David Emery OnlineKazaa, Skype Founders Launch Twitter-Like Music Service Rdio
Janus Friis with Niklas Zennström, who disrupted music distribution with the Kazaa file sharing service and phone companies with Skype, unveiled their Twitter-like version of a digital music service at the crack of midnight Thursday morning.
Rdio offers instant access to more than 5 million tracks from all the major labels and several indies to listeners in the United States and Canada through a web browser, downloadable software or mobile app. It’s available for free for three days and then for fees of $5 (web only) or $10 (web plus mobile).
Looks like a great service, but I can’t help but think that the pricing model doesn’t quite work; the lack of a free, ad-supported version (even if it’s limited to x amount of hours per month) is going to hamper adoption.
It’s why Spotify is doing so well, obviously; their subscriber levels are doing nicely, no doubt in part due to their mobile app, but I don’t think they’d get many people starting off on the paid plan without growing to love it via the free version first.
I also imagine it’s exactly the existence of the free plan – the one that makes it all work – that’s stalling Spotify’s launch in the US.
Visit ➔Six Degrees of Black Sabbath
Find the path that connects two artists
I think it’s impossible to go to this site and not get sucked in for at least 10 minutes.
Visit ➔Indie music mogul: The net's great for us
You read the industry is 60 per cent of the size it was ten years ago. But that 40 per cent that has gone is almost entirely the cream at the top. Records that sold two million now sell 500,000 - that's where that's gone. At the same time it's easier to sell those slightly smaller levels. [...] 99 per cent of what you hear about artists who can survive on their own playing live is crap. It's recorded music that drives success in other areas. Something like Enter Shikari was clearly a contrary example, and Mumford and Sons are something of an exception too - they built a large live following before putting out records - but there are very few exceptions.
A great read, and dead on the money (of course I would say that, as Martin’s my boss).
Visit ➔Pitchfork.tv: The National - Terrible Love
The Brooklyn rockers bring their big sound to an abandoned castle overlooking New York's Hudson river.
This track is just astonishingly good live:
Visit ➔Spotify Goes Social
In its newest app update, and the biggest since launch in 2008, Spotify users will now be able to connect to their Facebook page and import friends from their profile who are also registered Spotify users. Connected friends will become visible in the Spotify browser, and this opens up a whole new landscape of interaction and activity which can now be published simultaneously to users’ Facebook profiles and within the Spotify browser in the new feed section.
The social features in the new version of Spotify are pretty nifty – I already know plenty of people that share playlists so this is a perfect enhancement to current user behaviour.
What’s far more interesting – at least from my point of view – in this update though is the ability for Spotify to play, store and manage local files. At the moment I pretty much don’t use Spotify because the large proportion of music I listen to isn’t on there (music from blogs, pre-release albums etc), so this new feature makes it a lot more attractive.
If I didn’t have to pay £10/month for the iPhone app I’d ditch iTunes…
Visit ➔M.I.A. - Born Free
Director : Romain Gavras
This is one of the best videos I’ve ever had the fortune of working with (although please note, it’s very NSFW and not for the faint hearted):
This is what happens when you make videos for the internet, not for the TV – it doesn’t need to be lo-fi, cheap and easy. If anything, it can be better.
Visit ➔British recorded music sales rise for the first time in six years
Record labels, which have faced a slump in CD sales and a long-running battle against internet piracy, experienced a rise in income from music sales from £916 million to £929 million in 2009, the British Phonographic Industry said.
The surprise increase marks the first time that the growth in income from digital services such as iTunes has outweighed the decline from sales of CDs. Income from digital singles and albums leapt by 53 per cent, to £154 million, while physical formats dropped 6 per cent to £740 million.
Yep, sure looks like the recorded music industry is dying, doesn’t it?
In a slightly less flippant way, what this article really shows is the pointlessness of looking at overall industry figures like this; acts like Susan Boyle and Lady Gaga skew the figures massively and hence obscure how the majority of the industry is doing. And a lot of it is doing alright, and has been doing alright throughout the ‘downturn’.
Visit ➔Why All Those Records (Gaslight Anthem, Crystal Castles, Hole, Etc.) Leaked On Monday
Because PlayMPE--"one of a handful of technologies that record labels use to distribute advance, watermarked albums, to blogs, magazines, and a variety of other publications," reports AbsolutePunk.net--was hacked last week. PlayMPE is the preferred industry vehicle these days as far getting records to critics ahead of the official release date. But all it took was one clever teenager to get himself on the company's distribution list, and the rest was RapidShare history.
Ouch.
Visit ➔LCD Soundsystem - Drunk Girls
"Drunk Girls" - taken from the new album "This is Happening" directed by Spike Lee
I never trusted pandas:
Visit ➔Fun with social APIs: a pair of mini-apps
I’m very happy to say that we’ve recently released two free mini-apps meant to let artists do some fancy social network building on their own sites. They’re both simple PHP/Javascript apps that work with native APIs. One offers tweet-for-track capabilities for Twitter. The other encourages people to become fans on Facebook by offering a free download for all fans using Facebook Connect.
First off, let me just say I really admire what the guys over at CASH Music are doing; it’s great that there’s room on the internet for the intersection of Open Source and music, and that someone’s doing it.
However, am I the only one that has a great distaste with the whole ‘Tweet for a Track’ model? The premise is simple – to get a free MP3 download (or any other content, really) you have to let them post a promotional tweet using your twitter account.
The short term promotional benefits are obvious (lots of people tweeting about you or your content), and it seems like an easy shortcut to “viral” success but that’s just the problem; it’s a shortcut, not the real thing. A real viral success is something that people want to post to their twitter and tell all their friends about, and hence contains the authenticity of a genuine recommendation.
However, forcing someone to tweet (and often with a predefined message) just isn’t going to carry that same authenticity; it’s just going to feel like marketing to anyone reading it (and no one likes to think they’re affected by marketing). Not only that, the person you’ve forced to tweet isn’t going to feel great about inflicting it upon their friends either.
It turns something that should be exciting (getting a bit of content for free) into something that feels, well, icky.
Visit ➔