MixedContent

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!