Scenery from Austria. In some sense I also view this as a self portrait.

Some say we’re living in a market economy. I say we’re living in an attention economy at the market place of our lifes.

Strax efter tolvslaget trängde jag ut Jan Malmsjö-fansen och bad att få sätta på låten “Glorious” av Andreas Johnson (spotify:track:46fgRHqikCX4ca1m19Lrjp). Vet inte om jag vill förklara varför just nu. Eller varför jag funderar på att börja skriva på både svenska och engelska - i en eländig röra. Och blanda i stil-   Det kommer snart. Ni som inte har en aning så - this is the Swedish language, the langugae of IKEA and… well, I suppose, nothing else…. By the way, WE DON’T HAVE ICE BEARS…

This is a photo painting from the mountains somewhere around Serra San Bruno in the south of Italy. It is mainly created with cloning techniques in Painter, with some  post processing in PS and Lightroom.

I loved to see a new edition of Maia Hirasawa’s album Though, I’m Just Me on Spotify, but it made me wonder if the dear old album format is dying - or if it’s not dying but it should be. The album is a very strong socio-economic tradition in the music industry, but it’s strongly related to products as the LP and the CD. The album was also practical in a society with simple attention mechanisms. A few music labels owning most of the industry, and relatively few but very famous artists releasing albums evenly over the year, carefully planned for maximum attention. The Internet age will probably lead to substantial changes in this distribution form.

Maia Hirasawa’s new edition is, 2008, a rule rather than an exception. Most popular music albums is released in multiple versions. The digitalization of the music industry inevitable leads to reconstructed forms of distribution. Personally I think we will end up in the “blog format”, with the artist releasing songs as they are completed. The Swedish artist Marit Bergman is probably leading the way with her subscription service:

Next to last she hints the possibility of this distribution form supersiding the album format. I like this change. In a way I like the album distribution form, but it feels kind of strained in the digital world. I would like this change even better if all artists distributed new songs immediatly into distribution forms as Spotify, and let our listening determine the artist’s “pay check”. In this scenario, Spotify would not be taxonomized by albums, but by artists and their chronological flow of songs. As a listener I should be able to subscribe to new songs by for example Marit Bergman, and for every time i listen to her music, she would get paid. I hope this is the future of Spotify and other streaming services.

It would also be nice if distribution platforms as Spotify had a paypal button on each artist page, where I could sponsor artists if I like their music. Perhaps, this would especially benifit new artists - no point of sponsoring someone I know to be a multimillionaire.

Simulating a water color painting. The scene is from a stream called “Silverforsen” close to my home. Silverforsen might be called Silver Creek in English. Not sure this image reflect the name though.