Pixieguts

gurdonark wrote this as a comment and I thought it needed to be a post instead. So here it is as a post:

Pixieguts is an Australian vocalist who does vocals for electronic artists throughout the world.
http://www.last.fm/music/pixieguts. She’s wracked up 19,000 plays from 4,000 listeners.

She has a weblog, http://pixie-guts.blogspot.com. She releases at jamendo. She has a podcast.
http://pixieguts.jamendo.net/2009/02/05/pixicast-electronic-podcast-hosted-by-voide/

She’s organized a Ning called Pixies Palace which is a more or less a member/performer network of shared interests.
http://pixiespalace.ning.com/, with 160 members.

Marie, or Pixieguts, collaborates often, networks a great deal, and pushes forward a free download culture with aplomb. She’s not doing it with lots of money (I believe she types legal documents for a day job), nor immense connections in the industry (she’s in a part of Australia away from the center of things) nor the need to utilize the tawdry, the trendy or the self-aggrandizing. She just sings on music, and listens to music, and gets people together who do.

There’s lots of room for pixieguts in this world–and a lot of what she and her best collaborators (such as Northcape and Adrian Carter) do takes place not only on netlabels, but at last.fm.

YMP/goose greasemonkey fix in mail.google.com

jbum emailed a fix to a problem with my greasemonkey script for inserting Yahoo! Media Player aka Goose into a web page. It now handles https://mail.google.com correctly, meaning that it doesn’t break it any more.

When you make free software you don’t do much work, usually, but then you need to be the maintainer for a really long time. It’s a life long commitment if you’re up for it.

spam filter amok

A friend emailed to say that a bunch of his comments here hadn’t showed up, so I checked the spam filter and found them. This is probably some helpfully destructive feature of my comment spam filter, like detecting an IP address that has been used by a spammer in the past.

In conclusion, if you find comments not showing up don’t hesitate to give me a ping. It’s going to happen and there’s no point it letting it break things.

Last.fm+CBS getting the books balanced

Last.fm announced that users outside of the US, UK, and Germany will have to pay a subscription fee. No more free.

There’s no explanation in the offial announcement, but in the comments on the blog post a spokesman stepped up with this:

These are the countries in which we have the most resources to support an ad sales organization, which is how we earn money to pay artists and labels for their music. We are focused on the US, UK, and Germany as key markets, with the help of the CBS Interactive salesforce and our own sales team here in London. Our headquarters are in the UK and we’ve always had a strong presence in DE.

And so we’ve made the decision to focus on these markets for free streaming radio. We are still available worldwide and while listening is subscription, all the other rich content on the site is still free.

Last.fm is owned and operated by CBS, which also owns the major American radio sales companies and plenty of terrestrial broadcasting, and which services the (very very large) online radio presence of AOL and Yahoo!. These guys are not blue sky. They are meat and potatoes old school traditional etc.

And they’re doing the right thing for everybody. It doesn’t help anybody to have webcasting products run on make believe. Pretend businesses don’t exist. Suspension of disbelief doesn’t work for investors. To get internet music established for real, start with balancing the books.

URIplay

MetaBroadcast Blog » Blog Archive » launching URIplay:

A huge range of great audio and video content is now available online, but the content is fragmented across many different sites and platforms, with little connection between one siloed system and the next. We believe in the generative power of the web, we believe in linked data, and we want to see many ways to browse a full range of media content.

Enter URIplay, which aims to provide a single interface to metadata about audio and video content, built through a community effort. It makes light work of integrating content from a range of sources.

Great thing to do. It’s ridiculous to have media on the internet be locked up in a bunch of non-interoperable sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and iMeem.

I think this could also be used for content resolution, in that you’d be able to go from metadata about an item to the address of an instance of an item.

They’re product-level goals seem to be focused on video rather than audio, though music is part of that.

content resolution+Spotify+John Peel

Web service support for creating spotify playlists?:

XSPF import is coming, though initially only through the client application. We have some really cool things up our sleeves when it comes to integration with other web apps, but we’re not quite ready to go public with that.

HubLog: Festive 50 Spotify Playlists:

Lots of people seem to be making Spotify playlists of John Peel’s Festive 50 charts.

The raw data for Festive 50 track listings doesn’t seem to be available so I scraped them into TSV files.

Here are XSPF versions of the tracklists, for use with Last.fm’s Boffin (if you have the audio files locally). Ideally Spotify would read XSPF playlists and resolve them itself.

another one bites the dust

I picked up a guitar tuner app for iPhone. It was, uh, 2-3 bucks, maybe $4.

I just wanted a backup for gigs, in case the tuner I already have dies. I have one already and it works great. The iPhone-based tuner will never be that convenient! No way.

But the iPhone app is pretty damn good for what it is. It’s more than good enough for practicing or jamming, anyway, and since most guitar tuners are owned by people who only need something for practicing and jamming, that portends dark things for the guitar tuner industry.

A physical guitar tuner today costs $15-$50. They’re a thriving little market, since they get beat up and have to be replaced, and there’s plenty of competition in features. But no more. The high end will still be needed, but not the low end that accounts for the bulk of units. This industry has no future.

Electronic guitar tuners are a pretty young product. They only become common about ten years ago. That puts the lifespan at something like 2000-2015. RIP.

is there a Creative Commons way to ask for forgiveness instead of permission?

A striking thing about the thru-you / Kutiman mashups of YouTube music is that Creative Commons isn’t part of the picture. You’d expect the sources to have been all or mainly under permissive licenses that allowed derivatives to be made, but it’s not so. The final product is just simply unauthorized in a way that suggests “whatever” or “big whoop.”

Maybe the physics of online music are 100% different than the physics of source code, and that’s why the patterns which worked so well for free and open source software seem to be irrelevant.

pulling some videos

YouTube is disabling music for which it needs a license from a group called the PRS.

What this has in common with Fresh Hot Radio is being selective about catalog. Music products like the Spotify subscription service need all the music in the world, bar nothing, and when there is a gap in their catalog it’s a serious problem.

Whenever one provider feels obligated to encompass the entire world, it’s a step against an internet solution, and vice versa. Spotify is like Compuserve or pre-web AOL.