Category: Digital

A Question of Fidelity: Spotify Goes CD Quality?

Spotify - as good as a CD
Spotify - as good as a CD

We adore the Spotify service. It still has a way to go, but it’s getting there. For those in the dark – it’s a streaming service. There’s a free version with ads scattered across your listening experience. Then there’s a paid version with no ads, exclusive albums, pre-release stuff and, just announced, CD quality streaming.

The word is Spotify are finding it tough getting people to upgrade to their premium service. Offering albums before release date and exclusives will help. It’s already at a good price. But will CD quality streaming convince anyone to make the switch?

There’s a bigger question of sound quality here – if it matters – over convenience. It’s been a dog fight from the beginning. Vinyl sounded great, but it got damaged easily and was hardly portable. The cassette brought great portability but the sound quality was terrible, and cassettes snapped easily. The CD had a nice middle ground, and the war stopped for a while. Until DVDA and SACD came in, beating it’s chest about it’s 5.1 surround sound. It was around that time that the mp3 took over as the main way people listen to music.

So, are people going to care about CD quality streaming? With today’s headphones and computer speakers, it hardly seems worth it. But there is a niche consumer who can hook up their computer with a nice home stereo. But that person will no doubt have surround sound and high definition – something Spotify isn’t offering. It’s the CD all over again, a bit of each without being much of either.

Spotify are growing. They will hit mobile phones this year. Their catalogue continues to grow. We have faith. And we like the risks they are taking. We’re just not sure how many people are taking a risk on them right now.

NME covered the story quite nicely as well – http://www.nme.com/news/spotify/45507

We Follow: Finally making sense of Twitter

Wefollow.com
Wefollow.com

Wefollow.com finally does what Twitter itself should do – make sense of all the information it’s holding. It’s essentially a Twitter directory – neatly tagged and easy to use.

Almost two months ago, we crawled through Twitter to see who the biggest music stars on Twitter were. We pretty much had to guess and check. With Wefollow, we can just jump to the music section and see who the stars are. Sadly, it’s up to Twitter‘s users to register themselves. So the number one music star, Britney, is not listed. Taylor Swift is also missing from the top 20. But looks like we forgot 50 Cent and MC Hammer.

It’s a start, but really, Twitter should be doing this. We like Twitter – but it’s too niche. It’s too cumbersome as well. Even to see the twitter updates of peole we know we follow, we would rather use Google than the Twitter search engine (let alone browsing).

That’s not the least of Twitter‘s problems. The growth is slow, and the numbers are not there. Having a large number of followers crowds your page. And there is far too many spammers and porn.

Yet, micro-blogging (as this is called) seems to clearly be the future. With the lines between phones and computers being blurred, and short burts of information being the way we digest news, micro-blogging seems a natural. But Twitter could well go down as the MySpace of the scene. Facebook has already switched itself to be more micro-blogging focused. Google have been cooking up a grand plan in the meantime.

So, Wefollow can definitely help you enjoy your Twitter experience. Because Twitter isn’t going to help you.

Check out Wefollow – http://wefollow.com

Wednesday Web: Sound Opinions Podcast

Greg Kot (left) and Jim DeRogatis (right) with Booker T Jones
Greg Kot (left) and Jim DeRogatis (right) with Booker T Jones

Ok, not really a website. Sound Opinions is a podcast to most of the world and a radio show in America. They call themselves “the world’s only rock ‘n’ roll talk show”, and for us, it’s a mandatory weekly listen. Based in Chicago and hosted by music writers Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis, they comment and review an amazing amount of material, interview some huge names, fascinating characters, and seem to have a lot of fun the whole time.

Both Kot and DeRogatis are music critics at Chicago papers. Both are published authors on music, whether it be band biographies or anthologies (like the wonderful Kill Your Idols). They are rock nerds and a league of new music writers. They have a great knowledge of music history, yet a passion for new music. They have also been friends for years and fight a lot on air.

Now that we checked the CV, why we like this show is because it’s needed. They don’t play full songs – it’s talk. But it’s talk that covers the changing trends in music (the ground we hope to cover in our blog), playful reviews, studies of classic albums and genres, and exclusive live performances. Highlights from the show’s history for us are many:

– live sets from Wilco and Neko Case
– studies on Disco and the relationship between music and food (including a fascinating conversation with cooks about the music they listen to)
– classic album dissections, especially Johnny Cash‘s At Folsom Prison
– interview with a reformed Feelies!
– roundtable with America’s top indie retailers.
– desert island songs
– and more…

The show is powered by American Public Radio, and is a community supported radio network. No big corporate radio dollars here. You can download the podcasts anywhere in the world for free, and you can donate to support the show and the health of US radio.

Kot and DeRogatis are building quite a profile for themselves. They even appeared once on Conan. Of course, you cannot agree with everything they say, but at least they are throwing informed opinions out there, and there’s plenty of listener interactions to get a wide range of views. Yes, it’s occasionally indie and swarmy, but it’s the most informative and entertaining music podcast out there. In a sea of blogged judgements, it’s great to hear good music journalism on the iPod.

Sound Opinion website with all the links you need – http://soundopinions.org

This is the next century where the universal’s free: Virgin Media’s new service

Rachel Stevens, Virgin Media launch - can their new service put her music career back on track?
Rachel Stevens, Virgin Media launch - can their new service put her music career back on track?

Virgin Media and Universal music have gotten a LOT of press today after announcing they are giving the shop away – unlimited, unprotected mp3 downloads for a paid subscription service. If you are a Virgin Media customer (it’s a broadband service, non UK-ers), you can pay for this yet unnamed service like a subscription and keep all you download. No word on what this will cost.

Headlines are good – they create great anticipation for a new service. But this story promises much and doesn’t deliver very much in the ways of ‘how?’. More importantly – this is nothing new.

Universal Music has planted it’s flag here before. In 2006 they became the first high profile label to sign with Spiral Frog, an ad-supported download service. That is – you listen to or watch ads and in return you can download stuff. (Old story from 2006)

Spiral Frog struggled from day one. It’s self belief was not supported by the labels and it failed to secure the other major labels or the indies. It failed to find the advertising money and was by all accounts clunky and difficult. I wish we could point you to the service and see it yourself but two years after front page headlines, Spiral Frog spiraled to it’s doom in March of this year.

Having a risky and ambitious idea is one thing. Having no plan to execute it is another. Spiral Frog is one example – another is Qtrax.

Qtrax made it’s big launch at the music industry conference Midem in 2008. It’s a wonderfully wacky idea – a p2p program that is ad supported. That p2p activity is tracked, and what gets traded, artists and labels get a cut of the pie. Days after the huge launch, it turns out that they were only talking to the labels about a deal, no agreements were in place. A year and a half later, Qtrax is no-one going nowhere.

These two services contrast starkly with Spotify. This Swedish service with is launched in the UK made no big song and dance. It was in beta-testing for months and months – well after the time it started getting hot exclusives. They quietly did deals with the majors and the indie labels, and are slowly launching around the world.

What we like best about Spotify is that they don’t see themselves as a game changer – something that is going to rock the market. They want to be part of people’s internet entertainment experience. They don’t sell tracks – but they will point you to a service that will sell it to you if you want. That’s not what Spotify is about. No social networking add-ons. It’s just a streaming site. And a bloody good one.

A similar service exists and does pretty well. emusic.com has been going for years and is the biggest subscription service in music. Various plans from 25 songs for £10 to 75 for £25 a month – emusic has struggled to get major label stuff, but has a firm footing on the indies. You can get the new Sonic Youth and Placebo albums from there. It would cost you £10 for both together. It’s one of the biggest players in the indie digital world.

We don’t need a game changer. We need sensible alternatives. Not wishy-washy claims, which is what this new Virgin/Universal deal amounts to right now. No names. No dates. No price. No word on how this works in terms of paying artists. What the ads look like. What artists will be on there.

We will go into our take how this Virgin/Universal deal might work, or might not work, later. Right now, the CMU website has the best analysis of the deal we can find – http://www.thecmuwebsite.com/daily/090616.html – and a great deal of quotes and views from across the board.

we could not resist that headline, no matter how long and cumbersome it is

Wednesday Web: Smoking Gun Backstage/Rider Collection

Backstage pass - no brown m&ms
Backstage pass - no brown m&m's

After several weeks of this column, talking about great new website doing cool things online and with music, this week we present to you a website that’s truly in line with what the internet is about. Cheap gags.

You know a site is important when it’s Google search results has it’s own search bar. Such is the awesomeness of the Smoking Gun, now in it’s 12th year of publication. If you don’t know it, you may have heard of some of the stuff that’s on there. Smoking Gun collects documents that are fascinating, shocking or damning. It slants towards legal documents. Mugshots, who’s-suing-who’s and other incriminating evidence.

But our favourite part of the site is the collection of band riders. Found in the ‘Backstage‘ area of the site, 250 lists of what artists demand when they rock into your town. The crazy excess of rock ‘n’ roll life is now laid bare. The most famous backstage demand of all – Van Halen asking for no brown m&m’s – has been preserved on this site.

Most of them are quite dry, but a couple are truly amazing. Above and beyond the occasional ridiculous demand, sometimes you have a tour manager or a stage manager who should have written for comedy.

We have two far and away favourites. Iggy Pop (requests for someone dressed as Bob Hope) and Foo fighters (one bag of Pirate Booty, not Johnny Depp’s).

Iggy Pop’s rider – http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/iggypop/iggypop1.html

Foo Fighter’s ’08 rider – http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/foo2008rider/foo2008rider1.html

Read ’em to believe ’em.

After several weeks of clever, innovative, practical and obscure websites in our Wednesday Web column, it’s good to just write about a simply fun site. And hey, it’s still the kind of music site that can exist in this brave new age.

The Smoking Gun Backstage – http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/index.html

Storm the castle: Music Pirates in the EU Parliament.

Waving the flag for copyright reform
The Pirate Party - Waving the flag for copyright reform

Sweden is definitely the most interseting place in the world right now for Digital Rights law. Unlike places like Japan, Sweden’s location in Europe means any decisions made there will have a big effect in the western world. Slowly, in the last few years, both legal (Nokia, Spotify) and illegal (Pirate Bay and the legal battles) innovation has been taking place in Scandanavia. This has been taken to a new level today with the Swedish ‘Pirate Party‘ taking a seat (maybe two) in the EU Parliament.

Formed in 2006, the Pirate Party is taking copyright issues as their mandate. It’s an amazing showing from the young people of Sweden (we assume it’s young people anyway) that this issue is something they feel so strongly about. The conviction of the Pirate Bay founders have increased the party’s media presence. Is this a one-off blip or something more long lasting?

We strongly disagree with the Pirate Party on almost all it’s issues. Looking at their website, we believe they have made some terrible assumptions about how art and copyright works are created. They talk about the imbalance in creating and promoting culture, but they have shifted that balance to the side of promotion. It’s also pushed to the extreme. With almost no concessions for the artwork creators.

People are creative because they have something to share with the world. Take away the money and the rights side, artists want to have a painting or a song and say this is mine, this is what I created. The Pirate Party want to sever that sense of ownership. It does not encourage creativity. It does not inspire. The fact that copyright is automatic is one of the most basic functions of art. We have never met an artist that is against copyright.

It also stifles originality. And strangles innovation. Why would anyone try to invent something new if they cannot patent it? It pushes every innovation to the hands of whoever can promote it best. Some young kid who creates a great new YouTube succesor, for example, will lose it to a big company that copies his work. There is no protection there.

That said, the world of copyrights is a changing one, and perhaps the EU parliament is the best place to be part of that discussion. Just a couple of weeks ago, Apple was calling for a Europe-wide license for iTunes. The free-for-all nature of Europe has hampered innovation for years. When the numbers are crunched, 200K people in Sweden voted for this party. They also got 1 percent in Germany. Something has to break, and the Pirate Party may be the first ones with the mallet.

Great story about all this on Torrentfreak – http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-wins-and-enters-the-european-parliament-090607
(Our photo, from the press conference after the election win, is taken from this story)

Find out more about the Pirate Part (in English) – http://www.piratpartiet.se/international/english

Size Matters? – YouTube goes XL

YouTube XL - your fit?
YouTube XL - your fit?

YouTube is dancing a fine line between standard and passé. No doubt it has changed the world, and the way we view it. But it’s grainy player, dated website look and many hot competitors have made YouTube seem less innovative, more dinosaur. Add to the fact that YouTube has not been able to strike deals with many ‘rights holders’ – film, TV, music and other companies can provide official clips that people want so much. This week, it seems like YouTube have starting making steps towards the future. The first fruits of this is YouTube XL.

The thinking behind XL is the TV. The line between your TV screen and your computer monitor is blurring more and more, and that’s the place XL fits. If you can make the web appear on your TV screen (or you have one of those sexy Mac cinema displays), then XL is for you. The interface reminds us of cable TV screens – no scrollers, BIG writing etc. But we guess that’s a necessity in this space.

Most game consoles like Xbox can get onto the internet nowadays. It’s getting easier and easier to plug a computer into a TV. You can loop that Blu-Ray disc drive through your TV. AppleTV is a great device whose time is still to come (we reckon). Most major TV stations have online view-on-demand. Now the ubiquitous YouTube is heading to your TV as well. If YouTube can strike a deal with TV stations and other rights holders, then maybe we can throw our Tivos and Sky+ boxes away.

Also, we love how film quality, resolution and definition is back on people’s minds again. After some years of watching film clips made for a small YouTube screen, maybe we will head back to an era of widescreen film clips, full of detail. Technology and art follow eachother, after all. Now if they can do something about that audio…

Most of us will stick with our father’s YouTube for now. But just as it’s getting easier for people to hook up their iPods to speakers or the TV to play something for friends, soon it will be that easy for video. No more crowding around a laptop with terrible speakers to show someone a funny clip. Soon it will be prime time.

Check out YouTube XL here – http://www.youtube.com/xl

Spotify/Cloud Computing – it’s our forecast

Spotify - now in the clouds
Spotify - now in the clouds

Spotify, a European streaming/subscription service, has been making quite a bit of noise in the last year. Still in Beta, it’s been greeted with critical acclaim. We’ll discuss it in more detail in one of our upcoming Wednesday Web columns. This week, Spotify announced their latest innovation – their first App.

It does everything you’d expect. You can access music from your phone, streamed. It has all your preferences saved, including all your playlists. Also, the thing looks great.

Currently demo’d on a mobile phones that runs on the Google Android OS, an iPhone version has long been in the works as well. We can’t imagine it’s too far behind. Neither are available yet.

The ramifications are clear. As phone data services gets better and better, smartphones becoming more ubiquitous and more music becomes available online – you can almost see that sci fi world where anyone can listen to anything, any time, anywhere. The ultimate music library.

Which brings us onto cloud computing – THE buzz idea for the internet this year. People are holding less and less on their computers, and more in the mythical cloud. The Spotify App is a big win for those who believe this is the future. We are almost in that boat ourselves.

That ties in nicely with the biggest model for could computing there is – Gmail. Gmail (and Yahoo Mail and Hotmail et al) keeps all your emails online for you to access from your phone, your home computer, your work computer, your friend’s phone, the free net access at the library – just about anywhere. And ever so slowly, we’re moving our music, videos and documents into this cloud.

Gmail‘s owners are of course Google. It’s Google‘s I/O conference in the last few days that have sparked off all this news. And today they added some of their own – Google Wave. It’s almost too big for us to digest. It’s mail, it’s Twitter, it’s IM, it’s cloud computing – and it’s blowing our socks straight off into the washer. We can’t wait to see the real thing next year.

Find out more about Google Wave here – http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave/

Video demo of Spotify App after the jump.

(more…)

MySpace’s latest CEO speaks

All Things Digital has been covering the D7 conference, one of the big digital business conferences. Our hero Walt Mossberg has been putting up some great interviews. He’s such a cool old coot who can get away with saying just about anything. “People are buying iPhones despite of AT&T”.

But we thought we’d quickly post this. An interview with the two new heads of MySpace – News Corp’s Jon Miller (ex Facebook) and MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta.

Click on the image to watch video - we couldnt embed.
Click on the image to watch video - we couldn't embed.

Very interesting things in the first couple of minutes where Mossberg reveals the result of his polling (and ambushes his subjects). And then around 6 minutes in when they finally talk frankly about music, how they ever hope to make money, and how they feel about MySpace.

More cool videos here – http://video.allthingsd.com/

5 music tips for Twitter’s founders

Twitter bird - we hope its listening
Twitter bird - we hope it's listening

Billboard published a piece by Twitter founder Biz Stone. In it, Stone gives musicians and bands five tips to make Twitter more effective. We can swallow the arrogance of this (bands have been dealing with fans all their lives) – but we agree that there is something very frustrating about being a music fan on Twitter.

So, in response, here our 5 tips from us. Here’s how Twitter can improve it’s service for the music fan.

1. Tagging profiles by genre. Imagine you can search or just browse for music Twitters? Or news. Or movies. Or anything. Adding one simple field would make the mess that is Twitter seem more manageable. There could well be hundreds of bands I love on Twitter that I have not been able to find.

2. Sorting tweets by genre. Imagine at the press of a button, you can see what your favourite musicians are up to, without having to sift through all the news and friends and anything else.

3. Trending topics by genre. You can see what people are talking about, in the field that you love. With just ten Trending Topics on display, it’s impossible to see what people are loving in just music.

4. A better profile page for graphics. Trying to squash an image as background pic around something – that is so Myspace in the 90s. Allow bands who actually have a strong look and feel to make it their own.

5. Get involved. Put your money where your Tweets are. Go out and sponsor some gigs, run some events and do more. Don’t just ask us to drive your traffic. Promote yourselves as an entertainment possibility. If you really want to be there with the fans, then get there with the fans.

You can read the original article here – http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/5-twitter-tips-for-bands-from-co-founder-1003976197.story

Oh yeah, why not follow us on Twitter @yauami.