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.

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“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

 

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

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.

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)

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).

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.

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]

WillS sez, “The Get Out Clause, an unsigned Manchester band who could not afford a camera crew for their video, ‘performed’ in front of a load of CCTV cameras, requested the footage from the camera operators under the Freedom of Information Act Data Protection Act and then stitched the results together for their music video.”

Link

(Thanks, WillS!)

For the small price of $25, beaTunes can take your iTunes Library and make it much smarter. First off, is a powerful inspection feature that picks up typos and misspelled artists’ names in your library and fixes them for you so that you no longer have R.E.M and REM as separate bands in your music library. After helping you with the cleanup, beaTunes can also help you build intelligent playlists with its BPM detection tool that analyses music and creates playlists of music that have approximately the same beats per minute. This feature allows you to make playlists to fit whatever mood you’re in—if you want some relaxing music, just pick low BPM’s or if you are making a playlist for working out, pick a higher BPM list.

In their own words

“What started out as a BPM detection tool for DJs, runners and dancers, has become one of the finest iTunesâ„¢ library management tools around. beaTunes’ powerful inspection feature let’s you clean up your iTunes track data in a way unrivaled by any other software on the market today. Easily find typos or different spellings of artists’ names, automatically fill in the album artist names, and much more. No more R.E.M. and REM in your iPod’s artist list!”

Why it might be a killer

The price is very reasonable when you consider that you will never have to manually fix typos in your iTunes library again. People will also definitely like the ability to make playlists based on BPM’s

Some questions

They state that beaTunes doesn’t currently work with music imported from the iTunes store. Will they be able be successful without support for this considerable library?

Updates

 » original news

The site (which is a little bit buggy right now) is designed as an entertainment start page, with music, movie, and Web video recommendations that change daily. There are also RSS feeds that link to music and movie reviews. Explains David Maher Roberts, CEO of Exabre (the British company that runs the Filter):

The idea of the Website is the world of entertainment filtered for you. We go out and find lots of information, and filter that according to your taste. The more we know about you, the more we can give you a daily dose of entertainment content.

For now, though, the company is focusing mostly on getting the music recommendations right. Click on the music tab and you are presented with a list of songs selected for especially for you, as well as a list of songs that “everyone is into right now.” You can play each list, but only 30-second samples from each (a major drawback to the site that could be rectified through a deal with We7, an ad-supported, full-track online music service that Gabriel is also an investor in).

The Filter combines together a number of filtering approaches based on purchase, listening, browsing, and rating histories. It tries to collect as much information about musical tastes as it can, both yours and other people’s—overall music purchases, your iTunes history, how you rate songs and artists on the site, and the listening habits and ratings of your friends. In a sense it combines Amazon’s collaborative filtering with Last.fm’s behavioral filtering. Says Roberts:

Amazon’s recommendations are based on purchase data. Last.fm’s are based on consumption data. We are based on both.

The Filter gathers your listening history through an iTunes plug-in that you need to download (also called The Filter) that scans your music library and keeps track of your listening habits, similar to iLike’s iTunes plug-in or Last.FM’s Scrobbler. Then the Filter adds to that by comparing it to overall digital music purchase data. It gets this from OD2, another Gabriel-backed startup that was bought by Loudeye (later bought by Nokia) and powers the digital music stores for Nokia and MSN Music. (When Gabriel sold OD2, he invested in Exabre, which has raised $8.5 million in venture capital). All in all, the company’s database is filled with information about 4.5 million songs, 330,000 movies, and 50 million music transactions and playlists.

The Filter’s data, however, is skewed 80 percent towards European markets, so it ends up recommending songs that are more popular across the pond (they still love The Smiths over there). You can fine-tune the recommendation engine by rating individual songs or artists, or tweaking the engine with sliders that bring up “more expected” or “more surprising” matches. You can also filter by new or old songs. The recommendations seem a little hit or miss. (The Smith’s “How Soon Is Now?” and Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” Okay. But Van Halen’s “Jump”?). These should get better over time.

Every filtering approach has its issues. Collaborative filtering has a cold start problem. Until someone build up a purchase history, you don’t really know much about her tastes. Filtering based on the music people own or listen to runs into what Roberts calls the “Beatles Problem”:

There are several problems with the Beatles. For one thing, there is no purchase information. But the real problem is that everybody owns or has the Beatles in their collection. The algorithm thinks it goes with everything. If you leave an algorithm to its own devices, it keeps on recommending the same thing.

To get around these issues, the Filter’s algorithm recognizes super-popular songs and handicaps them with anegative bias so that they don’t dominate the recommendations. It also takes into account inertia. If you haven’t listened to the Rolling Stones in a while, their weighting starts to decay. The system learns about you, but also forgets about you. It gives purchase information the most weight, followed by consumption data gathered from the iTunes plug-in, followed by your ratings and other data.

The Filter has a long way to go to be competitive with Last.fm, iLike, or many other online music services. But its technology-agnostic approach and strong music ties could help it distinguish itself. Definitely what needs strengthening is the social aspect of the service. You can add friends, but they all need to be members right now. This summer, members will be able to take The Filter with them to Netvibes or iGoogle as widgets that show a recommended playlist. A Facebook app is also in the works that will let you mix your musical taste with a friend’s to come up with a musical taste mashup.

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