Monthly Archives: November 2005
Quarter of a million dollars
I read a good post at this fantastic blog today:
Analyst Gene Munster predicts that in 5 years Apple will be shipping 1 terabyte iPods for $500 each. That means I’ll be able to carry around a quarter-million songs in my pocket. At the current iTunes rate of $.99 per song thats about a quarter million dollars worth of music.
Something tells me that business models will have to change before this happens! Either that, or wages will have to undergo a serious increase. Hilarious!
The recording industry is not the music industry.
Recently, I’ve been doing some thinking about how our relationship with music might change in the coming years. After reading the book “The Future of Music” (which any self respecting music geek should read), one thing has become clear. While the mainstream ‘recording industry’ is looking like it’s pretty screwed, the ‘music industry’ has never been better.
This is a very different story then the major labels would have you believe, but at no time in history has there been such a large and active community of music listeners. I think the fact that a large amount of music that is listened to is acquired for free (through bittorrent or other means) is largely irrelevant. New business models will emerge. Artists will make money. Music, as always, will be created.
Making a distinction between the ‘recording industry’, and the more general ‘music industry’ is a crucial when looking at the hype and statistics floating around.
iTunes + Flock = Songbird
Songbird is an iTunes-ish music player built on top of the mozilla framework (much like that new browser everyone is talking about).
I really want to like this product. I think having an ‘internet aware’ music player could be a great thing. Sure iTunes can play streams and receive podcasts, but I like the idea of browsing a music blog, and pressing a button to listen to all the audio tracks contained on the page. Maybe even saving all the tracks in a playlist for later. I would love to see this integrated with music services like webjay, last.fm and odeo, (much like Flock integrated with Flickr and del.icio.us) and technically, it would probably be pretty easy.
If nothing else, I think this shows how the combination of open frameworks and open api’s can drastically lower the barrier of entry for new products. Have a good idea? Just take a little of this framework, a dab of web services, stir, and instant business 2.0!
Playing Music Can Be Good For Your Brain
Stanford University research has found for the first time that musical training improves how the brain processes the spoken word, a finding that researchers say could lead to improving the reading ability of children who have dyslexia and other reading problems.
The real story of Sony DRM
There has been much discussion about how Sony’s DRM (digital rights management) software installs a rootkit/malware/virus on your computer in order to enforce their copyright. While the mainstream media has pickup this story up, renowned computer security guru Bruce Schneier fills in the technical gaps and offers some poignant insight into this debacle.
Of particular note here, is that Sony’s piece of malicious code has infected over 500,000 computers, putting this ‘epidemic’ on par with virus like Blaster, Slammer, Code Red and Nimda. Somehow I don’t think the feds will come knocking on Sony’s door though. Where is the justice!
Google Analytics
Google is now offering a web stats tracking and reporting tool. In fact, I just added google analytics to this very site. At first glance, it looks quite impressive, and is full of useful stats that could help you tune your site to attract and hold more visitors. Web stats that are actually useful presented in a clean interface? It’s not a new idea, but it’s hard to pull off. I’ve been using mapstats for a while, and measure map and mint look nice as well, but this offering from google seems like it might be the best. We’ll see how it works out, but in the mean time, hit those pages so I have some real data to look at!
Complexity Theory and Old Macdonald?
I just came across this fantastic (and humorous) paper by Donald Knuth, where he analyzes the complexity of popular songs throughout history, noting the trend toward simpler and simpler songs.
I think he has correctly identified at least one of the main factors for this trend as well:
Not mentioned in the article is the space complexity of John Cages masterpiece 4’33”, which is left as an exercise for the astute reader.
Echonest (coming soon…)
I recently found out about echonest. Don’t bother clicking. There’s nothing really there yet. But both founders Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan seem to be up to neat things. A good article in the globe and mail gives some background on their new start up.
In a nutshell, the two have been developing software that listens to music and tries to predict which songs will be ‘hits’. Unlike some other services that concentrate only on the physical properties of music (rhythm, pitch, timbre, etc.) their software also scours chat room, discussion forums, blogs, and anywhere else music is discussed in order to glean pertinent information. This is a great idea, because (as I’ve said before) music depends on the social context in which it is created.
In the past, I was thinking about using a similar approach for stock market prediction. I thought it would be a good idea to combine a strong statistical analysis of stock data (using HMM’s and NLP techniques) with some real-time data collected by bots searching internet discussion forums, news releases, SEC filings, etc. I think this would work because stock prices are in a nice feedback loop with all this online data (Both influence each other). To ignore all this great socially relevant information about stock prices, and to focus just on the ‘numbers’, is akin to operating with huge blinders on. But I digress…
In any event, I look forward to seeing what echonest comes up with!
Pandora now offering free version
Pandora (the neat music recommendation service I have talked about before), has just announced they are offering a free version of their service. Their free version will incorporate advertising, but hey, it’s free! And you can always upgrade your account to get rid of those pesky ads.
They also have announced a slew of new features, including bookmarking, station editing, playlist improvements, and more. This sounds great! Nice work!
Good for a laugh
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