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‘But I still like CDs!’: why it’s OK if your audience are webphobic [Steve Lawson]
Steve Lawson responds to a fellow musician's observation that most of his audience aren't really interested in all this social media stuff, drawing on the ideas in my book and saying some very generous things in the process.
Is The Web Really Helping Us Find New Music? [Digital Web Magazine]
A round-up of some of the current recommender systems for music, from Last.fm and Pandora to mufin.com and Amazon. Nothing very new in the perspective, and a familiar criticism of the limitations of 'similar to' recommendations.
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Christmas is looming and no doubt we will all soon again be inundated with presents we didn’t actually want. As soon as the turkey and mince pies are finished, it will be off to join the Boxing Day queues for many of us, receipts clutched tightly in our hands. Online shopping has made this time of year much easier to bear, but anything bought online will present its own unique set of challenges. I shall most likely fail in any attempts to return music to iTunes, while getting a refund from Amazon because the ‘customer who bought this item also bought’ just seems far more trouble than it is actually worth.
Chopping the Long Tail down to size [The Register]
Will Page's new research on digital music sales suggests Chris Anderson got his figures and his conclusions wrong.
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The most comprehensive empirical study of digital music sales ever conducted has some bad news for Californian technology utopians. Since 2004, WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson has been hawking his "Long Tail" proposition around the world: blockbusters will matter less, and businesses will "sell more of less".
Perhaps iPods Aren’t Replacing Radio [New York Times]
Four years ago <a href="http://alchemi.co.uk/archives/mus/maybe_ipods_are.html">I was dismissive</a> of the idea that iPods were going to replace radio listening. Now here's some US research that shows radio listening increasing among 14-24 year olds. Mea
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Paragon Media Strategies reports that 14- to 24-year-olds mostly say their radio listening has increased over the last year or two, while they said the opposite last year. Paragon recruited the respondents and conducted the study online.
“Radio stations may be doing a better job at connecting with those people,†said Larry Johnson, the study’s author. “The music may also simply be more interesting. There tends to be a cycle.â€
Music fans back legal downloads [BBC]
"Almost 75% of music pirates would stop if told to by their ISP." So 25% would not stop, and these probably included the hardcore, high-volume pirates. 25% of a massive volume is still a lot. We are heading, with resignation in our weary hearts, to a worl
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Music pirates can be deterred by warnings from their internet service provider (ISP), suggests a survey. Almost 75% of music pirates would stop if told to by their ISP, the survey of 1500 UK consumers found.
The sixtyone - a musical adventure [Duke Listens!]
A music site that comes highly recommended by Paul Lamere and Anthony Volodkin. I haven't tried it yet...
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The sixtyone is part music discovery site, part social music site, and part online game. On thesixtyone, you listen to music (almost all of it by artists you've never heard of). If you find something you like you can 'bump it' - (it's just like digging) - songs or artists that get bumped a lot hit the home page, where they get lots of visibility and lots of plays (just like Digg). Not only is getting to the front page highly rewarding for the artist, it also can be highly rewarding for you if you were an early 'bumper' of the track. That's because everything that you do on the site can earn you points. Visit the site every day, you get points.
Interview with Last.fm founder Richard Jones [Read/Write Web]
Three-part interview that gives a reasonably interesting perspective on Last.fm's current position in the online music field, without providing any major surprises or exclusives.
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This week we interviewed one of the founders of online music service last.fm, Richard "Mr Scrobble" Jones. We wanted to find out last.fm's reaction to the launch of MySpace Music and the rise of Imeem, discuss business models in online music, and find out what's new at last.fm. We're running the interview in 3 parts, over 3 days. See also Part 2, on business models and Part 3, on design and features.
New imeem site layout
imeem is finally starting to make sense to me. This blog describes how they are supporting discovery, featured releases and other forms of... discovery.
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We’ve reorganized the front door of the site, changed the navigation menu you see at the top of every page, and created entirely new and fun features for you. Why? We wanted to organize all the social activity happening on imeem to surface the most relevant music, video and entertainment for you. Here is a rundown of the new and improved imeem:
The Echo Chamber - Will it replace Pandora? [Duke Listens!]
More recommender system sleuthing from Paul Lamere, with the obligatory side-order of ELP and related prog.
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At the ISMIR recommendation panel, Brian Whitman mentioned an Echo Nest showcase app called the Echo Chamber that adds the Echo Nest recommendation technology to imeem. This, to me, is a really big deal - imeem is one of the fastest growing music streaming sites on the web despite the fact that it has no discovery tools to help you find music. If you can add recommendation to imeem, especially the top-notch recommendation that you'd expect from the Echo Nest, then you could end up with a game changer - you could essentially replace Pandora and its million man-hours invested in the music genome project with a mash-up.
Bandcamp
Another of those 'middleware' services (cf. Topspin) that offers integrated, tailorable solutions for bands and artists to set up and manage their web presence, including streaming, downloads etc etc
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Bandcamp isn’t Yet Another Place to Put Your Music. We power a site that’s yours. So instead of our logo plastered between banner ads for Sexy Singles Chat, your fans see your design, your music, your name, your URL. You retain all ownership rights, and we just hang out in the background handling the tech stuff.
ISMIR Day 2: Hit Song Science is Not Yet a Science [Duke Listens!]
Useful summary of a paper from the ISMIR conference, which challenges the claims of Platinum Blue and their ilk.
ISMIR Day 2 - the music recommendation panel [Duke Listens!]
Paul Lamere summarises a panel presentation/discussion involving Pandora, Last.fm, EchoNest, The Hype Machine and Gracenote.
Real Genius - What's going on in iTunes [Zac Johnson, .:DataWhat?:.]
Fascinating and detailed (and speculative) assessment of what's going on with iTunes 'genius' recommendations. Zac Johnson has built his own playlist recommender system (he works for All Music Guide), so he knows what he's on about.
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The gritty part of collaborative filtering is that just because you have beer and diapers in the same shopping cart, that doesn't make them "similar" so at this point Apple applies a layer of filters to trim down the lists. Genre seems to be a big one, which makes it less likely that we'd see a Miles Davis song in our "Dream On" playlist. I speculate that they're also using their BPM data from the store, making it less likely that "Beth" (Kiss' wonderfully sappy love ballad) will be grouped in with an epic jam like "Dream On."
Zune's Recommendations Make Genius Look Average [Wired Listening Post]
Early reports that the recommendations service in Microsoft's Zune is better than that in Apple's iTunes 8.0. The former will be released next week -- we shall see...
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While iTunes serves up a text list of recommended songs within your library and from the iTunes store, adding to the more basic recommendations its MiniStore feature used to make, Zune reinvented the recommendation concept by collapsing artists, albums and fans into the same recommendation engine, more accurately mirroring the way people think about music.
Legal digital music is commercial suicide [Michael Robertson, The Register]
Another broadside from Michael Robertson, founder of MP3tunes.com, about the punitive/suicidal rates for licensing music for startup online services.
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The internet companies I talk to don't mind giving some direct benefit to music companies. What torpedoes that possibility is the big financial requests from labels for "past infringement", plus a hefty fee for future usage. Any company agreeing to these demands is signing their own financial death sentence. The root cause is not the labels - chances are if you were running a label you would make the same demands, since the law permits it. The lack of clarity in the law is the real culprit - and it's the huge potential penalties that create an incentive for the big record labels' law firms to file lawsuits. Without clear laws and rulings from the court about what is permissible, every action touching a copyrighted work is a possible infringement, with a large financial windfall if the copyright owner can persuade a Judge to agree.
How smart *is* the Genius? [Paul Lamere, Duke Listens!]
Paul Lamere is just the man to review the new automated recommendations in iTunes, and his comments have all the usual hallmarks: rigour, informed comparisons and a heavy dose of Emerson Lake and Palmer. His conclusion: "run of the mill" and underwhelming
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The iTunes Genius is just a run-of-the-mill collaborative filtering recommender - the recommendations are nothing special - there's no advanced content analysis like you get from MusicIP. There's no deep analysis of content and context like The Echo Nest. There's no social community or tags like at Last.fm. There's no transparency in the recommendations like at Pandora. - the Genius just gives rather pedestrian recommendations and playlists.
French firm intros remix-friendly music format [The Register]
New music file format that adds much more metadata than MP3 and a whole host of extra features. Looks potentially very interesting, but getting widespread adoption is going to be an uphill struggle.
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Dubbed MXP4, the file type allows content owners to embed a whole lot more data than the MP3 format does, including lyrics, interactives and remixes of the song - Musinaut calls them "skins".
Band Metrics
New service -- currently in private beta -- aiming to be the Google Analytics for indie bands, tracking their popularity online across social networks and blogs.
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Band Metrics helps musicians and bands analyze and measure the success of their music. We're in private beta at the moment, but register for an account, and we'll let you in as soon as we can.
BBC Radio Track playing
Real time information about the artists playing on BBC Radio, including matching to your last.fm profile
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Track Playing is designed to be viewed while listening to the radio. Select the radio station you're currently listening to and Track Playing will automatically display information about the track and artist being played (usually within 30 seconds of it starting). Information includes:
the track now playing
an artist biography
albums and singles released by the artist
links to other websites about the artist
events at which the artist is appearing
which BBC Radio station is more likely to play tracks by the artist
if you've entered your Last.fm username, whether the artist is recommended
Hairbrush divas help generate online royalties, says MCPS-PRS [Music Week]
Self-made fan videos, miming to their favourite hits, are starting to generate non-trivial royalties.
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MCPS PRS managing director of broadcast and online Andrew Shaw explains that a number of tracks in this list were boosted by self-made videos online. “The trend for posting self-made videos is driving the number of performances on the websites we license,†he says. However, he warns, “Lots more performances of music are needed online to generate meaningful royalties since each download or stream is individual in comparison to the wider audience numbers achieved by broadcasts on traditional media channels such as radio or TV.â€
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