David Emery Online

Hiring for a Web Developer

We are looking for a talented and enthusiastic designer/developer to join our in-house web development team, to design, code and build artist, label and promotional web sites.

Required skills:

• Strong Semantic HTML
• Strong CSS
• Great design skills

At work we’re hiring for a web developer / designer (front end stuff, basically). So, if you’re interested (or someone you know is) in working with artists like Radiohead, The Strokes, The National, Sonic Youth and many, many more drop me a line.

Music Hackday Boston

Hack-wise I was most impressed by Dan Kantor’s playdarTunes. An iTunes like web-interface that you populate by upload your iTunes library file and then play tracks through Playdar (as it’s all local content, in theory). It’s similar in principle to the Playlick player (James introduced me to Dan, in fact) and I can’t help but get excited about this idea of portable music collections. Where not only is the audio portable, but the library itself could come from different sources and is sharable. What I really want is a slick web-based iTunes which lets me select which of my libraries (or friends libraries) I want to browse and listen to.

That’s what I’d like as well – I guess it’s a similar sort of thing to what Spotify is doing, just more so. Could someone make it please? Ta…

Apple Strikes Deal to Buy the Music Start-Up Lala

In the most recent sign that Apple is looking at alternative ways for people to store and play their digital music, the company has agreed to buy Lala, a four-year-old start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif., a person with knowledge of the deal said Friday.

Everyone had assumed for a while that Apple was going to get into streaming music at some point, but this is the first actual sign it might be happening.

I wonder if Lala is to their forthcoming streaming product as SoundJam was to iTunes back in the day?

Efterklang - Modern Drift

For some reason I thought Efterklang sounded completely different then this – no idea why. Luckily though they do sound like this, where ‘this’ is something really quite special:

My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement

But there’s another possibility – one I don’t necessarily subscribe to, but one that could be avoided entirely by humoring pests like me. There’s a theory that labels and publishers deliberately avoid creating the transparent accounting systems today’s technology enables. Because accurately accounting to my silly little band would mean accurately accounting to the less silly bands that are recouped, and paying them more money as a result.

I’d chalk it down to sheer volume of numbers – number of digital services x number of new digital services every month x number of artists x number of releases. Maybe with a dab of evil and a dash of laziness on the side, of course.

Well worth a read though if you have even a vague interest in how artists actually get paid (or not, in reality) by record labels.

Socialite - All your social networks in one application

Socialite is a beautiful Mac OS X application, designed to make it easy to stay in touch with the social networks and services that matter to you. From news on Digg, photos on Flickr, statuses and photos on Facebook and Twitter updates, to full Google Reader RSS syncing, Socialite keeps all your social networks in one convenient place.

Socialite – which used to be called EventBox – is easily the best Mac twitter client, with a nice Mac-like UI and support for all the bells and whistles like multiple accounts, retweet support, lists, searches etc. If that wasn’t enough though, it also supports Facebook, Flickr, RSS and Google Reader, all going into one combined feed so you can stay up-to-date with everything.

It’s a must have app – I have 5 apps I always have running on every Mac I use: Mail, Adium, Safari, Quicksilver and Socialite.

(Full disclosure – back in the day, Eventbox was kind-of my idea)

Dear Taylor Swift

But I’m sad that your web site lets some of your most important fans — those who have special needs — down, in ways that you might not realise. Not that I blame you, you’re an artist, not a web designer or developer.

To be fair, yours isn’t the only country artist site that is inaccessible to people with disabilities. Both Shania Twain’s and Dolly Parton’s also make it either very difficult or impossible for some people to access their content. So I would like to show you how your site could be improved in small ways that would make a huge difference to a lot of people, with or without disabilities.

Always good to be reminded about these things; it amazes me, though, that people are still making nasty all-flash sites like this…

Rupert has balls

Companies that are ruled by task forces don’t act like him; they overthink to convince themselves they’re making smart decisions. News Corp. underthinks.

‘Overthink’ can be such a killer; you think you’re doing the right thing by planning, more planning and lots of research but you end up spending all of your time planning and no time actually executing. Sure, some planning is needed but not too much.

And for the record I’d be surprised if News Corp. removed themselves from Google, and their pay-wall strategy isn’t going to work (for news, at least).

iTunes LP and iTunes Extras for Developers

Here’s everything you need to know to create a rich, interactive experience around your music and movies. All right in iTunes.

Apple have released all the specs, templates and a load of documentation for the iTunes LP format, which is nice. Skimming through them I see lots of “don’t use JS for animation, use CSS” – nice to have a HTML5 + CSS3 based platform to develop for…

Bauhaus Ideology and the Future of Web Design

What follows is a frankly massive essay in note form. These are the notes I made to justify the aims of Bauhaus Ideology and the Future of Web Design – a presentation I did for the FOWD Tour in Leeds, September 2009. Thus, there is a vast array of ideas, conclusions and speculations with regard to the future of our industry. Take it with a pinch of salt, and think of this as a conversation, and not a manifesto.

Very interesting stuff – well worth a read.

The future of audio: The UK Radioplayer

It’s a really exciting development and a result of focussed, collaborative thinking within the radio industry. It’s a simple, compelling proposition for listeners, and I would welcome any comments on the project.

This looks pretty interesting – an standards-based, multi-station online radio player. Basically like the iPlayer Radio, but open to other stations. What I’d really like to know, though, is whether it’s open to people that aren’t radio stations – could Hype Machine have a station on this, for example?

Roundtable Discussion: The Role Of The Record Label

Last week, I had the opportunity to chat — and, by chat, I mean “chat via the Internet” — with a handful of independent record labels’ owners and managers. I wanted to discuss the role of the label in a time when fewer people seem to know or care what labels their favorite musicians or bands are on. Furthermore, and perhaps this has always been true, we may not even know what exactly a label does.

Interesting stuff (although – obviously – a quite US focused view on things).

Two Door Cinema Club - I Can Talk

I really like this new video by Two Door Cinema Club (and the song’s not bad too). Obviously made for the internet (as all that strobing won’t be allowed on TV) but not in a slightly-rubbish lo-fi way:

U Got The Look - JEFF the Brotherhood

JEFF the Brotherhood are a two piece (always a good start) from Nashville, Tennessee half of which used to be in the wonderful be your own PET. Half of two does indeed equal one and that one in question is Jamin who used to do the drumming duties in byoP, and is joined by his brother Jake on guitar and vocals.

They are totally my new favourite band, at least forthisweekanyway:

Google’s Music Onebox Launches, Powered By MySpace And Lala

Onebox will let users stream songs directly from Google’s search result page, and will also include additional content like tour information and music videos […] The new feature is being powered by two entirely different services: Lala, the innovative music site that lets people buy ‘web songs’ for ten cents, and iLike, the popular streaming music and artist hub that was recently acquired by MySpace.

Dear Google,

Hope all is well at Google Towers – I’m sure the revenue share you’re getting from iLike & MySpace must be a nice extra bonus on top of all your adsense cash.

I was wondering though; any chance of making it so we could populate the ‘Onebox’ content ourselves, based on putting content on musicians websites? Maybe even – and stop me if I’m talking like a crazy person – we could put it in the html (maybe in a specific format to make it easier) and you could somehow read that html, on a regular basis, and use that to populate your search results pages?

Just a thought – maybe that’s too difficult for you guys to figure out.

Anyway, keep on with the good work,

- David

After the Deadline – Open Sourced!

After the Deadline, an intelligent checker for spelling and grammar, is now free software. The server software is available under the GNU General Public License.

Very nice work from the people that make Wordpress – particularly interesting is their jQuery API which makes it very simple to add a spell & grammar check to a textarea.

The New Grooveshark: Faster, Prettier And Still Phenomenal

I’ve always considered the Grooveshark web app’s UI to be quite amazing, so I was wary when I was granted preview access to the service’s new look, which the startup is presenting publicly for the first time today (at 12 AM EST). Fortunately, they somehow managed to make it even more awesome than it already was, and the makeover was more than a new lick of paint as it also included a number of performance tweaks to make it run smoother.

You know what? The new version of Grooveshark is pretty slick; it looks very nice. However, while I was sitting through the (inevitable) loading screen and spinning beachball cursor that a flash-based app brings I was wondering: are there any popular all flash sites? Sure, you get plenty of places who use it as the way of delivering content (YouTube, MySpace etc etc) but I can’t think of any that are solely flash-based. Not one…

VW launches Real Racing GTI on iPhone

[…] Volkswagen got smart and instead partnered with developer Firemint, which already has a well received racing game for sale in the App Store called Real Racing. Together, the two companies have put out Real Racing GTI, a free version of the $6.99 app that exclusively features the new 2010 Volkswagen GTI.

Very nice free iPhone game there from VW, and a smart way of spending those marketing dollars…

iTunesLP.net

At this moment these iTunes LPs are available for a select list of new releases on the iTunes store. However we think it would be nice to have many older, out-of-print, obscure albums or albums on indie-labels to get the same experience; and with that in mind we started working on finding out exactly how this new format works, in order to share our results with the community.

I thought about doing this, but low and behold someone has beaten me to it (and done a much better job, of course). Thanks internet! The iTunes LP format is quite intriguing really – we’ve now got a extremely modern web renderer built into the most popular music software, and they can interact together nicely (using a dab of Javascript) – there’s got to be some interesting things you can do with that…

Spotify’s new music purchasing features

From today, every track on Spotify that’s also in 7digital’s catalogue will have a clear Buy button next to the track name (see pic above – click to make it larger). Albums will also have a Buy Album button below the cover artwork. […] clicking on the new Buy buttons doesn’t take you to a website any more: it pops up a window within the Spotify application itself.

This instantly makes Spotify that much more interesting – it’s already the second most prominent music playing software after iTunes, and now it’s got its very own store. I wonder, though, whether the people that use Spotify are that interested in buying music through it (really, why would you bother?).