Category: .

mix2r

mix2r

A music-makers community which improves on prior art by adding a collaboration platform.

Mix2r basically echoes the traditional workflow involved in creating multi-track digital audio recordings with one important difference. It uses a centralized portal to allow collaborations between musicians from any geographical location as long as they can access the site and have a basic (free) or pro (paid) membership. Mix2r has a well thought out data model which allows needs and capabilities to be matched.

postapocalyptic visions of the record industry

From the comments on sue em all not good for labels, here’s Greg on the prospects for the music industry:

It’s kind of like Dr. Bloodmoney or one of the other good Phil Dick post-apocalyptic novels: most of civilization may have been destroyed, but some industrious tinkerer out there can probably put together a wood-burning car, the kindly kid in the radio shop turns out to be telekenetic, and the small rodents evolve high intelligence.

On my optimistic days, I find this state of affairs exciting and stimulating — you never know what weird creature could come along mext — but just as often it seems dreary and near hopeless: there is, after all, a lot to mourn for.

And Victor’s response:

it does seem that taking something away as fundamental as charging per “copy” would be wrenching under the most visionary, forward thinking authority.

Meanwhile, the death of “my favorite band” seems to me a cultural phenom almost separate from sue-em-all and more a by product of other forces. Kids don’t seem to pin their parental-anxieties on celebrity rocks stars like they did in past generations. I don’t mourn that.

Unlike most, I don’t think things are over for the labels. I think that they are going to shrink to the size of the licensing opportunities, for example in helping jeans, cars, and games to sell. But once they get there they’ll stop shrinking, because the recordings they own will stay cultural milestones. If the song publishers — an industry rooted in the 19th century — can remain a big deal in the 21st century, the record companies can find a durable niche as well.

birth of the gamestrument

Embed:

No embed: http://innerpartysystem.shuffl.es/dontstop?r=63

That is fucking wondrous.

First of all, the impact of in-browser-music-making is not trivial or obvious. You can’t be blase about it.

But beyond that, what’s striking about this particular hack is how high-level it is. It pulls the end user up several levels from decisions like the selection of video clips or specification of harmonic progressions. The user is closer to the level of a music game like Guitar Hero, except that game play is open ended. You don’t score points by playing this game, you make music.

It would be cool to use a selection of these open-ended-music-games as the DJ for a party. Maybe there would be a person selecting and queuing up the games, so that there was some kind of playlist. The overall impression would be similar to parties where the music is coming from people doing Rock Band or Guitar Hero.

Know of anything similar out there? Instruments verging on games and vice versa?

internet audio FTW

Audio | For The SystemAudio | For The System

Hamlet:

Swear by my sword
Never to speak of this that you have heard.

Ghost:

[Beneath] Swear by his sword.

Hamlet:

Well said, old mole, canst work i’ th’ earth so fast?
A worthy pioner! Once more remove, good friends.

Horatio:

O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

Hamlet:

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 159–167

Not that this is the most amazing music in the world, but that the musical creativity flung across the corners of the internet is.

Flash album art at Thinner

The Thinner netlabel uses Flash for album art, but keeps the art conceptually very close to traditional album art — square, static, not too big. What they’re adding to the concept is subtle animations, which you’ll see if you go to one of the album pages, hit a play button, and stay awhile.

various artists – zu hause² remixes is an early version, and the changes are so subtle you barely notice them, like they’re trying to sneak past. daniel gardner – under the shower tower is more recent, and more active.

success of sue em all not good for labels

A comment by Greg on the “Sue Em All Awesome” post:

You’re right about the success of the “sue ’em all” strategy in having achieved the labels’ immediate goals, but the problem is that it has been a pyrrhic victory. Napster was the most effective music discovery and acquisition engine in history, it had an enormous and enthusiastic user base, and the labels killed it in an attempt to preserve their current business model.

Then mp3 blogs arose as a ground-up completely distributed user-driven model for taste publishing and music acquisition. They had a series of early instances of driving wild success of unknown bands (Broken Social Scene, Arctic Monkeys, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Arcade Fire, etc), a possibility that was formerly open only to the labels. The labels couldn’t actually sue each blogger — there were simply too many — so they conducted a comprehensive FUD campaign to discourage bloggers from linking to mp3, which has been fairly successful. Simultaneously they have worked to encourage the rise of a small number of highly visible music sites (Pitchfork, et al) which they have worked hard to control via the traditional methods of ad revenue and star access. The result has been the recreation of an online music journalism that looks a lot like its offline counterpart and is hence a relatively poor niche-satisfying discovery engine.

Somewhere in there the iTunes store arose as a very user-friendly interface and captured an enormous portion of the market. It didn’t benefit from any of the network effects of the web, but it did its best to serve users and so it became an incredibly powerful promotion and discovery engine despite its best efforts to the contrary. The labels immediately got scared of Apple’s power over them and so have tried to stand up a whole series of competitors such as the Amazon mp3 store, each their own totally incompatible silo. This has been good for customers in terms of prices and DRM options, but has again eliminated the incredibly powerful networks effects that are what make the web the world’s best tool for getting cultural supply together with demand.

Each of these incidents (and others, such as the Pandora/streaming debacle) has shown the labels choose control and fear of change over the potential distribution, discovery, and money making power of the web. The result has been that while they’ve “won” in the sense that they’ve largely prevented the creation of an online distribution system that would be a competitor for their offline systems, they’ve done it at the cost of utterly poisoning the well: ensuring that music on the web has withered as a market just when so many other digital ecosystems have taken off.

It’s had to argue that an industry that has gone from being enormously profitable to being on the edge of utter bankruptcy in the face of the largest expansion in the consumption of its product in history has done “Awesome”.

As much as I agree with this POV, I don’t think consensus reality is even aware of this bag of issues. Eliminating network effects by ensuring that all internet music is in a silo? Huh? Is that even English? Best not to waste this breath for a couple years.

duckett on Mixwit via teru

teru put together a fine Mixwit playlist of music on CC Mixter by duckett. I’ve been digging duckett’s stuff lately too, so here’s the Flash widget for the playlist:

MixwitMixwit make a mixtapeMixwit mixtapes

Off-topic: I’m pretty sure that there’s a way to get an XSPF playlist for Mixwit stuff, but they don’t document it and I forget the trick, so if you’re reading this in a context that doesn’t support Flash — like an RSS reader — you’re out of luck with this playlist. If there was XSPF you could render the playlist with the user agent of your choice, including whatever was appropriate to your machine.

site harshing mellow

Mary G emailed to let me know about a gnarly display bug in this blog where the page scrolls down to a couple old items. If you read this in an RSS reader you don’t see it, but if you go to the web site you do.

Fix is on the way.

The fix is in. The issue was that I had an iframe using a URL with a fragment identifier:


<iframe src="http://deepgoa.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/a-deeper-groove-k15-listen-vol-1/#post-7877"></iframe>

This should work but doesn’t, and since I don’t understand why and the issue isn’t a big deal I did a workaround and removed the #fragment.

bitching about sue em all for newbies

A comment by Victor Stone on the ‘Sue em all Awesome’ post:

Lawsuits have been SOP since at the least the 70’s when I noticed that, all of a sudden, every A&R guy had a law degree. Lawsuit insurance, at that time, was built into recording contracts (at the artist expense of course), replacing budgets for coke and ludes.

The Internet just exposed the ‘sue am all’ thing to everybody outside the industry, but they’ve been doing that all along.

My paraphrase: When the internet developers started working on music applications they were so green that they didn’t know the recording industry runs on lawsuits. It was to be expected for Napster to get the shit kicked out of them, and not just Napster, but the whole long line of tech-focused startups lining up to get knocked down.

The tech companies haven’t been tough enough to survive in the recording industry, in other words, and they have walked into one trap after another. They *keep* doing it, if skepticism over iMeem’s ability to survive its licensing deals is accurate.