New on Blog De La Musique: Ely, Rico, Raimund, and Barbie’s 21st Century redux of a 70s classic

My new music blog, “Blog de la Musique” (at http://blogdelamusique.com) has just kicked off with a post on a cool new TV Commercial that debuted this Feb 2. This tv ad debuted on YouTube and featured 90′s Pinoyrock icons Rico Blanco, Raimund Marasigan, Barbie Almabis, and Ely Buendia. Yes, it is a Smart commercial – but I had nothing to do with it, I swear!  

All disclaimers aside, the ad is an interesting collaboration of four now-mature artists (who all emerged during the 90′s Pinoy band boom), covering a 70s folk song (Heber Bartlome’s “Tayo’y Mga Pinoy”) using 21st century mobile technologies, like LTE broadband, tablets, video conferencing, all for the sake of some remote harmonizing.

Sounds like science-fiction? This is actually how a lot of music is made today, with musicians collaborating over the Internet. Maybe having record their vocals on a Nexus 7 while joy riding on a pickup in Bicol might still be far fetched – but the possibilities are all there.

Full review and blog post on the site here: http://blogdelamusique.com/2013/02/03/a-21st-century-makeover-for-tayoy-mga-pinoy-featuring-ely-buendia-raimund-marasigan-rico-blando-and-barbie-almalbis/

“What happened to PhilMusic?” and other Pesky Questions

A few weeks ago the questions started to pop up out of thin air and lunge at me. There were text messages, Tweets (public tweets and DMs), Facebook PMs. They were incessant. They arrived at odd times of the day – while driving to work, while at a meeting, while having dinner. You would have thought someone had died. 

In a way, someone had. The questions were “What happened to PhilMusic?” “Did you sell PhilMusic?” and the more direct “I can’t access Philmusic, when will it be back up? I need to sell my guitars.”

After some investigation, we figured out that the site was indeed inaccessible – our backend dude’s attempts to connect to the server directly returned a cryptic error message that apparently pointed out to a damaged hard drive. After some exchanges with our web provider we quickly decided the best thing for the site’s long term health was to to back up the data and move on and set up a new virtual server at a US-based provider.

But that would have take a bit of time – it was Christmas after all. And PhilMusic.com doesn’t currently operate as a commercial enterprise, so taking time off for vacations from our real jobs takes precedence over internet hobbies.

That explains the downtime – probably one of the longest ever spells since the site domain was registered in December 1996… Making PhilMusic.com 16 years old and probably one of the longest running Philippine websites around!

But what to do about all the nagging questions? Answer them! So without further ado, here’s a mini FAQ:

What happened to the site and domain? The server crashed. Investigation pointed to a faulty hard drive. We have had enough with the old provider so we are moving to a new provider in January 2013.

 Did you sell PhilMusic? Not that I know of.

 Will you sell me PhilMusic? I get this all the time. Give me an offer, preferably a P15M offer

 When will the new site be up? No firm timeline, and please don’t bug us, we have day jobs. Sometime January 2013.

 Are you on Facebook? 

Yes! We are on Facebook! You can keep in touch with Facebook (especially during the downtime) through our Facebook presence. We have two URLs:

PhilMusic Facebook Page – http://facebook.com/philmusic.dotcom

This is our official FB page. Public announcements and bulletins about the site are posted here.  We have about 14,000 likes. Please like us! You can never have too many likes.

The Official PhilMusic Facebook Group - http://facebook.com/groups/philmusic

We just started this a few days ago, for discussions and user posts. We’d like to keep the FB page clean, so this group is more for interactions, discussions, for-sale postings etc. We’ll also use the file area as a repository on FB for community documents. The group is set so anyone can read, but you must Join the group to post. We have over 1,500 signups today and expect to hit 2,000 by New Year’s Eve. Or maybe 2,500. Join us!

There are a number of other “PhilMusic” groups on Facebook, but they are maintained by over-zealous fans or impostors, or both.

Are you on Twitter? Hell yeah, since 2007! We are @PhilMusic (http://twitter.com/philmusic) Follow Us!

Will all the old messages be restored on the new site? We’re restoring from backups. Expect a lot of the newer messages gone, but hopefully the bulk of the 7-8 year old database should be there.

We want to donate to keep the site going! How do we do this? Thanks for the generosity! Crowdfunding is in vogue on the interwebs, so we will be considering crowdfunding models for new projects.

Are you a start-up? We’ve been a “startup” for 16 years! haha

What’s next for PhilMusic.com? Ok, so Ver 1.0 was PhilMusic as the music scene documentarian (what you would call today as a blog), Ver 2.0 was PM as the Musician’s Forum slash Buy-N-Sell slash Sulit for Musicians. There will be a Ver 3.0 in 2013. I’m not sure what it is yet but I would like to explore a mobile app based service. We would like the blog to return, assuming we can get music bloggers to contribute. And events! Expect some live events in 2013. None of these dreams can come true without community support, so we hope you’ll be there for us.

And last of all, thanks to the PhilMusic community for sticking by us all these years, through all our incarnations. You guys are great!

For upcoming announcements, stay tuned to our Facebook page. No Facebook? What are you, a martian?

Crowdsourcing local music scene documentation: The #PhilMusic hashtag on Instagram

Some years back, around the time the first generation Digital SLRs made their appearance. the photo bug bit me hard. Of course, every “serious” photographer eventually finds a speciality – mine was the area of concert photography. I liked the scene, loved the exaggerated stage lighting, and the unique expressions coming from musicians. 

Armed with a PhilMusic.com media pass, I prowled the backstages and mosh pits of some of the more raucous music events in Manila in the late 90s and early 2000′s. I would shoot several times a week, thinking I was doing my bit in documenting the events of that period.

My weapon of choice was a large and heavy camera rig, a Canon SLR (I eventually settled on a Canon 40D) and my favorite lens was the formidable Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS  zoom – superb low light optics that was about a foot long weighed a ton or two. I nicknamed the white beast “the bazooka”.

That lens is one heavy bitch to carry, but the results were always worth it. With it’s tack-sharp focusing and versatility in low light situations, it was the perfect concert lens, and I could always count on it to capture dramatic closeups of guitarists grunting and vocalists emoting on a distant stage.

Well that phase went by quickly. My beloved Bazooka stays in a cabinet unused for most of the year. I stopped going to gigs. I moved on to small cameras that shot fine stills and HD video, like the Lumix LX-3, and lately, the Canon S95. The pocketable S95 is about as small as a smartphone, so this is my go-to “real” camera.

But more often than not, my photographic weapon of choice nowadays is a phone. I went through a number Android phones over a 2-year period before settling on an iPhone 4s as the primary phone – and primary camera.

“The Bazooka”

With its sharp focusing, vivid colors, and most of all – wide array of camera apps, coupled with the ability to share photos instantly via social media, the iPhone is often the only camera I use and need, even on travels where I would have lugged along an SLR body and several lenses in the not so distant past. Indeed a number of tech blogs have posed the question, “Is the iPhone 4s the only camera you need?“

Among the many fine photo apps is Instagram, a portal to a community of cameraphone photo enthusiasts, which is more fun than  barrel full of monkeys.

The photo sharing app with the hipster filters has evolved into photo-oriented social network. And the twitter-inspired hashtag concept has found new meaning in the Instagram – a popular hashtag used by a number of people in the Instagram community becomes a crowdsourced photo album for that topic. Click into a hashtag and you can see an album of thousands of photo contributors all posting with the same theme.

So with that in mind, I remembered my “music photojourno” persona of years past and figured that Instagram might be the best vehicle to revive that aesthetic. And at the same time, I no longer have the time or even the stamina to attend the hundreds of music events that pop up in Manila. But it’s a sure thing that other people will be there, armed with their smartphones.

Last night’s Fete de La Musique street scene in Makati Avenue, posted on Instagram

With the right phone in the right place (usually a smartphone), anyone can be a music photographer like Annie Liebovitz and Instagram can be your  Rolling Stone. Why not crowdsource the role of music scene documentation, and provide a venue (in this case a hashtag) to collect all the photos in one convenient place?

Hence the birth of the #PhilMusic hashtag. I propose this as the hashtag for photos of music events in the Philippines. I hope that if it catches on , anyone who wants to get a bird’s eye of the local music scene can just click on the #PhilMusic hashtag and get a glimpse of the vibrancy of the local music scene.

As an example, just last night, the annual Fete de la Musique festival took place in Makati Avenue, which took a lot of people by suurprise. The festival wasn’t promoted too extensively, so it sort of snuck up on a lot of people and a lot of people missed it. But if enough people on the scene were posting photos on Instagram and tagging them with #PhilMusic, others could at least check in on the “channel” to view photos of the gigs and attend them vicariously.

Granted that peering into a smartphone or tablet screen won’t give you thrill as actually being on the scene in person, at least it gives you  bit of the flavor, less the smell of the moshpit sweat!

Here’s how to post a photo on your smartphone (an iOS or Android device running the Instagram app)

To post to the #PhilMusic hashtag “channel” on Instagram, just add the tag #philmusic to any photo covering a music-related event.

To view the #PhilMusic album – look for a photo tagged with #PhilMusic and click on it. Or use Instagram’s search function to search for the hashtag #PhilMusic.

Why Some Are Calling Jessica Sanchez the “World Idol” And Other Twitter Mysteries

A social media meme of sorts has popped up in the Philippine online space since yesterday’s American Idol results. The meme goes: “Jessica Sanchez may have lost American Idol but she is the World Idol” or something to that effect.

It sounds like consolation (or shall we say “consuelo de bobo“) for the hopelessly diehard fans still reeling from the results – shocking to some, but predictable to me, as I had an inside track that the Philip Philips – the archetypical “white guy with the guitar” – was going to win. After all, the most recent winners were all white guys with guitars! But I also knew that the twitterverse had revealed a more scientific explanation, as detailed in my last post “Did Twitter Correctly Predict the Winner of American Idol?”

That post detailed the findings of the paper “Beating the news using Social Media: the case study of American Idol“ written by a group of reputable social scientists (read the PDF here) and essentially pointed out that despite mentions of Jessica Sanchez consistently beating her out her opponents in global social media updates (specifically Twitter) over the course of the last few episodes, if you narrowed down the tweets to just those coming from the USA – Philip Philips was going to win. And he did.

Because at the end of the day, the show is called “American Idol” and the votes are cast in the good old USA.

While the American Idol live broadcast on Star World was underway Thursday morning, I had an interesting exchange with Maria Ressa of the blog Rappler.com over Twitter. Two hours before the show results, Rappler had just posted an provocative analysis called “Social Media Indicates Jessica is Next Idol” which in a nutshell laid out a case, supported by all sorts of twitter analysis tools, infographics and such – that explained why Jessica Sanchez was the most likely winner.

I had just read the previously mentioned paper, so I replied to Ressa’s tweet by pointing out that Geolocation (the geographic origin of the tweets – embedded into the twitter stream via mobile apps and web browsers) is relevant. And I pointed out a link to the paper, which Maria Ressa had not apparently seen before.

Ressa defended the initial analysis: “(We) Looked at total activity: follower growth, socialmention, sentiment140 & Zaba research (which uses predictive engine model)”…

But I reiterated the relevance of geolocation in doing this type of armchair analysis – American Idol may have a worldwide audience, but the voting mechanics are still locked in to the USA.

The paper’s methodology went one step further than the Rappler analysis because it examined the geolocation information in the tweets to determine where the data was coming from. And in the final analysis, Philip Philips had the most mentions in the USA – hence was more popular than Jessica where the votes counted. And thus he was most likely to win, as he did.

Quoting from the paper:

In the US, Phillip appears to have the largest fanbase of the two contestants (see also the cartogram of Figure 6). If the possibility of votes coming from abroad is discarded, using the available data, we could then claim that Phillip is going to be the winner of the 11th edition of American Idol.

About an hour after the Idol results, Rappler reversed its previous findings with a series of articles explaining Why Philip Philips actually beat Jessica Sanchez - this time citing the findings of the Social Media paper.

Ironically, a cursory glance at the Twitter and Facebook stats showed that the follow up piece garnered thousands more social media mentions than the original article which predicted Jessica Sanchez would win. So in page view terms, it was all good.

While Rappler may have erred in its original analysis, both studies show that if you just went by the total amount of tweets that whizzed by the twitterverse, Jessica Sanchez really did have the most amount of global support.

That is, if you consider “global support” to equate non-USA support. Further analysis will need to be done about a geographic country distribution of the tweet origins, but the paper did cite the Philippines as a source of the majority of the Idol tweets. So in yet another case, pinoys have shown their mastery of online medium.

As the paper pointed out, in the course of the American Idol tweet-a-thon, “The Philippines are distinctly more active than any other foreign country.”

Interestingly enough, the paper also expounded on the type of cheat techniques used by Filipinos (widely publicized in Philippine social media circles) to cheat the voting system.

The voting rules of American Idol are quite clear, as cited in the paper:

On Wednesday the participants perform on stage and the public is invited to vote for two hours after the show ends. Voting can take one of three forms: toll-free phone calls, texting and online voting. The rules of the competition only allow for votes casted by the residents of the U.S., Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands.

These rules clearly exclude the Philippines, but crafty pinoys devised “voting tunnels” that allowed to vote from the Philippines.

Officialy, Sanchez’s popularity abroad should not have any impact on voting, since, as mentioned above, only the U.S. based audience is allowed to take part into the election procedure. However, it is interesting to note that the Filipino-restricted Twitter activity concerning Jessica is strongly peaked in the two voting sessions of American Idol for the East and West timezones, and that numerous websites explicitly address the issue of ”voting tunnels”: “

Here’s an example of one of the many blog posts detailing “How to Vote for Jessica Sanchez from the Philippines and Other Non-US Countries” .

It’s unclear if these attempts to vote from outside the US actually worked. But even the paper mentioned this phenomenon as a possible wild card:

Officially, Sanchez’s popularity abroad should not have any impact on voting, since, as mentioned above, only the U.S. based audience is allowed to take part into the election procedure….  Although we have no proof of any irregular voting activity, tweets analysis clearly points out to a possible anomaly that may be a concern.

In the end though – all these nefarious methods failed to crack the American heartland. The Americans voted, and got their American Idol.

Jessica Sanchez might still be qualified as a “World Idol” – in a world predominantly Filipino

But don’t weep too bad for the gifted 16-year old, whose considerable vocal chops will get her a career span’s worth of notable gigs. The first bit of news came out on the Twitterverse before the American Idol results were announced, , attributed to Mexican singer/actress Thalia:

@thalia: WOWgreat news! #TommyMottola just call me from #AmericanIdol & he is confirm to work in the first #JessicaSanchez CD

Tommy Mottola (Thalia’s husband) was the ex Sony chief who essentially created Mariah Carey back in the day (and subsequently married her). That does smell “hit record” (or “hit download” as they might say today). So even if “the white dude with the guitar” got the plum prize, Jessica Sanchez has landed on her feet and then some.

Did Twitter Correctly Predict the Winner of American Idol?

As I write this, it is 9:22 GMT+8 so it’s almost an hour or so before the actual tweets announcing the winner of American Idol go out over the Twitterverse. But if some Idol-tracking scientists from universities like Harvard, Northeastern University, and the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences in Turin, Italy – social media (specifically Twitter) may have already predicted the outcome.

In their paper titled “Beating the news using Social Media: the case study of American Idol“, the scientists examined the data coming over the Twitterverse after the elimination episodes. They also considered the location of the tweets as they considered USA tweets to be more influential over the final outcome than those coming from overseas (which skew heavily towards tweets from the Philippines.) You can download the complete paper (in PDF format) here.

The conclusion?

Based on aggregated worldwide tweets, Jessica Sanchez clearly wins the Twitter popularity poll. But if you consider only the tweets coming from the USA, Philip Philips edges out Sanchez.

Considering that voting is mainly a US-based activity, geolocation is relevant. The paper concludes:

In the US, Phillip appears to have the largest fanbase of the two contestants (see also the cartogram of Figure 6). If the possibility of votes coming from abroad is discarded, using the available data, we could then claim that Phillip is going to be the winner of the 11th edition of American Idol.

** Update, it is 10:02am GMT+8 and Philip Philips was just declared the winner.

 Twitter correctly predicted the outcome.

Buying The George Estregan Groove Explosion Online

There aren’t many music sites where you can find an album with the NSFW title “Tangina Mo, Andaming Nagugutom Sa Mundo, Fashionista Ka Pa Rin” – which was the actual title of the last Radioactive Sago Project album. Not on Amazon, not on Spotify. But it turns up as one of the items for sale on Terno Recordings’ new online store, being prepped up as a Chrome (read: HTML5) app, available on the Chrome Web Store.

Users of the Google Chrome browser in the Philippines who visit the Chrome Web Store site (the store detects the user’s location via an IP check) are now shown a localized menu screen that displays PH-developed Chrome apps (essentially HTML5 sites optimized for Chrome) that stand out among the plethora of titles in the store.

The Terno Recordings app is apparently still a work in progress, but we understand it will soon enable online purchasing through means apart from credit cards, such as mobile payment platforms. This is significant considering credit card penetration in the Philippines is still quite low – with only 3% penetration according to some estimates.

“Tangina Mo, Andaming Nagugutom Sa Mundo, Fashionista Ka Pa Rin” - which incidentally could be used as a slogan by #OccupyWallStreet protesters – was notable for such stellar hits such as “Wasak na Wasak”, “The George Estregan Groove Explosion”, “Superhatdog”, and “Mambo Rat” and its tasteful cover graphics depicting a giant human brain being dissected. The album was the spoken word-meets-punk/funk/jazz group’s second album with the indie label Terno Recordings.

Kudos to app developer Codeflux and Terno Recordings for attempting to break new ground. No doubt George Estregan himself would be proud.

Spotify is Teeming with OPM! But are artists getting compensated?

As I recently wrote here, I signed up for Spotify, the cloud-based streaming music service with a bazillion of music tracks in its servers. While still not available to users in the Philippines, I was able to sign up using a US-based IP address. While there is a free service available for users in countries where Spotify is officially supported (like its country of origin Sweden, the UK, and the US), the paid version allows you to use the service wherever you travel – meaning countries outside the officially supported territories. So I signed up for the paid version.

I justified the expense by thinking, with all that music available, I may never buy a CD again. And I was right, the selection is staggering, a music junkie’s dream come true.

Evidently a lot of my local social networking friends in the PH are on Spotify too, so it looks like there is already quite a community of Spotify users in this neck of the woods.

Now here’s the ironic kicker. Though still unavailable to Philippine users, it turns out that Spotify has a massive collection of OPM in its servers. I would even venture to state that this is probably the biggest collection of Philippine music assembled online.

On Spotify, you can search for a track by Track name, Artist, or Album title. These fields are all cross references so if you you search for a track and a song comes up, you can list all the songs in the album where that track appeared – or list all the albums of that artist.

My search for OPM started with an innocent search query for “Himig Natin” – the seminal pinoy rock anthem by Juan de la Cruz. Lo and behold, a long list of performances appeared, both by the original artists, and cover versions. I even uncovered a jazz instrumental arrangement by saxophonist Tots Tolentino.

Curiousity piqued, I searched for the usual suspects, typing in names like “Gary Valenciano” and “Sharon Cuneta”. Spotify quickly returned detailed listings of apparently ever album they ever recorded, or guested in. A search query for “Eraserheads” turned up the complete Eheads catalog from Sony Music’s vaults. Well complete except for the final studio album “Carbon Stereoxide”. But the studio albums, live albums, and anthologies were all represented.

And so it went, testing Spotify’s search engine, I began to uncover even the most obscure Philippine artists.

Because Rogue Demanded it: My List of the Top 25 Greatest OPM Songs of All Time

My former officemate Miguel Mari (ah, long story), who is currently one of the honchos at Rogue Magazine, recently conducted a Facebook survey among people who were/are in one way connected with the local music scene about their list of Top 25 All-time OPM songs of all time. Or as Kanye would have said, “OF ALL TIME!”

Now this is the type of topic that can lead to riots if brought up in the context of a drunken bar brawl because this is always highly subjective. What may be gold to you may be pure garbage to my ears. Tastes differ. Furthermore, there are gems in a specific genre (like pinoy hardcore punk) which won’t make the cut in a listing of songs that stretch cross all genres.

But let the chips fall where they may. Here are mine. I tried to be fair and made a selection that crossed over genres (whereas the typical pinoy rock diehard would focus only on Pinoy Rock). Some are quiet lullabies, some are arena anthems. I also tried to list them down as fast as possible. Most of them are from the 20th century, which is when I did most of my critical listening. And as this is my taste, I’m sure you have you have your own, so let’s agree to disagree.

The drum roll please…

Digital Downloads are so 2010, Cloud-Based music streaming is the way to go

Record companies (and music artists) still mourning the death of physical media (Compact Discs and DVDs – which are fast going the way of the 45RPM vinyl single, the cassette tape, and the old 8-track tape format) are being hit with another whammy when along comes a new form of digital distribution in the form of audio streaming straight from the cloud. Who needs to download an mp3 when you can listen to music on the fly streamed directly from music servers in that big internet cloud in the sky?

In a one-two punch the past couple of weeks, both Apple and Google have opened up their own cloud music services. Apple has iTunes Match, a $24.99/year service, and Google has Google Music, a music store and free cloud storage solution (you can store up to 20,000 songs for free, but you must upload them to your account yourself) for your music files.

Reeling in the Years: Raiding the PhilMusic Archives

Our home baked music site PhilMusic.com has gone through several stages of evolution in its 15 or so years of existence.

It started as a mailing list (then referred to as a “listserv”) on the local ISP iPhil in 1996 before becoming a full-fledged web domain. It then went through another round of evolution as a website, from an online music magazine (actually more like a music blog in today’s sense, before the word “blog” was even invented) from 1996 to 2004 — to today’s musician-oriented community forum.

As a new media destination site for the band-dominated music scene of the the era, PhilMusic pioneered some things taken for granted today – the music artist chat event, an event calendar known as a “gig guide”, online concert photography galleries, the site podcast, and long articles and reviews that would probably have looked great in print but were dedicated to the online medium.

Since 2005, today’s PhilMusic.com Forum (talk.philmusic.com)  is more familiar to local musicians as the defacto place to find great deals in music gear. Looking to sell your guitar or want to swap stories about the best effects boxes with fellow guitarists? The PhilMusic Forum is the place.

This community identity may not be ideal for people who still miss the old music-journalism persona of the site, but in today’s net scene, every band already has their own site or social media account plugging their own gigs, and publishing their own content and photos. Having a third party join in would just add to the new media clutter. Besides, every local band out there already has its own Facebook page, and probably a Twitter account as well.

Speaking of Facebook, as of Feb 2011, you can now add another stage of evolution: PhilMusic the Facebook Page. Rather belatedly, The PhilMusic Facebook Page went up in Feb 2011 to serve as the official online presence of the site on Facebook. You can find the page through the URL http://facebook.com/philmusic.dotcom .

Facebook Pages  makes perfect sense for all sorts of corporations and media companies nowadays.The amount of people you can reach on it is staggering (22M Filipinos at last count), and the engagement is amazing.

Content posted on Facebook gets more hits than if they were just placed online on a stand alone website. Then there’s that whole social notion of “Liking” and sharing content, which drives eyeballs back to the original content sources better than the old darling of the blogging community – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) –  ever could. And since there’s no cost to hosting on Facebook – the combination is irresistible.

What to put in a Facebook edition of PhilMusic? After stumbling on a couple of old drives filled with old PhilMusic content – made up of photos, videos and features articles from the site’s “online magazine era”, some of which had been previously published online, some of which had never been seen by the public – I decided to sift through these old files and repost some of these on the Facebook page. People can then freely share these with their contacts.

So there’s the page’s reason for existence: A place to highlight material from PhilMusic’s archives.

A visit to the PhilMusic Facebook page today is a bit like a trip through a time machine. You’ll see images from a performance that took place in 2005, or read a review of a “new” artist that was originally published in 1999. But you’ll see this through the eyes of a modern Facebook user, using the online photo and video display and “like”, commenting, and sharing social functions of today.

So come join us and sift through bits and pieces of music history of the recent past. With 15 years of local music-oriented content to go through, you’re sure to bump into some gems.

The new-fangled social media touchpoints… “Like” or “Follow” PhilMusic on these links!

PhilMusic on Facebook: http://facebook.com/philmusic.dotcom

PhilMusic on Twitter: http://twitter.com/philmusic