Posts filed under: Technology
Gracenote / Yahoo partner for lyrics
Came across this article which describes a Yahoo/Gracenote partnership to offer an online lyrics service. The article is pretty flimsy on details, but I’m still excited.
Showing his wry sense of humour, Ian Rogers, General Manager of Yahoo said:
“Finally, a free, legal and definitive way to settle a bet with the guy sitting next to you at the bar who is certain the Ramones’ most famous anthem declares, ‘I wanna piece of bacon’”
I just hope there’s an open API of course, so we can generate awesome thematic playlists. Just imagine some of the neat queries you could add to playlist generating tools like MusicIP or Pandora - “Give me 10 songs about lost love regained”. Or if it’s a cold night out, you could generate a playlist based on the concept of “fire” (and related terms like warmth). It’s a gold mine waiting to be tapped!
This might be old news to some people, but now the rest of us can play ;)
Record labels as VC firms
Interesting story in Fortune magazine that describes how labels could act more like VC firms, taking a cut of artists touring, and merchandise - rather then just a portion of their record sales. This is the model Nettwerk Records has been using successfully for years. Label as VC firm - Artists as brand.
Instead of running a business that revolves around contracting with an artist to distribute recorded music in its various forms — CDs, digital files, whatever it may be — what if labels behaved as though they were venture capital firms, in which entrepreneurs, or artists, in this case, tap in to their patron’s deep pockets and expertise to exploit all areas of the business? That’s the idea behind merging record companies with artist management firms — and it looks like the theory will be soon put into practice on a very large scale.
The most interesting ramifications about this tweak to the business model is the alignment of common goals between artist and label. Tour revenue is up over 16 percent last year (to a record $3.6 billion), and I think this is a result of our unprecedented access to inexpensive (or free) music. If labels were to get a piece of touring revenue, they would surely complain less about file sharing, and we might start seeing more innovative music services take hold.
More on Internet Radio from SXSW
Here at SXSW, there’s much interesting discussion on the current rate increase for internet broadcasters that will see SomaFM’s rates (for example) rise from about $20,000 to over $600,000 for 2006, and will top 4 million in 2007.
So how did we get here?
The new rate increase is based on a “willing buyer/willing seller” strategy, where the royalty rate is set on what a willing buyer and seller would both hypothetically agree to in an open marketplace. There are many issues with such a scheme, but the best came up in a discussion with Rusty Hodge, founder of SomaFM.
His (tongue in cheek) point of view was since labels (rights holders) have been convicted of massive payola scandals in recent years, where the labels pay radio stations millions of dollars to hammer out a song until it’s a hit, the “willing buyer/willing seller” have in essence reached a negative price. Payola, shows that the major labels are willing to pay massive amounts of money in exchange for air time, and therefore, the rights holder should be paying internet broadcasters to *play* their music, rather then the other way around.
He was mostly joking, but I think it’s an interesting point.
More from SXSW to follow.
SXSW music recommendation panel accepted
I’m pleased to announce that my panel at this years SXSW Interactive was accepted. Yeah! This is one of my favorite conferences all year, and I’m looking forward to getting the opportunity to expose more folks to the cool new music recommendation services out there.
Look for more details about panel speakers to emerge as things are confirmed, and a big thanks to everyone who voted for the panel!
Back from Brussels
So I’m back in San Francisco after returning from Brussels and one insane week packed with conferences. (EuroOSCON, GovCamp, DrupalCon, and BarCampBrussels). I’m exhausted, but buzzing with excitement. There are just too many people doing interesting things in this world.
Next up: San Fran Drupaler’s should unite and throw something serious down at the upcoming Yahoo! Hack Day. I’d like to go, so if there are other Drupal heads in attendance, I’d love to work on any kind of hack involving Drupal, Yahoo! maps, upcoming.org concert data, and last.fm. Send me a shout if you’re interested!
MySpace now selling music
Nice write up about the snocap/myspace deal, where the former will now be selling music through the later.
There are already a few companies (like projectopus.com) that let musicians do this, but this is the first ‘official’ method.
Standout quote from the article comes from the always intelligent Terry McBride:
“We have a strong belief the next major retailer in music is the consumer themselves,” McBride said. “This is a step in the right direction.”
Amen.
Secondlife as concert venue
I love the trend towards virtual concert venues. Might still be a bit more of a PR move then an actual money maker right now (all though good PR does equal money), but you can bet that in the future, this kind of stuff will be common place, and a cash generator.
Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes says:
“We are hoping to give the crowd that come to the virtual concert a real immersive experience, so they can interact with us and react while we are stage. New technologies, such as Second Life, will become an enormous part of the music industry in the future.”
Amen.
Coming Zune…
Everyone is curious about the new microsoft player/online service known as Zune. Engadget has some speculation, but John Gruber sums it up succinctly with style and wit to spare.
The most shocking thing about all of this is that the new microsoft player and online store does not support microsoft’s own ‘plays for sure’ technology that napster and other onlines services use. ‘Plays for sure?’… How about ‘might play, but don’t hold your breath’ or the less verbose ‘cross your fingers!’
I do have to admit it though, I think the ‘comingzune.com‘ corporate site has a great URL…
UPDATE: Microsoft employee Sean Alexander discusses the ‘Plays for sure’ angle…
The future of album art
In this day and age of mp3 supremacy, I feel something missing from the experience of listening to music. I don’t want to sound like an old man here, but I get a feeling of satisfaction looking at my vinyl jazz collection that just isn’t replicated by seeing all my mp3’s sitting in a directory on my hardrive.
To address this problem, the XIPF group was created.
From the mailing list:
“The focus of this group is to discuss and begin to define an XIPF - Extensible Interactive Packaging Format. How do we add value to digital media by creating a standard packaging around it. What’s the digital version of the standard CD jacket?”
Recently, Lucas Gonze proposed an interesting idea of using XHTML as a packaging container. I had been thinking all along of XIPF just being a zipped or compressed folder containing resources (audio, images, etc…) and an xml manifest file that described the contents of the package. But by putting everything into a single XML (XHTML) document, including binary data for resources like images and audio, you get a single page mini app. Which I think is a really cool idea. As Lucas points out, it’s kind of like tidlywiki for audio.
The advantages of this approach are near ubiquitous adoption (what device or application can’t read XHTML), high ‘tinker’ factor (people will LOVE to build JS players, experiment with microformats for parsing, etc…), and portability (a single file is really nice).
There are some good reasons why munging binary data into an XML document is not a good idea, and there are some browser issues that need to be resolved with IE, but I think this could be great. Maybe this single XHTML audio file should be contained inside of a more traditional package?