David Emery Online"Location, location, location": Radio 1 Big Weekend Check-In Experiment
The Radio 1 Big Weekend offered the perfect opportunity to try this. We know the line-up in detail, and where each stage is located, and we know the audience has an appetite for 'sharing their pride' via social networks. Some research was conducted to see which platform would reach the most users, and somewhat unsurprisingly Facebook was in the top slot.
Nice HTML5-based location check-in work by the BBC.
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Top Ten Most Powerful
Spotify: It’s been too long and the message has been muddled. Now there are listening limits and purchase options and…didn’t Apple succeed by keeping it simple? Spotify is playing to the labels as opposed to the audience and it’s hurting them, like everyone else who’s tried to play by rights holder rules in the past. You can only win by being a renegade. Right now, Grooveshark looks more like the future than Spotify.
Completely agree with this – it feels like a death by a thousand (music industry) cuts with Spotify at the moment. They’re a lot less interesting then they used to be, and I don’t think a subscription product without a decent free ad-supported version is a mainstream product.
I think TopSpin’s importance is being overstated here though – haven’t we all realised that direct-to-fan retailing can work for some artists but is by no means going to be a massive part of the industry? It’s a niche market, but a potentially lucrative one.
Visit ➔Without The Labels, Google’s Music Locker Service Will Look Like Apple’s Ugly Sibling. Again.
This evening the WSJ reported that after a year of (failed) discussions with the labels Google will finally be launching a music service tomorrow at Google I/O — and it’s very similar to Amazon’s, which also doesn’t have approval from the labels. I spoke with Google’s Jamie Rosenberg, head of digital content and strategy for Android, who confirmed the news. And while he says that Google will improve on Amazon’s offering in many ways, one month from now I’m guessing it will look significantly less impressive.
A Flash-based music locker without label involvement (meaning you have to upload all your MP3s yourself, which will take ages) is hardly very exciting or innovative, is it?
The one interesting thing about this is that this beta version is going to be free, and I can see it staying that way (with ads, of course, but also just to fortify the Android platform). That’s going to make Amazon’s life in this market pretty difficult…
Visit ➔Spotify says hello to the iPod
You’ve been telling us how much you love discovering, sharing and talking about music in Spotify - and you’ve created well over 200 million playlists to prove it. But you’ve also said you’re listening to a huge amount of music on your iPods, and that getting your Spotify playlists onto them as MP3s has been a serious hassle, forcing you to juggle multiple music players. That’s until now…
Spotify are pretty clearly trying to supplant iTunes as peoples music player of choice which is no bad thing – Apple could really do with some decent competition in this regard, as iTunes has turned into a bloated mess over the years.
I’m intrigued by their download store offering as well, which obviously pares nicely with their new limits on how many times you can listen to tracks if you’re not a premium offering. The focus on bundles of tracks – ostensibly to allow purchasing of playlists – doesn’t seem like a feature that the majority are going to be interested in, however; sounds cool in theory – “people can share playlists and buy them” – but iTunes has had that feature (albeit without the pricing incentives) for years without much success.
It does also strike me that this is a slightly backwards move for Spotify, all in all – dealing with actual files and having your own library was what they originally rebelled against; I guess this is just a reaction to the constraints they’re in, but it certainly dilutes the brand a fair bit.
Visit ➔The “book” is dead
But more to the point, it would be full of piracy-related terms because that’s what people search for. Google’s suggestions come from actual searches. It’s a mirror onto the world, descriptive not prescriptive. If you don’t like how the world looks in the mirror, don’t blame the mirror.
Interesting post on how the book industry is now facing up to digital piracy, much in the same way the music industry has (or hasn’t, depending on your point of view). It also shows how much work Google needs to do with its search results – not to eliminate copyright infringing results, as that’s practically impossible, but to eliminate the huge amount of fake sites that clog up most results pages.
Visit ➔later.fm
With later.fm you can bookmark music while you browse and listen to it later.
I love the Internet – I’ve been thinking about this very idea for a few weeks now, to the point where I was seriously considering trying to make it myself (which would have never worked) and lo and behold someone’s already made it.
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Read All About It
A few weeks ago now I had the wonderful privilege of working again with Radiohead, this time on the release of The King Of Limbs but more specifically on the distribution of The Universal Sigh, a free newspaper distributed globally on the day of the physical release of the album.
It was quite fun.
It also turns out that doing something in 30-odd territories across the world at the same time on the same day is bloody difficult, but we got there in the end.
Early on in the project we decided that we wanted the online element to try and represent the activity of the event in progress, rather then replicate the actual content in any way (so no official PDF downloadable version, for example) as the whole idea stemmed around the actual physical artefact that is the newspaper. So, to try and represent the event we decided that as we controlled the distribution directly, we could endeavour to take a photo of practically everyone that received a copy, and have a live stream of those photos appear on the site.
Read more ➔Spotify takes the axe to its free service – can it now claim to slash music piracy?
However, this feels like a bad move. In one feel swoop Spotify is reducing its ability to say, with much credibility, that it is out to reduce the amount of piracy. If you can only listen to 10 hrs, and then only five times to one track, how can Spotify claim that it can significantly eat into the massive amount of file-sharing out there?
Obviously there’s little positive to be drawn from this move, but it was inevitable that Spotify was going to have to make some concessions to be able to launch in the US. The success they’ve had in Europe has made those discussions pretty difficult I imagine, as you’ve got the majors trying to weigh up whether they want to let the genie out of the bottle again.
Personally, I think that the limiting hours aspect of this makes sense, but I’m less keen on the pre-track limits as it just makes the whole offering a bit too complicated from a consumer point of view – I can see the 10hr limit making people upgrade, but the per-track limit making people just listen to something else.
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