Some things broke, some things improved

When Apple release the new 3.0 iPhone software yesterday, we found a bug in the SomaFM iPhone App. Here's what happens:

Some channels don't get displayed in the listings, while others are being listed twice. Well, they're not really being listed twice, for some reason the wrong text and graphics is showing up in the wrong position in that list, so it will seem like some channels are listed twice. As a temporary work-around, you can get to missing channel by clicking on one of the duplicate entries.

We're working on fixing the bug now, but we have to wait for the approval process again, so it will likely be a week or longer before the fix is available in the store. Really sorry about that. You can vent your frustrations in our iPhone support area.

In better news, the iPhone 3.0 software brings better features to our WebApp. If you have the 3.0 software installed on your iPhone, you now have access to our aacPlus streams, which sound great over EDGE networks. We have aacPlus support for Groove Salad, Space Station Soma, Secret Agent, Indie Pop Rocks and Illinois Street Lounge right now, we're planning to get a couple more channels up real soon now (most likely Boot Liquor, Lush and Drone Zone).

We've also rolled out streaming on more Nokia platforms, including the 5800, and the new Palm Pre. I'm excited how the mobile platforms are really taking off finally! It's been a long time, but internet radio in your car and wherever you are is finally starting to become common.

Listener email: Why do we expand our channels?

An anonymous listener from Germany writes:

i really enjoy the music you play at your station. Drone Zone, Groove Salad, Space Station, Cliphop and Doomed is the best mix for people FAR AWAY FROM MAINSTREAM. i think that was your original idea to launch this project, and i think many people will thank you for that great idea. BUT if you're not able to meet your budget why do you expand your channels? Is "getting bigger and bigger" the goal of a "underground station"? Does any one of the listeners from the beginning need christmas music? Please think about it and go back to the roots.

First, to set the record straight, Xmas in Frisko has been around longer than Doomed or Space Station Soma. I think it's unlike any other holiday broadcast out there, and very fitting for SomaFM. Christmas Lounge was an offshoot of holiday programming we did on Groove Salad - many people asked that we not play any holiday music on Groove Salad and instead start a dedicated channel for it, so we did.

Our mission has been to provide music programming that's "outside the mainstream"; music that you won't hear on FM radio. That doesn't mean every song we play hast to be unknown, it just means we're trying to play songs that you are far less likely to hear anywhere else. So yes, there are a few Christmas songs on Christmas Lounge that are by artists many people have heard of... but they're the songs that fit the theme, and they're less than 10% of what's played on that channel.

While it is true that SomaFM is slowly expanding, we're not expanding nearly as fast as the total online audience for internet radio is. Below a certain size, we'd be lost in the noise and gradually our audience would disappear. In fact, our listener growth in the last 12 months has been only a few percent. I'm sure a lot of the reason for that is there are no so many different options for listening to music online, and as people have more choices, they spend less time focusing on a single source for their music.

That's why we expand. And we expand into formats that are related to our existing formats. Illinois Street Lounge grew out of Secret Agent - bachelor pad music and easy listening but without the "spy" vibe. Digitalis grew out of Cliqhop and Indie Pop Rocks; Lush is a vocal-alternative to Groove Salad which most listeners prefer we keep instrumental.

When I audition music (and this is true for all the other music directors), we find a lot of good music that doesn't fit our normal channels. We start building up playlists for these new styles, and after a while, we sometimes find that we're getting tons of music that's really good but doesn't fit into an existing channel. That's when we launch a new channel.

The best thing about these new channels is that it gives our supporters a chance to hear something different yet still stay loyal to SomaFM. My goal is to be able to provide a variety of different styles of really good, hand-chosen music for our listeners no matter what kind of a mood you are in.

Hopefully that answered your question!

Holiday Channel Traffic!

The large number of listeners to our holiday channels has boosted our "listener hours" to about 6.7 million in December. We're pushing over 600mbit/sec of bandwidth just on the holiday channels. Who knew holiday music would be so popular... and we're not even the most popular holiday music station out there!

Fundraising Update

Based on our current level of donations, it still looks like we're going to be behind $18-20,000 by the end of the year. While this is an improvemement from last month where we were projected to be $35,000 in debt, we still need your help to pay our bills this year. If you're not already a supporter, please donate to SomaFM today!

If everyone who listened regularly (there are about 150,000 of you who tune in once or more a week and have been doing that for over a year) donated just $10 we would have enough money to operate SomaFM for a couple years!

By the way, here's a breakdown with our monthly subscribers, which in October we had 1700 monthly subscribers:

$1.00/month	16.5%
$2.99/mo	24%
$4.20/mo	27%
$7.99/mo	18%
$12.99/mo	10.5%
$25.00/mo	3.5%

We bring in about $9000 a month (net, after credit card merchant fees) from our monthly subsribers, so this is a very important source of revenue for us!

Alternate sources of revenue

Graham writes in:

I was wondering, you know, I bought a fair few CD's now as a result of listening to your station. Is there no way you can get any income through that? Like an agreement with a web CD store?

We currently do this with Amazon, so if you follow our links to Amazon, we get a 5% of the sale commission, but honestly, we don't make that much money on it... usually only about $600 a month because people tend to buy used CDs there.

We're working on partnering with CDBaby as well, and we'll get $1 for each CD sold through them. We experimented with iTunes in the past, but at 5 cents per track sold, it wasn't adding up to much at all. Plus iTunes only gives you credit for the direct link tracks, where as Amazon also gives us credit for anything else bought during that "shopping session".. so if the buyer buys more CDs by the same artists, we get credit for that.

Wasn't internet radio killed last year?

KG Writes in:

I thought internet radio was killed last year. What gives?

SomaFM and most other internet broadcasters have technically been operating "out of compliance" (that is, we're not paying the royalties we are supposed to be paying). At some point, we can't keep doing this... someone will sue us for copyright infringement. SoundExchange has informally agreed to not sue any broadcasters who continue negotiations with them, that's why stations are still on the air. Other large services like iMeem and Last.FM have made direct deals with the large record labels, in most cases resulting in the "Big 4" record labels owning a part of those companies. (And with that ownership comes influence over the music they feature.)

So making a deal with the big record labels is not acceptable for most broadcasters who strive to be independent in the music they broadcast.

We have continued to negotiate with SoundExchange (the agency that collects the royalties) over the last year, and are close to a settlement. Originally, one problem was that a SoundExchange settlement would only cover their members, and not apply to all music as the CRB ruling did, unless congress acted to codify any settlements. HR. 7084 which was recently signed into law, does exactly that: it tells the CRB that they have to codify any settlement internet broadcasters and SoundExchange agree to. This is the only way we can get the royalties reduced to a reasonable level.

Internet radio is running on borrowed time. But even without a deal, big, venture-capital funded services like Pandora will likely survive in a slightly altered form: they'll have to make deals with all the major labels which will cause them to lose some of their independence. But small stations like SomaFM will be put out of business: either by lawsuits from the RIAA if we continue to operate without paying the royalty fees or more likely by just not having enough money to continue our operations after paying all these royalties.

NAB drops opposition to HR 7084

I just got a call from Dennis Wharton at NAB, who told me that the NAB is now supporting the bill.

From what I'm reading on cnet and a few other places, NAB was concerned that they wouldn't get their own deal in time and didn't want to have web-only broadcasters get an unfair advantage over them. But a compromise they asked for was simple: extend the date of the bill to Feb 15th, 2009, and they're all for it.

No problem! The date extension is useful to other groups as well who are trying to negotiate deals, and the only possible opposition of the date extension would possibly be SoundExchange- just because they want to see this settled ASAP and not to continue dragging on.

Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008 passes in the House!

Thanks to everyone who called their representatives. The Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008 has passed the house, now it's onto the Senate. We'll need to call them in the next 24 hours and ask for the support of "HR 7084, The Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008" (it's still called HR even though it's in the Senate).

Look up your Senator's phone number and call them. You can leave a voice message after hours.

All you need to say is "Please support HR 7084, The Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008, in the Senate. I support internet radio and want to see a fair royalty agreed upon."

The Senate will resume Monday morning, September 29th, and will consider this in the morning. If we leave messages this weekend, we can show that there is considerable grass roots support for it, and it will greatly lessen the impact of the NAB's opposition to it. And calling on Monday as well is a good thing to do; as there is a good chance it won't be passed first thing.

Summary & Background

H.R. 7084 contains technical amendments to the Small Webcasting Settlement Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-321) which will permit commercial and noncommercial webcasters to negotiate royalty rates and terms other than those determined by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) in its May 2007 decision. That decision was the basis for legislation introduced last year and is currently subject to a legal challenge at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has, thus far, upheld the market rates and terms set by the CRB.

The principal purpose of the legislation is to facilitate a reduction in Internet streaming rates, something H.R. 7084 will permit to be voluntarily negotiated by willing parties rather than imposed by Congress. Essentially, this bill will allow SoundExchange, the organization which collects royalties on behalf of the music industry, to reach a settlement with the Digital Media Association, the national trade organization for the online audio and video industries.

iPhone streams updated for 2.0/3G

Until today, our iPhone/iPod Touch streams were only working on the current iPhones with the 1.x software. Now thanks to some testing by Mark Malone at Apple, we've updated our iPhone streams to work with the 2.0 software and the 3G iPhones coming out on Friday. So now our streams work on both old and new iPhones and iPod touches. While I haven't had a chance to test the 3G data network with a new iPhone, you should be able to use the WiFi streams when you're on the ATT 3G network. I'll be interested to see how it works out!

We rolled out iPhone streaming today!

After a lot of testing, we rolled out iPhone streaming tonight. I'm still not completely happy with the look of our iPhone mini-site so you might see some changes in the near future, but rather than wait until everything was perfect, I decided to release it now.

So now when you go to somafm.com on your iPhone, you get an iPhone-specific site with links for both EDGE (32-56k) and WiFi (128k) streams.

Infrastructure Upgrades

We've been improving our streaming and web infrastructure for the last couple weeks. Not everything has been launched until we can fully test it for a couple more weeks (for example the web site is still running on the old server). We're also installing a backup web server on the East Coast at the facilities of Steadyhost (where we have some streaming servers now). We've been happy with the service provide by Steadyhost, they also provide hosting for some other large internet radio stations such as DI.FM.

Continued problems with our hosting provider; email and web move to our San Francisco datacenter under way

Regrettably, we're still running services from ThePlanet.com's web hosting facilities until we can migrate everything to 365 Main in San Francisco.

So this morning, I wake up to find that our mail server is unreachable again, and this series of messages on The Planet's service update site:

• June 6 – 10:00am CDT - We have lost network connectivity to H1. We are confirming the extent of any power loss, and we will be updating shortly.
• June 6 – 10:05am CDT - Transport for H1 temporarily fell offline and is restored. H1 Phase 2 did not lose power. H1 Phase 1 lost power. We will be updating again shortly.
• June 6 – 10:10am CDT - The temporary generator powering Phase 1 failed. We switched over to the backup generators that were just brought in. The CRAC units have been powered on, and PDUs are having power restored right now. [THis is the second temporary generator that has failed in the last week at The Planet. Perhaps it is operator error? - Rusty]
• June 6 – 10:15am CDT - We continue to power PDUs in Phase 1. We will update when all PDUs have been restored.
• June 6 – 10:20am CDT - Power has been restored completely to Phase 1. Our DC Ops team will be walking through the aisles to confirm all racks are online.
• Customer Support Overview (June 6, 11:30am CDT): -Technical Support Phone: No Hold Time

From our monitoring, the service went down at 7:40 AM pacific, or 9:40 AM CDT. They were a little slow to notice they lost communications with their data center!

Of course our mail server is still unreachable at 11:44 Pacific, or 1:44 PM CDT, 4 hours after they stated that power has returned.

What really annoys me is that they are stating on their site, "Technical Support Phone: No Hold Time". The reason for this is that they're sending all support calls to their sales people, who don't do much more than tell you they're going to escalate you to Level 2 support, but all those techs are busy and they'll need to call you back. I suspect they did that to reduce their 800 number call expenses, because they had hundreds of customers sitting on hold for 30-40 minutes all the time. They also get to make it look like their response time is much better than it really is.

After waiting 45 minutes for a callback that never came, I called in again. Finally I got them to connect me with a real tech support service, not just the person logging callbacks. I've been on hold with "real" technical support at The Planet for 10 minutes now, trying to get our mail server powered back on.

10 more minutes on hold, and the tech tells me, "Can you go online and submit a reboot request ticket, that will expedite things."

At this point I have no faith of when our mail will be back again.

I'll continue to move our services out of The Planet and to our own servers in San Francisco; our DNS is already moved (although we still don't have the redundant location DNS in place yet); the hardware for the new mail server is setup but the mail services aren't configured yet. There are also a few issues with some of the web services we run; the old systems at the Planet used a much older version of the Berkeley DB software package which isn't compatible with the current versions. So I have make a few changes to our "now playing" code as well as our stream server monitoring systems. The "now playing" database is the most important to our listeners, because that's got all the information on which album songs come from, as well as the info on where to buy the track or get more info on the artist.

The mail server is a bit harder to migrate, but I'm also working on that right now as well.

Hopefully, the good thing that will eventually come out of this is that we'll have redundant servers, in different geographic locations,

Tough Weekend Outage

The company that hosts the webserver for SomaFM.com and the mail server, ThePlanet.net, had a rather large outage last weekend, which took the SomaFM web site off the air (so to speak) from 3:08 PM PDT Pacific time on Saturday, until about 3:37 AM Pacific time Monday morning (June 2nd).

Our mail server is still down, about 72 hours later. More on that in a bit.

The cause of this outage was outage was not immediately known, and calls to The Planet's tech support lines (which had 30 minute waits) were "unrewarding" to say the least. At first they wouldn't give me any information at all (because I didn't have the proper password), and they were only giving out information to "affected customers". I pointed out that since they had caller ID and they knew that I was calling from the phone number on record for our account, that should prove adequate to allow them to give me some information on what was happening. The rep finally agreed, even though he said, "he could get in trouble for telling me this".

What he told me was that they had had a transformer explosion at the datacenter where our servers were located.

This seemed kind of fishy, didn't they have adequate generator power? What about the UPSes? Blown transformers happen fairly frequently, that's one reason you have redundant power systems.

A while later, they made a public announcement about the outage at the Planet's Houston data center:

Today at approximately 5:45 p.m. [central time], a transformer in our H1 data center in Houston caught fire, thus requiring us to take down all generators as instructed by the fire department. All servers are down until power can be restored.

According to our monitoring logs, it was 5:07 PM central time, not 5:45 PM.

We received more information dated May 31 – 10:46pm (8:46 pm Pacific):

On Saturday, May 31st at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

This time makes more sense. Seems like the UPSes did indeed work, but they weren't able to switch over to generator power. So about 10 minutes after they lost power, the UPS batteries were expended, and the facility lost power.

This is also the first time they mention "the short". At first it was just a transformer fire. But now it sounds like it was a transformer explosion caused by an electrical short, which implies that some wires were so overloaded that the insulation melted and caused them to short out.

There have been lots of discussions about the blame for the problems at The Planet. I'm not going to go into that now. However I am less than satisfied at the quality of the communications from them, and not happy with at all how they've handled the situation.

The SomaFM.com web server eventually came back while we were just finishing up restoring our backups to a new web server. (So at least we now have a tested plan and sequence from restoring from backups!)

However, as of 10:30am on June 3rd, our mail server is still not running, nor did it come back up when The Planet said that they had powered back on the part of the datacenter where it is located. After sitting on hold (with very bad music) for 35 minutes, a tech told me that our mail server machine was one of the older ones that would have to be powered on by hand... and that there were over 1000 of these machines that they would be going around and turning on one at a time. But that never happened.

The last update on The Planet's web site was kind of ominous:

This morning at approximately 2:45 a.m. CST, the temporary generator supplying power to the servers and environmental control systems located in Phase 1 of our H1 facility shut down. This was caused by some faulty current sensors in the output breaker. The sensors detected an out of balance current condition that did not exist.

At this point, I don't know when the mail servers will be working again. I guess we have to deploy a new mail server (which is also the secondary DNS server).

Wait! Another update:

Fixing the faulty breaker on the generator powering H1 Phase 1 was not successful. we have located a second generator that is currently being delivered to the facility. It is expected to arrive this afternoon and we will provide additional information regarding the new generator at that time.

That doesn't sound promising. And for all I know, our server has been blown up by a power glitch or something. Time to get working on that new mailserver, I guess!

Unfortunately, I screwed up and didn't properly backup the mail server configs and will have to recreate all that by hand, so it's not a real simple process.

But I guess it won't take too long as I won't have any interruptions from email today!

But now we do have a full backup of the SomaFM web server up and running at our rack in 365 Main's San Francisco data center. And I'm working on getting further redundancy in place so this won't impact our listeners much if it happens again.

You can follow the drama of The Planet on their Service Update web page.

And thanks for your patience with us.

About that preroll

A couple people wrote in complaining on how we added a "preroll" support SomaFM message to our streams.

That was a mistake; The preroll was only supposed to show up when people were listening via third-party sites which embed our streams on their sites (next to our ads). Unfortunately, I made a mistake in a config file and left off one line... and that caused everyone listening with Windows Media to get the message...

Here's an example of what we were trying to affect. That's one of many sites that embed our streams in their pages, as if they were the source of our content, and then sell ads around our stream!

I tried to make it so that when they connected to our stream, they got the donation pre-roll first. After all we are paying for all the bandwidth and royalties and they're selling ads on our content!!! But rather than just block it, we thought we could make more people aware that we're supported by our listeners.

But I made a type in a config file. Left in an extra "#". And so all Windows Media listeners were getting the preroll. Not just the leachers.

So its fixed now.

If we ever do something like that in the future; it will be done where you only hear the leader/preroll ONCE a day at most, not repeated every time you change channels. But even that would be reserved for something special, we wouldn't do that on a regular basis.

Nine years ago....

Nine years ago, "Soma FM" appeared in the Shoutcast.com listings; it's when we turned on our first server (with thanks to Sam Habash who setup our first server at Best.com).

Here's how I described our first channel: ``a mix of ambient groove and electronica with obscure 70s music and the occasional drop in``.

Within a year, we'd have 3 channels: Groove Salad, Drone Zone and Secret Agent.

We didn't register SomaFM.com until Feb of 2000, and the website - more like a "web page" - appeared around March of 2000.

Happy New Year

Thanks to everyone for making 2007 an incredible year for SomaFM. While we had lots of challenges (hi CRB!), we also had incredible support from our community of listeners. We have some exciting new stuff in store for 2008. And the CRB battle isn't over yet, although at this point, it seems more like continued peace negotiations and nothing like a war.

Lots of broken parts of the internet today!

Blogger is broken right now; it can't upload to our server. They've at least acknowledged the problem, but who knows when this post will appear.

Paypal, on the other hand, is having some problems that they're not acknowledging - their history download is very broken right now. We use this to populate a Filemaker database we use for sending out the Tshirts and Cds. Not only is it taking a really, really long time (20+ hours to process) when it usually takes 10-15 minutes, but the last download we got was missing all sorts of data. The problem seems to have started yesterday morning; it affected all our shirt orders since 2-Nov.

The data isn't lost, but if we have to go in through the web interface and copy everything into the Filemaker database that will be a real pain.

Yeh, yeh, yeh I know we should be using Instant Payment Notification and not the batch download history - but apparently the Paypal IPN was even broken in the last few days. Paypal has a blog about system status, but it seems to not cover everything.

Earthquake in SF

The strongest earthquake in the last 10+ years has hit the San Francisco area. Merin was at OQO (her "day" job) in the Mission and it was really shaking there. Elise was at the store, and she said stuff was swinging and falling off the shelves. I have nothing to report as I'm in NYC (for some meetings with SoundExchange which I'll report on later).

For now, it seems there was no serious damage, but a lot of rattled nerves.

Blue Lagoon "Hangover Party"

An annual tradition of the Iceland Airwaves music festival is the Saturday "Hangover" party at the Blue Lagoon.

The Blue Lagoon is a huge thermal pool that is a by-product of the adjacent geothermal plant. Seawater is pumped into the ground and super-heated, which then turns turbines and generates electricity. The waste product is hot water full of minerals, silica and algae. The silica is what gives the water its blue look, and the bottom of the lagoon is full of silica mud which feels really nice on your skin.

For the hangover party, a sound system is setup and DJs spin as the audience soaks. This year, Flockids and DJ Detect from France provided the entertainment. The music was fun, upbeat techno which had everyone bobbing in the pools.

You can see the geothermal plant in the background, with all the steam coming of it. I overheard someone saying, "this place is so great. Too bad they built that power plant right next to it!" A bit unclear on the concept I guess.

I'd highly recommend a trip to the Blue Lagoon, it's an amazing sight and the combination of hot water and cold air is exhilarating. There is also a spa, bar, and places to eat. I'm not sure if you can normally drink beer in the lagoon, but for this we could.

The water is different temperatures in different areas of the pools. The entire thing is warm, but some sections are really hot, so by moving around you get your choice of heat. Hot water with cold air feels great; it really is a good way to wake yourself up on a Saturday. I wish I had taken some before and after shots of the people on the bus with us... everyone was half awake going out, and totally happy and relaxed on the way back.

Merin suggested SomaFM do some some sound installation there; Groove Salad and Cliqhop music in the "lounge" pool, and a Drone Zone-inspired multispeaker/multichannel installation through the larger and more distant pools. Maybe even some underwater sounds. (Like a giant version of the "Drone Dome" we did at Burning Man a couple years ago.)

Friday Night Update from Iceland Airwaves

I'm a bit backlogged on updates; it's taking forever to edit and upload all the media (not to mention I filled up my macbook drive)... perhaps if I wouldn't shoot so indiscriminately I wouldn't have this problem!

Quickly: saw the Samúel J. Samúelsson Big Band give an incredible performance, too bad they didn't have more time. Imagine the "Taking of Pehlam 123" soundtrack meets James Brown and you kind of get the drift.

Then, the Motion Boys - Icelandic German Electro sassiness...

The big performances of the evening finished up with Gusgus at NASA.

(All images in this message are actually video grabs from a Canon TX1!)

PS- Hi to Jerry, Kelly, Paul and a bunch of other nice folks we hung out with tonight!

CDs are SO EXPENSIVE in Iceland

I am amazed that there is any CD market at all in Iceland when CDs sell for 1995-2295 ISK, or about $30 each.

Even when artists are selling their CDs directly at the venues, they sell them for 1500 ISK, or about $23.

I can't believe how expensive CDs are here.

I was hoping to come back with a big wad of CDs. But I'm not so sure now.

Food Prices in Reykjavik

Last night, we had dinner at Vegamot, a bistro/bar in the city center. The decor is stylish, nordic modernist; the music was good and just loud enough that you could still talk but actively listen to the music as well. It was a combo of chill-house and downtempo, right up my alley... and the food looked good so we sat down.

I was surprised when I saw how relatively affordable it was. Merin had the curry satay salad and I had the chicken enchiladas. US$42.35. Food was good, although the Enchiladas were a creative yet non-standard configuration (i.e. not rolled). A glass of wine each would have added another $20 to that, but we just had water. Ok, I know, that sounds insane by US standards (or European standards!) but food is really expensive in Iceland; generally 50%-100% more than food in the US or EU.

The day before we shared a large pizza at Eldsmiðjunnar, supposedly one of the best pizza places in town. (They were playing some hipster indie rock, one song was an indy/emo cover of Michael Jackson's "Billy Jean" that was really well done.) With a local beer each, it cost US$54.32.

It was a real pizza, not as good as the best I've had in Italy, or not as good as Pizzeria Delfina in San Francisco, but definitely a good pie. Still, that gives you a price check. Comporable Pizza in San Francisco would have been $30 with two beers.

I won't even go into the cocktail prices here... in the land of the $10 beer, the $13 baby shot, and the $16-20 cocktail you realize that people do a lot of drinking at home before they go out... luckily there is lots of housing close to the city center so you can live near the action and not have to drive.

This also has the side-effect of people in music venues coming more for the music and less for the drinking. When a band is playing, people are watching and listening... not ignoring them like often happens in US clubs.

Internet/Telecom in Iceland

I can't make a good judgement call about the net in Iceland, because I have a weak WiFi signal at the hotel, so I'm not sure how much of the slow net is due to the WiFi, the connection of the Hotel, or the connection of the continent.

I did notice that .is sites come up faster than US .com sites... and my photo upload speeds to Flickr seem to be in the 10-15k range a second at best.

However, the internet is everywhere here. Tons of cafés have free WiFi, and every café has people working on laptops in them.

Until I can test speeds at a few more places, I can't really attest to the speed of the net here.

The GSM network supports EDGE but because of the high data roaming charges, I haven't tested it. The cell coverage is pretty impressive, it works everywhere I've been since getting here.

Some of the standout acts tonight at Iceland Airwaves

Two bands who I really liked tonight both have a lot in common: they mix "indie rock" (e.g. guitars and emotion-laden vocals) with electronics.

This is a direction in music that I'm very interested in, there is some really creative stuff being done, and did I mention that Elise and I are working on a new SomaFM channel for just this kind of music? (Coming January 2008 under the current plans.)

Icelandic bands do this really well. Björk is an obvious one to point out. Múm is another. Emily Torrini. You get the idea. They're really into this fusion of rock and electronica over here, and tonight I heard a couple of bands that I really liked and we'll be featuring on the new channel.

Soundspell

Their guitar player also plays synths, often at the same time. They have another keyboard player who mostly plays piano and a few synths. A simplistic description of them would be Jeff Buckley meets Radiohead, but it's more than that.

And they can rock when they need to.

Listen to some of their music here

Shadow Parade

I'm not sure how to describe these guys except that they are a little less electronic than Soundspell, but I'm sure they all grew up listening to progressive rock. Their songs are catchy yet complex, backed by rock-style beats that make you want to dance like a good house track. Some people call this "post rock".

Listen to some of their music here

That's the 2 bands that impressed me tonight.

NASA is a good space; the sound quality was excellent - not too loud but just about right.

Not all pre-parties are created equal

I was a little nervous because we went to a pre-party at Organ on the "second floor", a sort of loft space with just a bunch of bright florescent lights and a "bar" that only had 2 bottles of vodka that ran out before we arrived. Not only was their nothing to drink, but there was no vibe, and while I stuck around to hear a couple songs by Skakkamanage I felt sorry for them having to play in what felt more like rehearsal space than a performance venue. Luckily, this turned out to be a fluke and didn't set the tone for the rest of the evening.

(Note to self: if Finlandia ever sponsors a party of ours, they better bring a lot more than 2 bottles of Vodka!)

The music I've heard so far has been very good. The Reykjavik music scene is very good; I'm looking forward to what we'll hear in the next few days.

The weather has taken a slight turn for the worse. It's started raining, and the wind is now blowing hard. Let's hope that changes before tomorrow night. Reykjavik is a walking town, and the city center is small but still, walking 4 blocks in 30 degree weather with 25 mile an hour winds is pretty harsh.

I'm going to be tired the next few days!

We have the press pass, we have the goodie bag. We have invites to lots of parties. We've gotten a bunch of CDs. Now we just have to cover it all, edit the audio/video, write the blog entries, upload the audio/video, etc.

And let me know if you think there are some artists that I have to see which I may not know about, especially the off-venue stuff.

Did I mention it's cold here? Time for a coffee.

Iceland Airwaves starts tonight!

Iceland Airwaves kicks off tonight, with a pre-opening party at Hressingarskálinn (aka Hressó) in downtown Reykjavik.

We've gotten our badges and wristbands, now it's time to get lunch, take in a few sights, do a bit of planning and get ready to see Soundspell and Shadow Parade at NASA tonight. (NASA the club, not the space agency!)

It's a chilling 33 degrees right now around 1300 local time, good thing we'll be inside for most of the night!

Halloween programming and more

I sent this out to the SomaFM mailing list today:

It's almost Halloween! And our annual Halloween channel has turned into a full-time station from SomaFM called "Doomed" - but just because it's not a special channel, don't forget it's there this Halloween! It's the perfect soundtrack for your halloween party, or just to have playing in the house when the kids come trick or treat-ing.

Two more things:

1) It's music festival time. If you're in New York at the CMJ Music Marathon, keep an eye out for Elise Nordling host of Indie Pop Rocks. Or if your in Iceland for the Airwaves music festival, keep an eye out for Rusty (me!) who will be there as well (hint: come to Ione on Saturday night, I brought a bunch of T-shirts to give away to SomaFM fans).

2) We've revamped the website a bit so that when you launch the station, it now brings up a page showing what's played and gives you a chance to buy downloads from iTunes and CDs from Amazon.com - we make a 5% commission on these sales so whatever you buy helps us out!

AND FINALLY REMEMBER:

SomaFM is listener supported and commercial free! We do this by relying entirely on your for our financial support. Thanks to everyone who has supported SomaFM in the last year and if you haven't supported SomaFM lately, we'd love to have your financial support. We even have automatic monthly subscription programs now, or you can contribute in a lump sum.

If you listen all the time, please support us at the $7.99 a month level minimum. If you only tune in once or twice a week, the $2.99 level. And if you're too poor to support us, even $1 a month will help us. Think of it. You spend more than that on coffee or sodas.

We're a tiny operation and we do this because we love it. But love doesn't pay the bills. (And it costs a lot to run a radio station).

http://somafm.com/support

Thanks for being part of the SomaFM family!

Rusty

Links, Streams, Widgets, etc

A lot of people have been requesting Widgets for MySpace, Facebook, etc. I'd love to hear some feedback on what these widgets should include. It could be as simple as what's currently playing or it could actually be a player that you embed in your page, that starts playing when you go to your page.

I'm not sure how I feel about making the station start auto-playing when you land on a page- but if you want that, give me some feedback and let me know.

I was also thinking about something that showed what was playing on all the channels and sequenced through them - tickertape style - and then had a menu to jump directly to listen to one of the stations.

I'm also about to roll out 128k streams for Windows Media Player... and I'm wondering if that should be the default for Windows users when people click on the station logos? Or if we should still default to whatever app (iTunes, Winamp, etc) handles .pls files?