Category: .

Mail arrives from a friend, or at least somebody you know well enough to have them in your address book. But it isn’t to you, it’s a mass blast to everybody in their address book. And they didn’t even use a cc: list, they created a little mailing list. The return address is a person’s email, but you, you’re just a listing.

Ok, first off, this is rude.

Second, it makes the return email address useless. It used to signify an individual that you might correspond with, but now it means you’ve got junk mail, or at least bulk mail.

If you do this to me, it means that any personal mail you do send will either get auto deleted by my junk filter or it will get moved into the folder for noisy bulk mess that I rarely read.

But then again, I realize that people who do this are burning the personal friendship for the sake of a work project. When you join their bulk mailing list it means you’re dead to them but might be good for something after all.

This piece in the Guardian is a thoughtful perspective on the artistic aspects of sampling: An unofficial compilation of tracks sampled by Massive Attack showcases the group’s aesthetic through the songs that informed it – and provides fans with the thrill of discovering the originals

Sampling is weird. We’re so used to it, it’s been such a commonplace part of pop music for so long (since the late 1980s), that it’s easy to lose sight of what a peculiar thing it is. … To take a chunk of living time – which is what a sample is – and chain it into a loop isn’t just appropriation, it’s a form of enslavement.

No, it’s healthy culture in a free society.

A lot of musicians bitch about about how people who sample them shape their voice into a form they didn’t intend. They don’t want their song used in a commercial for Hitler, for example. (“Not just for breakfast anymore!”) But it’s contributing to reuse and appropriation that give the song meaning. The value of music is in how it’s used. Music on a pedestal is useless.

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The original guardian piece has this YouTube video of Billy Cobham’s band performing a song which I know through the Massive Attack sample:

Cobham was a jazz fusion player. He’s a fine drummer but his writing and his band gross me out. In the Massive Attack reuse 20 years later, though, I loved his thing. The moral of the story is that the musician is never fully in control of the stuff that makes his work valuable. Billy Cobham thought his writing and band were part of the package, but really they were just a tax you had to pay to hear his drumming. People who sampled him knew that, even though he didn’t, and they fixed the problem in a way that he never could have.

April 15+16+17 I’ll be at The Next Web 2009 in Amsterdam. I’m thinking about an ad-hoc BOF to talk about developments in music on the web — if you’re there and want to meet up, give me a ping.

hypebot: “Free” Thinker – The Orchard’s Greg Scholl:

On a cautionary note, however, we harbor increasing concerns about the long-term viability of many of the new ad supported businesses. The fact is, CPMs have been disappointing. Unless services get a lot smarter about helping advertisers hyper-target audiences using very detailed demographic information and are able to staff experience ad sales teams to engage advertisers and translate this into higher CPMs, then it is difficult to conceive of how these services will survive. Certainly, speaking on behalf of The Orchard at least, we won’t continue to license them.

Very few entities have both the density of users to hyper-target ads and the mass to deliver a significant number of impressions to a major advertiser. Only the biggest sites can do it. You’d have to be on the order of Myspace, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft.

HubLog: Playdar as an OpenURL resolver?:

While talking and (minimally) hacking with Playdar people at the Hackspace event last night, I was thinking about using OpenURL/COinS in HTML as an alternative to hAudio or RDFa for describing an audio object that could be resolved.

So I’m hooking up a module to publish an RSS feed for the sake of virality, and it strikes me that RSS should be more fun.

I still subscribe to feeds here and there, but I find Twitter, Facebook, Techmeme, whole blogs, personal email, and mailing lists are more urgent twitches. There’s something about the feed reader interaction that’s barren and dry. You want more human pathos in an app.

But maybe that’s just the style of my feed reader, Google Reader. Techmeme is a feed reader in some ways and it’s much more lively.

I stopped by Songza today for the first time in a while and found that they had changed their player so that it floats over the page and is positioned down at the bottom. Check it out on this Silver Jews page. See the way it’s stuck to the same place in the window, even if you scroll down or resize the page? That started with Yahoo Media Player — there was nothing like it at the time, and it was not possible using the standard Flash-oriented paradigm for in-browser music.

Bandzoogle is doing the same, e.g. on the Madame Pamita site.

And blip.fm.

Here’s the way the Yahoo! Media Player team described that model when we debuted it a few years ago: Magical floating design never gets lost, is available when you need it, gets out of your way when you don’t need it

What all these apps which have adopted this model have in common is something that will delight people who are passionate about the use of open standards rather than proprietary tools: you can’t make a player float over the page using pure Flash, so none of these players are 100% Flash anymore. Pure-Flash in-browser playback has become a lagging edge thing.

Back when we started the project, we literally heard “why not just use Flash?” on a regular basis. It seemed silly to people to do it with ajax instead. MP3 playback and Flash were synonomous. We changed that.

But we didn’t do it by evangelization. We did it by taking advantage of open standards to make better software than you can do otherwise. Once the proprietary tool got behind on features, the open approach took off.

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See also my post titled “Surveying Goose-Influenced Players.”

Onano-blog is EMI’s in-house music blog of their own releases.

I like the pocket in this Goldfrapp I found there:

Stop Motion Goldfrapp Oh La La from Jonathan on Vimeo.

Playdar – About:

Playdar is designed to solve one problem: given the name of a track, find me a way to listen to it right now.

It will search your local disk (iTunes library, MP3 folder etc.), it will search your home or office network (kinda like searchable iTunes shared libraries) and it will search other sources. You can write plugins for Playdar to enable it to search additional sources. It’s fast. If a matching song is within reach, it can start playing in less than a second.

This is called Content Resolution. Playdar is a “Content Resolver” – it will take metadata (artist, album, track names) and resolve them to a location of a matching music file. This might be on your disk, or over the network – regardless, sources are always presented as URLs that point to your local machine.

Courtesy of J, there’s now A MOVIE ABOUT SPIFFDAR.

ALL CAPS is the new mullet.

As J says, your head may spin at the power of what the Playdarers are doing. It’s a great piece of work.