Category: .

Mike Love — Songbird and XSPF for sharing music:

I’ve been thinking about way to do music distribution where people don’t have to host files.

Specifically, with a player like Songbird you could make an XSPF playlist that you could then send or post somewhere. On the other end people receive the playlist and find the audio using search engines, downloading from artists’ websites or buying.

…

Pros: no one gets sued, bands that host their mp3s retain ownership on the data about who is listening to them

Cons: at this point it’s too much work for the benefit.

About the amount of work for the recipient, it’s true that On the other end people receive the playlist and find the audio using …, but this doesn’t mean that the recipient manually tracks down every file. The XSPF plan is for the recipient to have a piece of software which knows how to locate the tracks automatically given a minimal amount of guidance from the user; this relies on the sender to provide enough metadata to support an automated search.

As it stands people share music references by uploading their own rips to a hosting service. That ensures that the songs they have in mind are globally available. This is a reliable process which is easy to figure out: rip, upload, send the URL via email or web. Most of the time the sender doesn’t even need to rip, since they were listening to an MP3 in the first place.

What are the drawbacks of this process?

* It’s inconvenient to have to upload. But not *that* inconvenient. And it’s getting easier all the time. I’d be surprised if there isn’t client software which integrates everything about the process.

* The media URLs go 404 pretty quickly because of takedown requests and the general instability of life in the underground.

* The file hosts are often sleazy.

Anything else? If the plan is to compete with file hosting, that’s not much to work with.

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Greg’s comment in the Attributor thread comes to mind:

Content trackers get it from all sides. In the new Hype Machine redesign, a fear of the record labels is plain as day. And, in reducing access to mp3s — de-emphasizing playlist-access, etc. — they’ve greatly angered many of their users (they’ve actually done a good job responding to the feedback and so have moved to reinstate some of these types of features in the weeks since the relaunch).

It seems to me that content trackers are going to have to become diplomats. Stuck between the copyright holders and the users they have three choices: 1) Take the side of the users, a la The Pirate Bay: ‘User experience is all, quaint local copyright custom be damned!’; 2) Take the side of content holders, a la Attributor: ‘I’m taking my ball and going home; and if you don’t like it, taste the business end of my 1000 staff lawyers!’; 3) Find a third way that tries to negotiate a peace between both sides. This third option is the one that is the least obvious, but also, I think, holds the most business opportunities: if you grant both sides the right to exist, and take it as a given that both have demands that need meeting, you have twice the number of possible products and you stand to be in the best position to participate in really sustainable solutions that constitute wins for all sides.

Attributor Launches Service to Track Copyright Infringement Across the Web

Links are the currency of the Web. They are the way attributions are made. In most cases, media companies would be better off if they could just get everyone who is copying their stuff to link back to them than by trying to extract licensing fees out of them or suing them. There is a lot less friction in asking for a link, and it doesn’t cost anything to give one out. Yet all of those links can turn into traffic, both directly and by imbuing the original source with higher search karma (i.e. a higher ranking on search engines).

Links may be the currency, but domain names are the gold backing the currency. This works because domains actually cost something.

Tunecore Tour

TuneCore is a music delivery and distribution service that gets artists’ original music (even cover versions) and record label releases up for sale on iTunes, Rhapsody, Amazon MP3, eMusic, Sony Connect, MusicNet and Napster without asking for your rights or taking any money from the sale or use of your music.

Enter the name of your band, the name of the album, upload your art and songs select which digital stores you want you music in and you’re done!

Providing services to active players is a good part of the music business to be in.

CD Baby is another artist services business, and they’re growing like a beanstalk.

Pasadena Doo Dah Queen Tequila Mockingbird and I played at the Pasadena Armory a couple weeks ago at a cabaret event for the 1-Second Film project.

A funny thing about the Tequila gig is that it’s jazz standards, none of which are public domain. Jazz repertoire is built on a closed set of about 200 songs which are heavily locked down. I have a real problem with this, even though they’re great songs which I love playing, but there doesn’t seem to be any way out short of refusing to play the compositions which are synonymous with the genre.

My philosophical absolutism leads to ridiculous positions sometimes.

(Image linkbacks: DSC_0138. Originally uploaded by the1secondfilm.com)

I ran across this interesting recording from 1928 entitled “Return of spring” by an outfit called The Three Vagrants over at the Cylinder Preservation Project. I like it for the Kurt Weil or Tom Waits-y flavor.

Biographical information on the act from NickLucas.com:

Frank Lucanese was Nick Lucas’ older brother that played accordion in a vaudeville troupe called The Three Vagrants. When he joined The Three Vagrants, around 1915, he composed much of the material they would record for Victor, Edison and Columbia.

The composition was listed as being by somebody named Emil Waldteufel, who is probably the same as the French composer Émile Waldteufel that I found on Wikipedia. I didn’t find a score for the piece.

The Three Vagrants

MP3: Return of Spring (mp3)

This hCard created with the hCard creator.

(image source)

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On a technical level what I’m doing in this blog entry is fiddling around with microformats for media metadata. The biographical bits above are in hCard format, which allowed me to express the name of the artist and a link for the artist. The MP3 URL is within that hCard construct with the link ‘title’ attribute set to the song title. That gives a media microformat which can express these bits of data:

• song URL
• song title
• performer name
• performer URL

Mike Linksvayer » Passwordless login « the WordPress of Lucas Gonze

Why do sites force frequent logins anyway?

Especially given this process:

1. You get a mail from a social network saying that you have a message there.
   
2. When you go to the URL of the message at the social network, you get bounced to a login screen to ensure that you have the right security credentials.
   
3. But anybody with access to your email can obtain the credentials.
   
4. 
5. So what is the point of hassling you for the password?
   

Mike Linksvayer » Passwordless login

Why do sites force frequent logins anyway? The real mystery is sites that do not force login every session (presumably this reduces problem of people forgetting to log out of public terminals), but something longer than a session and shorter than many years. What problem is that addressing?

In the comments on YouTube Phenom Has a Big Secret, Jay Fienberg said

The major labels have marketing strategies for breaking in new acts, that involve some form of making people think that they themselves have *discovered* someone new and cool–that they then can tell others about. The marketers know that they have to get a critical mass of people to feel that, so that the *discovery* spreads to a mass market, and doesn’t just remain the “secret” of a select few dedicated fans.

The marketers play a manipulative role (and, from my second-hand experience, I know that they can be really devious), but we, the people, tend to embrace that manipulation because, I think, it helps us maintain our social status. We need to affirm that we aren’t alone in the music we like, and that we like “cool” music, etc.

The thing is that the marketers don’t and can’t _create_ cool. What’s cool is obvious the instant you, the potential fan, hear it. And coolness always entails genuineness in one way or another.

At its best music marketing is a holistic act with fans, musicians and culture businesses bouncing references, new ideas and money back and forth to create a virtuous circle.  If the fans dig it, it’s not fake.

Amazon.com to launch music service in September: report – Yahoo! News

Amazon.com Inc has tentatively set a mid-September target for the launch of its music service, the New York Post reported in its online edition on Friday, citing sources familiar with the situation.

The store will offer songs in the MP3 format and give consumers an alternative to Apple Inc’s iTunes, the report said.

Notice what they’re *not* doing: launching music software for the client or a portable music device. They’re competing with the iTunes Music Store, but not with the iTunes client software or the iPod.

Not much blogging lately — I’ve been putting the time I normally put into blogging into practicing guitar instead.