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Blogarithms » SpokenWord.org: Open to the Public:

The day is finally here. No more excuses. No more alpha or beta. It’s time to open the doors. SpokenWord.org is ready for prime time and ready for you.

If you’re a regular reader of Blogarithms, you’re probably tired of hearing about SpokenWord.org, but if you’re a newcomer, here’s a portion of the press release:

There are perhaps millions of audio and video spoken-word recordings on the Internet. Think of all those lectures, interviews, speeches, conferences, meetings, radio and TV programs and podcasts. No matter how obscure the topic, someone has recorded and published it on line.

A portal / community for spoken recordings on third party sites is such a fundamental idea that it’s an instant landmark.

You’ll never make the lowbrow roots of blogging go away by doing such a great job on your writing, so to blog well you have to be comfortable with stupid shit.

Lately I’ve been feeling that the world is too interesting to just blog about it. I want to be _in_ it.

And anyhow an accurate description of things would be a straight reprinting of the state of the web on the day I was writing.

ccMixter: A Memoir:

When we started the ccMixter project, it was obvious that liberally licensed source material would provide musicians a way to interact that was simply prohibited by an All Rights Reserved model. For all the benefits of participating in the sharing economy that has been touted by free culture advocates, including myself, the surprising result of ccMixter is that it provides evidence indicating the most compelling argument yet: free-wheeling participation in a commons makes the art better.

This is an account by Victor Stone of his experiences as the lead at the ccMixter remix community. It’s fun to read and full of interesting nuggets. His key finding over the years was that the community had a net output greater than any one musician.

Victor coins the term distributed creativity to describe this phenemenon. This is a twist on the computer science concept of distributed computing, which Wikipedia describes as:

In distributed computing a program is split up into parts that run simultaneously on multiple computers communicating over a network. Distributed computing is a form of parallel computing, but parallel computing is most commonly used to describe program parts running simultaneously on multiple processors in the same computer. Both types of processing require dividing a program into parts that can run simultaneously, but distributed programs often must deal with heterogeneous environments, network links of varying latencies, and unpredictable failures in the network or the computers.

Distributed creativity is what you get when you network musicians rather than computers. And to network musicians, they can’t be encumbered by the law. If the law prevents musicians from working together in a networked way, for example by making derived works out of anything they see fit to use, then the law will make the music worse.

The recording industry is having a harder time restructuring for the digital economy than the news industry. Wherever these two industries are going, news will get there sooner than recording.

I think the reason is that music is so highly regulated. News is a more natural economy, involving things like the cost of paper and salaries for classified salespeople. When music needs more paper, or its analog to paper, it gets a law or a court judgement. These laws and judgements have created a byzantine framework. This framework is inflexible.

If the recording industry were more natural, creative destruction would make the move to the internet less wrenching.

I don’t mean to be hard hearted about the personal impact of the destruction. My thought is that there’s so much because this is not a very free market.

You can write a poem however you damn well please. You can take a photograph, you can paint. But you can’t play a song so freely. If you’re a musician, you need to get permission from lawyers and rich guys before you do your thing.

Last night’s listening:

THE SOUL OF GOSPEL, THE GOSPEL OF SOUL at Sir Shambling’s Deep Soul Heaven.

Today’s listening:

Mash Pit on The Audiot.

But don’t listen to them in-place here without clicking through to check out the writing and photos, which add a lot to the audio.

The user interface of the new Lala music player on Fred Wilson’s A VC blog is a close copy of the UI from Yahoo Media Player. Some of the goslings:

Lala:

Streampad:

The Sixty One:

(That player at TheSixtyOne used to be an exact copy of the UI, but they’ve tweaked it since then. See comments below).

The original YMP/Goose player:

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Some innovations that these developers have brought to the genre —

TheSixtyOne moved the player from the bottom of the viewport to the top, and merged it with global site navigation. The move to the top left gives it the single most important real estate on their site, which in fact makes good sense for a site that is about music. Merging with global nav is a more efficient use of limited screen real estate.

TheSixtyOne also made it so that no clicks within their site ever interrupt playback, which they do by having the entire site be one giant AJAX page. I remember having a conversation with Ian Rogers about exactly that method a few years ago, early in the development process. It’s fantastic to see it happen in the real world.

Streampad opens out to a much bigger size when you open the playlist tray, and that allows them to do a lot more functionality. Given how little space there is to work with in the actual player bar, creating real estate to fit new features in is important.

Lala added viral spread tools:

They also added the ability to add a song to a playlist right from the player. Both of their features are long overdue for this family of music player, and I doubt it will be long before they get copied into the other branches of the family.

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The wide adoption of the style innovated in Yahoo Media Player means a generational change in browser music playback. This style incorporates the two players that put play buttons into the document flow — Delicious PlayTagger (by Dan Kantor, author of the Streampad player), and 1pixelout — and extends them with a master playlist and many other features. This style supercedes the first generation — XSPF Musicplayer and JW player. (Given that both of the leading 1st generation players used XSPF, I also claim credit for leading roles in both the first and third generations).

PlayTagger:

1pixelout:

XSPF Musicplayer:

JW player:

The Rise of Online Music Software:

Online music applications are not just a niche existing – it will be widespread in a few years and music composers worldwide will share and develop their compositions in the net.