David Emery OnlineTwitter Drops The Ecosystem Hammer: Don’t Try To Compete With Us On Clients
Specifically, Platform lead Ryan Sarver has a fairly lengthy outline of Twitter’s line of thinking with regard to third-party clients and services. And while there’s a little bit of dancing around the topic at first, it quickly gets very clear: third-parties shouldn’t be creating straight-up Twitter clients any further.
There’s no doubt this is a very disappointing move from Twitter, considering you can’t find a company that has its success more routed in external developers and APIs. Presumably this is linked to the fact that Twitter has been promising advertising (in the form of promoted tweets and trends) in 3rd party clients to its advertisers to launch in Q2 2011; to be able to guarantee it they have to have tight control over those clients, and this is the start of that.
This seems like a major misstep; surely they can generate enough revenue from the mainstream users using the official clients (including twitter.com) not to have to resort to this?
Visit ➔It Started With A Click: How to Spawn A Viral Hit
This think tank will inform and inspire those looking to understand how to make music go viral over social media. Lifting the lid and debunking dogma about how to create a viral hit, this illustrated session will combine panel-led debate with open round table discussion providing all with pointers, next step suggestions and an eye on how music will broken in the future.
Come and hear me witter on in person about all this music marketing malarky on Thursday. Hopefully I will have figured out by then how on earth you do make a “viral” hit…
Visit ➔Island Def Jam Partners With The Echo Nest To Create Opportunities For Developers
In what the companies are calling the first-ever alliance between a major label and the independent app developer community, Island Def Jam and The Echo Nest are partnering to make the label’s catalog available to developers who employ The Echo Nest’s API. [...] As part of this agreement, the label is rendered the publisher of the app, giving it control over distribution and making it privy to a portion of the revenue (the rest goes to the dev and The Echo Nest). In turn, IDJ will market the app and pay music publishers when need be.
Amazing work here – use Island Def Jam’s API and they effectively own your app. I can’t see any serious developer being interested in this.
The idea of being able to access label data through an API is an interesting one – we’re actually mid way through developing one ourself – but I wonder how interesting it is when it’s on a label by label basis; most of the time you’re going to want a much larger range of content I would have thought.
Visit ➔British Sea Power plans Kinect-augmented webcast
Post-punk naturalists British Sea Power will be commandeering the Roundhouse in London at the end of the month to record a webcast enhanced by augmented reality, provided by a hacked Kinect sensor.
Something we’ve put together at work which should be pretty interesting – you can tune in here on Monday night at 9pm.
Visit ➔The REAL Death Of The Music Industry
10 years ago the average American spent almost 3 times as much on recorded music products as they do today.
26 years ago they spent almost twice as much as they do today.
An interesting article with lots of lovely graphs, but makes the mistake of lumping the whole of the industry together as one. Sales of certain types of albums are dropping massively, but that’s certainly not true for everything (and there’s plenty of money to made from recorded music, you just have to be smart about it).
Visit ➔experimenting with a second screen
I've had a rare weekend of telly. And instead of just lounging on the sofa (well, as well as just lounging on the sofa) I thought I'd see how the experience is changed by a slightly different sort of second screen. Not the usual twitter on iPad fiddling, but a little pico projector beaming Dextr next to the telly.
This is interesting. Not fully formed yet, but there’s something in this whole ‘second screen’ thing.
Visit ➔Foo Fighters - White Limo
I’d given up a while ago that the Foo Fighters could do anything other than middle of the road rawk, but they’ve conclusively proven me wrong.
Visit ➔fuck you, scalpers. terminal 5 shows added.
we tried calling our lawyer about the ticket scalping. “it’s legal”. no joke. it’s fucking legal. i tramped around with friends and band getting insane. i wanted to buy some expensive tickets and then track the seller down to beat him. i acted stupid. i did some classic, shakespearean vain “fist shaking”, etc. i made angry tweets. (i’m wondering now what on earth could be less effective and more of a first-world spoiled idiotic move than “angry tweets”? jesus.)
James Murphy Is Awesome (go read the whole thing, please).
Visit ➔Papa Sangre – who needs graphics anyway?
This game is an impressive technical achievement. It uses a binaural sound engine to place the player in a three-dimensional sound stage when using headphones. Binaural recordings are made by placing a pair of microphones in a position which corresponds to the position of our human ears and can be extremely effective
Love the concept of this iPhone app – it recreates a 3D world without using graphics, just using sound. It’s amazingly – almost freakishly – effective.
Visit ➔Giving it away.
Kayne West' cover for Vman magazine, comes with a dollar stuffed in Yeezy's mouth, wow.
Sometimes we joke at the end of an unsuccessful campaign that we might as well have just stapled £10 notes to the CD and it would have been just as profitable…
Visit ➔Spotify should give indies a fair deal on royalties
Last year, major labels Universal and Sony received more revenue from Spotify than any other Swedish music service or digital and physical record store, according to local newspaper reports.
The news came as a surprise to many independent labels and to Swedish songwriters, as their royalty statements tell a very different story. It appears that not only do the majors own shares in Spotify, they – and their artists – also get much better streaming rates than the indies. Some of the indies threatened in early December to withdraw their music from Spotify in response.
An interesting look into the ridiculously complex and convoluted world of music licensing and monetization; should give you a grasp on some of the reasons why new music services struggle to get legal (in short: it’s really complicated to do).
Also, from where I’m sitting all this talk about Spotify not making labels/artists money is rubbish – would any label be signed up if that were true?
Visit ➔Ikea Robotics
Adam Lassy has made a video that neatly sums up exactly the future Russell has been talking about. And it's as amazing and terrifying as he predicts. IMAGINE! A table that "expects feedback"
I love “the future is now” tech like this:
Visit ➔Readability’s new service
Today, they launched an entirely new Readability service: you pay a small fee each month, and they give most of the proceeds to the authors of the pages you choose (by using the Readability bookmarklet on them, or adding them in other ways). It’s a great way for readers to support web publishers, big and small, directly and automatically.
A really interesting concept; I can never see it supporting a proper business model for publishers, but it’s better than nothing.
Visit ➔MTA.me
At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop.
Lovely stuff, and a great example of what you can do these days without using Flash. I’d love a London Underground version as a screensaver…
Visit ➔How much more participation can you handle?
Suddenly digital is *everything* and everyone believes that social media has the power to turn boring crap into gold. Every product and every single brand wants to 'engage' users in a massive participatory experience. Especially if they're utterly dull. Obviously, you've got a Facebook page by now so you can 'be part of the conversation', but by now you've discovered there's very little to say if you're a brand people don't care much about or a product you put on food to make it taste better, or something clean your home with, or scoop up poop.
Facebook pages are the new microsites.
Visit ➔Uni' Lever Downloads
Sony and Universal’s announcement last week that new music will be released to the public as soon as its played on the radio has really put the cat among the pigeons.
Have they thought this one through?
Very interesting article by Steve Lamacq about this whole “put singles on sale digitally at the same time as you go to radio” issue. Interestingly this is the way the US market has worked for a while now, although radio works quite differently over there.
My take: I think it would be great if we move to this model, as if you hear something on the radio it’s a little silly you can’t buy it but probably can download it for free; however, I’m not sure if it will necessarily get wholly embraced by the industry.
Visit ➔Soundcloud 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 ➔Listening Room
Listening Room is a website for listening to music with your friends. Anyone in a room can play mp3s from their computer, and everyone hears the same thing at the same time.
So simple, but really nifty.
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 ➔