Category: .

digitalmusicnews sez:

The sinking CD is often contrasted against healthier music industry segments like touring, publishing, merchandising, and advertising. But sales of music instruments are also quite healthy, and a reflection of an ever-increasing demand in music.

Against that trend, big boxer Best Buy is now stocking up on musical instruments, according to details revealed Monday.

If you add up gains in parts of the music industry outside of record sales, do they balance out? And if they do, why is it a bad thing for musicians who lose their job as a clerk in a record store to get a newly created job as a clerk at a guitar store?

Over on CASH Music, Deerhoof released a new song as sheet music, and did it under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike-NonCommercial license. Their version is a nice hand made piece of writing with a good vibe, but it’s easier to work with this stuff if it’s digitized so I retranscribed their source into Sibelious. Given that I was able to auto-create a MIDI file for the whole thing, an MP3 file for the whole thing, and parts for each instrument, including guitar tablature, sheet music, and a MIDI file for each instrument so that you can feed them all into a sequencer and tweak each one individually.

There is no Deerhoof recording of this song yet, just a how-to in the form of sheet music. I am in awe that the band *led* with the interactive element in this release.

The MIDI file can lead straight to remixes. And the MP3 I produced from it can give people an idea of what this song sounds like, which most people won’t get until recordings come out.

The goods are all over in the dedicated page for this on my music site.

I have posted a new recording of Carrie Waltz over on Soup Greens.

Jon Udell has posted an audio conversation between us over on IT Conversations.

Jon’s very Charlie Rose. Great talk guaranteed.

I wanted to follow up on an exchange about making mistakes on your instrument. Here’s an audio excerpt:

Imagine that we lived in a world where all photography was the kind you see in magazines. In this world all photos are taken by professionals and all the people who got their pictures taken are models at the peak of their career. If you had your picture taken normally, you’d think you were hideously ugly. That is the musical world we grew up in, and it’s bogus. Things don’t have to be that way.

Chris Messina and Brian Oberkirch have posted video of an interview we did a few weeks ago.

From the “Downloads” section of Kristen Hersh’s web site:

Every month, CASH Music brings you Kristin’s newest recordings in several formats including lossless audio. For each song, Kristin also provides lyric sheets and a “Works in Progress” demo version of each song. Kristin also offers her songs to the CASH community in “Read-Write” format — by making available her Pro Tools mix stems!

Very clued in: periodical small releases of one song in an interactive format rather than irregular large releases of many songs on a static CD.

I can’t do a remix because I don’t have Pro Tools but I did play guitar along with the MP3 and it was fun. And I found that by engaging directly with the music I actively enjoyed Kristen Hersh’s work for the first time, so there was clearly a promotional effect.

I’ll be in San Fran on December 11 for the Media Web Meetup at the Songbird offices.

Here’s the event description:

Subject: Portable Playlists and other POSH-ibilities
Speakers: Tantek Çelik, Lucas Gonze, Scott Kveton and Tom Conrad

This Media Web Meetup should be HOT! We are having a panel of people who will lead a discussion on the possibility of portable playlists and other ways for media lovers to carry around their data with themselves as they move around the web.

Think about it…wouldn’t taking that Amazon data with you as you browse other sites (last.fm, iTunes, Pandora, the music web in general) to get better recommendations rock? Perhaps we can get a base discussion of what kinds of solutions there are out there and where to go forward from.

Question: what does POSH (“Plain Old Semantic HTML”, a ) have to do with it? Why must tech religions crush everything in their path? Per Wikipedia:

The purpose of the term ‘POSH’ is to:

• educate HTML authors who want to use microformats, but haven’t understood the intermediate step of ‘semantic html’ markup.
• encourage use of the term ‘microformats‘ only for semantic html patterns which have been through the rigor of the microformats process.

Two posts by Paul Lamere –

1. Toby Padilla is leaving the Musicmobs project for Last.fm: Musicmobs was clearly ahead of the curve – pioneering many aspects that are now seen as requirements in the ‘Music 2.0’ space. Social playlisting, recommendation, open web services, implicit gathering of taste data, – the ‘hipster <-> mainstream slider’, excellent design, cool name: Musicmobs has it all.
2. A parting gift from Musicmobs:
   

   As Toby shuts down Musicmobs, he has left us with a gift – an archive of all of the playlists that Musicmobs has collected over the years. It is a nice set of data for anyone looking to do research around artist or track co-occurrence in playlists. Some stats about the data:

   Playlists	1,899
   Tracks	429,873
   Unique Tracks	111,604
   Artists	23,463
   Users	577
   Tags	9,268

   This is really good data! Thanks Toby.

Amen. Thanks for posting it, kudos for doing such interesting work, and good luck at the last FM station, Toby.

Comments on music distribution where people don’t have to host files went towards the issue of band’s web pages:

Greg said:

– A very low percentage of bands are actually tech savvy enough to create their own websites.

-MySpace, which is by far the most popular way for bands to gain a web-presence, hosts mp3s and makes them available for listening, but goes to relatively draconian measures to prevent them from having reliable, publicly available urls.

Together, these two obstacles constitute a killer one-two punch: MySpace lures artists into using it as a stop-gap against building a real website; MySpace only lets artists put their music online in a crippled innovation-hostile way (in a flash widget, hidden behind temporary on-demand-generated urls, un-linkable, and un-discussable).

This means that most of the indie, unsigned, and local bands — exactly the ones who should have the most to gain from making access to their music for bloggers, fans, and other people in the conversation as easy as possible — are locked into a service that reduces the ability of their music to participate in things like mp3 blogs, XSPF content resolvers, and more general content detection services.

Farsheed replied

“A very low percentage of bands are actually tech savvy enough to create their own websites.”

This is a bit unfair. The reason most bands don’t have their own website is likely more financial than technical. It also takes a long time to do it right, time that most bands don’t have.

The trick is getting rid of all the middlemen, and having a *really* reliable URL that represents the band. From there the band can dish out reliable URLs to MP3s (could be 3rd party) which can get aggregated and indexed by search engines. That will in turn improve the search relevance of indexed mp3 links so that music bloggers, Songbird, Google, Facebook, etc can quickly see that the most relevant and reliable source for music is the band itself, and link directly.

Perhaps the simplest solution is just encouraging ultra-solid URLs. Have bands register their domain name, and maybe have a service or script using Apache rewrite that resolve to the most current mp3 of a file.

Example:

http://www.radiohead.com/album/in_rainbows/song/nude

I do think they need their own domain name to maintain ownership over the URL, even if the root domain redirects or redisplays their myspace page.

I could see a whole service being built around providing redirect links to other webservices, but giving the band control over these redirects (or having multiple sources to cycle through).