Category: .

Conversation on the question of music mattering went to the issue of the baby boom’s sef-awareness. Specifically, does music really matter less now, or was the importance of boomer music inflated then?

Was the press coverage of the Lennon/Ono “Bed Peace” event about music any more than the press coverage of Britney’s adventures with paparazzi?

Just framing the issue in terms of that question is misleading, though, because John Lennon was a real musician, and a very fine one, while Britney is purely an entertainer.

Eric Egggert has done a German translation of goose aka YMP aka PlayTwitter., and Stephen Garcia hooked up a wikia page for this and all future translations.

MIXMATCHMUSIC ACQUIRES MIX2R

Stems of guitar, bass, drums, keys and other instruments are the building blocks of songs. Both sites encourage mash ups and remixes of stems to create new songs, ring tones and music.

“MixMatchMusic’s combination with Mix2r adds a lot of dynamic new music to our library and brings us closer to the critical mass of stems and community needed to fuel our next stage of growth,” said Charles Feinn, MixMatchMusic co-founder and CEO. “This combination also brings us Mix2r founders Duane Nickull and Matt MacKenzie, two exceptional serial entrepreneurs and technologists who join our Board of Directors.”

Over in my music blog I have put up the second post in a series about the Victorian genre of mother songs.

Taylor of Hype Machine responds to Greg’s comment:

Greg: “In fact, when Hype Machine relaunched with their current vc-funded site lo these many moons ago (fall ‘07)”

Taylor: We’ve never taken any funding, VC, angel or otherwise. It began out of Anthony’s dorm room and I joined him once the site was making enough to pay the bills.

Greg: “they had greatly de-emphasized the ability to listen to the music on their own site to the point of making it quite difficult”

Taylor: As the designer of the new layout I can tell you that this is not true (or at the very least if you think so, then I’ve failed miserably). We redesigned the layout to be more usable and understandable by new visitors. Our challenge (that still continues today) is to get new visitors who end up on our site via Google etc to understand what Hype Machine is about, why it’s unique and not just some MP3 search engine.

Greg: “and were focusing solely on the ability to read snippets of blog posts”

Taylor: I added the blog snippets to further promote our “music with context” goal. The beauty of The Hype Machine is that every song that ends up within our system is there because somebody LOVED it so much they posted it and wrote about it on their blog. We didn’t feel that the original version showcased that there was a blog entry (and music lover) behind each and every song, so we added the snippets.

Greg: “with listening left to clicking through to the original page. There was such an incredible outcry from their users that, to their credit, they rapidly retreated, restoring much of the listen-on-site functionality that had been the core of the previous Hype Machine”

Taylor: This is simply not true. We’ve never taken out the ability to listen to the music from within The Hype Machine. We removed the pop-up player (that used http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/ ) because we really didn’t think it was needed after we added in-page playing (we strive for simplicity). The community outcries were because we underestimated how many people wanted to pop-up the player (instead of just listening to it in-page like we usually do). So we ended up designing a version that fit better with our new layout and launched it (which you can see near the top of the left column on the home page http://hypem.com ).

Lucas: Greg, man, I hope you don’t feel like you’re being called out for a flamewar. This wouldn’t be a fascinating conversation if we weren’t down in the details. The issue of a pop-up player vs an in-page player created a lot of emotion in the goose/YMP project too. For some reason it gets people on either side stirred up. For myself I’m a believer in in-page, because I don’t want the audio without the page to create context.

Ty White tweets:

playTweets is now fully automated. follow @playTweets, tweet it “play” and an mp3 url, and install http://go
nze.com/playtwitter to stream!

Got any ideas for fun or productive things to do with this hack? Feel free to modify the source code and either send it back to me for inclusion or just put your mods at a new URL — my stuff there is in the public domain. And if you want to establish a new web page for the project, like on a wiki, I’d be happy to redirect to it.

Where we’re trying to get to with the internet music business is projects with long-term futures.

• The labels are still making a living selling CDs, but that business is dwindling fast.
• The internet businesses that are licensing streaming rights are spending out the clock and hoping to cheat death.
• The pay-per-download stores can hang in there for a long time because they have low fixed costs, but eventually their owners will move their capital into businesses with competitive return on investment.
• The filesharing companies are waiting for a legal death blow.
• MP3 bloggers who get big enough to make a living take on real legal risk and enter Dead Man’s Gulch. Those who stay small work for free and eventually quit of exhaustion.
• Services and metadata businesses like Gracenote can keep going indefinitely, but can’t get that big.
• And musicians… The music scene’s crazy. Bands start up each and every day. There’s one born every minute. But you CAN make music in a sustainable way if you get the balance right.

The goal is sustainability. Are you doing something that will last?

Greg‘s reaction to the TinySong post:

Lucas, Hype Machine pretty much “manages redirects to third party song hosts”. They don’t have all this fancy “pastable URL” technology, but you could build it on top of their site as Greasemonkey script that mashed them up with TinyURL.

In fact, when Hype Machine relaunched with their current vc-funded site lo these many moons ago (fall ‘07), they had greatly de-emphasized the ability to listen to the music on their own site to the point of making it quite difficult and were focusing solely on the ability to read snippets of blog posts, with listening left to clicking through to the original page. There was such an incredible outcry from their users that, to their credit, they rapidly retreated, restoring much of the listen-on-site functionality that had been the core of the previous Hype Machine (read their blog posts around this moment, here: http://blog.hypem.com/page/4/ and particularly the very striking contrast between: http://blog.hypem.com/2007/10/whats-new-on-the-hype-machine/ and http://blog.hypem.com/2007/10/so-wheres-the-flash-pop-up-player/ and the following posts; just watch them struggle to convince their audience that hypem is about more than just listening to the songs in the face of the obvious rejection of that idea).

The idea that some other more contemporary technology (such as micro-blog linking or taste publishing) can supersede actually listening to music as the core of a successful web-based music technology, an idea that the labels have pushed had via their all-out war on the actual listening technology of all stripes and we web-devs have accepted in the name of peace and practicability, is why their has been no really large scale breakout music site in this era of large scale breakout media sites. On the web, finding stuff means search. And listening means mp3s and flash. There just aren’t that many ways to combine those technologies, and there, apparently, aren’t any that can both withstand labels’ legal pressure and provide a user experience of any large scale value.

VCs need music businesses that can grow to very large size. For scalability you need well known songs. For well known songs you need to commit to high royalties. For high royalties you need to give up on good return on investment.

It’s the cycle that defines the Dead Man’s Gulch of internet music.

Fourstones says music is dead:

music as a cultural influence has completely dropped off the radar.

Boomers who lived through the 1960’s and still hold sway in the halls of politics and culture were so heavily influenced by the popular musicians of their day it is impossible for them to conceive (i.e. they live in complete denial) of a world where 99% of teen males are gaming and only a tiny percentage identifies in any culturally significant way to musicians.

I think this is overstating it a little, but the basic point is on the money.

TinySong is an interesting and original piece of work.

Like Seeqpod and MixTurtle, it’s a search engine for free-range MP3s. But those apps are designed to lock you in to listening in the context of their own web pages. They won’t even give you song URLs for your search results, even though their own business relies on other people publishing URLs.

What TinySong does is different: it gives you a URL that you can use to share the song with friends. Like TinyURL the URL is a short link pointing to their web site which redirects to a remote web site.

This way of doing things complements and integrates with the rest of the web.

There are already many places to listen to music. Apps like MixTurtle block you out from getting to them. Like a pushy salesman, they grab your attention stream and try to prevent you from leaving. TinySong does the opposite. Like a great salesman it makes itself helpful when you need it, then gets out of the way.

TinySong has only one little thing which is special about it, and it invests all its energy there.

TinySong interoperates easily with the rest of the web because it uses the universal API: the URL. You can almost never use Open Social to interface your app with social networks. You can almost always paste in a link.

But TinySong doesn’t work on the level of MP3 links. It works with web pages that expose the media in whatever format they want to, whether as a streaming ASF, the Ogg applet on Wikipedia, or a Flash player. The media file is on a lower level than the user is thinking about. Maybe the user will want to download, but that’s not what TinySong is for. It is for getting a shareable reference to a song, so you can illustrate your comments with listenables.

As a result, TinySong will be a very hard target for legal pressure. Apps like MixTurtle can be forced to incur endless legal bills and have real risk to their investors of getting blown out of the water with a big judgement. TinySong is too light and discrete for that. Not only doesn’t it host the song, it doesn’t host the link or do playback. All it does is give the user a pasteable link.This is an innovative legal angle.

The big downside is that it seems to only index one source right now — a thing called GrooveShark. That’s a big limitation, but I’m assuming it’s temporary.

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See also: Crenk.com on MixTurtle.