Billboard.com sets 51 years of music charts free! ...sorta.

As the old saying (kinda) goes, “If you love something, set it free. If there’s enough advertising revenue to sustain it, it’ll love you back.” Billboard.com, the originator of the music industry behemoth which is the Hot 100 and Billboard 200 charts, has got-with-the-program and is now offering free access to its complete archive of charts, reports PaidContent.org.

Billboard is betting that its chart archives, free streaming/paid download music from Lala.com and ticketing integration with Ticketmaster will be a big enough draw to keep advertising revenue high. Personally, I doubt it.

First: you’ve got to be global to succeed and Billboard has ignored its substantial global audience and brand by signing up partner services that are geographically restricted to the US domestic marketplace.

Second: to leverage the power and the brand of the Billboard Hot 100 and extend them across the broader interweb, we need to see those rich data archives addressable through an API. Billboard has to get more open and more free, or I predict it will soon drop off its own charts.

Prince’s interactive chart history on Billboard.com. Pretty, and you can link to it or embed it, but you can’t infer anything from it in Excel.

Discovering new music: public libraries

If you’re like me, the problem is not finding money to buy great music, it’s finding great music in amongst all the chaff and crud shoved out there by the majors.

Radio? TV? With very few exceptions, forget about it — way too much noise-to-signal. Magazines? Maybe, if you can recall the name of the artist, album and track next time you’re buying music. Podcasts and blogs? Certainly, but that’s all a bit obvious, innit?

I have lots of other ways to find new music I’ll love, some of which I now realise is not commonly used by other music fans. So over the course of a few blog posts I’ll try to jot down some suggestions for great ways to find good music. Here’s a cracker: walk into a public library with your laptop and look for shared iTunes libraries:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

See, these days, public libraries are full of cool people with laptops seeking a comfy chair, free wifi, a power outlet and sometimes if you’re really lucky, great coffee. The Wellington, NZ city public library where I’m writing this is great source for all of the above.

It’s an under-utilised feature many iTunes users don’t know about, but you can choose to share your iTunes music library with other users on your LAN, and you can also browse and play the shared libraries of other iTunes users.

Coworking spaces and large companies with flexible IT policies can also be good locations.

You can’t copy or rate the songs on someone’s shared iTunes library, but really, considering the relationship the music industry has to copyright law, it’s a small miracle they allowed Apple to even let us play each other’s music.

So here I am in Wellington and somebody’s sharing a library containing a big back catalogue of Kiwi native Dave Dobbyn’s music. Since discovering him on the soundtrack to the NZ film Footrot Flats years ago I’ve been meaning to get some more of his music. It’s great diverse, interesting and thoughtful music, with some similarities to Elvis Costello and Neil Finn and you could do worse than come away from your NZ visit with a few choice tracks of his, Bro, eh?