Archive for: mp3
Dagfinn Bach, one of the team behind the original development of the .mp3 file format, and his company Bach Technology have designed and released a new format based on the MPEG-7 platform, intended to provide new ways for producers, consumers and retailers to interact with and gain information about digital music.
There are metadata ‘tags’ associated with each .mp3, .wav, .ogg and .flac music file (as well as all the others) detailing things like the name, duration, author of each particular track – Bach’s new file format MusicDNA has many more of these tags, detailing more complex and intrinsic things about the music it encodes, things relating to the qualities of the music itself, for example:
- Genre
- Mood
- Tempo
- Aggressiveness
- Instrument Density
- Syntheticity
- Similarity to other tracks
These are only a few of the categories listed in a ‘genotype’ similar in intent to the one that Pandora uses in its “Music Genome Project”, that they use to recommend new music to users of their music streaming service. Other tags can be used to identify the point of origin of a particular file, or record the number of times it has been played, duplicated, altered etc…
This richness of ingerent information in a file could be put to a lot of different uses – making it easier to find other types of music a listener is likely to enjoy, building playlists of similar music, automating web radio stations to play particular kinds of music, combatting piracy by tracing files back to their source, in fact, any purpose that the industry can devise:
MusicDNA™ is BACH’s core technology that is developed in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute of Digital MediaTechnologies (IDMT). The MusicDNA™ analyzer is continuously updated and every year new descriptors are added.
As yet, none of the major retailers of labels has subscribed to the use of the new format, but since the Bach Technology launched the project officially at Midem, they’ve had to upgrade their website’s server due to the volume of visits, presumably from interested parties in the music industry.
It’s been a while since we reiterated this: RouteNote is here to help YOU get your music online and selling. There are a lot of other players in the digital distribution market, all offering different models of payment and return, different combinations of stores, different packages and percentages, but we think we have the simplest, most efficient and cheapest service on the net.
We don’t charge any upfront or subscription fees, and only charge a 10% fee out of any revenue that you get once you start selling music. Other sites either expect you to shell out fees that can end up totalling hundreds of dollars before you even sell a single track, or take big chunks out of your back end in return for their services (The Orchard will take a flat rate of 30%). Other places will charge you depending on how many stores you want to sell through (Tunecore, Musicadium) – we don’t do any of this stuff. We just want you to confirm that you can license us the rights to distribute the music you upload, tell us the email address attached to the paypal account you want us to send revenues to and then upload your music. Our contract doesn’t make any claims on the music’s copyright, just enables us to make, store and send copies of your files, and it has a break clause of 60 days, so if you get fed up with us, or suddenly get signed by Warner you’ve only got a couple of months maximum wait before you can make a move. Once you pass our moderation (we need to check you’ve not just uploaded a Spice Girls album, or some hateful tirade against Guinea Pig owners) we’ll turn it around within 4 weeks and get your music to iTunes, eMusic, Spotify, Amazon MP3, Snocap, and other online digital stores that cover more than 95% of the online market.
You can check out our agreement once you’ve input your details in the Register page – don’t worry, you don’t need to sign your life away to look at the agreement – you have to specifically agree before we’re in business! We hope you’ll think it’s equitable (feedback on what you’d change is always welcome), and we look forward to having you join the 1,500 artists and labels who are already working with us to make their music make money.
7Digital and Spotify have announced a new partnership that will see 7Digital purchasing links in the Spotify platform. This partnership is aimed to help Spotify increase revenues in this very difficult economic situation that is heavily affecting online advertising revenues.
Beginning with the UK, France, Spain and Germany, the deal enables Spotify users to purchase 320kbps MP3 downloads from 7Digital’s 6M track catalog along with a selection of FLAC downloads. Sweden, Norway and Finland will follow in a few weeks. In the future, users will be able to purchase playlists that have been created within Spotify at a discounted price. Future improvements will include closer integration including one click downloads.
The Spotify deal follows a similar 7Digital partnership with open source media player Songbird using 7digital’s API which allows integration with 7digital’s catalog and commissions on sales.
There have been a lot of reports over the weekend about the demise of SpiralFrog. SpiralFrog was an ad supported music streaming and download service that never really took off.
Having raised as much as $12 million in VC and debt funding, the company made a splash in August 2006 (after 2 years in operations) when Universal Music made their entire music catalog available for free download through SpiralFrog, joined by EMI a month after. About a year after, SpiralFrog started handing out private beta invitations (what took them so long?)
Attorneys representing defunct music service SpiralFrog have notified investors not to expect any returns. Whatever money comes from liquidating assets will go to a group that loaned the company an “amount exceeding $34 million.”
Is this going to be the start of more ad supported music download and streaming services moving towards the deadpool? I can see Qtrax is going to now have a lot of trouble is this economic environment and Im sure they will be the next to be closing.
Nokia has announced that it will be launching it “Comes with Music” offering in Italy, Sweden and Mexico in the coming months. Nokia initially launched their Comes With Music service in the UK and Singapore and its already announced it will launch in Australia later this month.
The company has also announced three new music phones in its XpressMusic range: the 5730, 5330 and 5030. The first two of those will be Comes With Music handsets in selected markets.
Music Ally has reported that over 445,000 people illegally downloaded the new U2 album. All these downloaded were alleged to happen between the 18th of February till the 3rd of March from BitTorrent sites.
The chart supplied by the company shows the spike in downloads following the album’s leak in February, apparently due to it being accidentally made available for sale on an Australian digital music store ahead of its official release on 2nd March.
The debate is always would these people have purchased the album if it wasn’t leaked on BitTorrent clients? No one can really answer that question, but I’m sure that certain sales would have happened because of this.
Overall this does make me think that the claims of the Pirate Bay in the last couple weeks that “80 percent of all their torrents are legal”, cant be true.
Over at MusicAlly they have pointed out that the new U2 album (No Line On The Horizon) is currently on Amazon’s US Mp3 store for only $3.99. However, because we are based in the UK there is nowhere we can get this album for so cheap, until now. Tesco has taken the step forward and is now selling the new U2 album in a week-long deal for ony £3.97.
This shows that the digital music store price wars are about to heat up! However, you will notice that iTunes never seems to get into these price wars.
Amazon has release their MP3 Album Sales chart for 2008 and here are the results.
- Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails
- Viva La Vida by Coldplay
- Narrow Stairs by Death Cab For Cutie
- Juno – Music From The… by Various Artists
- 3 Doors Down by 3 Doors Down
- Vampire Weekend by Vampire Weekend
- Sleep Through The Static by Jack Johnson
- A Hundred Million Suns by Snow Patrol
- Modern Guilt by Beck
- Perfect Symmetry by Keane
Amazon has just launched their
Mp3 Music store in the UK. The store can be found at
http://mp3.amazon.co.uk. The simple-to-use digital music store offering over 3 million DRM-free (Digital Rights Management) songs which will work on any MP3 player including the iPod™- with top-selling albums from just £3 and individual songs from 59p.
Amazon Mp3 UK has all four major labels signed up, SonyBMG, Universal Music, EMI Music and Warner Music – and leading independents such as Cooking Vinyl, Harmonia Mundi, Beggars Banquet, The Orchard, Concord and IODA.
In the current climate P2P and Bittorrent file sharing isnt seen as illegal in all countries, but overall it has to be the biggest threat on the music industry because of its nature.
Songbeat has launched a new version of their service which seems to be taking piracy to a new level.
It’s a desktop app that lets users search for music on Seeqpod, Project Playlist, Last.fm and other sites, and then download the files and import them into iTunes or Windows Media Player, or burn them as a CD. It’s free in its basic edition, which only allows 25 downloads, but users have to pay €19.99 for the premium version to download as much as they want.
This has to be illegal! They are now a company that is profiting directly from piracy. Not according to Songbeat: “The downloading of music is not fundamentally illegal. However, it lies in the hands of the user to discern whether or not they have the right to download the particular music file at hand.” Even Musically thinks this’ll end up in court.
(via TechCrunch)
This richness of ingerent information in a file could be put to a lot of different uses – making it easier to find other types of music a listener is likely to enjoy, building playlists of similar music, automating web radio stations to play particular kinds of music, combatting piracy by tracing files back to their source, in fact, any purpose that the industry can devise:
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