Posts filed under: Technology
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…
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!
SanFran Music Tech Summit
I had a fantastic time today at the San Fran Music Tech Summit, catching up with old friends and finally putting a voice and face to some of those blogs I read. Congratulations to Brian Zisk for putting on a truly great event. It’s not every day one gets to discuss such heady topics as playlist formats, media packaging, and open API’s for music recommendations, all while drinking soju cocktails.
I also (deservedly) received some flack for not blogging for a long time. That is changing now ;)
See you all at sxsw!
On DeepRockDrive and brave new business models
Around the end of last year, a site I had the pleasure of working on for almost a year and half went live. It’s called DeepRockDrive, and in a nutshell, it serves as both an online community, and a platform, for fans of live music.
Here’s how DeepRockDrive works
It starts off with a fan going to the site and creating a “petition” to get their favorite artist to perform on DeepRockDrive. They can then take this digital petition and embed it on myspace, facebook, their blog, etc…, the goal being to get as many people as possible vote on this petition. Once a petition gets over 1000 votes, DeepRockDrive will contact the artists management and book the band for an in studio performance at DeepRockDrives headquarters in Las Vegas. Fans pay $6.99 to watch the show live in quality HD video, and the money is split 50/50 with the artist. You can find out more about the site here.
One interesting aspect about crowd sourcing the “concert promoter” role of the site, is that DRD is able to mitigate the risk typically associated with booking an artist at a traditional venue. Since DRD is able to (almost) perfectly match supply to demand there’s minimal exposure to some of the large gambles that concert promoters face.
We also thought long and hard about the user experience of attending the actual show itself. One of the greatest things about live music is the cycles of feedback that exist between an artist and audience. A (good) artist is constantly gauging the audience and incorporating this information back into their performance, and while this is tricky to recreate in an online environment, we’ve certainly given it our best. For example, when you go to a show on DeepRockDrive, you can blast messages out to the band, which are displayed on huge monitors in the studio. Often at DRD shows, artists will reference messages that have been sent, responding to viewers comments. Fans can also vote on the artists set list (the digital equivalent of shouting out “Freebird” at a show) - and my favorite - A fan is able to show their appreciation for an artist by hammering their space bar on their computer, sending a ‘digital applause’ needle moving in the studio. One can also choose between 1 of 5 HD camera angles to watch at any given time. Perhaps if you play drums, you might be inclined to view the overhead cam of the drummer, in order to pick up a few tips.
I remember Danny, one of the founders, explaining that if the experience at any point felt like watching a clip on youtube, we will have failed. This is designed to be “lean forward” entertainment, rather then sit back, and while there is still room for improvement, I think it’s well on it’s way.
Big implications
I like DeepRockDrive because it’s a big idea. In a day and age of declining record sales, and doom & gloom stories of major labels, it’s refreshing to know that there are people building real businesses predicated on the question of “What is next?”. While entities like the RIAA are busily obsessed with suing their best customers, DRD founders Danny Socolof and Jeff Henshaw, have shown a great example of how it’s possible to use the internet to provide a convincing value proposition for music fans and artists alike. Live music is one of the few areas in the music business that has been on fire lately, perhaps due to the publics increased awareness of (and access to) music. Imagine a relatively unknown artist being able to perform a live show for a truly global audience (and get paid). It’s the democratizing nature of the internet applied to live music, it’s a huge leveling of the playing field, and I love it.
This weekend I read an interesting article about artists and music piracy in China and if you want any further proof about the demise of the current recording industry, one has to look no further then to this story and the rest of the developing world. I remember when I was traveling in South America, I came across a local music shop in a small town where the shop was no more then a guy with a computer hooked up to the internet, with a bittorrent client running. He had a list of albums you could purchase, and after you selected the album, he burned a copy for you, and then printed off a cover on a laser printer. Since an internet connection was far from ubiquitous in this town, a lot of people purchased music through his store. My point is the days of selling a physical disc with music are done. It was a nice hundred years, but it’s time to move on and build what’s next, and I’m confident that DeepRockDrive will be part of that.
iLike update
Fresh off the iLike blog comes an announcement that they have reached the 1 million user mark, after only 6 months. Impressive!
More impressive (to me) is how concert information is now being shown throughout the site, but sadly not in the iLike sidebar yet. With the recent infusion of Ticketmaster cash, one can only speculate about how deep the integration will go. Purchasing tickets from the iLike sidebar? Bring it on!… The only downside of course are those pesky “convenience” charges, illustrated perfectly in this image from Zack.
Thanks for the link Jeff!
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!