Category: .

I want to embed a playlist of the complete soundtrack of The Life Aquatic. But I want to do it on the open web, where anybody can listen. To do that I just need a list of URLs that the Yahoo Web Player can digest, including MP3s and YouTube. The player will knit them together (as long as you’re reading this post right on my web site, on gonze.com, in a browser, in 2012).

Rdio has a track list. And here’s the playable media, with play buttons if you’re on my site:

1. Shark Attack Theme – Sven Libaek
2. Loquasto International Film Festival (Score) – Mark Mothersbaugh
3. Life on Mars – David Bowie
4. Starman – Seu Jorge covering Bowie
5. Let Me Tell You About My Boat – Mark Mothersbaugh
6. Rebel Rebel – Seu Jorge
7. Zissou Society Blue Star Cadets/Ned’s Theme Take 1 – Mark Mothersbaugh
8. Gut Feeling – Devo
9. Open Sea Theme – Sven Libaek
10. Rock N’ Roll Suicide – Seu Jorge
11. Here’s To You – Joan Baez
12. (below is TBD, just text and no media link yet)
13. We Call Them Pirates Out Here – Mark Mothersbaugh
14. Search And Destory – Iggy & The Stooges
15. La Nina De Puerta Oscura – Paco de Lucia
16. Life On Mars? (Album Version) – Seu Jorge
17. Ping Island/Lightning Strike Rescue Op – Mark Mothersbaugh
18. Five Years – Seu Jorge
19. 30 Century Man – Scott Walker
20. The Way I Feel Inside – The Zombies
21. Queen Bitch – David Bowie

That’s all I have for now. It’s kind of a scavenger hunt to dig up the rest of these. I’ll keep updating this as I get time for the scavenger hunt. If you come across any missing tracks, post a link in the comments.

Mothership Hackermoms, my wife’s mom-friendly hackerspace, got their Kickstarter funding. To my friends who kicked in, Thanks!

Wired did a nice writeup on the Mothership:

I have searched high and low for a space or group where my particular brand of crazy would be welcomed; the kind of crazy that always has dirt under her fingernails, paint on her pants, glue in her hair, algorithms in her head, and wacky overambitious ideas in her heart. It is during this desperate search for mommy tinkerers that I found Mothership HackerMoms, the first hackerspace for women.

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Sometimes I enjoy shared music played out loud in a public space, like when a coffee shop has Pandora on. But if I put on earbuds to listen privately to music that’s less dense than what they’re playing out loud, the stuff they’re playing is audible through the gaps in my private music. If they play something that’s a big jam with wall to wall sound, I have to play something equally dense. If they’re playing EDM on the speakers and I’m playing jazz on the earbuds, I hear both. There’s no way of opting out.

You can’t explain this to a person who is playing music out loud. It’s prissy to say “the people here can put in earbuds if they want to hear music, but if you put on music out loud they can’t not listen to music.” I guess everybody plays big jams with wall to wall sound so it’s usually moot.

My office is usually quiet, but yesterday a guy in my office hooked up speakers to his laptop. Late in the day he offered me the speaker hookup so I could DJ. So I picked some super quiet and sparse music, Morton Feldman, to keep the density down below whatever people might have in their earbuds.

The piece I put on is an hour-long solo piano number called “For Bunita Marcus.” It’s on YouTube. If you play it for yourself, play it quietly enough that the sound mixes with the natural sounds in the room you are in. It shouldn’t overpower conversation, the coffee machine, the sound of keystrokes on your laptop. You can even put it down so low that you only notice it once in a while.

Wal-Mart to Sell Boxee TVs Challenging Apple and Roku:

Starting tomorrow, the world’s biggest retailer will exclusively sell the new $98 product, called Boxee TV, in more than 3,000 U.S. locations during the holiday season. Wal-Mart will set up displays and send out marketing materials for the device, a small black box with a remote control that can access free TV broadcast channels as well as Internet content.

“It’s going to be a big launch for us,” Avner Ronen, Boxee’s chief executive officer, said in an interview. “There’s a big difference between having your product being carried by retailers, where it sits on the shelf, and getting real marketing behind it.”

Channel Surfing
Last year, Boxee sold 120,000 of its devices, which are manufactured by D-Link Corp. (2332), while Roku sold 1.4 million, according to Jordan Selburn, an analyst for research firm IHS ISuppli. Apple said last week that the company sold 5.3 million Apple TV devices in the past 12 months. Roku’s devices range in price from $50 to $100, while Apple TV sells for $99.

Consumers haven’t flocked to these devices because they don’t have many of the shows offered on cable networks, Selburn said. That’s not expected to change any time soon as broadcasters and pay-TV operators look to protect their lucrative businesses, he said.

Boxee TV is a compelling option because it pulls in broadcast channels and Internet video into a single system, Ronen said. The device, which has a built-in antenna for accessing over-the-air TV signals, shows TV channels when it boots up, unlike services that typically ask users to navigate menus at the outset to decide what to watch.

“You turn on the TV, and it’s a familiar ground,” Ronen said. “We don’t believe the future of the TV is going to be a future filled with apps. When you turn on the TV, you don’t want 60 icons. You just want to watch something.”

This is a huge change in product direction for Boxee. I’m impressed. The old product vision was not hitting the target. It was nowhere close to product/market fit. The company didn’t choose to be buried with that vision. Instead it went to a really new and creative place and came back with something useful and well differentiated. Personally I really want the new Boxee, even though my old Boxee ended up just gathering dust.

Jay Fienberg on Video as the New Audio:

The “videos” on YouTube are web pages. But they are very object-y, with the video player being the object people see, share, favorite, etc.

Meaning: in reality the new format is not video in isolation but YouTube pages as a whole. The change isn’t towards generic video files, it’s towards a web-based user experience that includes the web-based containers for videos, and which for the most part is specific to YouTube.

Anu Kirk’s blog – Too Much Music:

In economic terms, the supply of music is vastly increasing – a result of dramatic drops in the costs of creation and distribution combined with many more creators.

Part of the value of music is as shared cultural reference.

I am writing this in a coffee shop. A few minutes ago a conversation broke out about the Spice Girls. Multiple tables joined in to comment on the differences between Ginger, Scary, Sporty and Baby. It was a moment of bonding and community. People who had been staring into their private worlds had a chance to meet.

This was only possible because we all knew who the Spice Girls were. When there is more music, less of it is widely known, so it can’t serve as a landmark anymore. With increased supply, the value goes down.

youtube.com/disco insta-turns a search into a playlist. Ultra low friction listening.

Right now I’m working to a playlist of a search for “John Fahey”.

I wonder if you could pull a Music Genome on YouTube content and write a playlist generator that was competitive with Pandora’s. It’s not impossible.

The Washington Post wrote up a handy little capsule history of Obama’s presidency. (Also it endorses him, but I don’t really care about that).

Koreans have a history of using television for radio. They turn on the TV to listen to music.

Why K-Pop is taking over the world (NPR): In Korea pop music always comes with an image. … While our record labels were built on radio, their record labels were built on television. (This point /via Jonathan Altman).

And then there was YouTube, where music doesn’t exist unless there is imagery attached.

But what about hypertext? Why should audio be extended with video instead of web pages?

Web pages are a superset of video. They can include video, but they can include other features as well, and these other features might be more applicable. For example lyrics in a video are great, but you can’t resize the font or do a web search.

In the past I have blogged about media players letting you provide a bundle of audio and HTML together, and treating the bundle almost like they would treat plain old MP3.

But maybe this is a misunderstanding of the value. Maybe what users want is not web, it’s media, and video is the thing they desire because it speaks in a sensual, emotive, expressive language.

Isn’t it strange that the best source for on-demand music on the open internet is YouTube, a video website?

Maybe what’s happening is that music recordings without moving pictures are becoming obsolete.

Attaching images to sound doesn’t degrade the sound. They are purely additive. Almost no matter what the images are, they can only be an enhancement. And if stills along the lines of album art are good, moving pictures along the lines of a music video are better.

Why not always use video? Why continue to release pictureless audio?