Category: .

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.

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.

If music is covered by a blanket license, and the license is compulsory, how is that not socialized music?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tapes is a personal-scale act of creative web music technology by Jim Nachlin:

Wherein I share with you some of my prized collection of audio cassettes. I’ve saved many of these cassettes, hoping to someday do something with them. Most haven’t been played in almost ten years. The “something” that I am now doing with them is inflicting them on you, my friends who might happen to look at this web site. I hope that you enjoy them. I hope that you put them on your iPod and listen to them at the gym.

One reason you might check this is out is that it’s creative. Another is that Jim’s a good writer:

This tape was made for me in March of 1993 by my friend Carlos, who used to DJ at the Limelight under the name DJ Tera or DJ Teras. … It’s easy to make fun of it. It’s full of outer space noises, or places where the drum machines drop out and a man says, “It’s getting strange. I can feel it … all around us now”, which one is supposed to take as a drug reference. … But techno is cool. It’s music that sounds like it was made by a lonely dude at a basement, but it’s listened to at parties.

When I look at my list of unread blogs, I can never remember which blog title goes with which person. So if I’m not keepin up with your blog, it might be because I don’t know that it’s yours.

A way for you to fix this is to put your name up in the title somewhere.

Screencast of mep3 mega hackage ripping into action.

A related bit of raw but wizardly content resolution action: Playdar. This factors the idea of content resolution out of XSPF and treats it as a standalone thing, which is a smart thing to do. Don’t get your hopes up about the code, though, this project is barely out of the gate.