Holiday greetings from the Popcuts Team!

Today we’re pleased to announce Popcuts for Causes.

Now when you buy a song, that song can raise money for the cause or charity of your choice. Popcuts has always given money back to fans, but now we’re letting fans “pay it forward” to those in need.

It’s simple: just find a song you love, and at checkout, select an organization to sponsor. After that, your Popcuts rewards for that song will go into the fund for that cause, along with others’ donations. Every time we hit $5, we’ll cut a check and notify the fans who made a difference.

For the holidays, you can even make a Popcuts for Causes gift purchase! Music can be that great gift. And donating money on someone’s behalf is really cool too. Now your Popcuts purchase can be the best of both.

For right now, we’ve begun our giving campaign with four awesome organizations:

• Kiva.org – A cutting edge organization for good, connecting people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.
• DonorsChoose.org – An online charity that makes it easy to help students through donations to individual teacher’s projects.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation – The leading civil liberties group defending your rights in the digital world.
• Amnesty International – A worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights for all.

Just in time for this season of giving, Popcuts reminds you to support music that gives back.

- Team Popcuts

See the Facebook photoset.

During the discussion, I noticed that the distinction between “streaming” and “owning” was a bit misleading, as it focuses too much on technology. There are gray areas, such as owning MP3 files but storing them somewhere in the cloud and retrieving them on demand. So instead I proposed to look at these two concepts as “buying” music versus “renting” it.
But this contrast can also be understood as a dichotomy between permanent versus transient music artifacts: Most of us grew up in an environment where indiviuals owned large music collections, conserved as sound recordings on various media. But of course, it wasn’t always like this. Four or so generations ago, the concept of recording sound was unknown. Music was intrinsically for the moment. After the last note was played, the performance was gone. So before we had physical, tangible, sensual media like vinyl with its beautiful cover artwork, we had no media at all!

If you plot these two dimensions – permanent versus transient, and sensual versus virtual, you end up with a picture like this.

It’s clear that we somehow started out in the upper right quadrant: Ephemeral, but very sensual musical experiences. We then moved along counter-clockwise, and for a few decades lived primarily in the land of somewhat sensual sound recordings that could be listened to over and over again, and some of which we cherished as rarities, as treasures.
More recently, with the advent of CDs and MP3s, sound recordings have become less physical, and more virtual, even though the sound recordings haven’t changed (if you ignore media-inherent artifacts such as vinyl noise). Now with the rise of streaming services such as Last.FM and Spotify, it looks like the pendulum is once again swinging back into the realm of the transient. Consumers have access to music but don’t put value into “owning” it anymore. They simply consume it on-demand, and after it’s played, it’s gone.

But I feel like this picture is misleading. Firstly, it’s a short-term extrapolation. We observe streaming services becoming more popular, we look at software services moving to the cloud, and we project a similar future for music. Secondly, I sense a contradiction between die-hard music fans wanting to identify with their favorite band, wanting to own part of what they love, and merely having access to music like turning on a water faucet. I think it’s much more reasonable to assume that the two concepts – streaming music and owning sound recordings – will live side by side for a rather long time.

Which brings me to my final point: Can the concept of owning music be redefined? If digital sound recordings are ubiquitous, readily available, and replicable at zero cost and loss of quality, how can we even speak of owning something any more? Which is why I’m so glad to see services like Sellaband enrich the music ecosystem. They provide fans the opportunity to develop a more meaningful connection with their favorite artists, and the fans can feel like they own more than just access to a sound recording.

Of course, with Popcuts, we aim to do just that, as well: We want to extend the sense of ownership. When you buy a song, and it’s in your interest that that song does well and becomes popular, it’s a whole different game. You can brag about discovering a band early, or silently enjoy the satisfaction of being a great trendspotter. But it’s more than the mere, passive “access” to music. Because music’s not water.

But it turns out, that’s not neccessarily bad: In an impressive show of determination, creativity and organizational talent, Berliners from all backgrounds have scrambled to replace Popkomm with something more contemporary, more open-source and more flexible. Dubbed all2gethernow, next week in Berlin will be all about determining where the music ecosystem is heading and what can be done to navigate out of its crisis.

Popcuts is proud to be there. At the bar-camp-style part of the event, on September 16 and 17, there will be a Popcuts booth, but we’re also hosting a roundtable discussion about

Music Access vs. Ownership –  What does it mean to ‘own’ music these days?

We hope to spark a discussion about the fading sense of ownership in music. If digital recordings are readily available at practically zero cost, what’s the difference between owning a song and having access to it? We want to explore ways to make owning a recording meaningful again (and of course, being Popcuts, we have some ideas of our own).

In cooperation with Petar Djekic from mufin on Thursday, September 17 at 12.30pm.

See the full #camp schedule here.

Let us know if you’re coming!

But we need your help getting there! Please take a minute to register and vote at the SXSW Panel Picker. You’ll have to sign up, and we’d be really grateful if you did!

To vote, visit: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/4980

To sweeten the deal a little bit, we’re giving away prizes for people who vote for us! To participate in the raffle, simply send an email to sxsw@popcuts.com, telling us that you’ve voted in support of our panel (honor system!).  First prize will win $50 in Amazon Gift Certificates.  Second prize will win $50 in Popcuts credit.  And Third prize will win a gift package complete with Popcuts gear, autographed albums, and free concert tickets! If you’re a winner, you’ll hear back from us by September 6.

And the Bonus Prize: If this panel makes the final cut, we’ll give away a free pass to SXSW (either Interactive or Music – your choice) to one randomly drawn participant!

Thanks, and we hope to see you in Austin next year!

Team Popcuts

EDIT: Voting got extended till 11:59 CST on Monday evening, September 7. We’ll let winners know after that!

Team Popcuts

We’ll be rolling out the UFO Music catalog over the next months, starting with some great stuff by cutting edge new artists as well as some classics that are just begging to be rediscovered by fans new and old.  We’ve got music by jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie, R&B star Luther Vandross and sensational hip-hop artist Nate Dogg.

Here’s a photo of Dizzy being Dizzy:

And of our most exciting artists is Celtic rock band Enter The Haggis.  Check out “Lancaster Gate” off their album “Soapbox Heroes.”

That’s all for now, we’re always on the lookout for new music that you’ll love.  So stay tuned.

Just in time for the Lost season finale, we’ve added Operation Aloha, a joint venture by members of Maroon 5, Gomez and Phantom Planet, among others. A total of 14 musicians met up in Hawaii in between tours to record their self-released and self-titled debut.

Staying in line with our beach theme, also just released: The Beach Girl5’s self-titled debut!

Geared at the younger audience, The Beach Girl5 consists of Mandy Jiroux (best known as a featured dancer for Miley Cyrus and star of YouTube’s “The Miley and Mandy Show”), Brooke Adams, Dominique Domingo, Noreen Juliano, and Laura New, with songs produced by the hit-making music team of Antonina Armato and Tim James (Miley Cyrus, Mariah Carey).

On the other coast, Aaron LaCrate has been promoting Baltimore’s sound into the world for years. His latest track is a wonderful breaky remix of The Pharcyde’s Soul Flower.

Enjoy!

After Accelerator, we celebrated for a bit at Habana. Only, I had no idea what anything on the menu was, so we kept changing our orders quite a bit. Luckily, we had Molly Ryan as our waiter. She didn’t care, and demonstrated extreme patience with the SXSW crowd.

So Molly was one of the first to receive an award, the Popcuts Award for Extreme Patience!

One of the first shows we saw at SXSW Music was Themselves at the Red Seven. Fun stuff. Outside, we met a couple of pretty serious media people. For instance, music blogger Dave Evans, who was wearing a camera that could easily hold three cans of PBR.

So Dave earned the Largest Camera award.

On Wednesday morning, we had coffee with Alexis from Reddit. And we couldn’t help but notice this awesome hot dog hat he was wearing.

So the award for Best Hat goes to Alexis! Congratulations.

Later that night, we headed over to Tiniest Bar in Texas, which quickly also became our favorite bar in Texas. Not only did we love the setup: a tiny shack with an outdoor area crammed between condo skyscrapers popping up everywhere around. We also loved some of the Southern electro bands that later played there: Roy G And The Biv from Denton, Texas, Culture Prophet from North Carolina, and Glasnost from Houston.

In the audience, we met Arriel. When he first bragged about his dancing skills, we didn’t believe him and dared him to a dance-off.

But it turned out he wasn’t lying. To the contrary – Arriel sure did rock everyone’s face off. So the Popcuts Award for Rocking Everyone’s Face Off goes to Arriel. Well done!

And one more outfit award: When we visited the Whole Foods flagship store in Austin, we spotted Trixie at the salad bar and noticed her awesome cowboy boots. We tracked her down in front of the store and handed her the award for Best Cowboy Boots. She was excited!

That’s it for today. We’ll be back with more Best of SXSW this weekend. Enjoy your day!

Looks like everyone’s doing a Best of SXSW writeup, so here is ours:

We noticed everyone at SXSW is basically just trying to get noticed. By being on or hosting panels, by playing shows, or by wearing funny hats. Of course, some ways to get noticed are more amusing than others, and we thought we’d honor some of these.

So we decided to hand out individual Best of SXSW awards to noteworthy people. And this post is the first in a series that documents the winners. Stay tuned for more!

(Example of our awards. They come with a free song.)

This is Bridget, one of the throng of helpful SXSW volunteers:

After panels ended, it was usually time to head over to the Registrant’s Lounge across the street from the Austin Hilton, which was basically a fenced-off park with free booze for badgeholders. Good place to unwind, think about something other than blogging and social media for a change, and get some sun for the first time in the day.

Too bad it only opened at 5pm. But not to worry – there was Bridget, who let us in early because she was just nice like that. She also hooked us up with an extra drink coupon. So the Popcuts Award for Best SXSW Staff / Volunteer was an easy choice for us!

Veteran music recommendation researcher Paul Lamere (ex Sun Labs, now with the Echo Nest) led a panel named “Help! My iPod thinks I’m emo!”. It was both insightful and hilarious at times. Our favorite slide was his example of what a “freakommendation” is: People who buy Pat Robertson’s book also shopped for The Ultimate Guide for Anal Sex for Men.

So Paul totally earned the Popcuts award for Most Hilarious Panelist.

For the very last timeslot of SXSW Interactive, we headed to a roundtable discussion titled Music 2.0 = Music Discovery Chaos? Also in the audience was Tim Malbon, who caught our attention because he dared to ask the question of questions (and we have to paraphrase here): “Is music discovery really such a huge problem? I don’t see people running around on the street screaming ‘I can’t discover new music!’”.

So Tim got our award for Ballsiest Question to a Panelist.

Speaking of music recommendation: A few months ago in Berlin, we ran into Petar Djekic at the booth of a cool new music recommendation startup called mufin. We saw Petar again here at SXSW and hung out for a while. And after getting us into Berlin Fest (which featured free beer and sausages), and giving us tips on a ton of other fun stuff, we decided Petar deserves the  award for Extreme Generosity.

At Berlin Fest, we met Judith Govey from the British Music Embassy. Their mission is to promote British music in the rest of the world, which sounds like a pretty kickass thing to do. Judith received our award for Most Pieces of Flare because we noticed she was wearing way more than the minimum of 17! Because Judith knows that people can get a song anywhere. She even gave us a button to keep.

We’ll be posting more of the award-winning people we met in Austin!  Signing off from Berkeley!