David Emery Online4ad Audio Player
To match the Rough Trade audio player, we’ve just launched one for the 4ad site. It’s currently got 3 of the best tracks released this year on it, all available as MP3s and all well worth listening to:
Visit ➔Passion Pit - Sleepyhead
The current big blog buzz band - definitely worth a listen. From http://pastaprima.net/?p=979 via hypem.comPassion Pit - Sleepyhead Visit ➔
Foals - Super Unuit (Holy Fuck Cover)
From http://www.likesounds.com/2008/10/13/foals-holy-fuck-covers/ (via hypem.com)Foals - Super Unuit (Holy Fuck Cover) Visit ➔
Huffduffer
Using the service is pretty straightforward. First of all, you have to sign up. No, I haven’t implemented OpenID support. Sorry. I hope to get around to it at some stage.
Secondly, you find MP3 files out there on the web. Using either a bookmarklet, or a form on the site itself, you “huffduff” the file: give it a title, description, and tags.
That’s pretty much it. People can subscribe to your podcast and you can subscribe to other people’s podcasts. You can also subscribe to a podcast of files with a certain tag or a combination of files from a particular person with a particular tag. Basically, if there’s a page for it on the site, there’s probably a corresponding podcast you can subscribe to.
Very nice way of automatically creating a podcast feed out of MP3s you find on the web – think Delicious but just for audio. Perfect for micro-mp3 blogging – I think I’ll integrate my Huffduffer feed into this main blog feed when I get a chance…
More info on Jeremy’s Blog.
Visit ➔An industry with a great future behind it
Sister Ray Records in London… was my favourite record store in the capital. Or at least – I thought it was. In fact, Sister Ray was not my favourite record shop because I liked Sister Ray. It was my favourite record shop because it fitted a romantic, nostalgic notion about London independent record shops.
Great article, and I firmly agree – small indie record shops are great in theory but less so in practice. However, I do quite like the new Rough Trade East although it’s telling that I’ve never bought anything there – I like it for the instores…
Visit ➔NIN Edition of Tap Tap Revenge
In what may well stand as a defining moment in the maturation of Apple’s App Store, Tapulous has announced that it has partnered with the band Nine Inch Nails to release a premium version of its popular game Tap Tap Revenge some time in October.
I find it quite interesting that this NIN version of Tap Tap Revenge will be a premium version, considering that the normal version is free (and has been very successful).
I’ve been thinking a lot about the pricing models of music related iPhone apps recently – it’s the traditional ‘free, but with promotional value’ versus ‘monetized, but with less promotional value’ debate that music videos also have to face. My general conclusion is that the ‘free with promo’ option is probably the best to go for – if the game you are in is selling music then the surrounding content you generate that isn’t part of the body of work (like you could argue a music video is) should be seen as promotional value only, there to increase music sales.
That being said, if the content you create is compelling enough in its own right then it seems reasonable to think about charging for it, but then is that worth the development time and resources? This NIN/Tapulous deal seems like a nice bridge between the two, although I think it would have made far more sense to have the NIN version free – with the value being in increased music sales – and the normal version for-pay.
Visit ➔