David Emery Online

SoundCloud’s Terms and Conditions - Are they fair and reasonable ?

Have you read SoundCloud’s Terms and Conditions ? Did you know that by signing up, you grant them (and their successors) the right to do almost anything they like with your music? For free? Forever?

The article goes on to say how they’re sure that SoundCloud aren’t going to do anything nasty with their your content, and I agree but that really misses the point; what happens – and this isn’t too far fetched – if SoundCloud gets bought up by someone who has lesser morals? The T&Cs are quite clear – they could do almost anything they like with your content.

This isn’t a problem unique to SoundCloud either – web darlings Vimeo and ustream.tv both have similar conditions in their T&Cs. This is the really boring side of working on the edge of developing technologies, but in the long run do you really want some little web startup owning your content?

Left

As I write this I’m watching ‘Night at the Museum’ for the second time in a week – for some mystifying reason Channel 4 showed it last Sunday and this Sunday. The only thing more mystifying is that I’ve accidentally ended up watching it each time. I suppose that it’s the natural conclusion of the concept of the TV replacing the fireplace in modern homes; it certainly has in my household – always on, providing background noise and I guess – somewhere deep down the national grid – burning fossil fuel.

CSI certainly buoys up this argument, by having the intellectual ingenuity of a damp log. (CSI:Miami is kindling in this particular strained metaphor.)

What the burning fire that is Ben Stiller playing fetch with a dinosaur skeleton has enabled me to do is to finally get caught up processing photos from the last week, specifically the ones from the Future of the Left gig at ULU on Tuesday. Now as regular readers will know I saw ‘the Left at the Great Escape only a couple of weeks ago but they’re a band that’s worth going to see every time you get a chance. Also, their set in...

Introducing Typekit

That’s where Typekit comes in. We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.

This sounds great in theory. They are promising magic however, so I will believe it when I see it. Also, it looks like they might be relying on @font-face which really doesn’t have enough browser support at this time. Hopefully they’ve solved all these problem, though…

Palm Pre syncs with iTunes on a Mac just like an iPhone

“Plug a Pre into a Mac and it syncs, seamlessly, with Apple’s iTunes,” the financial publication reports. “In fact, the iTunes Store treats the Pre just as it would an iPod or an iPhone with one exception: it can’t handle old copy-protected songs.”

This is smart. Very smart. The Pre is the first credible contender to the iPhone, but the first thing that went through my head was ‘what about my music?’. Don’t forget that half of the success of the iPod is down to iTunes and the ease of use when it comes to device management it brings with it. I would assume though that if the Pre turns out to be a serious threat – personally I think there’s room for the both of them – Apple will make it start not working.

Spotify Music App for Android

If I were Steve Jobs, the video to the right would scare me senseless. It shows a Google Android phone running a Spotify app that appears to succeed in porting the full Spotify experience — still not available to most Americans – to a mobile phone.

On the contrary – I think the reason that we’ve seen this running on an Android based phone is that the iPhone app is embargoed until the WWDC keynote in a week and a half’s time, where it’ll get some stage time. Don’t forget that Apple has been featuring the Last.fm app – which has similar streaming music capabilities – on its TV adverts. A Spotify app is a great addition to the app store.

Looking for a Web Developer

We are looking for a talented and enthusiastic developer to join our in-house web development team, to develop and build upon our suite of online internal business systems and to code and build artists and label web sites. The role will work alongside our web developers specialising in the back-end technical development of wide and interesting range of sites and tools.

Required skills:

• Strong PHP
• Strong MySQL
• Semantic HTML
• Javascript
• CSS

We are hiring again at work, so if you’re a web dev in London and would like to work with bands like Radiohead, Jarvis, Sonic Youth, Bon Iver and many many more get in touch.

Dizzee Rascal Driving U.K. 'Bonkers'

Dizzee Rascal is set to score a big-selling No. 1 single in the U.K. on Sunday (May 24) with “Bonkers” (Dirtee Stank), his collaboration with DJ and producer Armand Van Helden.

…and it’s self released on his own label. Who says indie record labels are a dying breed? There’s still plenty of money to be made selling recording music, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise (just don’t count on selling as much as Dizzee).

Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS

When I asked myself why people visit my sites, and the ones that I make for other people, the answer was always “for the content”. Content that is almost always written words and that means type.

That is why I’m now advocating to my clients (and to you), that where feasible, not to waste hours in time and a client’s money on lengthy workarounds in an unnecessary attempt at cross-browser perfection. Instead, you and I should provide simple but effectively designed HTML elements. This means just great typography for headings, paragraphs, quotations, lists, tables and forms and no styling of layout.

A great idea, I think – come up with one stylesheet just for IE6 that completely ignores layout, backgrounds etc and focuses on making the page content look nice (albeit simple). We’ve stopped supporting IE6 on the sites we make now as the user % has dropped below 5% (finally!) but it would be nice to easily give those 5% something that works and is easy to read, so this fits the bill quite nicely.

Busy in a good way

I keep catching myself recently. After the perennial “How’s things?” question I keep answering “Really busy!” and, quite frankly, it’s a lousy answer to the question. By it’s rather troublesome expediency to come out – like it’s been under starters orders in my mouth waiting for the question to be asked – it makes it sound like a bad thing.

On the contrary; busy is good.

Wo betide anyone who doesn’t have stuff to do, and lots of it. I’ve certainly had a lot of stuff to do recently but it’s all been good stuff. A brief roundup of things is in order I think.

I’ll start – going in a roughly chronological order – with the new site for God Help The Girl which we launched a couple of weeks ago now. I’m fairly sure I’ve mentioned the GHTG project before – in short, it’s Stuart from Belle & Sebastian’s new project, and it’s really rather lovely. The new site features a cornucopia of interesting content – diary’s, Q&A’s with Stuart, videos and all that jazz.

It also features a bit of a novel subscription feature, where you can pay £35 and get everything that’s released for the rest of the...

Twitter - An application would like to connect to your account

Why on earth would I want universalmusic.com (I was signing in to Eminem.com) to be able to update my information on Twitter?!

At the very least make sure you have it coming up as the artist, as opposed to the big corp name, but also why are they asking for so much access? Of course, it’s because they really do want to spam your twitter given half the chance, which is why I’m inherently untrusting about using Twitter as a 3rd party site log-in system. My Twitter account is too important to be giving out to people willy-nilly, I might as well be logging in using my email account details…