and science. As it turns out, most of the posts so far have emerged from my work-life, dealing with finance and economics. Seeing Sonny Rollins perform last night at the Sydney Opera House makes for a good excuse to change this with a post with a musical theme.

When I first started a serious exploration of jazz a few years ago, Saxophone Colossus was one of the first classics I added to my collection. Recorded in 1956, it features perhaps the most famous Rollins track, St Thomas which rapidly became a standard and is likely to be familiar even to those with but a passing acquaintance with jazz. But just in case you are not familiar with it, St Thomas is the first track on my Jazz Sampler over on mixwit [Update: with the demise of mixwit, these links no longer work].

There was a full house in the Concert Hall for Sonny’s only Australian performance. Time appeared to have taken its toll as a stooped, white-haired old man walked slowly out onto the stage. Walking may have been an effort, but when the saxophone came up to his lips, Sonny’s playing was powerful, clear and seemingly effortly.

Backed by trombone, guitar, electric bass, drums and congas, Sonny graciously turned his back as the other players took their turn to solo. It was, however, his night and his stamina for blowing his horn was extraordinary as he repeatedly improvised for ten minutes or more at a stretch. By the end of the night, he had played for two and a quarter hours in a set that included a rendition of St Thomas that clearly excited the crowd.

This was Sonny’s first ever performance in Australia and it was a privilege to see the venerable colossus in action.