Posts filed under: Technology
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?
Identity Open Space in Vancouver
Today I am headed off to the Identity Open Space, happening in Vancouver BC (Got to love those hometown events). My colleague Boris Mann was planning to go, but got called away to Germany for one of our large clients, so I am attending in his stead.
Identity is not an area that I have a lot of experience in, but I’ve been doing some reading to try and brush up, and I feel like someone peering down a rabbit hole. Pretty fascinating.
I like the simplicity of address based schemes (OpenID, LID, SXIP), but they seem like they might be vulnerable to phishing attacks. Despite this, SXIP seems quite interesting, and I like how the system supports the storing of SAML tokens. The WS-* metasystem also seems quite robust, and in particular, InfoCard sounds impressive (although as a newbie, I have no practical experience with any of these).
Recently Lucas Gonze posted some thoughts about his experiments with URL based schemes. As someone involved in many cool music projects, I was wondering what he thought of the relationship between DRM and Identity. While I still maintain that DRM in general makes no sense, DRM tied to a user (rather then devices) makes slightly more sense. Back in 2002, Brian says:
“The point is, information producers over time will tend to want stronger controls over exactly who and how information consumers can use the information. Customer-empowered identity. Big studio DRM. It’s all the same problem pattern from a software perspective, and one which (I believe) can never be satisfactorily solved with software alone. We’re all going to want teeth on our side.”
In any event, looking forward to learning about (and getting schooled) in a new topic!
Rhapsody web services
Rhapsody has announced their new web services and a contest for the best rhapsody mashup. A contest is certainly an ingenious way to get developers to look at API documentation. Looking forward to seeing what people come up with…
UPDATE: Great post on Read/WriteWeb about Rhapsody.
DRM battles…
The issues surrounding DRM seem to be heating up, especially in Scandinavia. Public protests and flash mobbings like those put on by DRM activist group Defective By Design are adding pressure as well. I’d like to see more economists and politicians stepping up to the plate, and maybe these recent events will serve as a catalyst. The roar from the crowd is getting louder, but still, most of my non-tech friends (yes, I have a few) have never even heard of DRM…
Playlist/music links
Some interesting links that I’ve come across recently:
AOL Music Now Web Services
http://aol.musicnow.com/media/developer/index.htm
(Courtesy of Zac) All Media Guide also has some cool playlist stuff going on:
http://www.allmediaguide.com/tapestry/
Be sure to check out the demo of Tapestry here:
http://tapestry.allmusic.com/
I really enjoyed wasting time playing with the “Build Descriptors” function. (in the right panel, click the little “Down Arrow” next to where it says “Descriptors”) This brings you to a tabbed interface that allows you to explore different types of music. I’d love to see these descriptors be influenced by (if not entirely based on) a community driven folksonomy. Or maybe have the descriptors be personalized somehow. As in: “These are my descriptors”…
Pretty neat though!
The future of music: Big hooks up front
Technology and music have always had an interesting duality. Throughout history, it seems that most popular music is "designed" (perhaps unwittengly) to exploit the technology used to deliver and consume itself. What do I mean exactly?
My favorite example is that of Louie Armstrong’s horn. The early phonograph had a very narrow acoustic range, and had difficulty picking up certain frequencies. Louie’s trumpet, with it’s warbling pitch, and high treble, was able to pierce the audio haze of early recording devices. It wasn’t just that the trumpet was more popular an instrument then the flute for example; it was that the Trumpet was the perfect vehicle to exploit the medium it was to be delivered on. Other examples include Mark Katz’s hypothesis that violin vibrato was introduced to help early recording devices better pick up the sound, in a similar fashion to Louie’s trumpet.
Moving ahead in time, consider Pink Floyds album, “The Wall”. The Wall was designed to capitalize on the two, long-playing and uninterrupted sides of a piece of vinyl. Other attributes of the media are exploited as well, such as the high fidelity nature of most stereo system at the time, and even the dimensions of the album cover in order to display art work. Could “The Wall” have been as successful in today’s world of downloaded singles and iPod shuffle’s? Perhaps, but unlikely…
When I was at SXSW a few months ago, I found myself in an interesting discussion with Matt May (and others), that I kept on thinking about. We were talking about how current technologies were going to affect the type of music being produced.
Our best guess?
Most online stores or music websites offer you a 30 sec (or so) listen of the track before you purchase, so we figured that future music would be designed to exploit this. Who cares about song structure or melodic development! All that will matter in the future is to have the first 30 seconds of your tune “optimized” for a public bent on quick scanning. All of a sudden, leading off your track with that huge punchy chorus seems like a good idea. The future of music is “big hooks up front”.