9 posts tagged “music”

by Kristen Nicole

Noisetap is a product of Cottenblend, a creative agency specializing in web development, and provides a  rare blend of user-generated resources for the music community.  There is a ranking system  built into their service that pushes the best content to the top.  Their posts are segmented by music genre and context, and offer an aggregate of relevant information for their users.  People are connected to each other through this relevant information, so based on your interests, you can find others that share your tastes and will offer information that is compelling to you.  Their relationship with Ticketmaster and iLike gives them an opportunity to research and develop intriguing products and provide additional value to their users. They are currently testing in beta, and hope to be launching their official service sometime later this year. 

How is beta testing going so far?  What type of feedback are you receiving?
...
It’s going great. We’re currently focusing on performance issues and logic bugs. Most of the feedback we’ve gotten so far has been positive with very little bugs to report. We want to pound on the site for a good period of time before we go into GAMMA.

Any plans to add additional social components or music genres?
...
Definitely!

Any hopes of branching out other specialized networks?
...
Of course. We have plenty of ideas cooking at the Cottonblend labs

What are the next steps for Noisetap?
...
The very next step for Noisetap is fine-tuning performance and fixing critical bugs, if any. Then, we’re going to implement new features one by one, allowing ample time in between for testing and fine-tuning. Noisetap is a living entity that will always change, evolve and improve.

When do you plan on your official launch?
...
No official date has been set, but if I had to guess, I would say mid-summer.

MyStrands is a social music discovery site that has been in the press quite a bit lately.  Their most recent announcement was the launching of their Social Player yesterday, which makes their service available through their Symbian mobile platform.  A good portion of their core functions found on their website have been optimized for their mobile website.  They have included a powerful search function that still allows you to search for and discover music and friends, wherever you go.  The mobile app is still fully integrated with the MyStrands API and truly brings social networking and entertainment to the cell phone.  With the current trends, it's important to note the increasing capabilities of mobile devices as well as the web-based solutions that are being rather opportunistic when it comes to this expansion. 

Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarria, VP of Communications for MyStrands, gives great insight to this expansion during our phone interview, shown below (see video here).

So tell me a bit about your recently released Social Player.

It's a music player for Symbian mobile devices. The Social player is a music discovery tool and has a strong community component. We can see  the strong evolution in mobile industry. Right now we use the mobile phone to talk, and early adopters use mob phone to do work (send email on their Blackberries). Some years ago we used the PC to do office work and now we use the PC to do fun stuff.  Soon the mob phone will help us stay connected but also be a gateway to entertainment.  That's why we're buidling the MyStrands Social Player.  It helps you discover music and stay connected with friends.

And how does the Social Player work?

Every time u listen to a song it gives you a recommendation of songs that are similar. Then you can get more info about the song and artist on our mobile website. We have over 6 million songs, and not just with the big recording labels but from independent artists too.

Then there's the community component. It helps you discover new people with similar music taste to yours, and tells you who else is listening to that song. You can see their profile and see what they're listening to as well.

And does this include what theyre listening to at the same time, or does it include their entire playlist?

It shows their entire playlist in real time. So it will show who listened to it when, whether they listened to it 2 hours ago or 2 days ago.

What challenges did you have in creating the Social Player across cell phone platforms?

It's very tough to deal w/them.  You have a different handsets, and different technologies. Not all services work on all technologies. One of the things with the MyStrands social player is that you don't even need to be with an operator.  You just need a cell phone with connection to Internet. 
To be realistic, if you want your technology to reach millions of users, you need a partnership with an operator.  Or u need a lot of marketing.

Do u have a partnership?

There's not much I can tell you but we're in talks with a lot of people.

And where do you see some of these mobile trends going?

This is just the beginning of the mobile revolution. We'll see more and more cool things you can do on the phone. for example with the iPhone, they'll sell who knows how many units, but it will open the eyes of the end user and let us know that the phone is capable of doing more cool things.  Until the iPhone we didn't use the phone to do things like listen to music or see Google maps. But w/the marketing from Apple, it will be a behavior changer.

How are you planning on leveraging that?

At the end if you think about it, this is a product that we've announced and what we've seen is that people that have used it talk about it to other people.  We've been getting a lot of feedback.  What we're missing is time to put into effect all those ideas.  We'll offer more and more solutions. 

What 'm saying is that there are a lot of initiatives like the iPhone, and PartyStrands, and the MyStrands Social Player that are suggesting that the future is mobile. People are getting more familiar with the possibility of the phone. 
...

Imagine you're going to school and you're on the bus, and you have 20 minutes to get to school. What do u do? Maybe talk to your friends. With MyStrands, you can listen to music and know what your friends are listening to at home or even at school.
We're approaching a wonderful age and music and mobile are made for each other.

Last.fm took the opportunity while at SXSW to mention that they will be incorporating video search into their services.  Modeled after their vast music  social recommendation technology, they feel that video is the natural next step.  Online video is, after all, the new music.  Last.fm will create their video search service based on their Audioscrobbler software, which is currently used for music.  They have already signed deals with EMI and Warner, which will allow Last.fm to stream their music videos. 

...
And while there are several businesses including video search in some fashion, as well as the growing number of start-ups that are tackling video search with a fresh take, it is the type of recommendation system that Last.fm may propose that will really give the best access to the long tail of music videos.  Amazon and Netflix both built strong businesses on social recommendation systems.  And considering the difficulty in finding the true nature of a video and relying heavily on keywords that content owners have attached to their content, leveraging a social recommendation system is a nice way to get around such an obstacle.

via

Below is an interview with BlastMyMusic founder Chris Fellure.

There's a lot of activity surrounding music culture, distribution and  selling online.  How did you get into the market?

I’ve been a concert promoter, band manager, and venue owner for the last 9 years, so I’ve been very familiar with artists and how they make a living (and why the are not actually making a living).  I signed a band to EMI and realized that they weren’t going to see any money from their records sales for several years, if ever.  Then one day my girlfriend, Kristina, had an idea that I realized was the answer to the problem of artists not making money from their music.  Fourteen months later, that idea is now BlastMyMusic.com

Are you a music artist as well? 

No, I realized early on that my talent is not in making music, but in selling it. 
 
How does BlastMyMusic work? How do artists get paid and how do you get paid? 

BlastMyMusic is a very simple, easy to use service.  An artist creates an account for free (there are no fees for artists to use our service, ever).  They upload their music.  Then they place the MusicBlaster on their websites.  When their fans purchase music, we pay the artist 65% of the gross sale price (as opposed to other companies who pay artists net after “expenses”).  BlastMyMusic uses the remaining 35% to cover transaction fees and administrative costs.  All songs are tracked geographically in real time in the artist stats section so the artist will know where their songs are selling and can plan tours more effectively.  Funds are available to the artist immediately after a 30-day verification process. 

What other tools do you offer the artists? 

Aside from the stats section that tracks sales geographically and in terms of popularity, etc…we also have a promotions page with tools available to the artist.  If an artist is releasing a new record exclusively through BlastMyMusic, we can also run a feature on that artist.

       
In terms of tracking sales (regional data, etc), do you think you'll  ever allow that information to be public in the sense that artists would be able to compare themselves to others in their industry? 

That information is extremely valuable to the artist, and should only be viewed by those who that artist deems necessary.  If an artist wants to share their information, they are free to do so, but we currently do not have plans to make it available to the public.  (if we start to get requests from artists wanting that information publicized, we can introduce that functionality) 
 
It looks like you're sort of covering two ends of the music  distribution spectrum here; music can be bought and sold on your website, or sellers can export your service to their website.  How are you going about being a destination site as well as providing a plug-in for users? 

     
At this point in our marketing endeavors, we are not focusing on being a destination site.  We want the destination site to be the artists website.  They are our greatest advertising outlets, and we want fans to feel like they are directly supporting their favorite artists, because they are.  In the future, we may begin marketing the option to buy music from our site, but our primary focus will always be driving fans to the artist sites. 
 
In terms of your success as a business, which do you think will be  more important; being a destination site, or providing a mobile plug-in for sellers to export onto other websites? 

As we continue to grow and expand, there will be opportunities that involve using our site as a destination, but they will not interfere with our primary focus of driving traffic to the artists site.  
 How does your widget work? 

     
An artist arranges their catalog (albums, songs, etc…), features any music they want to feature, then copies the code from the MusicBlaster section in their artist account into their websites.  Any changes they make to the MusicBlaster in their account automatically shows up in all the websites incorporating the MusicBlaster as soon as they save those changes.
 
How do you protect the artists selling music, as well as ensure that  copyrighted material isn't being sold by users? 

     
If an artist or label attempts to sell music they do not have permission to sell, any profit they earn can be taken by the owners of that music, and the artist or label attempting to sell it will be subject to legal action. 

     
Right now we are focusing on digital music, but those options are on the table.

Photobucket is supposedly set to announce their partnership with PumpAudio, a music licenser service, in order to offer music to be included in Photobucket's new media mixing features. The mix capabilities are powered by Adobe, which is posing itself to really allow widgets to power to the next level in terms of creative license, image faculties, sharing capabilities, and overall aesthetics.

This is all very important, as the realm of widget-ry will get incredibly competitive in the year 2007. The look and functionality of widgets will be ruthlessly judged by the consumer base, and those with the most desktop and mobile phone compatibility will probably overrule most others.

So if I can add music to my Photobucket slideshow now, will that interfere with the music that's already annoyingly playing on my profile?

    eSnips has launched their music widget, enabling users to take their playlists with them.  While there are a number of widgets out there that allow people to do this, eSnips offers a fairly wide range of options for their music widgets, incorporating a good level of color and size customization in addition to the number of options they offer for widget themes and shapes. 

eSnips is an online community that provides a set of folders in which to keep music, image and video files for personal or public use.  Their service incorporates the basic aspects of a social network, and provides widgets for images and videos as well, though these widgets will only show one image or video at a time.

The next step for eSnip widgets would must likely need to be some sort of "channel" provision for better distribution of other content (images and video) as well as music.  Many content-sharing services are beginning to offer collaborative tools that allow for group contribution to one channel of distribution, and this is quickly being manifested in the form of a widget as well.

My biggest challenge with eSnips widget feature is the lack of ease for turning my own content into a widget, though it is very easy to use someone else's content for this purpose.

  SpotDJ launches their newest feature, "wePod" which allows their spots to be included on the iPod as well as heard on their web component.  Now the spots that you leave before your favorite songs can be heard by other users on their iPods.  Spots can now be taken on the go! 

Additionally, users playlists are updated everytime they are synched with their iPods, meaning they will get different spots with their songs as often as they synch,  "turning the iPod into a "wePod" where people are actively sharing content about music," says SpotDJ co-founder Kevin Barenblat.

What's more, several artists have recorded spots to be shared with SpotDJ's community, including Taylor Hicks from American Idol, Lars Ulrich from Metallica, Paul McCartney from the Beatles, and professional DJs such as Ben Fong-Torres. 

It's really a fun way to add renewable life to your iPod, making the iPod somewhat a social device.

Read full press release here.

via  The music industry is seeing a resurgence in anti-piracy action as the RIAA and other groups are more aggressively targeting schools and universities to be responsible in the punishment allocated for unlawful behavior. Perhaps the music industry is riding on the coat tails of the film and television industries, which are seemingly gaining leverage in regards to anti-piracy actions. And their targeting of schools and universities for these actions would appear to be somewhat biased, but understandable in terms of where the highest concentration of illegal piracy is likely to be found.

RiaaLogo

Utilizing such an indirect form of punishment for those that are pirating songs may be among the only viable options for RIAA. Going after the schools and encouraging them to prosecute students that are participating in piracy is a legal highway with few loopholes, as the universities are required to handle student accordingly. As they provide the Internet connections for students, they are responsible for actions taken by their students. While this is the case, some schools feel that it should not be their job to police this particular kind of behavior.

Could the aggressive ways of the RIAA be broadened to other larger forms of communication providers? Will they eventually hold Comcast and Verizon responsible for illegal behavior online, especially when it comes to piracy? With the growing concern around video piracy, will the actual laws have to be changed yet again to accommodate our changing culture, or will the music industry simply use their influence to recoup declining profits?  Let me know...