Posts filed under: Music
If bands were operating systems
After the recent news regarding Metallica’s prima dona behavior, where they’ve forced bloggers to remove (positive) reviews of their new album, I’ve drafted the following chart to help my fellow geeks understand the lay of the land.
Metallica == Microsoft (closed, proprietary systems, active disdain for customers)
Radiohead == Apple (just works, listens to customers)
Trent Reznor == Linux (totally hackable, but can be tricky to configure)
Pandora takes on the desktop
Pandora has just released a new (Adobe AIR based) desktop client, and it’s pretty cool. Congrats to Tom and the rest of the team!
We’ve always wanted to find a simple way to deliver Pandora as a desktop application — it’s probably been on our to do list longer than any single feature. Today we’re dipping our toe into those waters for the first time with the release of a Beta version of Pandora Desktop.
The Whitburn Project: 25 megs of OCD
Andy Baio has two great posts analyzing the Whitburn Project that will have all music data junkies salivating.
One hit wonders and pop longevity
The Whitburn Project
What is the Whitburn Project? From Andy:
For the last ten years, obsessive record collectors in Usenet have been working on the Whitburn Project — a huge undertaking to preserve and share high-quality recordings of every popular song since the 1890s. To assist their efforts, they’ve created a spreadsheet of 37,000 songs and 112 columns of raw data, including each song’s duration, beats-per-minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart position. It’s 25 megs of OCD, and it’s awesome.
Hypebot’s “Top 10 Issues Facing Music 2.0″
On Hypebot’s blog, there is an interesting post entitled “Top 10 Issues Facing Music 2.0″. Ethan Kaplan astutely observes that these are not so much ‘issues’, but rather a laundry list of virtually untapped possibilities.
Of particular interest to me is “issue number 11“, as is suggested in the comments section of the post: Patronage.
Music patronage is an idea that I’ve been thinking quite a lot about for a number of years, and perhaps its time is coming. There’s certainly a few startups taking a crowdfunding or micro-financing approach to creating music: Sell A Band, Artist Share, and the slightly mysterious, stealth project from Throwing Muses singer, CASH Music, to name a few. An informative round up on these, and other similar services can be found in this great post by Peter Spellman.
As a tangent, I can’t help but contrast historical music patronage (wealthy lords and land owners in a Feudal society hiring court musicians), with modern day licensing deals (Britteny Spears singing for Pepsi). Many individuals have suggested an analogy between the Corporation and the Feudal Estate. Perhaps then, massive, contemporary music licensing deals are simply the inflated version of a very old practice.
SF Music Tech Summit wrap up
The latest SF Music Tech Summit was a total success. Great people, interesting panels, fantastic hallway conversation and free (as in beer) wine. What more could one want?
The panel I moderated was great fun, and we looked at all sorts of technical issues one faces when developing a “music2.0″ site. Tom Conrad had all kinds of great stories about scaling Pandora. Shaun Haber from Warner Bros. did an admirable job filling in for Ethan Kaplan , earning him the dubious nick name “Virtual Ethan”. In the audience, personal hero Derek Sivers told the story of his journey from php to rails, and back again. Paul Lamere took some notes as well, for those interested. All in all, very enjoyable time spent.
There were many great comments floating around throughout the day, but a one that stuck out in my mind was Michael Petricone stating that:
“IP is like chocolate cake. A little can be good, but too much… look out.”
I’ve also been thinking about Tim Westergren from Pandora who suggests that every four piece rock band should get a 5th member whose primary role is to act as blogger, videographer, and online marketing ace, working all the social media sites. Truly good advice, in my opinion.
Corey Denis had an interesting panel on the new music economy, in which part of the panel was devoted to coming up with a new wikipedia entry for the term “new music economy”. Nothing like some panel participation to get things going.
I also had a few good conversations about Microsoft’s “Plays For Sure” fiasco with conference attendees, but the best description of the whole ugly mess is written by Mark Pilgram in a post entitled “the day the music died“. It’s a spectacular story of a truly epic fail. There’s many lessons in there - of what *not* to do.
Thanks Brian! Looking forward to next time.
SF Music Tech Summit tomorrow
Just a reminder to everyone in the bay area that the second SF Music Tech Summit, hosted by the talented Brian Zisk is taking place tomorrow, May 8th at the Kabuki Hotel.
I have the pleasure to moderate a “tech talk” panel at 1:00pm on building music related web apps with:
- Tom Conrad - Pandora
- Marc Urbaitel - In Ticketing
- Ethan Kaplan - Warner Bros.
- Jack Moffitt - Chesspark / Xiph
- Jeremy Riney - Playlist.com
Lessons learned from last SF Music Summit: Easy on the soju cocktails…
Should be a blast, and I hope to see you all there.
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/