David Emery Online
Check Out Danger Mouse's Interactive 3D Video
Rome, the new album from Danger Mouse and Italian composer Daniele Luppi, is inspired by spaghetti westerns, so it makes sense that a video from the album would be a filmic experience unto itself. Danger Mouse has teamed up with Google and director Chris Milk, the man behind Arcade Fire's amazing interactive "The Wilderness Downtown" video, to make "3 Dreams of Black", an interactive 3D complement to the Rome track "Black", which features Norah Jones on vocals.
Looks beautiful, and an amazing demonstration of what you can do with the right browser without Flash these days, but the interactivity seems like an afterthought.
Visit ➔"Location, location, location": Radio 1 Big Weekend Check-In Experiment
The Radio 1 Big Weekend offered the perfect opportunity to try this. We know the line-up in detail, and where each stage is located, and we know the audience has an appetite for 'sharing their pride' via social networks. Some research was conducted to see which platform would reach the most users, and somewhat unsurprisingly Facebook was in the top slot.
Nice HTML5-based location check-in work by the BBC.
Visit ➔CSS Regions Prototype
This page contains information regarding a WebKit-based prototype of CSS Regions, the proposed additions from Adobe to the W3C CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) modules to build complex, magazine-like layouts using web standards. Capturing in digital form the complex layouts of a typical magazine, newspaper, or textbook requires capabilities beyond those possible with the existing CSS modules. CSS Regions is a proposal that describes how content creators can use some additional basic building blocks to express complex layouts with CSS.
Quite an interesing development – Adobe are obviously looking to move to HTML for their emagazine publishing workflow, which will be far better then what they use currently (which is essentially lots of pngs outputted by InDesign).
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Top Ten Most Powerful
Spotify: It’s been too long and the message has been muddled. Now there are listening limits and purchase options and…didn’t Apple succeed by keeping it simple? Spotify is playing to the labels as opposed to the audience and it’s hurting them, like everyone else who’s tried to play by rights holder rules in the past. You can only win by being a renegade. Right now, Grooveshark looks more like the future than Spotify.
Completely agree with this – it feels like a death by a thousand (music industry) cuts with Spotify at the moment. They’re a lot less interesting then they used to be, and I don’t think a subscription product without a decent free ad-supported version is a mainstream product.
I think TopSpin’s importance is being overstated here though – haven’t we all realised that direct-to-fan retailing can work for some artists but is by no means going to be a massive part of the industry? It’s a niche market, but a potentially lucrative one.
Visit ➔Without The Labels, Google’s Music Locker Service Will Look Like Apple’s Ugly Sibling. Again.
This evening the WSJ reported that after a year of (failed) discussions with the labels Google will finally be launching a music service tomorrow at Google I/O — and it’s very similar to Amazon’s, which also doesn’t have approval from the labels. I spoke with Google’s Jamie Rosenberg, head of digital content and strategy for Android, who confirmed the news. And while he says that Google will improve on Amazon’s offering in many ways, one month from now I’m guessing it will look significantly less impressive.
A Flash-based music locker without label involvement (meaning you have to upload all your MP3s yourself, which will take ages) is hardly very exciting or innovative, is it?
The one interesting thing about this is that this beta version is going to be free, and I can see it staying that way (with ads, of course, but also just to fortify the Android platform). That’s going to make Amazon’s life in this market pretty difficult…
Visit ➔A zoom lens is never wide or long enough
I was taking photos at Angkor Wat in Cambodia yesterday with my Olympus E-P1, and noticed something about my pattern of taking photos: Most of the time, I'm taking pictures either fully zoomed in, or fully zoomed out. It was annoying me, because I figured that showed a weakness in the lens: Basically, it was never wide - or long - enough for the photos I really wanted to take.
When I used to use zoom lenses this is exactly what I found – with my 24-70 I was 90% of the time either at 24mm or 70mm. I much prefer now using primes (fixed focal length lenses) all the time; I think it’s much easier to focus on composition when you take zooming out of the equation. The trade-off is that you might not have the right focal length on the camera at the right time, but you can’t always be in the right place at the right time.
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Spotify says hello to the iPod
You’ve been telling us how much you love discovering, sharing and talking about music in Spotify - and you’ve created well over 200 million playlists to prove it. But you’ve also said you’re listening to a huge amount of music on your iPods, and that getting your Spotify playlists onto them as MP3s has been a serious hassle, forcing you to juggle multiple music players. That’s until now…
Spotify are pretty clearly trying to supplant iTunes as peoples music player of choice which is no bad thing – Apple could really do with some decent competition in this regard, as iTunes has turned into a bloated mess over the years.
I’m intrigued by their download store offering as well, which obviously pares nicely with their new limits on how many times you can listen to tracks if you’re not a premium offering. The focus on bundles of tracks – ostensibly to allow purchasing of playlists – doesn’t seem like a feature that the majority are going to be interested in, however; sounds cool in theory – “people can share playlists and buy them” – but iTunes has had that feature (albeit without the pricing incentives) for years without much success.
It does also strike me that this is a slightly backwards move for Spotify, all in all – dealing with actual files and having your own library was what they originally rebelled against; I guess this is just a reaction to the constraints they’re in, but it certainly dilutes the brand a fair bit.
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