Posts tagged Music
WordPress For Musicians: CASH Music Wants to Open Source the Industry
Feb 29th
We hear a lot about how dramatically the music industry is changing. And indeed, there are plenty of positive trends amidst the disruption. Music creation is easier than ever. So is music discovery. Streaming services offer a new model for the consumption of music on any device, in any location. Whether from within a startup or at Music Hack Day, developers are building new things everyday that will help shape the future of music.
It’s an exciting time, but not always a reassuring one for the people that create the music themselves. In a lot of ways, the new music ecosystem can be even more confusing for artists, even if unprecedented opportunities technically exist for them.
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It’s with this reality in mind that Jesse von Doom and Maggie Vail are seeking to build the CASH Music Platform, an open source toolkit for bands and musicians to use to promote their work and advance their career while beginning to cut out the army of middlemen that has historically been a part of the process.
“We really believe that one of the major missing pieces in the music industry is an open framework — the bit that gives artists more control, is easy, and still lets them use any service they want,” von Doom said.
Building an Open Source, Turnkey Online Platform For Musicians
Right now, CASH Music offers a number of self-installed promotional tools for artists, such as an email address collection form, contest entry form, a widget that displays upcoming tour dates and a module for pulling in and mashing up social feeds. A few more features are in the works, including basic e-commerce, fan club module and third party integrations for multimedia content. These features are all open source, install-it-yourself tools for bands to use on their websites.
If the above sounds analogous to WordPress.org, what von Doom and the rest of the team are hoping to ultimately ship is more of a WordPress.com-style product. That is, they’re building a fully hosted, turnkey solution for artists to use to manage their online presence. To get there, they’re using Kickstarter to raise money for the development that’s needed. Their initial goal was met within the first 72 hours of the page being live, but the more resources they can throw at this project, the better, von Doom told us.
CASH Music was founded in 2007 by Kristin Hersh and Donita Sparks, both of whom are veterans of the alternative rock scene that emerged in the 1980s. Today, their board is made up of notable digital media entrepreneurs and indie music vets.
The original site offered a Radiohead-style pay-what-you-want pricing model for digital downloads from select artists. The more fans paid, the more got in return, including posters, access to shows and ProTools files for remixing their favorite songs.
The CASH Music Platform, once it’s complete, will offer quite a few features, but it is by no means intended to do everything artists need. Instead, it will be developed to be compatible with a wide range of third party services and APIs. Whether artists use MailChimp for email newsletters, BandCamp or SoundCloud for hosting music or PayPal for e-commerce, the idea is to launch a product that integrates seamlessly with as many relevant Web services as possible.
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Big Question (Answered): Will Apple Enter the Streaming Music Game?
Feb 29th
Variety abounds in the streaming music game. Spotify, Pandora, Last.fm, Rdio, Slacker, MOG, Turntable… You really have your pick in streaming services.
As yet, Apple has stayed out of the fray. As we look towards the upcoming Apple event, we wonder if that will change? Do you expect Apple to become a player in the streaming music market?
Will Apple Enter the Streaming Music Game?
We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and presented them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.
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Digitizing Music History: John Peel’s 65,000 Vinyl Records to Be Put Online
Feb 24th
When it comes to the history of modern popular music, the importance of the late radio DJ John Peel can hardly be overstated. During his nearly 40-year tenure at the BBC, Peel welcomed hundreds of artists in the studio to record Peel Sessions, from legendary classic rock acts and Grammy winners to under-the-radar indie bands in the late 90s. When he died in 2004, Peel had himself reached legendary status.
As you can imagine, he amassed quite a record collection over the years. In total, Peel owned over 25,000 vinyl LPs and 40,000 vinyl singles. Before long, we’ll all be able to browse his collection on the Web, according to the BBC.
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The records will be scanned and digitized along with other personal notes from Peel, interviews, videos and other content. It will be hosted online in coordination with The Space, an experimental digital arts platform created by the BBC and the Arts Council England. The end result will be a sort of interactive museum through which people around the world can peruse Peel’s record collection and learn more about his life’s work.
Whether or not the music itself will be digitized isn’t clear, but in any event, it will likely not be made publicly available due to complex and costly copyright licensing limitations. This is the kind of thing that seems ripe for integration with services like Spotify and Soundcloud, if not digital music stores like iTunes or Amazon’s MP3 marketplace.
What may be more feasible, as the BBC points out, is access to some of the Peel Sessions archives. That audio won’t cover his entire collection, but given the list of artists that recorded in Peel’s studio at the BBC, there’s an enormous trove of potential content there.
This project is just the latest one that aims to preserve musical history by digitizing it. Last month, Universal Music donated over 200,000 masters, discs and tapes to the Library of Congress. The collection, which contains music from the first half of the twentieth century, is the single largest donation of its kind in history.
Digitizing older music is seen as imperative because of the deterioration of physical media that happens over time. John Peel’s LPs may not be at risk of crumbling into dust anytime soon (nor are many of them necessarily rare), but it can’t hurt to start the process now.
Vinyl photo by FourthFloor.
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Infographic: The Online Music Landscape
Feb 20th
A new infographic from Gerson Lehrman Group’s GPlus.com maps out the current online music on-demand landscape from the top 10 players. You can see at a glance what the monthly fees are, whether or not you can add your own tunes to their online libraries, how many current users, whether they have mobile, Web or desktop apps and what the major features are. If you were thinking about trying one of these services, this is a handy place to start to evaluate their basics.
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Certainly, the idea that we need to carry our entire music collection on our own hard drives is becoming less important as these on-demand services improve and become more popular and feature-complete. How both Facebook and Apple’s iTunes will handle these competitors remains to be seen.
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NPR’s Music App For iPad is What Radio Should Look Like in the 21st Century
Feb 17th
Before the rise of smartphones and tablets, it was hard to imagine Internet audio content ever supplanting radio. The limited Web programming that was available may have been convenient to listen to at one’s desk, but it didn’t do much good in the car, on a jog or otherwise on the go.
Today, traditional radio is still far from being displaced, but streaming audio from mobile devices sure does offer an attractive, personalized and more interactive alternative. For some of the strongest examples, look no further than NPR’s digital efforts. The historically radio-centric news organization has wasted no time building a bridge to the future with its digital products, including a few rather impressive mobile applications.
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Most recently, NPR has expanded its music-focused iPhone app to the tablet screen. NPR Music for iPad, which went live yesterday, takes their voluminous archive of music coverage and live performances and packs them all into one very well-designed app.
The content is broken down in a few different ways, which makes it easy to browse depending on what users are looking for. It can be viewed by content type (articles, videos, etc) or by genre or individual radio programs. There’s also a search utility if you’re looking for a particular artist. If the band or musician you’re looking for has appeared on any NPR program in recent years, they’ll come up in search results. This could be an interview on WXPN, video of a live “Tiny Desk Concert” performance, a feature on “All Things Considered” or just about any other kind of music coverage NPR does.
The interface is fluid and intuitive, with blocks of content sliding and falling into place when you make a new selection on the navigation. When you pull down and release to reveal additional content, the page blurs quickly blurs in and out of focus, which is a nice touch. They could have simply sized the iPhone app up and made it fit on the iPad without any bells and whistles, but they didn’t. It’s evident that the team put some thought into the user experience on this one.
If the app has a single feature that makes it worth downloading, it’s probably the playlist builder. As you come across audio clips and shows you want to hear, whether it be via search or by browsing, you can add queue them to play one after another. This ends up working like a sort of personalized radio station, not of songs, but of NPR’s best in-depth music coverage.
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Music Labels at Their Worst: Sony’s Whitney Houston PR Gaffe
Feb 15th
As news spread on Saturday that famed singer Whitney Houston had died, millions of fans around the world did what is now customary. Well, first they tweeted about it. Then they went to one of the many sources of online music to reminisce. Whether by streaming songs from YouTube or Spotify or by buying tracks from iTunes, fans paid tribute to Houston on Saturday by listening to her music.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the depths of Sony Music’s UK headquarters, the decision was made to bump up the price on those digital downloads. The reaction was swift and unequivocally critical. How could Sony capitalize on somebody’s death? After initially staying silent, Sony apologized and changed the prices back, chalking it up to an error. A mistake indeed, but the notion that it was unintentional is hard for many to swallow.
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The trend is now quite familiar. When pop stars die young, fans buy up their music in droves. This was true when Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Kurt Cobain died, but it seems to be even more true today. Music purchases are now a few clicks or taps away and can be made without leaving one’s home, or better yet, from the devices we all carry in our pockets.
When Michael Jackson died in 2009, sales of his music increased eightyfold and he topped charts around the world. Though her career was much shorter than Jackson’s, singer Amy Winehouse had her album sales spike after her death last year as well.
The people who profit the most from the sale of recorded music know how this works. A popular artists dies, sales go up. In the past, record stores could increase inventory in the days following a singer’s death. Today, inventory is infinite, so these posthumous sales spikes are even more dramatic. You’d think that would be enough for music executives.
From a business standpoint, increasing the price of Whitney Houston’s records makes sense. If demand goes through the roof, why not capitalize on that? But that’s a strictly profit-focused viewpoint. It ignores the fact that a human being has died, and that the people getting ready to shell out money for the work they created are, at least to some extent, in mourning.
The perception easily follows that the record company is trying to profit from both the deceased and the bereaved. Whether it’s a wise business choice or not, the fact that nobody foresaw the PR backlash it would cause is pretty unbelievable.
These are the same people that, via the RIAA, sue music fans for illegally downloading music and desperately want draconian laws like SOPA and PIPA to be passed. Raising prices on a dead singer’s music is a move that is bound to infuriate many and encourage others to seek out the material elsewhere, whether that be through less legal means or from streaming services that, no matter how you slice it, don’t generate as much revenue as digital downloads.
The gaffe may or may not result in a perceptible impact on sales of Houston’s album, the demand for which is very high right now. But given the sometimes chilly relationship between labels and fans in the digital age, it’s amazing that they were willing to take the risk.
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How Developers Are Shaping the Future of Music
Feb 14th
That the music industry has radically changed in the last decade is a serious understatement, if not too cliche to mention. Technology has altered everything from the creation and distribution of recorded music, upending retailers, studios and business models across the industry. But it’s not all bad news. Music isn’t dying so much as evolving, and the landscape is already beginning to look quite different.
Not long ago, the professional music industry involved a complex but fixed set of players: artists, labels, managers, promoters and the like. Many of these roles have changed, but none have disappeared. They’re joined by a new set of participants: tech giants, streaming services, social music startups and, perhaps most crucially, developers.
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Every stakeholder in this new (and still emerging) digital music ecosystem plays their own important role in the creation and consumption of music. But it’s this new contingent of hackers and developers that appear poised to have the biggest impact on what music will look like in the future.
This weekend, coders and industry representatives gathered in San Francisco for Music Hack Day, a tradition that has spanned continents for the last four years. Like other hack days and hackathons, the event is dedicated to bringing developers together to build new things using the latest technologies and platforms. In this case, the focus is on music, so the toolkit includes everything from mobile hardware and homemade digital instruments to open Web standards and the APIs of services like SoundCloud, Last.fm, Spotify and the Echo Nest.
Noteworthy hacks conjured up in the past have included various software mashups between services, as well as things like invisible, interactive instruments that can be played in the air or on a surface. Some hacks are strictly Web or software-based, while others involve some tinkering with hardware, including LED lights, Nintendo Wii controllers and Kinects.
The most recent Music Hack Day spawned a total of 62 hacks. The list included a music search engine that queries multiple streaming services, as well as a Theramin made from two iPhones. One app succeeded in predicting Sunday’s Grammy winners almost as effectively as Billboard did.
Some creations were simpler, such as a Spotify-based clone of the classic MP3 player WinAmp, a mash-up between iTunes and the Echo Nest’s recommendation engine and a SoundCloud plugin for WordPress.
The hacks ranged from the mind-blowing to the simplistic but useful. They dealt with everything from the creation of music to its distribution and promotion.
How Music Hack Day Helps the Music Industry Evolve
Music Hack Day was started in 2008 and hasn’t stopped growing since. In the tradition of other hacking events, SoundCloud VP of Business Development David Haynes teamed up with experienced hack day organizer James Darling to create a music-specific event. The proliferation of APIs from various music-related platforms plus some of the other disruption going on in the music industry made the space ripe for some creative hacking.
“Weren’t sure what to expect from it at first,” said SoundCloud cofounder and CTO Eric Wahlforss. “It got off to such a good start that’s now become sort of a tradition for the last few years. Music Hack Day is a big part of our culture.”
For startups like SoundCloud, events like Music Hack Day yield creations that could one day find themselves integrated with the company’s core product. The vast majority, however, will not. And that’s okay. The event’s value is of a much deeper nature, in that it fosters a developer community around music and brings a wide range of players into the same, from independent coders to music industry representatives.
A side effect of this type of collaboration is that the entire industry is creeping forward. A few years ago, Wahlforss told us, some record labels had no idea what an API was or how it was relevant to their business. Today, EMI has an API of their own. They, along with Universal Music Group, participate in Music Hack Day and are curious about much of the fruit it bears.
“If you speak to the labels today, they’re all about API’s and mashability of their content,” Wahlforss said. “They’re very on board with this trend, which is very exciting to see.”
For SoundCloud, this spirit of hacking is something that plays a prominent role in the culture of the company and its growing team of developers. Modeled after Google’s “20% time,” the company encourages employees to use what it calls Hacker Time to experiment and build new things that may or may have any direct bearing on the official product strategy for SoundCloud.
The company also recently hired its first developer evangelist and is silently preparing a major announcement about its platform.
Pushing Music into the Future
SoundCloud isn’t the only company pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in online music. Innovation is all over the place, from Spotify’s new third party app platform to the long and growing list of apps powered by the APIs from services like The Echo Nest, Last.fm, Bandcamp and several dozen others.
The open architecture of the Web, the proliferation of APIs and hacker culture have already made a notable mark on how people create, discover and share music, yet all of this is still very much in its earliest stages.
Twenty years from now, things will look even more different. The industry and ecosystem will move forward together, probably with a few players becoming obsolete along the way. Artists and sound engineers may lead the creative charge, but if what emerges looks and works radically different from what we have today, we’ll have developers to thank as well.
Music Hack Day Photo by Thomas Bonte
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MySpace’s Music Focus Pays Off
Feb 13th
The social Web space is abuzz with new developments and entrants these days. Facebook’s IPO. The explosion of Pinterest. The rapid evolution of Google+ into a place where the president of the United State hangs out. One name you never hear is one that all the rage just a few years ago.
MySpace has been losing traffic since 2008, when Facebook first surpassed it on Alexa. Last year, the company was sold for $35 million by News Corporation, who bought it for $580 million six years earlier. Its new owners, Specific Media, have tried to reposition the site as an online entertainment hub rather than a full-fledged social network. If early numbers are any indication, the refocus appears to be working.
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For the first time in quite awhile, MySpace has some good news to report. Since December, it has added 1 million new registered users. That may not sound like much, but it begins to reverse the downward spiral the site has been in for the last few years.
If this particular trend line continues to move upward, it would suggest that the site’s music-centric gamble was a wise one. It would certainly make sense, given the site’s history. When MySpace first came onto the scene in 2003, it was used by independent musicians to share music and connect with fans, who quickly flocked to the site. By 2008, the site attracted nearly 80 million unique visitors per month and was considered the preeminent social networking service.
Specific Media’s new strategy aims to capitalize on MySpace’s roots while building new features and functionality to help better reposition the site as a music hub. Even as the site’s popularity has declined among the general population, it continued to be big among bands and other musicians.
Over the years, the site has amassed a library of music containing over 42 million tracks, which positions it quite competitively with the likes of Rdio and Spotify, even if MySpace’s content leans heavily toward unsigned and independent artists.
Is this enough to turn things around for MySpace? The site won’t return to being the social behemoth it was before the rise of Facebook, Twitter and Google+. By more aggressively carving out this niche, its new owners could at least allow the site to grow and build a viable, more focused business.
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“Look Around” With The Red Hot Chili Peppers Interactive Music Video – ReelSEO Online Video News
Feb 6th
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"Look Around" With The Red Hot Chili Peppers Interactive Music Video
ReelSEO Online Video News He is also founder of The Viral Orchard (http://www.viralorchard.com), an Internet marketing firm offering content writing and development services, viral marketing consulting, and SEO services. Jeremy writes constantly, loves online video, … |
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Is the Digital Music Revolution Really Ruining Sound Quality?
Feb 6th
It seems like every advance in digital music brings with it a debate about whether the latest format degrades quality in exchange for convenience. This was true when CDs first came onto the scene, and it’s probably even more true today with MP3s and their digital audio brethren. Heck, even the advent of the gramophone in 1889 sparked debates over whether its sound quality was worse than Thomas Edison’s phonograph.
Last week, rock veteran Neil Young chimed in with his assertion that the digital music files we listen to today are of much lower quality than the original recordings. Speaking at the D: Dive Into Media conference, he said that the technology now exists to deliver much higher-quality audio to music fans, and that he had even talked to Steve Jobs about a possible solution.
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It is certainly true that an MP3 file, by definition, is of lower quality than the original recording. The files that sit on the hard drives of recording studio engineers are massive – several gigabytes apiece – compared to the file consumers eventually download or stream. To get those MP3 file sizes down, the audio has to be compressed substantially. It’s inevitable that some of the detail will get lost in the process.
How Serious is the Problem? … And How to Fix It?
Exactly how bad is this problem? By Young’s estimation, what we hear in most files today is “only 5% of the data of the original recording”. That may be a slight exaggeration, depending on how the files are encoded. Certainly, lower bit rate files (such as 128kbps MP3s) have a noticeably degraded quality to them, compared to a CD. But most sources have graduated to higher quality files now that broadband speeds allow for it. A standard track on iTunes is a 256kbps AAC file and premium Spotify subscribers can listen to many songs at 320kbps, which is about 22% of a CD track’s bit rate.
When it comes to streaming audio on mobile devices, the quality buck pretty much stops at whatever the data connection can handle. On 3G networks, streaming CD-quality audio just isn’t feasible. Over a good WiFi connection, things look a little more promising, but there are still limitations if the user experience is to be preserved.
So what does Young propose as a solution? From the sound of it, he’d like to see a sort of mega-iPod with more disk space and internal guts optimized to playback massive files. Such a device wouldn’t be designed to include one’s entire library, but rather only a selection of audiophile-quality albums. Presumably, it would tend to be used with superior quality earphones or speakers, which is another important factor in the quality of what we hear.
Even if a device akin to what Young describes were produced and sold, how big of a market would there be for it? The quality of the audio found on sources like iTunes, Spotify, MOG, Amazon and Google Music is apparently good enough to convince millions of people to pay for access to it. At the end of the day, most of the content on the pay music services is certainly good enough. Musicians and audiophiles can pick up on the degradations in quality, but for the average listener, it’s pretty subtle. The device that Young describes would have to be marketed toward the audiophiles for whom 320kbps simply won’t cut it.
Last week wasn’t the first time Young has criticized the state of digital music. Some may dismiss his stance as nothing more than a grumpy, old-school perspective, as though he’s just an old guy that doesn’t get the new-fangled ways of the Web and digital media. This isn’t the case. Young may be a veteran of the music industry, but he’s well aware of what’s changed about it and why. During the same interview in which he slammed MP3′s, he said that “piracy is the new radio” and encouraged new artists to forgo record labels in favor of doing it themselves.
There’s Nothing Wrong With Analog
As Young pointed out, Steve Jobs may have been a digital music pioneer, but “when he went home, he listened to vinyl.” This is true not only of Young’s generation, but of a growing number of music fans today. Vinyl sales have been surging for the last few years, with 2011 seeing a 39% increase in sales over the previous year. Digital music sales grew last year too, but by considerably less.
For music fans with the deepest concern for audio quality, it seems analog is increasingly the way to go. That’s okay. We can have our digital revolution in music and still fall back on analog formats. Just like with books, the value offered by digital music is primarily about volume, convenience and ease of production and distribution. And just like sitting down with a good, paper-bound book, putting on a vinyl record is more about quality and the overall experience.
Digital and analog don’t need to be at war with one another. What many labels and artists are doing now is sell records on vinyl and include a coupon for a free, high-quality digital download in the record’s sleeve. That allows people to enjoy the album as it was intended and also throw it onto their iPod or smartphone for listening on the go.
It’s also possible to go the high-quality route in a digital-only format. When The Beatles’ catalogue was remastered and reissued in 2009, the material was released on CD and, for the first time, via iTunes. For diehard fans who wanted more than what iTunes could offer, they also sold an apple-shaped (no, not that Apple) thumb drive containing every album in superior quality, lossless FLAC format, as well as as 320kbps MP3s.
However things may evolve, it’s evident that digital music has brought us great value, but it’s done so at a cost, namely quality. This may not be perceived as a problem by every consumer, but for those who take the craft of creating and recording music most seriously, it’s a one worth solving. Whether it’s through a hybrid of analog/digital music consumption or through some new, high-capacity device for playing back lossless digital audio, the challenge isn’t an insurmountable one.
Vinyl sales chart courtesy of Digital Music News.
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