I adore music of almost any sort.  I used to say that there were only two sorts of music that I could not enjoy country and western (10 points to those of you who spotted a vague Blues Brothers reference in that joke).  The situation changed when Elvis Costello went to Nashville in 1982 and produced “Almost Blue”, his album of covers of classic and not so classic country songs.  I was hooked by the lead single “Good Year for the Roses” and it is still a favourite now.  When the album came out I naturally gravitated to the well known tracks like “Sweet Dreams” but one track grabbed me by the heart and has never let go, “Hot Burrito #1″ or as Costello calls it “I’m Your Toy”, which turned out to be a Gram Parsons track.

This led me to Gram Parsons and Costello also sent me off to look out Hank Williams Snr.  Gram Parsons, it turned out was already part of my collection as he was on my favourite Rolling Stones LP “Let it Bleed” (as a side note you only need five Stones albums, “Let it Bleed”, “Beggars Banquet”, “Sticky Fingers”, “Exile on Main Street” and “Forty Licks”.  the latter would be greatly improved if it had the full version of tracks on it rather than cutting so many great songs short.  Anyway).  I have a soft spot for the very melancholy country songs but find over produced country very hard to stomach.  I wandered down the bluegrass route and took great joy in finding the albums by Jerry Garcia, already being a fan of his guitar playing with the Grateful Dead.

Eventually this led to the Avett Brothers album “Country Was”.  A simple country album packed with good songs and full of promises to come.  Their latest album “I and You and Love” is their major label debut and was issued via Columbia Records and American Recordings.  it was produced by Rick Rubin, who surely can be spoken of in the same breath as the greatest producers in the history of modern music George Martin, Brian Eno and Phil Spector (as a producer not as a person at which he sucked donkey balls as Cartman would say).

The album starts with the title track and after 13 tracks of ballads, rock songs and bluegrass ends with “Incomplete and Insincere” two things this album is most certainly not.  My personal favourites include the distinctly country “Laundry Service” (dig that violin solo folks), the very rocky “Kick Drum Heart”, the title track and the very country “January Wedding” the latter could surely count both Gram Parsons and Hank WIlliams as close relatives.

I am not alone in this love of the album and it will surely not be long before the Brothers are not a secret of those ahead of the curve but a staple fo the festival circuit and are being mentioned by Bono et al.

Welcome to the Next Big Thing ™ or was that last month? Spotify, either the saviour of the music industry or its death-knell is a hot topic. It was widely talked about in the Net community but went mainstream in the UK with the launch of the mobile versions, especially the iPhone app. Indeed that launch made such big headlines that Spotify had to revert to the invite only model for the time being in the UK. Before looking at the Spotify of today it is perhaps helpful to remind ourselves of the general concept and some of the key features.

The vinyl disc replaced the piano in the front room, similarly the compact disc replaced vinyl, the iPod and iTunes replaced the need for physical music entirely (the iTunes LP is a lovely attempt to return to the joy of buying a vinyl LP but more of that in another post). Welcome to the iTunes killer, although you still need a computer or mobile device to listen to Spotify. Spotify is the logical result of combing the availability of computers with the increasing speed of the internet and cloud computing. Your music is no longer stored on your computer, in fact it is no longer your music but that is another issue, rather you log into the Spotify servers and there you can find the playlists you ahve created and saved and search for new music. One of the joys of the introduction of the cassette was that we could all become creative artists by making up mix-tapes. This concept became somewhat tricky with iTunes but Spotify and the web have recreated that singular pleasure. You can now create a playlist and then send it to your friends, put it online or Tweet it to the world. One music website in particular have used this to good effect by creating a Friday Spotify music playlist, congrats to Drowned in Sound.

There were three big drawbacks with the original Spotify. First, that it was only available for the home computer with no mobile version available. Second, that you needed to have an active Internet connection to listen to music and third the music catalogue itself did not include all the major record labels. I am sure I am not alone in that I already have ripped my CD collection into iTunes and therefore having Spotify on my Mac was not essential. What I really wanted when I got hold of the 3G iPhone was to be able to listen to all those tracks on my phone whenever I wanted not the small selection that i could fit into the phones memory. The second issue was not an issue at home but when I visited my parents, my sister or went on holiday it became a real issue (do not get me started on trying to watch TV abroad, in fact you can but it will be a topic for my technology blog Connected to the Mothership). The third is still an issue although if you follow Spotify on Twitter or their blog then you will see that they are constantly adding to the online catalogue and in significant numbers too. There is talk of the major labels buying into Spotify, which may or may not be a bad thing depending on far too many variables to cover in this blog. I still find many bands, albums and tracks that I would like to listen to are not available in Spotify. However, I have also rediscovered a number of wonderful albums and artists by searching for tracks or even by hearing something in a TV show and following the breadcrumb trail as one does with Google or Wikipedia.

The first issue was tackled when Spotify submitted their iPhone app to the guys at Apple in August and a month later the Cupertino peeps saw fit to approve it for general consumption. The “drawback” was that you had to have a subscription to use the app. Now let us get this straight now, paying £9.99 a month (or lees if you take out the annual subscription) is small beer, one CD a month for access to hundreds of thousands of tracks. My joy at the mobile app was short lived because despite living in London, a city so connected you can see its lights from the moon, a 3G mobile signal is something that comes and goes like my luck with the horses. Even worse, like many I listen to music on the Tube, oh wait, no signal at all! I tried using it in the car but frankly that was even worse than walking down the street and get outside of town and into those lovely green areas and the signal disappears like the mist on a summers morning.

The true scope of Spotify was opened up on their next major update where they introduced “offline mode”. This meant, as the name suggests, that you no longer needed to have an active Internet connection to listen to music. You could specify playlists to be available offline and then when connected to the Net Spotify would download those tracks into its cache and allow you to listen to them unplugged. initially this was a mobile app only feature but swiftly followed for the desktop version too. Overnight Spotify truly started to live up to its billing as a potential iTunes killer, especially given its reasonable 3,333 offline song limit. What this means in real life is that I download playlists to my iTouch when I am at home via my home network, which means I can listen to them in my car, on the Tube or in the countryside (drowns out those noisy animals). Currently I am using it in conjunction with iTunes but ultimately if it acts as the musical equivalent of the British Library and has (almost) all music ever recorded available to listen to then I would think about dropping iTunes as my music portal.

One last thought, pay for the subscription. Spotify is losing money currently and the fee is a small price to pay for such a huge library, which will only continue to grow if the music industry can see that they and the artists will get a revenue stream from it (remember how Apple had to fight to get them onboard for the iTunes store, these people are luddite in their adoption of new technology and ways of marketing their wares whatever they claim to the contrary). If Spotify can survive then it might just be worthy of being the next truly big thing.