David Emery OnlineSoundcloud and How Major Labels are Spoiling Things…Again
Towards the end of December I started receiving emails telling me that Soundcloud had taken down certain tracks at the request of the rights holder. Ever since they started, the emails have been trickling through a few every week or so. Three days ago I had twenty-two in one go. All of these tracks have been deleted from my account.
Now, my beef is not so much with the legality and official policy of Soundcloud, rather it is with the principle and backward nature of the major labels attempting to regain control in somewhat tyrannical and damaging ways (to Soundcloud and their own artists).
This is a complicated issue (and I’m writing from the position of someone who has asked SoundCloud to take down tracks before). I think the ideal would be the setup mentioned at the end of the article; YouTube style attribution to the label if you upload a track you don’t hold the copyright on.
However this would be very complicated the was SoundCloud is set up at the moment, as – to my knowledge – they don’t have any revenue sharing deals with labels at this time, which is what the YouTube setup hinges on. I guess the key thing to remember is that – just like a download – a streaming track has a value. Sure, it might be a lot smaller then the 79p you pay for a track download but it still exists nevertheless – it’s just that the consumer doesn’t pay it, the hosting site or service (think: YouTube, Spotify, MySpace et al) does.
Don’t get me wrong – I think there’s definitely a promotional benefit for embeding songs but it needs to be coming from a source sanctioned by the label or artist; sometimes that might be a SoundCloud player, sometimes that might be a player direct from the artist or label site (which is what we do) and sometimes that might just be a YouTube embed.
Just like uploading any MP3 you like to your blog isn’t cool, neither is uploading someone else’s track to somewhere like SoundCloud.
Visit ➔Clarity
Following the unsurprising outbreak of confusion and disappointment that this falsehood caused, the W3C have now backtracked. HTML5 means HTML5. The updated FAQ makes it very clear that CSS3 is not part of HTML5.
An update to this post. Probably for the best I guess, but there’s no doubt that HTML5 will continue to be used to refer to modern CSS and JS as well as HTML.
Visit ➔A this for a that
There are three things I really want to see.
1. Stories written for the the kindle - that use 'kindleyness' the way novels use 'bookiness'.
2. Music made for the shuffle - pieces designed to appear randomly but still hang together. More than a bunch of songs. And long too, filling up a shuffle, hours worth of it.
3. Comics made for an iPad. Something that's not just a port of a comic, that combines words and pictures in a way that exploits the iPad's capabilities.
I’m very much looking forward to seeing how literature adapts to the new possibilities that eBooks open up, and on the music front I think you could make a pretty good argument that a lot of pop music is “designed for shuffle” – or at least, not designed to be consumed in a linear album format.
Visit ➔Badge of shame
The W3C have unveiled a logo for HTML5. I’m not sure the world needs such a logo, but I think it looks pretty good. It reminds me of some of the promotional materials used by the Web Standards Project back in the day—simple bold lines that work well at small sizes, with a whiff of Russian constructivism.
[…] “But,” cry the cheerleaders of ambiguity, “we need some kind of term to refer to HTML5 plus CSS3!”
Citation needed.
I think the citation is pretty clear considering the amount the media use HTML5 as a catch-all term for modern browser capabilities. Is it technically accurate to call these features HTML5? Of course not. But is it worth ignoring the popular usage at the expense of pushing standards forward? I don’t think so.
Sure, it would have been great to have a term that was more technically correct but being able to say “oh, we’re not using Flash for this we’re using HTML5” and have someone understand roughly what you mean is incredibly valuable.
Visit ➔Yahoo!locaust
I am, frankly, a mixture of disappointed and sad that after Yahoo! shut down Geocities, Briefcase, Content Match, Mash, RSS Advertising, Yahoo! Live, Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Pets, Yahoo Publisher, Yahoo! Podcasts, Yahoo! Music Store, Yahoo Photos, Yahoo! Design, Yahoo Auctions, Farechase, Yahoo Kickstart, MyWeb, WebJay, Yahoo! Directory France, Yahoo! Directory Spain, Yahoo! Directory Germany, Yahoo! Directory Italy, the enterprise business division, Inktomi, SpotM, Maven Networks, Direct Media Exchange, The All Seeing Eye, Yahoo! Tech, Paid Inclusion, Brickhouse, PayDirect, SearchMonkey, and Yahoo! Go!… there are still people out there going “Well, Yahoo certainly will never shut down Flickr, because _______________” where ______ is the sound of donkeys.
Does anyone have any good recommendations for a Flickr alternative?
Getting seriously tempted to attempt making one myself (although that would obviously be a ridiculous folly) as there seems to be no service actually aimed at photographers (rather then just people that take photos) that competes with it.
Visit ➔Non-Titular
Titles appear to have quietly died again.
They used to be alive: In email subject and body form, in newspaper articles, books and academic papers. The first popular forms of independent, online writing imitated these, basing themselves on the opinion columns of print.
[...] Perhaps it’s just a trait of apps simplifying and requiring less of users to create content, especially desirable on portable devices where if not restricted by cramped input, people are restricted by time. Alternatively, it’s a necessary pattern for streaming content, since the frequency of regular updates need to be skimmed and a formal title interrupts that flow. Either way, I don’t think mandatory titles will come back this time.
Generally speaking I disagree; I don’t see titles disappearing on the most part as for long form content (i.e. longer then a tweet) they’re very useful in determining whether to read the article or not. I’d also argue that on something like Instagram the description is a title, and that on a more general level titles = short descriptions.
Just because Twitter doesn’t have them doesn’t mean everything else shouldn’t.
Visit ➔Sony's Qriocity music service leaves Spotify, Pandora, Last.fm and we7 unruffled
Someone should have told Sony that trying to get people to pay a monthly subscription for a service just like people can get for free is probably not a winning business model
Come on guys, surely you can do better then that?
Also, “Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity” really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
Visit ➔Radi
Heard about HTML5 yet? It's the new standard for the web. Apple loves it. Microsoft fully supports it. Google says it rocks. And Radi lets you enjoy it without learning to code. Radi is designed from the ground up to help you create content that will take full advantage of HTML5 features.
It’s an early beta from a one man shop, but it shows promise that hopefully sooner rather then later we’ll have a decent HTML5-based animation tool (which desperately needed if we really want to get rid of flash).
Visit ➔Apple releases iAd Producer: Mac app to create iAds
iAd Producer makes it easy for you to design and assemble high-impact, interactive content for iAd. iAd Producer automatically manages the HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript behind your iAd to make creating beautiful, motion-rich iAd content as easy as point and click. For advanced developers, iAd Producer offers sophisticated JavaScript editing and debugging, along with a powerful extension mechanism that enables them to create and re-use their own page templates and components.
Go on Apple, just cut to the chase and release a killer HTML5/CSS3 IDE. Between this, Dashcode, the Webkit inspector and Xcode they’ve basically got all the bits already, they just need to glue it together.
Visit ➔