Entries Tagged 'music' ↓

Rock band Radiohead has already pushed the envelope in the past year by first releasing their new album under a pay-what-you-want price scheme in October, and then calling on fans to create a music video for any of the album’s songs in March. Now the band is at it again, teaming with Apple, makers of iTunes and GarageBand, to launch a public remix contest.

The contest offers up the single “Nude” from the album for remix. The band has for sale on iTunes “stems” for the bass, voice, guitar, strings/fx and drums for the song and anyone who purchases all five gets access to a GarageBand file that can be opened in GarageBand or Logic.

Until May 1st, the public can vote for their favorite remix, and remix authors can use a MySpace or Facebook widget to allow fans on social networks to vote for them. The prize, though, is just that Radiohead promises to “listen to the best.”

So interesting idea, but like the rest of Radiohead’s innovative marketing techniques, this one also feels a bit gimmicky. Requiring entrants to purchase the source files, and then offering as a prize only that the band will listen to the winning entries is somewhat lame in our book. Still, the site has already collected 142 remixes, so some great new music could come out of this for Radiohead fans.

Further, Radiohead has perhaps inspired many other mainstream musical acts to take the plunge and embrace alternative methods of distribution. Nine Inch Nails released an album via BitTorrent, REM open sourced their music videos and streamed their new album on iLike, and Pennywise put their album on MySpace. We may be able to credit Radiohead with making distribution experimentation cool, which can only mean a win for consumers in the long run.

Image credit: Steve Rhodes

Leave it to Radiohead, the pioneering alt-rock band that released its latest album last fall under a pay-what-you-want price scheme to a lot of fan fare (and some criticism of gimmickry), to push the envelope further. The band is now asking fans to create their first music video for the album in a contest utilizing online YouTube of animation (and Crunchies finalist) Aniboom.

Radiohead is hardly the first act to call on fans to create a music video. In the past couple of years the Decemberists, Modest Mouse, Junior Boys, Willie Nelson, Bjork, Jonathon Coulton, and The Hold Steady, among others, have all held video contests. The Beastie Boys went a step further and relied solely on fan footage for an entire concert DVD. Even Madonna, known for lavishly expensive music videos, held a “Make My Video” contest with MTV for “True Blue” in 1986.

The Radiohead In Rainbows contest is being run a bit differently in that they’ve partnered with an independent video site, are focusing on animation, and are using a tiered voting approach that allows fans to be involved with picking the winner. Further, any song on the album is eligible for being turned into a video, which means fans will in many ways get to define the band’s first single.

Until April 27th, anyone can submit a storyboard or clip to Aniboom detailing their idea for a Radiohead video. Users will vote on the 10 best, who will then each be given $1,000 to create a one minute version of their concept. The band will choose the winner, who will receive a $10,000 budget to make the full video for the band in June.

Check out the storyboard example below:

A great way to spend this lazy Sunday afternoon is looking up Yamelo and be ready for a music trip down memory lane. This site has collected almost every hit from the sixties and beyond. Just click on a year or search for an artist. Remember your first kiss, school party, rock concert or that first vacation without your parents? All the songs you listened back then, are there.

Yamelo presents the songs as videos, ripped from YouTube. That basically makes it a music video search engine annex directory, with a great interface. Try to look up a song on this page and then compare it with Yamelo, you’ll know what I mean.

I hope the makers of Yamelo will put even more effort in developing the site, and filter out the videos of bad quality. Also, the service lets you relive your greatest memories but wouldn’t it be great if you could also share them? Yamelo would become a beautiful archive of not just music, but also the funny, touching, great and sad stories connected to the melodies.

The video says it all. PocketGuitar is an electric guitar emulator for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Fret the strings and strum across the bottom of the screen to play a chord. It even has vibrato via a virtual tremelo at the top.

Real? Fake? Who cares? We predict a guitar shaped iPhone dock any day now.

UPDATE: It does work! I tried it on the iPod Touch and aside from being a little quiet, it rocks. You get the choice of three guitar sounds: Distorted Guitar, Acoustic-Electric Guitar and Electric Bass. The settings button is too easy to hit while playing: It’s right where the nut would be on a real guitar, so fat fingered players beware. Otherwise, it’s really smart use of the multi touch input method.

Project page [Google Code]

A new desktop application called Songbeat has been released that allows you to search the web for MP3s using Seeqpod technology, stream those MP3s, and even download them.

Seeqpod, which we covered alongside Skreemr and Songza, is a search engine for MP3s that are hosted across on the internet. Whereas with Skreemr, you can actually click on a link to download a track, SeeqPod only displays a non-clickable URL to the file so it’s not easy to download several songs. Therefore, Songbeat makes it easier than SeeqPod to proactively collect copies of MP3s from across the web.

The client is currently only available for Windows, although a Mac version is purportedly coming soon. Two versions of the Windows client are available: a free, ad-supported version and a “pro” version for 10€ per year that gets rid of ads and allows unlimited downloads.

Songbeat says explicitly on its website that it “assumes no responsibility for any copyright infringements or legal issues” and insists that you “make sure that you have the right to download the music you have chosen.” Yea, that’s going to happen.

Also check out Freemusiczilla, which makes it possible to download tracks from any streaming site, including SeeqPod.

Seeqpod

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Skreemr

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songza

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Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Music search engines are just one of the many ways to get free music on the Internet (BitTorrent and MP3Sparks, formerly AllofMP3, are other popular ways). But for some users they are a near perfect way to listen to music on demand, and/or round out their music collection.

Three that we’ve been tracking are SeeqPod, Songza and Skreemr.

All three index the web, or parts of the web, looking for music files that people have uploaded to servers. Users search by artist or song. MP3s or other non-DRM sound files with metadata matching the query are served as results.

Unlike sites like LaLa, Imeem and Pandora (and many others), which are all trying to play by various RIAA rules to deliver music to users, music search engines generally don’t pay royalties of any kind. The music itself is never on their servers, so they have significantly less copyright exposure. More on that below.

Of the three, Seeqpod is the most useful. It has an index of 8 million individual songs, auto-spell checks queries to find common misspellings, and allows users to create playlists. Seeqpod also has embeddable players, and will try to find music videos of songs you are playing. Seeqpod, by the way, was originally a project of the Lawrence Berkely National Lab.

SeeqPod Music beta – Playable SearchSongza also allows users to create playlists and provide embeddable players.Skreemr has bare bones functionality and the hit rate is a little iffy. But they have one feature that the others do not – a direct link to the file on the third party server. That means downloading the song to your hard drive is just a right mouse click away.

A fourth company, Deezer, changed its model in the face of litigation in France.

Copyright, Schmopyright

There’s no reason to mince words here – the music these sites are playing is almost always copyright infringing. But it’s distributed on servers unaffiliated with the search engine itself, making it effectively impossible for the RIAA and its international equivalents to do much about it other than try to force the largest infringers to remove the content. That’s because there is little recourse against the search engines themselves.

None of those legalities affect the search engines, though. It’s unlikely that under current U.S. law the RIAA can do anything at all to stop them.

Current case law gives a lot of leeway to search engines. I spoke this evening with Andrew Bridges, counsel for Google in Perfect 10 v. Google. In that case, Google was held not held to be infringing the copyright on images just by displaying a thumbnail of the image in search results.

The same arguments are valid with the music search engines, says Bridges (with the caveat that he’d have to look much more closely at the specific facts of any case).

The services may still be liable for contributory infringement, he says, but there just isn’t any definitive U.S. case law on matter yet. And no statutes cover contributory infringement.

So for now the search engines are free to link to infringing songs, and even stream them on their site. Just so long as the songs themselves are never stored on their servers. That’s good news for Deezer, Seeqpod and Skreemr, and the users who’ve come to rely on them.

Seeqpod

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songza

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Lala

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Pandora

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Imeem

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Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Can’t see the video? Click here

Radiohead made waves with their latest album, selling it in digital form for whatever price you wanted to pay for it. Now EMI, their old label, is looking to hop on that bandwagon of goodwill by offering a set of all of the band’s past studio albums and one live album in a number of formats, including uncompressed WAV files on a custom Radiohead Bear USB drive.

In case you've been living under a rock for the past 14 years and don't own a single Radiohead release, now's your chance to get on board. The first way to buy it is in a set with all seven discs in digipacks with original artwork. That'll set you back £40, or about $83, which isn't much of a discount (thanks mostly to the insane exchange rate).

The next option is to buy all seven albums as digital downloads, all encoded as 320kbps MP3s, along with digital artwork. The price for this is an unforgiving £35, or $73.

The last option is probably the most appealing to Radiohead die-hards, as it comes with a limited-edition USB drive. The 4GB drive will come loaded with the seven albums encoded as uncompressed WAV files as well as digital artwork. The price for this "strictly limited edition" piece of hardware? £80, or $167. Yes, $167 for a thumb drive loaded up with WAV files.

So, how many of these sets do you think EMI will sell? You’ve got to appreciate the choice of encoding options, but those prices are beyond insane. And the real problem is that only the most devoted of fans would even consider spending this kind of coin on RH materials, and they obviously own all the back catalog already. So, uh, what the hell, EMI? [Product Page]

The MP3 blog aggregator HypeMachine is set to relaunch with a whole new website once 10,000 people have the site’s splash page open simultaneously. When they reach that number, I expect the relaunch to be very well received. At “press/blog time” there are just over 3,000 people waiting, but major music sites will likely cover it soon and put that number over the edge. (Update: It appears the new site has launched.)

A new design, lots of smart social networking features and a DRM-free emphasis are the key points of the relaunch. Details and screen shots below.

HypeMachine was launched in 2005 by Anthony Volodkin but gained increased visibility in the Web 2.0 world when it won best in show at the third annual Mashup Camp and has since expanded its team. The site tracks and makes available music posted on MP3 music review blogs all around the web. It’s always been a great site but the new HypeMachine is better than ever. If you’re new to the world of MP3 blogs, or tired of waiting for HypeM to relaunch, check out Elbo.ws (correction: Elbo.ws is an aggregator as well, see comments section) and Aurgasm.us, two popular MP3 blogs that feed HypeMachine.

The new site is beautifully redesigned by new addition to the team Taylor McKnight, a former Gawker artist and co-founder of the eye-catching video aggregator Chime.tv.

Users can now create profile pages with lots of information about themselves, including their favorite songs, bands, searches, blogs and other users. The social networking component is very nicely put together and includes acronym-free tracking of the RSS feeds of your friends’ favorites, your favorited blogs and new results in persistent searches.

Search results pages highlight buying options via DRM free music stores above all else. Video results are available in the very nice Chime.tv player (see screenshot below).

There’s very handy Twitter integration, you can tell HypeM to send a tweet any time you favorite a new song, blog or search. I’ve been doing this manually for awhile when wanting to share music with friends.

There’s no longer a Flash pop-up player, which is a shame, but you can still play all the songs on a page continuously and if you want to change pages without the music stopping you can just open links in a new tab.

In total, I think it’s a very nice relaunch and I expect to use the service more now than ever before. As soon as 10,000 people amass, we should be able to see how well it scales and leverages the network effects of a mass user-base. Hype Machine is certainly a widely loved service, I expect that will only grow to be more the case in the future.

Austin band Spoon have collaborated before with yellow robot Keepon, but their new video, for “Don’t You Evah” gives us a little more than the first one. Keepon’s creator, Hideki Kozima, costars alongside the little blob of sunshine, and there’s a whole load of robot cameos toward the end.

If you want more of the same thing, only live, Keepon and Spoon will be making an appearance on September 10 at the Henry Fonda Theater in LA, kicking off Wired’s NextFest fair. [YouTube via Creative Commons]

Nugs.net is the biggest network of music sites you’ve probably never heard of. Created in 1993 as a place for founder and CEO Brad Serling to keep his growing collection of live Grateful Dead and Phish tapes, the site has since grown into a major force in online music sales, having sold over 50 million paid downloads of live music.

Nugs.net currently powers the online download stores for over 300 artists, including Metallica, Dave Matthews Band, Phish, the Grateful Dead, Widepread Panic and moe. The company also runs download stores for major US music festivals like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza. Via compilations (such as the environmental benefit album “Music for the Planet“) and festivals, Nugs.net has provided live download services for over 400 bands.

How Nugs.net Got Started

When Serling launched the original Nugs.net back in 1993, he had no plans to turn it into a business — he just had a overwhelmingly large tape collection that was getting harder and harder to manage. Because it was getting more and more difficult to trade tapes (and later DATs and CDs) with other fans while on the road following the Grateful Dead and Phish, Serling set up his website as a place for people to download MP3s of his taped concerts. He got permission from the bands to set the site up as long as he wasn’t profiting from it. By 2000, the site was serving 3 million downloads per month and the Grateful Dead took notice, contacing Serling about turning Nugs.net into a business.

In October of that year, the popular touring band Phish was preparing for their last show before what would become a two year hiatus. The band’s management had heard about Serling and his work on Nugs.net from the Grateful Dead and set up a dinner with him on the night of what fans fondly refer to as “The First Last Show Ever.” Serling tells me he and the band “hit it off immediately and saw eye to eye on many important themes (no DRM, allowing tape trading to continue, offering lossless audio) and we made plans to stay in touch during Phish’s hiatus.”

Fast forward two years and Phish was ready to return to touring. The band and Serling cooked up a plan to release every one of the shows from that tour as downloadable MP3s via what would become Live Phish, Nugs.net’s first branded band website.

“I officially created Nugs.net enterprises as an LLC with my attorney/partner Jon Richter in November of 2002, and we charged are first credit card for a download on December 20, 2002, ushering in what is now a common practice of releasing paid downloads of live shows. At the time, no band had ever released every night they played as a download the next day. In fact, iTunes wouldn’t launch for another 7 months.” — Brad Serling

Present and Future

Since that time, Nugs.net has sold over 50 million downloads across their network of paid download stores. The original collection of free audience tapes still exists as the Stash and attracts 3 million downloads per month. Nugs.net operates an online streaming radio station that goes out to over 50,000 listeners and Serling’s live music “nugscast” podcast reaches 70,000 people each month.

Phish was not the first act to release an entire tour as a live set. In 2000, Pearl Jam released their entire tour via a set of officially sanctioned “bootleg” CDs. Serling tells me he met with Pearl Jam in 2001 and advised them to release their tour via the Internet as downloadable media, which they eventually did starting with their 2005 tour via a partnership with basecamp productions. I asked Serling what he thought of Pearl Jam’s early efforts in the live music business that he has helped pioneer. “I think it was ballsy and should certainly be applauded,” he told me, “but it was ultimately problematic that all those live masters were property of Sony and not of the band. Many of the more established artists I work with learned that lesson from Pearl Jam.”

Recently, Nugs.net has begun offering live video alongside their traditional audio product. This is an area that the company plans to explore more in the future, but because there is no standard licensing rate established for music in video, the situation is tricky from a legal standpoint, and Nugs.net has been forced to keep their video library fairly small.

DRM

Though Nugs.net offers custom DRM solutions to its clients, most of them appear to opt not to encumber their downloads with digital rights management. Serling himself takes a rather indifferent view toward DRM. “I’ve often said DRM stands for ‘Doesn’t Really Matter,’” he told me. “While I certainly wish that more people bought than stole from my company and my clients, the reality is that DRM does not solve the problem. People who want to steal will steal and people willing to pay will pay.”

Serling favors a value added approach to selling music. Nugs.net, he says, offers products that consumers can’t get elsewhere (professionally mastered live music the day after a show and live concert videos), and the service also includes “value adds” like downloadable CD and cover art, photos from the shows, and in many cases, high quality FLAC files and an option to purchase a CD copy.

Conclusion

I asked Brad Serling to sum up his thoughts on the future of online music distribution. “Ubiquity,” he said. “All your music everywhere. True music fans will happily pay for the privilege.” And I think he’s right — that’s something I would gladly lay out cash for.

Disclosure: I’ve bought more live Phish shows from their Nugs.net-powered site than I care to admit.