Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
This week saw the launch of Myspace Music, described as being a new, separate entity with the potential and opportunity to be as innovative as it would like to be. It has the backing of the big music labels and is selling music via Amazon; it’s not going to fail any time soon, I don’t think.
Unfortunately though, it’s only fully available in the US and there are complaints from smaller labels, and independents, that they’re not being given the same chance for exposure as the big four. Both of these things are a pretty big deal, for me at least, but neither are beyond solving. Pandora has never been any good for people in the UK, but as far as I’m aware, Last.fm manages to let people everywhere listen to the music, so it’s hopefully just a matter of time. Similarly, Last.fm makes it really easy for anyone to upload their own music to it, claim ownership and the (generally miniscule) royalties that follow. Last.fm then, surely, has to be something for Myspace to aim for if they don’t want to be an also-ran.
A few weeks ago, Waxy.org had an interview with Ethan Diamond regarding Bandcamp, a site that aims to make it really easy for bands to create good looking websites that let people listen to, and buy, their music. Like the new Myspace (music is all I’ve ever used Myspace for so, for me, this is as good as a replacement) it takes the approach of making entire albums streamable. This is a pretty big improvement over Last.fm or the old Myspace, where generally only a handful of tracks are made available. Bandcamp seems to be aiming very much at indie-label bands though, the kind of groups who have albums available but who rely on word of mouth and reccomendations rather than radio-play and labels’ advertising budgets to get themselves heard.
Then, yesterday (I think, that’s when I saw it) Muxtape filled their homepage with the chronicle of their attempts to get licensing with the labels sorted out. It’s worth a read, it’s not a particularly happy ending but the new plan is to re-launch Muxtape as a platform for bands to make it easy for them to have a web-presence, without the need for a developer. This is sounding familiar.
Is this the new big thing then? It’s exciting in a way to see what the different approaches will result in (if nothing else Bandcamp has shown that visualisations can work on the web, and don’t have to be boring) but at the same time, without the kind of aggregation that makes Last.fm (and Hype-Machine) so useful for the times when I want to find new things, being less specific in what I want to listen to, I don’t see myself being a frequent user. The people who actually seem to Get It don’t seem to be able to get the people who matter (the labels) onside, which is a real shame.
Giles Coren’s letter gets the Downfall treatment.
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HBO is developing Manhunt, a miniseries from David Simon and Tom Fontana about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the frantic 12-day hunt for his killer, John Wilkes Booth.
The project reunites the network with the creative forces behind two of its former critical hit series—Simon created The Wire and Fontana created Oz—as well as the two writers themselves. Simon and Fontana have not collaborated since Fontana turned Simon’s book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets into the cop drama Homicide for NBC.
I’d heard that this project was somewhere on the horizon for Simon, but had no idea that the creator of Oz was involved as well. The series is going to be based on the book Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, and has all the components to be a pretty good mini-series. Shame the book only seems to be available in hardback over here, on Amazon at least.
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Three pretty good albums released on monday from TV on the Radio, Mogwai and Ladyhawke. It’s also supposed to be the day Bloc Party’s Intimacy CD is released (after the download a few weeks ago), and the Sigur Ros special-magic-version should be arriving next week too. So much music!
Includes such questionable gems as:
My granny was recently beaten to death by my granddad. Not as in, with a stick – he just died first
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Described, rather unfairly I think, as “Girl Talk for people who aren’t insufferable cunts.”, Radio Friendly Unit Shifter is a mixtape containing artists such as Pavement and Nirvana and works quite nicely. And it’s free.
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Brad Sucks, in his own words:
I write, record and produce songs and put them on this website for people to download and hopefully share and enjoy. There are also some albums for sale.
In 2001, I started using the Internet (blogs, MP3s, P2P) to spread my music and not worrying so much about copyright violation. I’ve even been giving the source of my songs away for remixers to play with. I figured that spreading my music should be the number one goal and so far it’s worked out pretty well.
Despite giving my music away for free online, my songs have been licensed for television, played on commercial and campus radio, and I made enough money from licensing and sales to do a real pressing of my first CD: I Don’t Know What I’m Doing.
It’s really pretty good, and in my opinion well worth supporting (MP3s currently downloading, CD ordered…) someone who has the sense to operate in such a way that will get his music heard. You can choose what you pay for the MP3s or for the CD, or just download them for free (and then pay later when you realise it’s worth it).
Andy Baio has put the power of the Mechanical Turk to great use in analyzing Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals Album (do you see what he did there with the title? - you can download for free and/or buy an as-yet-unreleased CD). There’s graphs detailing the start-points of the different samples in different tracks as well as the release-years of the songs they come from.
The results are worth a look, but the write-up of the methodology is what to me is really interesting, detailing just how well the Turk system can work for tasks like this. I came across this write-up just this morning of one user’s experience with Amazon’s system that gives a glowing review, he managed to get confirmation of more than 6000 business contact details for just $300 and gives some useful tips for others thinking of putting the system to use.
Returning briefly to Girl Talk, Wired recently had an piece showing the different samples, with timings, in a pretty diagram that works pretty well.
