Monthly Archives: September 2005
Bittorrent record release
Seattle band Harvey Danger have decided to release their new album for free download via bittorrent (Shameless plug for Kris’s new book). I love watching how indy artists are starting to use all these new tools to take control of their own music careers. From the press release:
“In preparing to self-release our new album, we thought long and hard about how best to use the internet. Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal” file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.”
I can appreciate how scary this must be for an independent artist. From Jeff’s blog:
“So there it is. I suppose personally this ranks among the biggest gambles I’ve ever made in my life; all my savings went into the album’s production. So even if the plan fails miserably, at least I can say I put my money where my mouth is; it’s one thing to give away something that someone else (i.e. a label) paid for, and it’s another thing entirely to give away something you paid for… We’re not a bunch of fake Marxists. We’re just trying to be smart capitalists so we can sustain our lives as musicians.”
But Jeff, forget the cost associated with giving away music (you paid for) for free. Focus instead on the dollar value associated with being mentioned on Boing Boing and every corner of the internet! I would love to see some stats on how many people donate money or buy an actual CD, compared to the number of individuals who download the album. But my gut feeling is that this is a very viable way for independent artists to distribute and monetize their music. Hope the experiment works!
Thanks to Gus for pointing me to this, as well as many other interesting articles in the past.
Playlist module released
Over the last little while I’ve been working on a playlist module for Drupal. Farsheed was also working on a playlist module. So we have combined forces and now present to you the fruit of our labours: The new, improved, ass kicking playlist module.
Features include:
- support for mulitple playlist formats, including xspf, m3u, pls
- podcastable playlists
- AJAX ordering of audio tracks
- multiple ways to add an audio track to a playlist
- For the geeks in the crowd, playlists are implemented as a new node type.
Farsheed has set up a nice demo site where you can go and kick tires a bit, but you have to sign up first to create your own playlists. Enjoy!
Audioscrobbler web services
As promised, Audioscrobbler has now released their web services API. The API consists of a slew of methods to slurp data out of last.fm, but nothing to add or modify content (although I’m not sure what one could really edit on last.fm anyway). It seems a bit strange to have an option to get a text file of comma separated values being returned, but I bet some people might find it easier to parse then the XML.
There are a few other strange items: For example if you go to:
http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/cbumelle/weeklyalbumchart.xml the ‘from’ and ‘to’ fields are identical; probably not the best range to choose. Its possible to change these by playing with the query string like so: http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/cbrumelle/weeklyalbumchart.xml?from=1&to=2
This is all un-documented of course, but hey, it’s beta! What do you expect? But all in all, it looks like fun to play with. I can’t wait to see how people will remix this!
Joomla is the new Mambo
As a closure to the earlier controversy surrounding Mambo and the Mambo Foundation, a new project Joomla has been created. Although I still think they should have taken my name suggestion of “Merengue”, it’s great to see the new project off the ground and running. In particular, notice the ‘TM’ beside the Joomla logo. Lessons learned I guess…
Good luck and much success to Joomla!
PubSub site stats
I’m not sure where I’ve been, but I recently was shown the cool siteStats feature in pubsub. Apparently it’s been there for months, but I just never noticed it. Note to PubSub: more marketing! This is awesome stuff!
Micro Formats and Audio = Peanut Butter and Chocolate
Boris has an interesting post summarizing a discussion we had on micro formats and audio files. The problem is that audio found on the internet has its meta information (title, artists, album, etc..) obfuscated by the binary nature of the file. Jonathan left a comment on Boris’ post saying that it’s pretty straight forward to grab this information from the file itself. But how much easier (not to mention computationally less expensive) would it be for crawlers and bots to find audio if meta information is embedded right in the glorious page itself; no need to parse another large audio file again! I think a micro format that is a one-to-one representation of ID3 meta information will be quite useful.
I think it’s also important to point out that I’m not saying this is the only way this information should be stored and retrieved. The audio module (shameless plug) I have just released for Drupal stores all of it’s meta information in a database and will soon be query-able via a web service, but I also think it would be great if this rich meta information was available right in the XHTML.
There is some good preliminary information on the micro format wiki, and in related news Lucas Gonze has also recently been talking about a playlist micro format based on XSPF.
I think audio meta information is one of the most compelling use cases for micro formats yet, and I look forward to more discussion on this!
Bumbershoot highlights
The Decemberists were my favorite band of the festival. Their epic (and sometimes grandiose) music translated perfectly to the big stage. I also enjoyed the Be Good Tanyas set, especially the rhythm section of Mark Beaty and John Raham.
Other highlights include the Waybacks, and David Bazan and TW Walsh from Pedro the Lion performing with their side project the headphones.
Despite some rain on Sunday afternoon Bumbershoot was, as always, superb.
AJAX side effects
I’ve been busy adding some AJAX code to a new album/playlist module for Drupal. Since this is the first time I have really worked with the XMLHttpRequest stuff, I was surprised at how adding these calls actually made my code a bit cleaner. I felt like I was really able to base my code on the actions my module was going to perform, and as a bonus, I basically have a RESTful interface to my module as well! I don’t know why I never really thought about it, but someone would have to work actively to not let AJAX-ing some code open up a web service. You’ve got to like it when technology that is chosen (primarily) for user interface reasons, comes bundled with a few nice architectural bonuses.
It seems like as AJAX adoption continues, we should see a corresponding increase in RESTful web services being offered.
Bandnews: Track your favorite bands
Just got a ping from Nader Cserny about the bandnews.org site. All in all, I’m impressed. The idea is that most band websites do not push out RSS feeds (all though I’m trying to change that!), so the smart folks at bandnews.org wrote a bot to crawl band pages and publish RSS feeds for those artists’ sites. At bandnews, after creating an account, you can add a number of artists to your profile (a ‘watchlist’ of sorts), and then receive a combined RSS feed for those artists. They even have a little desktop client (windows only it seems) that pops up alerts as they come in.
I do have a few quips and suggestions though…
- With pubsub, technorati, google news alerts, RSS readers etc., it seems like a lot of this could be done with existing tools, albeit without the flair and ajax goodness of the bandnews site.
- The RSS feed that is generated is headline only, and I would find this much more useful if it contained the full article in question.
Final thoughts:
I think this is a really good start, but what I would like to see is user interaction. Bandnews is an aggregator of interesting musical content, now lets see a community (built with Drupal of course!) around it. I want to see what bands other users are watching. I want to see which other users are watching the same bands I am. I want to know what the most watched bands are. I want to see tagging for bands. Boris and myself have often talked about how cool it would be to see a ‘43bands’ (in the style of 43things and 43places). Bandnews is pretty slick the way it is, but by adding some more community features, I think bandnews could become something really great.