Best Tracks of 2009... So Far: Six Month Mark Playlist

Phoenix – Love Like A Sunset Part I
St. Vincent – The Strangers
Handsome Furs – Radio Kaliningrad
Sufjan Stevens – You Are The Blood
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Dull Life
Dirty Projectors – No Intention
Animal Collective – Brother Sport
Passion Pit – Sleepyhead
The Maccabees – No Kind Words / Bag Of Bones Part A - Album Version*
School Of Seven Bells – Iamundernodisguise
Manic Street Preachers – Jackie Collins Existential Question Time
Franz Ferdinand – No You Girls
Metric – Gold Guns Girls
Temper trap – Science Of Fear
PJ Harvey – Black Hearted Love
Sunset Rubdown – Idiot Heart
Andrew Bird – Anonanimal
The Veils – Sit Down By The Fire
Bat For Lashes – Pearl's Dream
Soap&Skin – Spiracle
Fever Ray – Triangle Walks
Wavves – Goth Girls
The Horrors – Scarlet Fields
My Latest Novel – I Declare A Ceasefire

http://open.spotify.com/user/seaninsound/playlist/37bnP7qg7dEYNZoPc2HzSn

...i put this together at 4am with insomnia last night and there's LOTS more to follow when we run this next week, as part of DrownedinSound's year so far (in review) week as we cruise over the 6month mark this week.

See a thread with some of our readers tracks of the first 6months of 2009 here.

This Mess We're In

I've been drafting and deleting various blogs in relation to the Digital Britain report and how disappointed I am that, despite it being a decade since the music industry and governments dropped the ball with turning Napster legit, it might as well have been yesterday.

Before I go into any depth, I wanted to reveal some things I've found. First off, for the sake of context, here is a selection of Google Trends graphs which show how much interest, in terms of search traffic, certain sites have received:

The Rise of Twitter



The Fall of Myspace



The Growth (court case/"bad pr" related spikes?) and Scale of Pirate Bay



The Contextualized Rise of Spotify



To make your own comparision graphs visit Google Trends.

I'm sure someone much techier than me can come up with some even better graphs and would be grateful if you could pop them below as a comment if you do find anything more revealing.

Top 10 Recent Bits on DiS (for those not on our mailing list)

Please Note: If you'd like to join the DiS mailing list click here.

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D R O W N E D
I N _ S O U N D
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Hello,

We've been rather busy and forgotten to update you all with what's on the site. Here is our current top 10 things to see/do/read/share...

1. THE DEAD WEATHER live!
On the frontpage http://drownedinsound.com/ tonight you can watch Jack White and Alison Mosshart's new band The Dead Weather live From the Basement. In the lead up to the show you can see the best of the sessions they've done so far.

2. NIGEL GODRICH
DiS had a natter with Radiohead's legendary producer, who's also the man behind From The Basement.http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4137177-from-the-basement-on-a-television--dis-talks-to-nigel-godrich

3. GLASTONBURY
Last week we had a special Glastonbury preview week, where, amongst other things we made a gigantic selection of mixtapes/Spotify playlists, spoke to some of the bands playing and cherry-picked the must-see acts.

Find all of our Glastonbury coverage here:http://drownedinsound.com/lists/glastonbury . Also if you'd like to follow our coverage of the festival over the weekend, follow our DiS-at-large Twitter http://twitter.com/drownedin

4. What's the best cover version of all-time?
A huge thread with audio playlists and lots of suggestions. Join in and let us know which your favourite cover is:http://drownedinsound.com/community/boards/music/4186407

5. MANIC STREET PREACHERS
In an epic three-part interview, Nicky Wire told DiS all about their album-of-the-year-contender Journal for Plague Lovers. He talked openly about everything from working with Albini to his love of The Horrors to putting music to Richey's words. He even talked about Richey Edwards, the man behind the myth and much much more http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4137098

6. MARS VOLTA
Are they? Aren't they? At the Drive-In getting back together that is. DiS asked the question and got a better answer than we could have dream of http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4137051

7. SUNSET RUBDOWN score 10/10!?
Alexander Tudor courts controversy with this 10/10 (in his opinion) review http://drownedinsound.com/releases/14463/reviews/4137069

8. FRIENDLY FIRES
Played a gig in the dark. DiS has a chat with them about ithttp://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4137096 - check back later this week for a special video interview and night-vision footage from the Pitch Black gig.

9. FUTURE OF THE LEFT
Andy Falkous is a heroic ranter and amongst the former-Mclusky man's bile, there's an awful lot of sensehttp://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4137105

10. MONTH IN RECORDS... Best of May
The Field, The Horrors, St Vincent, Phoenix, Sunn0))) and Manic Street Preachers make our best of the monthhttp://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4137002

And that's not all, we have...
- Photos of the Pixies, The Horrors, The Gossip, Doves...
- Interviews with Yo La Tengo, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Speech Debelle...
- News on the reformation of Hole, Iranian punk-rock, ATP 10th Anniversary...
- Community discussions about the worst band in the UK, Little Boots album dropping from 5 to 40, last.fm, Spotify, whether Twitter is killing journalism...
...and lots lots more.

Until next week, keep on the green grass to avoid the mud

DiS xo - http://drownedinsound.com

My Sunday Times Columns - So far...

Earlier this year I started writing a regular (about every 3 weeks) column for the Sunday Times Culture. I share the My Generation column with the former Deputy Ed of NME who's now based in New York as the music director of Nylon Krissi Murison and Rebecca Nicholson, former Editor of The Lipster (RIP), who now freelancedly writes lolness 'n' greatness all over the place.

A few people (3) have asked for links to my previous columns and as the Times site doesn't seem to file them together anywhere, here are the links for the four I've done so far...

My Generation: Download your favourite bands
Confusingly the title online (which is always different to what was in the paper) says it's about downloading but it was all about cloud-computing services, like Spotify, Last.fm, etc and little how-to guide to help deal with the choice paralysis that hits when you can't think what to listen to... Read it here.

My Generation: No more heroes
A ponder on how creative geniuses have been buried by a beige wave of media-savvy wannabes... Read it here.

My Generation: Waiting for a star
Is our obsession with new music, killing music? Sort of a retort to this year's Camden Crawl and othersuch dredging for gold festivals. Starts by bigging up Steve Lamacq. Ends with love for Idlewild. Read it here.

My Generation: Digitise This...
A bit of an explanation of how and why I've decided to try to be more eco-friendly by going CD-free, and talk of alternative ways to share music like Soundcloud. Read it here.

The next one runs this Sunday (21st June 2009) and is about politics and music, and how the only revolution of the Noughties that has been 'successful' and has a fantastic soundtrack, is the technological one.

You can find all the My Generation columns here.

Statistically these are my favourite albums

Created using this http://www.associativetrails.com/stuff/normalisefm/index.cfm

Last.fm normalised rankings

A little application to rank your favourite artists and albums by an estimation of how long you have spent listening to them. The form below takes your last.fm username, gets the lists of your favourite artists or albums and estimates the time you have spent listening to each of them based on the average track length. The resulting table shows the rankings based on the estimated listening time.

drownedinsound's most played albums

	Artist	Album	Original rank	Tracks	Minutes	Difference
1.	Elliott Smith	XO	2	220	693	1
2.	Metric	Live It Out	4	178	682	2
3.	dEUS	The Ideal Crash	18	105	579	15
4.	Deftones	White Pony	10	129	563	6
5.	Panic! At the Disco	A Fever You Can't Sweat Out	8	150	500	3
6.	Elliott Smith	Figure 8	5	166	495	1
7.	Interpol	Turn on the Bright Lights	19	103	431	12
8.	Colder	Heat	43	78	426	35
9.	Broken Social Scene	Broken Social Scene	30	88	399	21
10.	The Postal Service	Give Up	34	86	384	24
11.	Broken Social Scene	You Forgot It in People	34	86	377	23
12.	The Sea and Cake	The Fawn	27	89	341	15
13.	Longpigs	The Sun Is Often Out	42	80	339	29
14.	The Associates	Singles	36	84	336	22
15.	The Kills	No Wow	46	77	336	31
16.	The Shins	Oh, Inverted World	17	109	314	1
17.	PJ Harvey	Is This Desire?	49	76	266	32
18.	Pretty Girls Make Graves	Élan Vital	46	77	261	28
19.	Q and Not U	No Kill No Beep Beep	43	78	250	24
20.	Idlewild	Hope Is Important	30	88	249	10
21.	M. Ward	Transfiguration of Vincent	43	78	224	22
22.	Justice	Justice	30	88	164	8

All of drownedinsound's top album charts: Overall | 3 Month | 6 Month | 12 Month

Drowned in Sound's stats : Jan 1st - June 1st 2009

DROWNED IN SOUND
Google Analytics Traffic Stats: January 1st - June 1st 2009

Visitors

Total visits to the site: 3,072,847 (average 607k per month)
Total unique visitors to the site: 1,359,201 (average 304k per month)
New visitors: + 7.74% (based on same period in 2008)

Pages

Total number of page views: 15,500,330
Average number of pages viewed by visitor: 5.04
Average time spent on the site: 6mins 44s

Top 10 Most Read Articles

1. DrownedinSound's Top 50 Albums of 2008
2. Review: The Horrors Primary Colours
3. Review: The Decemberists Hazards of Love
4. News: 95% of Downloads in 2008 were Illegal - DiS Reacts
5. Review: Yeah Yeah Yeahs It's Blitz!
6. Review: The Prodigy Invaders Must Die
7. Review: Gallows Grey Britain
8. DiS' Guide to Musicians on Twitter
9. DrownedinSound's 40 Songs of the First Quarter - Spotify Playlist
10. Review: Animal Collective Merriweather Post Pavillion

Top 5 Forum Threads

1. Weekend Football Thread
2. ATP The Fans Strike Back
3. Football Thread
4. I'm back from ATP and I have the worst case of the blues...
5. The Latitude Headliners

Referring Sites

1. Google
2. Wikipedia
3. Twitter
4. Facebook
5. Metacritic.

Geographically, this is where our users come from:

1.	United Kingdom	2,140,758	69.67%
2.	United States	393,903	12.82%
3.	Canada	67,508	2.20%
4.	Australia	49,458	1.61%
5.	Germany	38,763	1.26%
6.	Ireland	38,739	1.26%
7.	France	30,769	1.00%
8.	Netherlands	25,916	0.84%
9.	Spain	18,768	0.61%
10.	Sweden	17,989	0.59%

All of these numbers are from Google Analytics.

Alternatively you can view DrownedinSound.com's stats on:
Alexa: http://alexa.com/siteinfo/drownedinsound.com
Compete: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/drownedinsound.com/
Quantcast (very US skewed) http://www.quantcast.com/drownedinsound.com


Additionally, @DrownedinSound now has 6,535 followers on Twitter.

Sounds like Summer - A Spotify Playlist

SeaninSummer: http://open.spotify.com/user/seaninsound/playlist/2l6WtuBFATWS95pzwGAVkw

Phoenix – Love Like A Sunset Part I
Tarwater – Stone
The Flaming Lips – Bohemian Rhapsody - Bonus Track Dolby Digital Stereo
Gui Boratto – Beatiful Life
YACHT – The Summer Song
Radio 4 – Dance to the Underground (DFA remix)
The Rolling Stones – I'm Free - The Postal Service Remix
The Shins – Spilt Needles (alternate version)
Cut Copy – Out There on the Ice
Kylie Minogue – Can't Get You Out of My Head (Soulwax KYLUSS remix)
Nine Inch Nails – Slipping Away
Daft Punk – Robot Rock (Soulwax Remix)
The Kills – The Good Ones
Les Savy Fav – Disco Drive
Liars – Mr Your On Fire Mr
Hot Hot Heat – Talk to Me, Dance With Me
The Rapture – Heaven
Friendly Fires – Lovesick
Beck – Peaches & Cream
Queens Of The Stone Age – Better Living Through Chemistry
Panda Bear – Bro's
Grizzly Bear – Knife
LCD Soundsystem – Losing My Edge
The Magnetic Fields – The Sun Goes Down and the World Goes Dancing
The Polyphonic Spree – Section 2: It's the Sun
Panic! At the Disco – I Write Sins Not Tragedies
Beirut – Cliquot
Final Fantasy – This Is the Dream of Win & Regine
St. Vincent – The Strangers
M83 – Lower Your Eyelids to Die With the Sun
The Beatles Tribute Band – Here Comes The Sun
Violent Femmes – Blister in the Sun
The Libertines – Don't Look Back Into the Sun
Weezer – Island in the Sun
Super Furry Animals – Cardiff In The Sun
TV on the Radio – Staring at the Sun
The Offspring – Staring At The Sun
U2 – Staring at the Sun
The Seahorses – Blinded by the Sun
Smash Mouth – Walkin' on the Sun
Doves – Catch the Sun
Supergrass – Sun Hits The Sky
The Chemical Brothers – Setting Sun
The Verve – The Sun, The Sea
Fleetwood Mac – The Sun Is Shining
Mogwai – The Sun Smells Too Loud
Joe Cocker – Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me
The Be Good Tanyas – House of the Rising Sun
The Animals – House of the Rising Sun
Bob Dylan – House of the Risin' Sun
Modest Mouse – Float On
Digitalism – Kitsuné Boombox - Mixed By Jerry Bouthier