David Emery Online

Roundtable Discussion: The Role Of The Record Label

Last week, I had the opportunity to chat — and, by chat, I mean “chat via the Internet” — with a handful of independent record labels’ owners and managers. I wanted to discuss the role of the label in a time when fewer people seem to know or care what labels their favorite musicians or bands are on. Furthermore, and perhaps this has always been true, we may not even know what exactly a label does.

Interesting stuff (although – obviously – a quite US focused view on things).

Two Door Cinema Club - I Can Talk

I really like this new video by Two Door Cinema Club (and the song’s not bad too). Obviously made for the internet (as all that strobing won’t be allowed on TV) but not in a slightly-rubbish lo-fi way:

Dynamic Design

Back in the day – before we called everything ‘ajax’ even when it wasn’t – we had this buzzword called DHTML. The ‘D’ stood for ‘Dynamic’ and the inference was that by using Javascript you could make you static, boring HTML pages all wizzy and amazing by adding some ‘D’ to it, which inevitably actually meant adding some drop down menus into the navigation.

However, I’ve been thinking about something for a while which actually works on a similar principle – Dynamic Design.

Dynamic Design is exactly to design (and we’re talking web design here) as DHTML is to HTML – the improvement of a web page design using Javascipt. When I say ‘improvement’ I mean using JS to implement layouts that are simply impossible using normal CSS; ‘smart’ layouts that take into consideration things like the browser window size, content size, browser capabilities and available fonts.

I’ve been forging along this path for a while, most obviously with the design of this site and its dynamically resizing images, but at work we’ve just launched a new site that puts into practise a few of these ideas:

4AD Sessions (go have a look, resize your window etc...

U Got The Look - JEFF the Brotherhood

JEFF the Brotherhood are a two piece (always a good start) from Nashville, Tennessee half of which used to be in the wonderful be your own PET. Half of two does indeed equal one and that one in question is Jamin who used to do the drumming duties in byoP, and is joined by his brother Jake on guitar and vocals.

They are totally my new favourite band, at least forthisweekanyway:

Google’s Music Onebox Launches, Powered By MySpace And Lala

Onebox will let users stream songs directly from Google’s search result page, and will also include additional content like tour information and music videos […] The new feature is being powered by two entirely different services: Lala, the innovative music site that lets people buy ‘web songs’ for ten cents, and iLike, the popular streaming music and artist hub that was recently acquired by MySpace.

Dear Google,

Hope all is well at Google Towers – I’m sure the revenue share you’re getting from iLike & MySpace must be a nice extra bonus on top of all your adsense cash.

I was wondering though; any chance of making it so we could populate the ‘Onebox’ content ourselves, based on putting content on musicians websites? Maybe even – and stop me if I’m talking like a crazy person – we could put it in the html (maybe in a specific format to make it easier) and you could somehow read that html, on a regular basis, and use that to populate your search results pages?

Just a thought – maybe that’s too difficult for you guys to figure out.

Anyway, keep on with the good work,

- David

After the Deadline – Open Sourced!

After the Deadline, an intelligent checker for spelling and grammar, is now free software. The server software is available under the GNU General Public License.

Very nice work from the people that make Wordpress – particularly interesting is their jQuery API which makes it very simple to add a spell & grammar check to a textarea.

The New Grooveshark: Faster, Prettier And Still Phenomenal

I’ve always considered the Grooveshark web app’s UI to be quite amazing, so I was wary when I was granted preview access to the service’s new look, which the startup is presenting publicly for the first time today (at 12 AM EST). Fortunately, they somehow managed to make it even more awesome than it already was, and the makeover was more than a new lick of paint as it also included a number of performance tweaks to make it run smoother.

You know what? The new version of Grooveshark is pretty slick; it looks very nice. However, while I was sitting through the (inevitable) loading screen and spinning beachball cursor that a flash-based app brings I was wondering: are there any popular all flash sites? Sure, you get plenty of places who use it as the way of delivering content (YouTube, MySpace etc etc) but I can’t think of any that are solely flash-based. Not one…

VW launches Real Racing GTI on iPhone

[…] Volkswagen got smart and instead partnered with developer Firemint, which already has a well received racing game for sale in the App Store called Real Racing. Together, the two companies have put out Real Racing GTI, a free version of the $6.99 app that exclusively features the new 2010 Volkswagen GTI.

Very nice free iPhone game there from VW, and a smart way of spending those marketing dollars…

iTunesLP.net

At this moment these iTunes LPs are available for a select list of new releases on the iTunes store. However we think it would be nice to have many older, out-of-print, obscure albums or albums on indie-labels to get the same experience; and with that in mind we started working on finding out exactly how this new format works, in order to share our results with the community.

I thought about doing this, but low and behold someone has beaten me to it (and done a much better job, of course). Thanks internet! The iTunes LP format is quite intriguing really – we’ve now got a extremely modern web renderer built into the most popular music software, and they can interact together nicely (using a dab of Javascript) – there’s got to be some interesting things you can do with that…

Spotify’s new music purchasing features

From today, every track on Spotify that’s also in 7digital’s catalogue will have a clear Buy button next to the track name (see pic above – click to make it larger). Albums will also have a Buy Album button below the cover artwork. […] clicking on the new Buy buttons doesn’t take you to a website any more: it pops up a window within the Spotify application itself.

This instantly makes Spotify that much more interesting – it’s already the second most prominent music playing software after iTunes, and now it’s got its very own store. I wonder, though, whether the people that use Spotify are that interested in buying music through it (really, why would you bother?).