I’m listening to a worthy mix MP3 titled A Deeper Groove, courtesy of a site called deepgoa. So far it’s a great list for getting me into the groove of work.
playlist about winter in a climate without real seasons
for Cloudy Days is a really good playlist that just appeared in the wild. Compare it to what you could do using any XSPF-based method like XSPF Musicplayer, JW player, and EasyListener, using any all-in-one solution like Muxtape, Mixwit, Playlist.com, Myspace Music, Rhapsody, or iMeem, or using an iTunes playlist.
Here is that page within an iframe for easy inspection:
There’s a big piece of artwork splashed across the top of the page, and this playlister takes advantage of that big expanse of pixels with a landscape photo. Imagine the 640 x 450 pixels of that peaceful open landscape crammed into the 64 x 64 square for album art in any Flash widget — it wouldn’t be on the same level.
Underneath the art is a long text annotation about the playlist, 265 words in all:
This past weekend reminded me why I love the winter months coming up ahead; however, here in California there’s not really a true winter season. To me winter is just a reminder of those calendars in elementary school with the image of the snowman and leaves being swirled up with a bunch of lines symbolizing the cold wind.
It’s only after that big piece of art and expansive explanation that the songs start. At that point the capabilities of all the other playlisting providers kick in. I bring this up because it a really great example of why it is that the HTML-based playlisting solution in goose (which he uses in that page) is better than any Flash-based one. This is a new and better generation of playlisting technology.
pure AJAX audio formats now a reality
The best hack I’ve seen since Brad Neuberg did AMASS in 2005: Arek Korbik implements Vorbis in Flash, with no dedicated Vorbis support provided by Adobe as part of Flash. It’s a god-level piece of hacking.
What Arek’s hack means is that new sound formats can now be implemented in pure AJAX and deployed with browser-borne technology. This breaks the logjam at MP3, where new audio formats could never reach wide deployment because the only one that Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe could agree on was MP3. The result of the logjam was that innovation related to audio file formats was over in about 1998.
That innovation can now start up again. We can expect growth of patent-free codecs like Vorbis and FLAC. I’ll bet there will be a JSON-based audio format based on Vorbis. And in the long term, freaky Big Daddy Roth audio files with chromed metadata, embedded blenders, etc.
Upate: I’m getting a little pushback from people who feel that (1) there’s nothing new here because it has been possible to do Vorbis using Java applets for a while and (2) this method doesn’t support video.
Java is not a viable option. Most people don’t have Java installed, and the people who do have it installed won’t tolerate the slow and ugly startup. About the need for video, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. One thing at a time.
long overdue unapology
Personal blogging is slow, like slow food. You meander along for years, starting and stopping as life demands and inspiration strikes. There’s no destination.
I have been slacking on posting lately. This post is to not apologize.
I have been blogging here for more than five years, and I have been meaning to write this post for the whole time.
Fleet Foxes from Starbucks
I bought the Fleet Foxes CD at Starbucks yesterday. Reasons why:
1) Recommended on Twitter.
2) Cheap — only $12! Damn right CD sales are affected by pricing.
3) Convenient as hell to snag it while I have my wallet out anyway.
I haven’t listened enough yet to know how I feel about the music. So far my reaction is that I like but don’t love it.
the blogads of music
Hit the “Hello Goodbye” button in this widget, and what you’ll hear is (1) This is Jonathan Clay and you’re listening to a brand-new song called ‘Hello, Goodbye.’ Thanks to Levis 501 Jeans for making this a free download
and (2) the song, which makes my skin crawl but what the hell I’m not the target market and that’s probably what it’s supposed to do.
That’s from a company called TrueAnthem (check out their FAQ for a fine intro), which describes itself this way:
an advertising supported, online music promotion and distribution company. We believe that artists should get paid for what they have created; that fans want music for free; and that the best way to reach a targeted audience for an advertiser is through music.
They remind me of blogads in that they’re matching advertisers with independent content producers.
I used blogads way way back when. Another thing TrueAnthem and Blogads have in common is that the HTML they give you to embed doesn’t validate and screws up a web page like this one, so you’ll have to debug it for them. Hint to TA: <BR> has been off the shelf for ten years. Did you mean <br />?
Another thing they have in common with Blogads is that they’re stuck with mid-range to low-range ad inventory. Content producers (bloggers and musicians) that get a really big audience have an incentive and the means to either do their own ad sales or to move to a premium network. In either case they make more money on each incremental bit of traffic once they leave TrueAnthem/Blogads. Or at least that was how the space worked back in the day; it must have changed, though, because I can easily find largish sites that still live on Blogads, like Daily Kos and Perez Hilton. Anybody know why these sites wouldn’t have moved on to a display network like Value Click?
playing music tomorrow night 9/25
slot music
the listenerd on the Slot Music plan:
this nearly universally maligned plan is to sell albums not as CDs or MP3s, but on SD memory cards. The idea may well not be a good one at all, however, the attitude and authority with which so many people claim to know the music business and what’s good for it is appalling and depressing.
Amen.
Selling physical music media in a cell-friendly format is a no-brainer. It’s plainly a good idea. This isn’t like DAT or Minidisc, where a new format had to be accepted, because so many cell phones already have SD slots. It’s not like selling audio files in a new type of encoding (like WMA, AAC, or FLAC). It’s just making media available in a convenient form factor for listeners who are already using their phones for music.
Does anybody have a simpler and more widespread approach to loading music directly onto cells, one that will work at the checkout counter at any convenience store? Bluetooth? Wifi? Over the air? Nope. The buyers don’t keep the card, they throw it away (or put it away for backup) once they make a copy. It’s just like delivering software on a floppy.
What’s up with the dumb negativity of internet opinion? Everybody rags on everything the recording industry does, and the less they know the harder they rag. Selling music as files without DRM on physical media designed for cell phones is creative and rad, and if Apple or Google had done the exact same thing the peanut gallery would be loving it.
Ok, maybe this idea won’t set the world on fire. I’ll buy that. But so what? It’s a fine business decision with a plausible chance of success.
song pages at bandcamp
The song pages at Bandcamp are very good. For an example, see the page for the song “Mercury Vapor.”
They give the song a full page worth of real estate, which lets them elevate the song title to the page title and give the album art enough emphasis; that’s a great use of plain old semantic HTML for media metadata. The song title is also in the URL, which is good for search engine rankings; the pages have excellent search engine optimization overall, which allows musicians to capture search results for their own works. There are lyrics and a commentary by the musicians. You can download or stream the song. There is a link to the album containing the song and links to other songs on the same album.
And notice that the page isn’t empty. Giving the track a page of its own doesn’t waste space. The opposite — it lets the track have enough space for once.
details on changes in the music publishing business
Key points about the state of the music publishing business, gleaned from an excellent blog entry by Eric Beall:
Mechanical royalties take 2-4 years to get paid, so the apparent health of the business is deceptive in that it doesn’t yet reflect reductions in CD sales over the past few years. Mechanical losses *are* kicking in, though: The mechanical income that a publisher earned in 2007 was largely based on CDs sold in 2004 or 2005. Because of this, the publishing industry will always have a delayed reaction. If a bomb drops on record company profits this year, the explosion will be heard in the publishing business two to three years later. It appears that this year, there is the rumble of something about to go boom.
What about areas of growth? The other streams of income that keep publishers and songwriters afloat are actually rising, in many cases, enough to keep the overall budget numbers looking pretty placid. Sure, Warner Chappell’s mechanical income dropped. But the same report shows that their performance revenue jumped 7.9 percent, synchronization revenues climbed 6.3% and digital revenues also gained. That same week, BMI announced that they collected a record –breaking payout of $786 million this year, an eight percent jump over the previous year.
The new revenue streams emphasize hits more than ever: “hit” songs matter more today than ever before. Popular singles are the songs that will get played on the radio, on television, and in restaurants, bars and wedding halls. Consequently, the bulk of the money paid out by BMI and ASCAP goes to chart-topping “hit” songs. Very quickly, the whole industry is beginning to reflect the country music market, in which having a radio hit is all-important when it comes to earning significant income.
Except with revenue streams for soundtrack-style uses: “sync”- ability is the other key to cashing in. Songs that will work for advertising, television, movies or video games are far more valuable than generic album cuts on pop records. This gives a high value to certain styles, like electronica or alternative rock, which might not correspond with the level of CD sales in that particular genre.