David Emery OnlineA Ruby Retort [not a report] from 15 year old Chantelle...
On music:
I never buy CDs, I have a CD collection from when I was younger, but I can’t even remember the last time I bought a CD, it was from ages ago. I don’t use Spotify, I don’t know what it is at all, never heard of it. I use Limewire, to download all my music , though I have sometimes got music off of iTunes, though that’s just when I had the vouchers. I don’t do music streaming, what is it? It sounds interesting especially if it’s free, and it would be interesting… It has to go on my iPod though, if not then no! Actually I dunno, I’d probably use both… Actually no I wouldn’t use Spotify if it didn’t go on my iPod.
It’s going to be very interesting when Spotify gets its mobile app out the door (although I’m sure the kids will bulk at the monthly subscription it’ll need), as there’s a whole generation now that not only hasn’t really ever bought CDs, they’re not too interested in music ownership full stop.
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Web fonts — where are we?
With all the talk about web fonts, I think it’s time I tried to outline the present situation. I’ve not attempted to do so before, owing to the complexity of some of the material, and the speed at which things are moving.
A very useful writeup of the current state of using embedded fonts in web pages. The webfont proposal sounds interesting to me, although I don’t really see what it’s adding on a practical note as it looks straight forward enough to tamper with the metadata. On a pragmatic note though; if that’s what the foundries want we should give it to them, so hopefully we can start making some progress.
I wonder if they’ve considered watermarking as an alternate solution – I imagine that with the kind of data that makes up a OpenType font file it would be fairly easy to embed enough information – without visibly altering the font – to make tracing who has a licence for that particular file (and what sites it’s licensed for) simple. Most of the benefits of .webfont, without having to implement a new format.
Also, it’s interesting they mention that EOT is as good as dead, while simultaneously hyping up TypeKit – I’m fairly sure that they feed IE EOT versions of their fonts…
Visit ➔Finally, A New Face For Topspin
(From the comments): “Are we supposed to believe that a sales widget with data capture is somehow ground-breaking? Granted, this is a great tool for indie musicians, but what TopSpin doesn’t talk much about is the high distribution fee they take when they don’t handle any physical fulfillment like Music Today et al, and there are plenty of other great solutions out there to sell your music digitally and direct market to fans. The data they capture isn’t leaps and bounds beyond what other great e-commerce innovators are doing, and as anyone who has dealt with widgets before knows, there is no viral magic that happens unless the act is great and is doing a decidedly low-tech activity of personally being in front of their fans performing their art. The problem I have with TopSpin supporters is that they’re heralding this company as the future when it’s really just following best practices other industries are familiar with. Until the music business catches up with others in its knowledge of how to leverage technology, companies like this can come in and sell a bill of goods to a lot of people.”
Quoted for truth. Nice response by Ian from Topspin further down as well.
Visit ➔Rock Band to Get its Own Music Marketplace
Rock Band Network, currently in closed beta, should launch to the public in August (with in-game sales later in the year), and allow for any wanne-be or tried-and-true beat master, music mixer, or soulful singer to add their music to the Rock Band catalogue for user purchase and game play.
It’s easy to forget, but the Rock Band and Guitar Hero track stores do a staggering amount of business so it’s great that they’re opening up. Also very useful, considering they may become chart eligible soon.
Visit ➔Location Now Built-In To Google Maps — In Chrome And Firefox
If you are using either Google Chrome 2.0+ or Mozilla FireFox 3.5+, you’ll now notice a little dot in the upper left-hand corner of Maps, just above the Street View guy. If you click that dot, Google Maps will show you your location on the map. It does this using the W3C Geolocation API standard
Very nifty – it works exactly like the location finder on the iPhone Google Maps app, and seemed to find me pretty accurately. Here’s hoping that it gets adopted in Safari fairly sharpish…
Visit ➔Prowl
Prowl is a Growl client for the iPhone. Notifications from your Mac can be sent to your iPhone over push, with a full range of customization and grace you expect.
This is pretty darn cool – an easy solution for twitter direct message notifications on your phone (if your client supports it) amongst many, many other things. It also has a perl script for passing it direct notifications without using Growl, which means you can do server side notifications to your phone which is superawesome. Very tempted to whip up a Textpattern plugin to do comment notifications…
Visit ➔From Moby
How’s it going?
The album just came out and it would be #1 euro charts if not for michael jackson re-releases.
So that’s good.
But here’s something funny: the best selling itunes track is ’shot in the back of the head’.
Why is that funny?
Because its the track we’ve been giving away for free for the last 2 months and that we’re still givng away for free.
Odd.
How are you?
Moby
We’ve had many similar experiences – giving away a track can lead to higher sales; for example, at exactly the same time we were giving away The Horrors ‘Sea Within A Sea’ from their website we were seeing great sales of the track on iTunes (and it’s still the second most popular track from the album on there, even though we’re still giving it away).
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