David Emery Online
Facebook To Launch Music Service With Spotify
Facebook has partnered with Spotify on a music-streaming service that could be launched in as little as two weeks, sources close to the deal have told Forbes.
The integrated service is currently going through testing, but when launched, Facebook users will see a Spotify icon appear on the left side of their newsfeed, along with the usual icons for photos and events.
Well that would certainly be interesting. Presumably this would tie right into Spotify’s (eventual) US launch as well – I’d be surprised if Facebook would do a major venture with someone without US presence.
This comment by Spotify on the story is hardly much of a denial either.
Visit ➔Bronze
Bronze is a new non-interactive music format in which recorded material is transformed in real time, generating a unique and constantly evolving interpretation of a song on each listen.
The first piece of music available in Bronze will be Flesh Freeze by Gwilym Gold.
Interesting stab at the “music as app” concept – particularly of note as it’s not the traditional ambient electronic instrumental music that you normal get with this sort of thing – it has lyrics and everything.
Visit ➔Amazon Sells Entire New Lady Gaga Album For $0.99
We've seen deep discounting before from Amazon. But today the online retailer is hit new lows by offering a download of the new Lady Gaga album "Born This Way" along with a digital version of the CD booklet today only for just 99 cents
Now, I think there’s a reasonable debate to have over what the correct price of an album should be (and whether something more like £4.99 could work out better as a general price point, as some people have argued previously), but I think we can all agree that this just a little bit too low?
Obviously it’s a piece of marketing for the new Amazon CloudDrive service, but considering that it seems to have crashed due to demand I’d hardly say it was money well spent.
I wonder if all those 99¢ album sales count for SoundScan, and hence whether we’re going to see a crazy-high first week figure for the album in the US next week (which is do doubt going to be high anyway)?
Visit ➔Cloudy With a Chance of Music
I tried Amazon and it just made me depressed. Though I haven’t received my invite yet, the others who have tried Google Music have all said how pitiful it is. Rdio and Pandora are both fantastic at what they do, but the songs you listen to don’t belong to you.
Pretty good run down of all the potential players in the burgeoning cloud-based music market (european readers can replace Rdio with Spotify in this article for the same effect).
Visit ➔Independent Label Market 2011
More photos of the lovely Independent Label Market on Flickr here.
wahwah.fm
Other wahwah.fm users can tune into your broadcast and hear the exact same music you are listening to. It's like running your own mobile radio station. Anywhere you are. Anytime you like.
Looks quite interesting – reminds me a little of the Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx Album Transmitter we did a couple of months ago.
Visit ➔Google And Amazon May Have Just Handed Apple The Keys To The Cloud Music Kingdom
So the labels, which for the better part of a decade now have been looking for someone, anyone to help counter Apple’s power in their business, is turning right back to Apple when they need help. And Apple will obviously gladly welcome them with open arms. After all, with these licenses, Apple will have secured the cloud music high ground despite being the last to launch.
My prediction (based on no insider knowledge): Apple will launch their cloud service in September which quickly becomes the market leader – due to the fact you won’t have to spend 3 days over ADSL uploading your music library to it – even though it’s more expensive then Amazon and Google. Amazon and Google will then scrabble around and get licenses from the labels but by that point Apple’s service will be entrenched, in much the same way the iTunes Store is.
Apple wins again, and the labels still don’t have a decent digital competitor for iTunes.
I love the fact that for years I’ve been hearing things like “we shouldn’t have let Apple come in and take over digital music retailing, we should have built our own store first” yet the exact same mistakes are being made again with cloud music. And it’s not as though this kind of venture is beyond the major labels – look at Vevo, which is a pretty good stab at this kind of thing but for music videos.
Visit ➔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 ➔