There’s no hiding it anymore – winter’s here. The sunshine has packed up and gone down south, and summer’s long gone.

We’ve got another 7 months until 2010’s festival season gets truly underway, so what can you do to pass the time until the next time you can watch the sun rise over the stone circle, or wake up next to someone not remembering their name, let alone your own? Well, we’d suggest that you give Sony’s Fantasy Festival a go.

Unfortunately it doesn’t involve getting your wellies muddy, or having too much warm beer than is probably healthy,  but it does offer you the chance to make your own fantasy festival lineup, and possibly win prizes along the way. How? Using the rather large amount of data that those nice guys at last.fm have amassed, you assemble your ultimate, imaginary festival line-up and gain as many points as possible through your acts’ popularity in the real world (calculated by activity online – blog posts, twitter mentions, last.fm plays etc).

Bands are given “buzz points” every Wednesday, and the person who creates the highest value Festival will be presented with four “money can’t buy” tickets (including VIP accommodation, flights and spending money) to one of Europe’s best festivals next summer. Alongside this, there are other prizes up for grabs in weekly draws. If you choose a band that is relatively unknown now, but starts to generate buzz over the next few months, we will give you kudos points in the main competition.

I’ve created a There Goes The Fear fantasy festival – a nice mixture of bands I love and are already huge, as well as a league for you to compete against us – it’s called, rather unimaginately, “TGTF”. Join that and pit your festival against ours – who knows, if you’re ahead of the crowd and spot the next Killers, you could well beat us!

A new year, and hopefully an even more successful year than 2008 was for TGTF. We spent New Years in London catching the fireworks on the Embankment. Amazing times, and was quietly amazed to see two of my favourite new bands, Passion Pit and Chairlift making the mix by the DJs (okay, the second isn’t quite as new, but new to us!)

MP3: Passion Pit – Sleepyhead
MP3: Chairlift – Bruises

However, as much as we love Bon Iver’s Skinny Love, we think it hardly fits the profile of party music – still, that’s my only rant. We were like kids in a chocolate factory with the likes of Friendly Fires, Blur, Oasis, Passion Pit, Justice, Simian Mobile Disco and more all were mixed together… heaven!

One of the side affects of me cavorting off to London was that we forgot to close the survey for 2008 on time. So, it’s been open for an extra day, apologies for that. Anyone would have thought we’re the BBC running competitions.

We’ve just started going through the 85 responses, with some interesting points coming up – it seems most people dislike the colour scheme, so we need to brighten that up. You all seem to like the new bands stuff and ticket alerts, so we’ll keep them going for sure! The two £10 iTunes vouchers went to Andy and Lauren, so sorry to the others who weren’t as fortunate – we’re hoping to be able to offer some new giveaways later this month, so keep your eyes peeled.

In other news, Stephen Long (pictured top right, who we introduced here) got in touch to offer us a free download of song “Passport Photographs”, which is below. Expect us to keep you up to date with his forthcoming EP, “Songs To Suit Your Mood” in coming weeks.

MP3: Stephen Long – Passport Photographs

We were introduced to Marina and the Diamonds (pictured top) over the break, and fell in love with her sound. She’s a bit of a crazy one – a combination of Greek and Welsh who spends her time between songwriting, hand-creating merchandise and selling vintage clothing.The Guardian said she has a “seriously warped mind in the body of a fox”, and her sound is rather unique – she takes on piano ballads, synth heavy bass lines, brass, bird calls, chanting and ooohs and ahhs in varying vocal ranges. Think Imogen Heap meet Bjork with a hint of a few other artists I can’t think of right now. Have a listen and let us know what you think.

As you can probably guess, we spent much of the holidays (yes, it’s an American phrase, but it fits well for those who aren’t big Christmas / NY fans!) finding new music, and catching up on stuff we may have missed in 2008. We also stumbled across We7, a great service that seems to be like on-demand radio – choose what song / album / artist you want to listen to, and it plays them, peppered with advertisements. They were ad-free for a bit of the Christmas break, and offer a great chance to have a “taster” of an album you like or re-hear a song you love. We love last.fm, but much of the music on the site only has 30 second snippets, which is a shame. Check it out and enjoy.

last.fm is just my favourite sort of company. It’s a new-ish, young, hip technology company that uses social networking to find new music for people. Just about all my favourite topics. (Yes, how geeky, I know!)

I’ve been using last.fm since December 2003, making me distinctly older hat than a lot of members. For an explanation of the site, Wikipedia is our biggest help to explain it simply:

“Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations or on the user’s own computer or iPod. This information is transferred to Last.fm’s database (“Scrobbled”) via a plugin installed into the users’ music player. The profile data is displayed on a personal web page.”

Since their early start back in 2002, the folks behind Audioscrobbler (the technical backend) and last.fm (the pretty, social networking front end) have worked tirelessly (even camping out on the roof of their offices when money was so low that they couldn’t afford accommodation). They only completely merged in 2005, and their growing popularity often caused database overloads, with close to 10 million tracks being “scrobbled” each day.

Their original roots had the site as a simple way to show your listening tastes on screen, and use the last.fm radio to listen to new bands their recommendation engine believed that you’d like. Since merging the two sites both the forward-looking social networking crowd and the geeky graph lovers have praised their innovative site.

This year they’ve gone from strength to strength, thanks in part to the explosive growth of social networking sites like Myspace and facebook (their facebook widget is one of the most popular new facebook applications). The mainstream British press has (in part) jumped on board, with the Guardian heralding it as one of the top 10 UK dotcoms to watch. Big agreements with the likes of Sony BMG that are mutually beneficial have helped grow the site, and finally their sale to US conglomerate CBS has meant that they’re right up there with the main web 2.0 players.

Thanks to staying true to their roots (the founders have committed to keeping their multi-nationality workforce in London for the future), and maintaining their sense of humour (their staff page makes for some amusing reading. Notice The Hoff at the bottom…). last.fm is one of my favourite companies of recent years – granted, they haven’t got the ethics commitments of Howies or Innocent, but they are pioneers in their area, and completely unique.

For more reading, there’s an interview with the founders over at Media Guardian.