Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a total sucker for pop music of all sorts; electro, bubblegum, whatever. Very little excites me us much as a disposable pop song that I will have forgotten about in a fortnight.
Enter Alphabet Backwards. Their EP ‘The Superhero EP’ is scheduled for release on the 22nd day of this very month, and if these three tracks available on their Soundcloud page are anything to go by, it should keep me entertained for at least a month before being deleted from my iTunes library forever.
It may sound like I am being unfair and harsh on this band. I’m not, I like them and I think you should listen to them. This kind of pop music has a place in the world, and if you can accept that you might find yourself getting some joy out of it. Stop being such snobs and give it a chance, for goodness sake!
Have a listen to the embed below of my favourite track currently available on their SoundCloud page, and if you like it send your peepers towards their MySpace page.
Just a quick post for those of you who missed yesterday’s Apple news because you live in a cave on the moon or somewhere beneath the ocean – here are the most exciting bits from the keynote;
1) iPod Shuffle – not much new to say here. They have returned to the clip design which I approve of. The voice over feature might be useful; this will say the name of the song, album or playlist to you so you know roughly where in your playlist you are. This has been a genuine problem with previous shuffles. £39 for 2gb is excellent value for money.
2) iPod Touch – consistently the most underwhelming of the iPod range. This new version has made a move inline with the iPhone 4, as was probably to be expected. HD video recording, front facing camera allowing for ‘FaceTime’ blah blah blah. It’s not that I don’t think this is a great product, I do, it’s just that the entry level 8gb model is £189. For that price you could just get an iPhone 4 and have the same product as your mobile phone.
3) Apple TV – you’ve got to give it to Steve Jobs, the guy is persistent. After years of trying to make Apple TV work they are still grinding away. Here is the latest redesign/revamp of the service. I really want this to work and think that the Movie rental feature will be key to its success. Call me a capitalist if you will, but a way to monetize the online video market is something the media has been in desperate need of for years. I will be buying it, I suggest you do the same.
4) iPod Nano - this 6th generation of the iPod Nano has taken my first place award as the best announcement of last night. A brilliant multi-touch screen on a device that clips to your jacket is inspired. If I didn’t already own an iPhone 4 this would be the iPod for me. At £129 for the basic 8gb I think that these will sell quicker than any of the other new announcements. Watch the video below for full details.
Yoko Ono yesterday told Beatles fans “not to hold your breathe”, waiting for the most popular and demanded music collection of all time to be available on iTunes. By doing so she alienates herself even further from the people who have paid for her luxurious lifestyle for such a long time, and demonstrates yet again what a naive and contemptible ass she really is.
I suppose I should qualify the two defamatory statements above; she is naive for not understanding web culture, which is common for someone of her age. If someone has a computer and an iPod and wants to buy the entire Beatles back catalogue, but when arriving at their computer cannot find the said music on the iTunes store, what will they do? Well of course, the more tech savvy amongst us will know how easy it is to find the music and exactly where to find it, as the below soundcloud file will show you.
The less tech-able will probably ask a friend, or ask google. They might google something like “how do I get Beatles music on my iPod?” Go on Yoko, type that into google, you thick bitch.
Of course, the most irritating part of this whole affair is that at heart, she knows people will carry on dishing out the cash to buy the remastered box-sets. They will do this year after year after year, because they like the music that Yoko’s husband made with a few of his friends. Hence, she is deserving of our universal contempt.
Well, here is a free Beatles song for you all to enjoy. I know it’s not a particularly good one, but at least whilst listening to it we can all feel happy that we have taken a couple of coins from Yoko’s money mountain, a mountain that she probably sits atop and cackles from whilst we all make her rich.
I hope she holds her breathe. I hope she holds it for a really long time.
Before the end of July its rumoured that HMV will be launching their own digital download store. HMV has been a main player in the world of CD sales, now they have noticed the rise of digital and want part of that market.
HMV have been running hmvdigital.com for serveral months now, but on in a beta sense. Prices are currently £0.99 per single and around £7.99 for an album. These prices seems very similar to iTunes, so why would anyone think of purchasing on HMV instead of iTunes?
HMV will only be launching their download store in the UK, but Im sure over time they will hit all the other major music markets.
It has been reported that Amazon MP3 may be upgrading their systems, user interface and more in Q1 2011. Currently Amazon accounts for 7.1% of the entire US music market and their download service accounts for 1.3% of the same market. Amazon is looking to turn things around and really compete with iTunes head on.
Amazon is aiming for a major Q1 relaunch of the MP3 Store’s APIs and web services. They’re asking partners that are building out or planning to launch Amazon MP3 integrations to hold off until this new release is baked.
Another piece of evidence: Amazon is actively hiring for the MP3 Store team. The MP3 Store’s Twitter account has just tweeted a page with over a dozen job openings for both business and engineering positions, including spots for a Web Applications Manager, Client Application Developer, and engineers dedicated to mobile apps for both Android and other partners (some of these openings were listed in the last five months, while others are apparently brand new).
There are a lot of people out there who still think vinyl is a million times better than digital music in terms of sound quality. Martin Skelly believes that digital music is lacking in the tactile satisfaction department. To remedy this egregious problem, Skelly designed the Playlist Player, a delightfully backwards sort of music player.
The Playlist Player looks like a record player but works like an MP3 player. After creating playlists on your computer, you load the lists into the player via a memory stick. Each of the color-coded “records” represents a different playlist. Setting a “record” onto the player activates the playlist associated with that color.
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.
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 
