Lala the music streaming service that was acquired by Apple has just announced via their site that they will be shut down on May 31st 2010. Apple will not be accepting new users, and existing users will be able to log in only until the end of next month.
Does this mean that we will soon be seeing iTunes in the cloud?
I’m pretty sure we will be seeing a new iTunes.com by the end of June.
Spotify released a major update to their service today, integrating a massive set of social and functional features, including the ability to linkn your Facebook and Spotify accounts, and the option of using to play all the music on your computer’s hard drive.
The new features will be available to free and premium subscribers alike; full list after their little introductory video. All of this new functionality makes Spotify an even stronger contender in the battle for dominance in the online music market, which will be put to the test if and when they launch in the US later this year, going up against already established services like MOG, Sirius and Pandora.
Social
Library
Additional features
* Connect to Facebook: you can connect to Facebook inside of Spotify, instantly adding all your Facebook friends who’ve selected the same feature. Your friends’ profiles will appear in a new ‘People’ sidebar at the right of the screen, with your personal profile at the top.
* Add usernames: you can also add people by typing their Spotify username, should you know it, into the Spotify search field. For example searching ‘spotify:user:username’ will bring up their profile (if their profile is published).
* Publish your Spotify profile to the web: easily publish the link to your Spotify profile on your blog, Facebook page, website or anywhere else on the web and allow others to follow your musical journey. For example here’s a link to the official Spotify profile.
* Inbox: a new ‘inbox’ folder on Spotify’s left sidebar lets you send tracks to friends directly within the platform, simply by dragging and dropping a track to their name in the People sidebar. Alternatively, just right click on the track and select the new ‘send to’ option.
* Facebook feed: music your friends have posted on Facebook will be visible on the Spotify ‘What’s new’ page and via a new ‘Feed’ tab.
* Popularity count for playlists: all playlists will show how many other Spotify users are currently subscribed to that playlist. By clicking on the number, you can even see the usernames of those who added the playlist.
* Track playlist changes: see who and when a track was added to a playlist with the new ‘Added’ and ‘User’ columns in playlists.
Library
* Local files: missing any music in Spotify? Now you can import a link to all the music files stored on your computer with a simple click of a button.
o Gracenote: As with any good music media player, if you have missing or incorrect track information you need software to check those files and automatically correct them so that you can better organise and link them to our catalogue. Gracenote does just this.
o Local file linking: we will check your local files and see if we have that track/artist/album in Spotify. If we do, we’ll make the file linkable so you can easily go from that file into an artist or album page. This allows for better sharing of playlists that contain a mix of your own music and Spotify’s.
* Starred: every track and album on Spotify can now be ‘starred’ – allowing you to tag all your favourites into a special sub-folder.
* Wireless sync: you can copy your music files to your mobile without connecting a USB cable with our new wireless sync feature.
* Filter bar: the library has a permanent filter-bar at the top so you can easily type in what you’re searching for. In all other lists the filter bar is visible when pressing cmd-f (mac) or ctrl-f (windows).
Additional features
* Mosaic images for playlists: the artwork from the first nine tracks in a playlist will create a cool mosaic image for your playlist
* New toolbar in headers: Sharing music to Facebook/Twitter and your friends is much simpler. Easy to subscribe or unsubscribe to a playlist as well as view information about how popular a playlist is.
* A share icon in ‘Now playing’ artwork: makes sharing what you’re currently listening to much easier.
* Automatic track replacement: Spotify will now automatically try to find a replacement for any track you can’t play. So if a friend in another country sends you a playlist with tracks you can’t play or a local file, we’ll search our catalogue and link to a playable track when possible. A ‘link’ icon next to the track name represents replaced tracks.
You may have heard of Chatroulette, the internet’s favourite new way of showing your genitalia to strangers. Well, it’s not all anonynmous wang; this increasingly famous chap called Merton has been entertaining his video partners with improvised songs about them as they appear on their webcams:
His musical stylings were widely compared to a certain Mr. Benjamin Folds, who obviously got to hear about it, because Hypebot picked up the elaborate high-five he pulled by opening up Chatroulette during a live concert he was performing and copying Merton’s antics, making up the same sort of jolly little song.
Now, what I really want to see is a fully improvised version of Trapped In The Closet in this style, or possibly U2 doing the same thing at their next massive arena gig. Mind you, probably too much wang around to do it for an audience of 100,000 people.
At a recent NYC Pandora listener meetup CEO Tim Westergren offered these Pandora stats:
MGMT’s new album, Congratualtions found it’s way onto the file sharing ecosphere over the weekend, so in a striking move to make the best of a bad situation, Columbia and MGMT decided to put the whole thing up to stream for free on the band’s website:
Hey everybody, the album leaked, and we wanted you to be able to hear it from us. We wanted to offer it as a free download but that didn’t make sense to anyone but us.
Which is a pretty cool way of going about things, if you ask us. Bound to generate interest in the band and their music, and more of a gift to their fans than a capitulation to the pirates. Music has changed so drastically that bands are having to combat leaks and pirates in new ways, and we really hope this strategy pays off for the band. Go visit the site, get a t-shirt, buy the album in legit music stores, and stream it on Spotify, and let’s make sure they get their dues.
Poor old Myspace – everyone loves to hate them these days. Even before it was assimilated into Newscorp’s Dark Empire, it was beset with a hideous, clunky user interface, a messaging system only slightly less cumbrous than training a carrier pigeon to take your messages, some of the slowest load times on the internet and that’s all without mentioning the millions upon millions of scene-teens that infested the site like so many gnats, their sparkly, buggy, eye-scorching profiles and six-figure friend counts repulsing the mind at every click. What it did have going for it was content. You could click over to a band’s profile and see a neat summary of news and information about them and maybe listen to a song or two. Then came Facebook, and Grooveshark, and Last.FM, and Spotify, and suddenly Myspace was wondering where all the traffic had gone. Then it’s spiritual heart got cut out when Tom got bought out and booted, its got decapitated twice [DeWolfe, Van Natta], and now it looks set for an implosion of hideous proportions, as when all of its management staff and key programmers get their bonus paycheques in June, a lot of them are going to abandon ship.
With an owner that’s rooted in old media, and known for his rapacious treatment of his conquests, is there any hope for Myspace?
The Oxfam-chic has been abandoned in favour of boiler suits in their latest web outing – a huge Heath Robinson (OK, since they’re from Chicago, Rube Goldberg) contraption to rival the one in Honda’s Cog advert. Ironically, given the fuss they’ve been making about revenues from embedding their previous treadmill viral super-hit, the video wasn’t embeddable, but sponsorship from a certain insurance company means that we can now save you the trouble of clicking all the way over to YouTube for this little beauty:
Can music streaming ever be a viable alternative to hard copy and download music sales? WMG’s Edgar Bronfman has his doubts, and looking at some of the figures being published in the media they might seem reasonable. Increases in the number of users on services that provide on-demand music streaming (where you pick the track you want to hear like MOG, Spotify, and Grooveshark) correspond to decreases in music sales, while increases in use of radio’ streaming services [Last.fm, Pandora] seemed to drive more sales. There doesn’t seem to be any mystery as to why this might be; Spotify’s and MOG’s users no longer have any reason to buy music from other sources once they’re signed up (particularly as they can put their playlists on their iPods and other mobile devices if they buy a premium account), while Pandora and Last.fm’s customers have no guarantee of getting a particular track on their playlist again, so they have to buy it to hear it whenever they want. This might seem to be an open and shut case for the record labels; one service drives sales, while another cuts revenue – but it’s not quite as simple as that. Spotify has massive customer appeal, as the hordes that try and sign up every time they re-open user registration prove, and it also drives a lot of interaction with listeners; according to Spotify’s own figures the average use playlists around 15,000 tracks. The vast majority of Spotify’s users might be on the free-to-listen ad supported plan, with only single figure percentages signed up to their £10 a month premium package, but it’s clear that the proposition is incredibly attractive to consumers. The premium users represent a healthy annual income for the record labels to share with the platform; £120 a year is not an insignificant spend, and the potential for fledgling on demand platforms to increase their advertising revenue so that even the non-paying customers are generating profits for the record labels is proportional to the platforms’ desirability and popularity,
On demand services are what the consumer wants, and are proven to reduce the incidence of file sharing and online music piracy, something that unequivocally costs the music industry. Cutting off support for such services would surely drive a proportion of users back to illegal, non-revenue-generating, methods of consumption. Assessing the profitability of on demand against radio streaming will have to be done over the coming years as the platforms mature and adjust their business models, but it seems unlikely that killing off the most eagerly recieved of the net’s music biz babies just as they’re getting established would be a rational strategy for the industry.
For our part, we’re seeing tangible revenues come back for our artists from on demand services, and we’re happy to be able to help independent artists get music up on Spotify and in other online stores.
Since Damon Albarn and Jamie ‘Tank Girl’ Hewlett’s collaborative cartoon band Gorillaz were nice enough to give YouTube an exclusive on the video for their new track ‘Stylo’, YouTube have let their fictional bassist Murdoc Niccols curate a post on their Celebrity Playlist section. The mask slips a little bit, and Murdoc’s voice betrays him as an excitable 40 year old man, rather than a sharp-toothed ego-bass-maniac. Some of the videos are nice, like the clip from Jacques Cousteau’s ‘Silent World’, and others are revealing, like the dressing room rehearsal of “Hip Hop”, by Mos Def and my favourite colliery band/rap mashup group, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble (who you should definitely check out on dino-space here). Anyway, here’s the clip – and no, Charlie Bit Me isn’t on there, odd, considering the teeth thing.
If you haven’t seen the Record Club project that is being run over on Mr. Hansen’s website, it’s worth a look. He’s collecting transient teams of highly talented and professional musicians and jamming out ‘covers’ of classic albums in a day. The tracks thus produced are then breathed on and released weekly in video format through the site. The current slew of tunes is from Skip Spence’s album OAR, and includes some [I think] really interesting stuff. This strange upbeat video is called ‘Lawrence of Euphoria’, reminiscent of some of the punchier stuff from early in Beck’s career, but there are also tracks like “All Come To Meet Her”, which positively reeks of Fleet Foxxes, and “Weighted Down”, which has got Feist’s imprimatur all over it. Lovely stuff.
Record Club: Skip Spence “Lawrence of Euphoria” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.
This collaborative project is bearing fruit from different branches – funk/soul producer Jamie Lidell’s new album will feature both Leslie Feist and Beck, whom he worked with on the Record Club project. Nice to see they’re building stuff together, and that success breeds creativity. All Beck’s videos are available on his Vimeo channel here: http://vimeo.com/videotheque
