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You may know this already, but Beats is basically the music recording industry moving into the music hardware business. It’s a similar strategy to 360 deals: abandon ship. Key people at Universal Music Group saw that the money was in iPods, not MP3 files.

The label people see the same writing on the wall as everybody else.

Wolfgang Spraul posted a long and interesting comment which is worth reading in its entirety. The gist of it is that increasing centralization of the music industry is bad for musicians and listeners.

I agree that less choice of vendors is a bad thing. If Beats is aligned with a single distributor – MOG – then they will make life harder on customers of Rdio, Rhapsody, Spotify, etc.

But it’s really important to create a healthy foundation for the recording industry. The evolution of clusters of related businesses like { HTC + Beats + Universal Music Group + MOG } is about the ecosystem reconfiguring to match changes in the environment.

This is the change we are seeking. The business of recorded music needs to leave physical media behind, and that’s precisely why { HTC + Beats + Universal Music Group + MOG } exists.

That doesn’t mean this is the final form of the business. A device has to play all the content in the world, so companies like Beats and HTC can’t lock out distributors aside from MOG. They have to allow Rhapsody et al into their world.

How will Beats go to market with MOG? My guess is that the MOG brand will be abandoned in favor of the Beats brand. MOG’s software, like the in-browser app and mobile apps, will continue to exist, but will be named “Beats.”

When you get an Android phone with “Beats”, that will mean it comes with a subscription to MOG. You’ll be able to add a subscription to Spotify or whatever other service interests you, but you’ll have already paid for the MOG subscription as part of the purchase price of your device. That means phone prices going up to cover the subscription. Where will the money come from? The subsidy paid by your telecom. The cost is about $10 a month. I suppose that will be added right on top of your phone bill.

A subtle thing about the MOG/Beats/HTC deal just occurred to me.

Companies like MOG, Spotify, and Rdio rely on negotiated deals with record labels. Those deals usually contain clauses that make the deal non-transferable in case of a change of ownership. When MOG changes hands to ownership by Beats, it has to start over again with the labels.

It happens that one of the major stakeholders in Beats is Jimmy Iovine, who is also a lead at Universal Music. That’s not to say that in this deal UMG is getting ownership of MOG (they already have equity anyway). It is to say that getting Universal’s blessing is pretty much a done deal. And where Universal goes, Sony and Warner go, because Universal is the 600 pound gorilla of labels.

The deals not being transferable depresses the value of a company like MOG, because the deals are a key asset. That’s why Myspace Music went for so little. But Beats doesn’t have the same problem with buying MOG that other suitors did. For Beats the deals actually *were* transferable.

On-demand subscription services don’t earn a profit for their owners. All the money goes to other parts of the ecosystem. The subscriber fees are passed to the labels. Electronics used for listening make a profit for the manufacturers.

Think of iPods. Most of the money for buying tracks goes to the labels. Apple keeps the money from selling iPods. There is no independent “music store.”

So how to interpret the news that Beats, which is owned by HTC, is buying MOG? Beats and HTC are device companies. They make good money by selling equipment on which to listen to music. In addition, Beats is affiliated with Universal Music Group, the biggest label.

MOG makes little money. In that sense it’s no different than other online music distributors, including Pandora and Spotify. However such companies do make money for device makers and labels. The content, equipment, and distributors are complementary goods. HTC, and sorta kinda UMG, are buying a complement in order to enhance the value of their primary line of business.

This move is ultimately good for the internet music industry, because it puts the industry on healthier footing. MOG’s product makes more sense as part of a larger service which makes a net profit than it does as a standalone which breaks even at best. The underlying economics are getting better.

When you have a song cheat sheet with chords and words (and maybe notes) on it, how come it’s always black and white? Well, because color printing is more expensive, obviously, but also because the value of color is underestimated.

I wrote up a cheat sheet for a song the band was going to learn live, performing it the very first time they played it. So the cheat sheet needed to be excellent, and therefore the cost of color ink was worth it.

Written music is an information graphic like a subway map or graph of annual GDP. There’s visual design being used to communicate quantitative information.

When you think about it that way the value of color isn’t controversial. The GDP of Romania is a blue line, the GDP of Poland is a red line, the color contrast helps you compare and contrast the data.

So here’s my chart. The chords are the most important thing when a band is faking it, so I used color to distinguish the chords from the lyrics. In addition I communicated the arrangement by putting labels for sections on the right margin in all caps.

(click for full size PDF – good for printing out to jam on).

I accommodated transposing instruments like trumpet (needs to see a “d” note to play a “c” note) by naming chords according to their relative position within the key, and went with the convention of using roman numerals for showing those chord names. In the key of G a “g” chord is “I”, a “c” chord is “IV”, a “d” chord is “V” or maybe “V7”.

This would be better if I had actually notated the pitches but I didn’t have enough time.

I don’t know if the world really needs higher fidelity audio. I doubt it.

But it would be useful to be able to choose a version of a file that was mastered to match your listening gear. One version might be mastered for the classic low end white earbuds that come with an iPod. The other would be mastered for good speakers in a room with reasonable acoustics.

This would be different than EQ settings customized for the listening device. EQ is only one of many tools a mastering engineer uses. For example you might want more compression for iPod earbuds, because quiet sounds are inaudible and loud ones distort. Or you might want less reverb on earbuds, because it makes it harder to distinguish a fast series of staccato notes.

Choosing these settings isn’t really a job for an automated system. A human needs to drive it. That’s why people find the money to pay mastering engineers. So you can’t just build in a standard switch in the player – there would need to be two files to choose between.

I’m imagining an audio file format that allows you to switch between different masters depending on context. They would both be in the same file. It would be basically a multitrack file where the different track types were well known in advance – like “hifi” and “lofi.”

From 1709 Blog:

It seems almost the natural ecosystem response to the likes of the Megaupload reward program (Black hats outsource/crowdsource the provision of links to their content to specialists for cash –> white hats outsource/automate the following of such links and the serving of take-down notices to a countering cottage industry for cash)

The DMCA take-down system is often declared “useless” by those pushing for ever shinier new laws. But does this claim by a (self-promoting, far from uninvolved) takedown agent suggest that just possibly it may not be so ineffective after all?”

For Music Hack Day in San Francisco this past weekend I did a hack related to my blog post on “hyperaudio notation”. My idea was to caption a recorded song using music notation, as an instantiation of ideas like hyper video, hyper audio, popcorn.js, and WebVTT.

There is a recording and a score. The recording is an MP3, the score is a PNG. The purpose of the system is to move a highlight through the score in sync with the MP3, so that the listener can see which part of the notation in the image is currently being played. It’s like text captions for a person talking.

I could have designed it to show just a portion of the overall score, but showing the entire image with a moving highlight was easier.

To move the highlight in sync with the music, you train it. Pushing a button marked “start recording” initiates a training run. The music starts, in time with a recorder for clicks within the image. When you click in the image the time and location are recorded. The trainer clicks in the image in sync with the music. When the first bar is played, click on the first bar in the image. Continue until you have provided music captions for as much of the song as you want. Then press “stop recording.”

At this point, press the “play recording” button to rerun the training session.

The vision is that the training would be done by the person publishing the page, and visitors would just use the “play recording” button.

To see it in action, go to the live demo code or view a screencast I made. (The live code was super quick and dirty and assumes that you have exactly the same everything I do, including browser, bandwidth, etc. Chances that it will actually work are slim).

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I emailed Sylvia Pfeiffer about the implementation status of WebVTT. When can developers use it, if not immediately? She replied that there is support (probably incomplete) in the IE10 developer build, work is underway in WebKit, and Opera’s status is unknown. She recommended that web developers who need captions right away should use a polyfill such as captionator.js.

I’m reposting our conversation to make the answer Google-able for other developers looking into WebVTT, at least in the short term before this information goes stale.

What’s WebVTT? Captioning for online video. See this talk by .

Bruce Warila wrote:

Reading comments around the Internet, a common theme from legal types is that “DMCA takedown” is an adequate (legal) mechanism. Up until this morning, this generated a “huh?” response in my head. After retreating from Starbucks, it occurred to me that DMCA takedown could be just fine if automated-monitoring-and-DMCA-takedown machinery existed, then yeah sure. Give me a dashboard and charge me $10 per song / per year to fling automated takedown notices at random services that I haven’t authorized; back it up with ‘class-action’ protection; and I think someone could make a serious business out of this?

I wonder if I could stand to work on such a system. Would I be forced into a position of doing things I consider wrong? Or would I be making the world more fair?