Monthly Archives: March 2008
Live Nation: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
Live Nation just signed a 12 year deal with U2 , as the group walks away from Universal Music. This is hot on the heals of Madonna’s defection from Warner Bros. last year, which saw her sign a 10 year deal with Live Nation, worth $120 million.
As CD’s are on their way (quickly) to cultural irrelevance, Live Nation is on a tear signing up artists for deals linked to merchandising and tour dollars - one of the areas in the music industry that is experiencing growth (live nation revenues grew 12.8% last year).
In even bigger news, top grossing touring act The Rolling Stones are rumored to be in discussions with Live Nation. The Stones contract with EMI comes up for renewal this summer.
Slightly unsettling is the emergence of a new monopolistic gate keeper in the Music Industry. Nothing new, of course…
Update: Jay-Z just signed up with Live Nation too, for $150 million!
Quote:
“I’ve turned into the Rolling Stones of hip hop.”
Nice…
Hilarious interview with Keith Richards
GQ has a must read interview with Keith Richards. It’s amazing the man is alive and still (reasonably) coherent.
Standout quote:
Keith: Apparently, I do have an incredible immune system. I had hepatitis C and cured it by myself.
Q: How?
Keith: Just by being me.
Music blogs made easy
I ran into this very cool post from Joe Lazarus, in which he describes the steps to link last.fm, Pipes, the Yahoo! Media Player and Tumblr together to make your own music site in 10 minutes.
If you follow the clear and straight forward instructions in his example, what you end up with is an automated way to post mp3s to your music blog, based on what you’re playing on your local computer. With the inclusion of the Yahoo Media player on the page, it’s easy to listen to the whole lot through a browser. Pretty neat, for 10 minutes of work!
It’s genius is how it turns the (mostly) passive activity of listening to music into a content creating endeavor (albeit, an automated endeavor). The newest version of the Yahoo player even has a ‘buy’ button, that lets you link in your own Amazon affiliate code. On the Yahoo! Media Player wiki, Lucas Gonze points out:
What’s interesting about this button is that it automates a crucial but neglected part of the ecosystem for net media. Monetization shouldn’t be a manual operation. Music bloggers, for example, usually have a little blurb in their sidebar encouraging visitors to buy recordings associated with the songs they post. They do this out of a kind of musical environmentalism concerned with ensuring a flow of recordings to discover, keep, love, and post. However, it’s a lot of labor for a blogger to set up a purchase link for every track. An upsell link needs to be part of their infrastructure along with comments, RSS, and other basics. With this feature we’re making purchase flows a standard part of the tools for web media.
So every time someone buys a track after listening to it on my Tumblr blog, I get something like a nice shiny nickle. In theory, this means one could get paid to listen to music - truly my dream job. All I need is more traffic, and better taste in music ;)
Thanks Joe!
Check out the end result (still in desperate need of some themeing)
http://music.mixedcontent.com/
SXSW Wrap Up
I just got back from my third trip to SXSW and all I can say is what a blast. The mix of Spring Break, BBQ, Rock’n'roll and geek fest seems to agree with me. It was great to catch up with old friends and colleagues like the crew formally known as Bryght, as well as meet a few new folks.
Highlights included:
- Eating BBQ at IronWorks, where the central ornamentation on the table is a large roll of super absorbent paper towel, and the “kids portion” of tasty ribs is just about right for me.
- Seeing Moby and Lou Reed play “Walk on the Wild Side”, with back up choir doing the “Do, da do, da doo’s” to a small crowd. Did I mention there were free drinks?
- Finding out that rock band is the new twitter, and that Dopplr will be the next RockBand.
- Hacking away on Rilli
- Learning all about FireEagle from Tom Coates himself. Very excited to integrate this into Rilli.
- Listening to great panels, like the one on “Building Portable Social Networks” which focused on how OpenID, microformats and OAuth will let us build open, user-controlled networks. Jeremy Keith was sharp on the mike too - wish I could find a video of it. The other participants - Chris Messina, Leslie Chicoine, Joseph Smarr, and David Recordon - were no slouches either. It’s great that (finally) the pieces are coming together, and that ‘we’ (as users) are poised to be in a position of control, rather then servants to the services we use. After all, they’re *my* friends, not Facebooks, for example. This talk, more then any other at SXSW, made me feel as though the original principals behind the creation of the early internet (interoperability, open access, etc) are still alive and well.
Can’t wait for next year… I’ll certainly be back. And maybe with a mobile version of my gig guide.
Introducing: SXSW Gig Guide
With around 1600 bands playing at SXSW, planning your time is critical. With the inevitable slipping of gig schedules, knowing who else is playing at a given venue is really important, and so I threw together this tool to help myself plan my evenings entertainment. You might also find it helpful:
I screen scraped the SXSW site, plotted the venue data on a map and then scrapped artist MP3s from the SXSW site, and hooked those into the new Yahoo Media Player. The end result is you can click on a venue marker, and then listen to the bands that are playing there that evening.
It was also interesting in how long each part of this app took to build:
- Using Ruby and the totally awesome hpricot HTML parser to write the screen scraper to grab HTML from sxsw.com and convert data to JSON - 20 minutes
- Writing the JS to show the JSON data on the map - 1 hour
- Fussing with CSS and HTML layout (which is still broken!) - 3+ hours!
Moral of the story - Either learn more CSS, or surround myself with talented developers and designers so I don’t have to. I’m inclined to do the later…
Next up is to incorporate this data into Rilli so it’s possible to build your own calendar and see where your friends are going.
Thanks to Jeremy Keith for inspiration, and Mike Purvis for some Map code.
UPDATE: Now working in IE7. Thanks to Lucas for the bug report.
UPDATE 2: A few folks have asked for the data I’ve scraped from the SXSW site. The (huge) JSON file can be found here. Go nuts…
URLs are people too
Hot on the heals of my recent post talking about how the URL will be the next MP3, we had an interesting discussion at Rilli about what information we should put on our new business cards. In the end, we made a somewhat bold move and left off email and other contact details in favor of a simple URL. Why? Well, because we don’t really want to get more email. In many ways, email is where ideas go to die, as my friend Boris Mann famously says. A URL (marked up with microformat goodness) will point people to additional ways to get more information themselves, or to contact us through alternate means. It feels a little like Apple leaving off the CD player on their original iMacs, but I think it’s a neat idea. Email is sort of broken, and this seems like it will work well…
You can check my new card here or the entire teams
A chat with Spotify, and how the URL is the next MP3
At this weeks San Fran Music and Technology conference, Rob Lord made a great point when he said “I can’t believe the MP3 is the new MP3“. It is kind of surprising that the latest format to be getting all the buzz is simply a MP3 devoid of DRM. I mean, isn’t it time to move on already? This morning, I had a chance to sit down with the fine folks from Spotify, and if they have their way, the URL may be the next MP3.
URL’s are a really powerful concept, and I’m going to make the bold claim that if something is not addressable with a URL, it might as well not exist. To this end, Spotify have rolled out a cool feature where one can now link to a specific point in time in a song. This link for example, points to Jimi Hendrix’s solo in Little Wing (but you have to have the Spotify beta client installed for it to work). I believe that it’s currently only possible to point to a particular starting time in a track, but once you are also able to specify a duration for the url, this will be golden. Some work could go in to making the URL’s look nicer to humans, but the hard part is certainly done. When Thomas Edison released the first phonograph player in 1877, he proclaimed that it possessed the ability to annihilate the significance of time and space. Now 125 years later, it’s the URL’s turn…
I also heard about how Spotify is in the process of building a brand new metadata store. They have licensed information from familiar places like Gracenote, AMG and MusicBrainz as well as added in some of their own data including song recommendations and indexing of song lyrics. Apparently, they even have detailed metadata about the individual musicians performing on a given track, so one could find all the songs where Eric Clapton plays guitar, but does not sing, for example. If this isn’t cool enough, the even bigger deal is that they’re releasing it through an open API. For free…
Now imagine combing all this music RDF data with other distributed data stores. One could write a SPARQL query that looks up artists who have released albums before 1970, that then references Upcoming.org (or another new event site) to see which of those artists are now on tour. Or… as a musician, I could write a query to check a list of my musician friends, marked up in FOAF on my blog, and alert me if any of my friends have a new album.
Keep in mind that this is all supposed to be paid for by advertising, so keep clicking on those ads everyone, because I want at this API…
Thanks again to Daniel and Niklas from Spotify for the morning chat!