Entries Tagged 'music' ↓

How did an interview recorded 40 years ago win a 2009 Emmy? We have a long gestation time, YouTube, and peace to thank, reports the Observer.

In 1969, then 14-year-old Jerry Levitan made his way to John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto, elbowed a long line of press out of the way and somehow convinced the famous Beatle to give him a 40-minute interview. The conversation made its way from reel-to-reel tape to an animated short almost 4 decades later and was posted to YouTube in 2007.

Created with director and animator Josh Raskin and illustrator James Braithwaite, the 5-minute animation was originally developed to be included on DVD with Mr. Levitan’s book, I Met the Walrus: How One Day With John Lennon Changed My Life Forever. Since being posted to YouTube the short won Best Animation at the Manhattan Short Film Festival and was nominated for a 2008 Academy Award.

This year, I Met the Walrus went up against an “All My Children” video podcast, the New York Times Style Magazine screen tests and other notable nominations to win the “New Approaches – Daytime” award at the 36th Annual Creative Arts Emmy Awards.

The animated short features audio footage from the interview as its soundtrack, with Lennon imparting messages about peace being in the hands of the people even in a time of war. Its visual style is wonderfully playful, intelligently cartoonish and stylistically appropriate to the subject, being almost reminiscent of some of Lennon’s own illustrative work from his published works.

Check out the video below and let us know what you think. Is the film and its attendant story about an unlikely meeting between a teenager and the then biggest star in the world worth its accolades? Do you think I Met the Walrus succeeds, as Jerry Levitan hoped, “something that I thought John would love”?

---

I Met the Walrus

---

Image courtesy of Roy Kerwood

---

Reviews: YouTube

Tags: animation, Emmys, john lennon, the beatles, youtube

The record industry has approached Apple’s App store with a somewhat amusing amount of hesitation. When the App Store first launched last summer, a few major artists tested the waters with some obnoxiously basic apps, sometimes consisting of little more than a splash screen and a handful of their songs. But things are beginning to change. Leading the charge has been Nine Inch Nails, which partnered with Tapulous last fall to release a special NIN version of Tap Tap Revenge and more recently launched a robust ‘NIN Access’ app that offers fans a library of rich media, news, and social features. The app’s reception has been overwhelmingly positive, with over 75% of reviewers giving it five stars.

Now the major record labels (and countless indie bands) are looking to get in on the action. Enter Mobile Roadie, a new application platform that allows bands to quickly deploy their own custom applications to the App Store. For a relatively small fee, bands can use Mobile Roadie’s mostly-automated system to build their apps and have them posted to Apple’s App Store in as little as a week (and the majority of the wait is from Apple’s still-mysterious approval process).

The application supports a wide range of content, including photo galleries, streaming music (which can be linked to songs for purchase on iTunes), YouTube videos, a list of upcoming shows, and interactive features, like a ‘fan wall’ where users can post comments and photos in real time for all to see. On the backend, bands will have access to an intuitive CMS, where they’ll be able to update photos and video, manage comments, and post news stories. They can also choose what price they’d like their app to sell for on the App Store.

CEO Michael Schneider acknowledges that there are other media platforms available, like Kyte, but says that these can run thousands of dollars apiece. Mobile Roadie is substantially cheaper, running $399 for intitial setup and then $29 a month after that. For larger bands that receive over 1000 installs, there’s an additional 1 cent per month, per install charge. The company is currently in talks with every major record label (some of which are already testing the app), and has forged an exclusive partnership with The Orchard, a leading indie distributor.

I’ve tried out a few of Mobile Roadie’s apps, and for the most part they seem to work quite well (though if a band doesn’t upload many media assets the app feels a bit barren). The company has positioned itself well in a space that is about to really take off, especially once the iPhone 3.0 software hits and users will be able to see updates in realtime from their favorite bands without having to open the application manually.

If you’d like to check out a band’s app built on the Mobile Roadie platform, you can see a directory of their apps here.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

In their own words

“Stop listening to only the songs you own or listening to 30-second samples on iTunes before you download. VastFM allows you to listen to full versions of any song imaginable.”

What it does

VastFM allows you to stream every song by every artist, for free. Simply furnish the name of the artist to see his entire discography, and listen to any song you’d like. This solution uses open music directories and audio from YouTube videos to deliver every song you can think of. Links to concert tickets in your area for artists you might like are also provided.

The site claims to have the largest music directory on the Internet, and to have all your favorite unsigned artists. If you just look at the cloud of keywords on the opening screen you will see that is quite accurate – at a single glance I spotted Americana artists like Explosions In The Sky, representative figures from the 60s like Leonard Cohen and also bands like The Jam and Franz Ferdinand. Of course, hip hop artists and contemporary rockers like Kaiser Chiefs were prominently featured.

At the end of the day, the site is a true platform of discovery. You can find new music on the spot, and also listen to brand new albums to decide if you like them before parting with your cash.

Why it might be a killer

Finding new music through the Internet has never been easier.

Some questions

Can you create playlists and share them with your friends?

Link: http://www.vastfm.com
Our Review: http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-Photo/vastfm-com-stream-every-song-by-every-artist-for-free

 

Music mashup site shows how User Experience is done.

MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine launched a new microsite today called the Music Blog Zeitgeist. There you can listen, for free, to entire albums from the most blogged-about musicians of 2008. Bringing together a whole host of different technologies to create one experience, the site is beautiful and a lot of fun to navigate.

Sponsor

Lots of sites have published top album lists for the past year, but Hype Machine tells us objectively who the most popular musicians on the web have been, at least among the army of music bloggers it’s been tracking for years. The Top 50 lists will be published throughout this week, starting with the 50th through 41st most popular songs, bands and albums posted today.

Technology combined with Hype Machine’s own aggregation and parsing includes:

• Imeem Flash players that let you listen to entire albums for free. Not thrown haphazardly on the site, either, they are displayed beautifully.
• Creative Commons photos of the bands are used to illustrate each entry. The effect is really nice. Reminiscent of what we’ve see at travel social network Dopplr but actually inspired, they say, by this similar city guide to Berlin.
• Blog Fresh Radio has produced embeddable “shows” about all the music, including interviews with the artists.
• Musebin has been used to automatically create 1 line album reviews, parsed from all the blog coverage discovered via Hype Machine. Visitors can click through multiple reviews without leaving the page.

The end result is an awesome site that we’ll be visiting all week and beyond. When it comes to data driven media mashups, we can’t sing Hype Machine’s praises loud enough. With this new site they’ve really outdone themselves.

Check it out at hypem.com/zeitgeist.

Discuss

By Ashley Ringrose

Imagine if three minutes of video could save your career. That’s what happened to OK Go when the group produced its own film clip after its label threatened to let them go. Gone are the days of multi-million dollar music videos; today they are all produced with love on small budgets by a committed group of creative people.

Below are 60+ original music videos to inspire you and get you excited about the medium again. Some old, some new, but I guarantee you haven’t seen all of them before. Note: these are presented in random order. Just something to relax on a rainy sunday. Please be patient: the page may need some time to load.

You may also want to take a look at the following related post:

• 29 Brilliant Music Videos

The Music Videos

1: TISM: Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me

2: Mansun: Taxloss

3: Queens of the Stone Age: Go With the Flow

4: Aphex Twin: Windowlicker (NSFW)

5: Aphex Twin: Come to Daddy

6: Lenny Kravitz: Are You Gonna Go My Way

7: Prodigy: Smack My Bitch Up (NSFW)

Watch in high quality on YouTube

8: A-ha: Take On Me

9: Beck: Girl

Get Quicktimes here

10: Pharcycle: Drop

11: Blur: Coffee & TV

12: Junior Senior: Move Your Feet

13: Royksopp: Remind Me

14: Peter Gabriel: Sledgehammer

15: White Strips: Fell In Love With a Girl

Watch in high quality on YouTube

16: Daft Punk: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (fan made)

17: Daft Punk: Around the World

18: Daft Punk: Interstellar 555 Clips

19: Tenacious D: Fuck Her Gently (NSFW)

Watch original Flash animation here
More info here

20: Michael Jackson: Thriller

21: Lemon Jelly: The Shouty Track

22: Justice: D.A.N.C.E.

23: Justice: Stress

24: Justice vs. Simian: We Are Your Friends

25: Justice: DVNO

26: Beastie Boys: Sabotage

27: Radiohead: House of Cards

Get The Code and more info on Google Code

28: Coldcut: Timber

29: Eels: Novocain for the Soul

30: Gorillaz: Clint Eastwood, and Dirty Harry

31: Chemical Brothers: Star Guitar

32: Chemical Brothers, featuring K-OS: Get Yourself High

33: Weezer: Buddy Holly

Full version here.

34: Weezer: Pork and Beans

Pork and Beans – Weezer

35: Coldplay: The Hardest Part

36: Bjork: Wanderlust

Official website for the video here

37: Gotye: Hearts a Mess

38: Funstorung: Sleeping Beauty

39: OK Go: Here It Goes Again

40: Metallica: One

41: Verve: Bittersweet Symphony

42: Supergrass: Pumping on Your Stereo

43: Santogold, Julian Casablancas, N.E.R.D: My Drive Thru for Converse

44: Bjork: All is Full of Love

45: Alex Gopher: The Child

46: Paula Abdul: Opposites Attract

C’mon, this was a classic when it came out! Don’t judge me.

47: Unkle: Rabbit in your Headlights

48: DJ Format: We Know Something You Don’t Know

49: Telemetry Orchestra: Suburban Harmony

50: The Bumblebeez: Dr. Love

Directed by my favorite director, Tom Kuntz. A true genius.

51: Jamiroquai: Virtual Insanity

52: Tool: Stinkfist

53: Red Hot Chili Peppers: Give It Away

54: Weird Al Yankovic: Bedrock Anthem

55: The Avalanches: Frontier Psychiatrist

Also directed by Tom Kuntz

56: Basement Jaxx: Where’s Your Head At

57: Wu-Tang Clan: Triumph

Directed by Brett Ratner!

58: Battles: Tonto

59: Sia: Buttons

60: Fatboy Slim: Praise You, and Weapon of Choice

61: Architecture in Helsinki: Do the Whirlwind

62: Softlightes: Heart Made Of Sound

63: Fujiya & Miyagi: Ankle Injuries

64: Yuki: Sentimental Journey

Last Click

Here are three music videos that will get stuck in your head.

Related Posts

You may also want to take a look at the following related post:

• 29 Brilliant Music Videos

(al)

I’m not a morning person. The moment my iPhone’s terrible “alarm” rings, I curse the day. There’s only one reason why I make it to the office, or anywhere besides my bed. Music.

It fuels my life. And those of my friends. We exchange music every day – our drop boxes are working overtime. The Hypemachine, a secret new music service, and some specific friends on Twitter supply us with inspiration for new songs and albums. There’s only one downside.., my iTunes collection is a mess.

In comes TuneUp

Actually, my iTunes collection was a mess. Ever since I’ve discovered TuneUp, I can browse my collection Cover Flow style without being agitated by the lack of covers.

TuneUp is a management tool that let’s you clean dirty tracks (like the ones that have the artists’s name in the song title), find missing cover art, receive upcoming concert alerts, and enjoy music videos.

The PC version is available in French, Spanish, Italian, German, and English, so most of your European folks can use the service in your native language. People from Holland, Scandinavia, and Eastern European countries must remain patient for a while.

Still in beta, we have 50 invites

TuneUp for Mac is still in private beta, meaning it made my Mac crash once and it loads very slowly. But still, my collection looks way better now. So grab yourself one of those Next Web invites to try it our yourself. Send an email to thenextweb@tuneupmedia.com, the first 50 will be invited to the TuneUp Mac Beta.

The normal program is free for 500 songs/50 album art cleans, and $19.95 for unlimited (Gold version).

Combine the element of Web search with music playback and a mohawk-sporting, ciggie-smoking dinosaur, and you get MixTurtle, a new service that works as you might expect it to. Just click and play.

Ajax is responsible making it behave as it does. Some might consider it bit too heavy on the large print. Everything but the topmost menu is sized big. But this is fairly easy to get accustomed to. And there’s an upside to the design choice. The results are easy to make sense of. If your music search produces an especially large volume of material, this can really prove helpful in finding what you’re looking for.

Most impressive with MixTurtle, whose content sources are absent the picture, is the sheer speed with which information is displayed. Begin to type a keyword, and you’re immediately shown a selection of choices in a drop-down overlay. You can select one listed or continue with your query by manually inputting any desired text. Once you’ve entered your search, the rate of return is all but instant. I don’t recall testing any other engine with such alacrity. Not Seeqpod, not Songza, not any other. This little reptile has one heck of a rocket affixed to its rear, for sure.

The rest of the engine is fairly self-explanatory. As noted directly above the results box, you can add songs to a playlist, which you can call on any subsequently visit once you sign up for a free account.

To play back music, you click the artist/track label. Click again to pause. A slim submenu emerges directly below the chosen song, which displays the buffer bar, the number of sources discovered to hold said track, and an option to browse other sources. That last item may not prove too useful, however, since MixTurtle automatically begins to plays a song. (Note: sometimes a request or a user name and password will surface for a particular track.)

I work on Google Code. Hearing that Radiohead was going to release data with progressive licensing and wanted to do so on Google Code was awesome.

Now we see how cool it is that the data is open. People like Jacob Seidelin are doing interesting things with it.

In this case, Jacob has created amazing visualizations of the data using JavaScript and Canvas:

I figured it would be a nice little experiment to try visualizing this data using JavaScript and Canvas so I went and did just that. The data is simply point clouds, meaning a whole bunch of points with x,y,z values (and intensity) for each frame. The data on Google Code is about 800 MB, so obviously a bit of trimming had to be done. You can’t expect 30 fps with Javascript doing with this kind of data, so I’ve only used every 5 frames giving us a framerate of 6 fps, not great but acceptable. Then the actual points, each frame has about 12,000 points. No way this will render with 6 fps in any browser, so again I’ve taken only 10% of the points. Additionally, I’ve tried to filter away the noise around Thom Yorke’s head since that took up a good deal of points. The interesting bit is him singing, anyway. In the end, we have a dataset of about 4 MB (converted to a JS array) for the one minute clip they released.

Now the data is in a more manageable state and the visualization can begin. It’s not as good as the real thing, obviously, but I think it’s ok (it’s best when you look at Thom in profile). The audio clip is as usual played via SoundManager 2 which also gives us free timing information to sync the rendering to. I’ve played around and made a few different effects that you can toggle on and off (by pressing keys 1-9). While it is playing you can also rotate around the vertical axis by moving the mouse horizontally over the video. Also try clicking/doubleclicking.

Great publicity for Radiohead too. When you are first to do something, that is often the case.

The Radiohead video for “House of Cards” that used no cameras or lights, only fancy lasers, just hit the web, and it’s just as crazy and trippy as the screenshots suggested. Above, check out the video, while after the jump you’ll find another video that details just how it was made. Did I mention that because this video is pure data instead of images you can manipulate it in real time using a visualizer? Because you can.

Also be sure to check out the awesome visualizer, which lets you manipulate the data to adjust the image and rotate around the objects in real-time. The most fun time waster you’ll find all week, guaranteed. [Radiohead]

Recently we brought you a list of free & legal music downloads, but we understand that not everyone wants to eat up space on their hard drive or MP3 player.  So we’ve compiled a list of 30+ awesome streaming music sites we know you’ll enjoy.

Whether you’re interested in general streaming music, mixtapes, music discovery, or more, the Internet offers a plethora of streaming music services. Tell us which are your favorites.

General Streaming

AH.fm – Streaming techno and dance music, as well as a forum for you to discuss with other fans.

AmazingTunes.com – Search for artists you want to hear or choose from a list of stations. Has a pop out player so you can listen as you browse other sites on the Web.

AOL Radio – Powered by CBS Radio, AOL Radio brings you talk, streaming music and actual radio stations.

Deezer.com – Part social network, all music.  The site allows you to listen to free streaming music, build your own playlists, share them with friends and even embed music on other sites.

DI.fm – Digitally Imported specializes in streaming electronic and dance music from all around the globe.  Also offers premium upgrades for higher bit rates.

Free.Napster.com – Free streaming music from Napster that includes full albums.

Grooveshark.com – Build your own playlist, as you go along, save it, and you can listen to it again in the future.  Also suggests similar songs and more.

iLike.com – Features a mixture of full songs and samples that you can listen to. An extremely popular app on many social networks.

iTunes – While not a Web application, the vast majority of us have it already installed on our systems.  Just click on the “Radio” link and listen to different Internet radio stations from all over the world.

Last.fm – Last.fm follows what you listen to and then makes suggestions of what else you may like, or you can also just dive right in, listening to whatever you feel like.

Live365.com – A mixture of free stations and ones only available to VIP subscribers, it covers just about every genre of music you can think of.

Magnatune.com – A home for independent artists where you can either stream their albums, or buy them by naming your price, starting at $5.00.

MikesRadioWorld.com – A guide to over 5,000 streaming radio stations from the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Europe.

MP3.com – Stream the music, or download it free.  Lets you jump around choosing the tunes you want to hear.

MusicMesh.net – Start with one album, listen to it in its entirety or just one track, and then check out other artists and albums that are of a similar vein.

RadioTime.com – Collects streams from radio stations from all over, putting them in one easy to use directory.

Real Player – Download Real Player and then play free music via their Rhapsody service.

SHOUTcast.com – Using a program such as Winamp, choose the radio station of your choice from around the world, and “Tune In”.

Slacker.com – Listen to their pre-built stations, or start building one of your own.

Streampad.com – Search for music to listen to, or point it directly to a page you want to listen to, including podcasts.

TheSixtyOne.com – Streams music and then allows you to purchase the tracks via Amazon.com’s MP3 store.  Site also has social aspects allowing users to “bump” songs up playlists as well as make leaderboards by building their own playlists.

Yahoo Music – Only works with Internet Explorer (still), but streams music from artists or by station.

Mix Tapes

MeeMix.com – Start exploring your favorite music and similar artists, create your own station and then share it with your friends.

Mixwit.com – Like Muxtape, you can create and listen to “mix tapes” and then share them with friends.

Muxtape.com – Not your typical streaming site as users make up their own “mix tapes” of up to 12 songs, and then share them with anyone.

Spinjay.com – Create playlists and have people vote on them to make you a popular “DJ”, or simply browse through the existing ones and listen.

Music Discovery

Blip.fm -A “Twitter” for music that lets you tell others what you are listening to and embeds the music in your post, making an ever growing playlist by following the main timeline of the site.  Check out the Mashable Conversations interview with Gavin Hayes, lead singer of Dredg, we did a while back about the site.

Finetune.com – As you find music you like, you can add it to a playlist which you can then embed in your site.

Musicovery.com – Name your “mood” and Musicovery starts playing music based on that.  It then follows a progression based on your votes for the song, or you can jump around on the other suggestions on the screen.

Pandora.com – Many people were depressed when Pandora had to shut down its non-U.S. streams, but the site lives on.  Enter the name of a song or artist you like, the site analyzes it, and builds a channel on that style of music.

Soundpedia.com – Similar to Pandora in that you start with artist and then it builds a station based on that style/genre of music.

Music Search

Dizzler.com – Search for streaming music, radio stations, video and more.

Jiwa.fm – Search for music you like and Jiwa will search for streams of it.

SeeqPod.com – Even though its legality has been called into question, Seeqpod allows you to search the Internet for publicly available MP3s for you to listen to.

Skreemr.com – Like SeeqPod, Skreemr allows you to search for all of those allusive tracks you’d rather just listen to then admit you have them on your iPod.

[image credit: hryckowian]

—
Related Articles at Mashable! – The Social Networking Blog:

Billboard Top 100 Now Includes Yahoo and AOL Music
Rumor: Pandora Adding Videos?
Mininova, BitLet Launch Streaming Music Service
Qbox Beta Launches Streaming Music Straight from Social Networks
Sonos Raises $6M in Series B Funding
Snocap Launches Pandora Mashup
Last.fm Still Growing. Thanks, Free Music.