Archive for: online music

World of Online Music

This is a great infographic that outlines the world of online music.

Spotify Updates Platform With New Features

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

• 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

NARM Issue White Paper For Development of Digital

With suspiciously good timing as the Digital Economy Bill is hurried along towards becoming law, the National Association of Recording Merchandisers has issued a white paper outlining their recommendations for the development and standardisation of deliverable media and information collection. Essentially aimed at people like us (digital music distributors, that is), record labels, online music stores, that sort of thing, not exactly light reading, but interesting if you want to keep an eye on the future of the digital music industry.

The document can be downloaded by handing over your email through the widget below (powered rather pleasingly by Topspin media)

The White Paper details historical information on standardization both within the music industry and in other industries, along with member-identified and prioritized issues surrounding identification and communications standards for music release metadata. It is intended to provide an understanding of the core issues currently undermining accurate and efficient delivery of music information and music. It also features recommendations regarding how NARM will work strategically address these topics.

Vinyl Up Close

You’ll need your 3-D specs to properly appreciate this amazing view of the surface of an LP, magnified x390 by an electron microscope, photographed by Chris Supranowitz at the University of Rochester, who has also taken pictures of a load of other interesting stuff, including the pits on a CD, ladybird claws, and the surface of a fly’s eye… Makes you appreciate the wonder of the commonplace! Click on the pic to go to Chris’s project page, where you can find the rest of his images, or here to go to an amazing and totally non-music-related zoomable image of an ant under an electron microscope. 1950′s monster movie anyone?

The End Is Nigh – Chaos Reigns At Myspace

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?

Digital Economy Bill Approved By Lords, Criticised By ISP’s

The much-debated Digital Economy Bill was yesterday ratified by the House Of Lords, to squeals of dissaproval from those worst hit by the bill’s contents. The “3 strikes” proposal at the centre of the bill will mean that repeated copyright infringers will have their internet connection disabled or slowed down, but other sections, such as Clause 17, which would have given ministers power to tear up current UK copyright law, have had their range diminished by the Lords.

ISP TalkTalk were among those to protest the ratification of the bill; their Director of Strategy and Regulation, Andrew Heaney said in the Guardian:

“The digital economy bill proposals create a new and unfair duty on broadband customers… It asks them to implement complex and expensive security measures on their connections to make it more difficult for their neighbours and others to use their connection for copyright infringement. The bill reverses the core principles of natural justice by requiring customers to prove their innocence.”

The bill will not pass into UK law until it has been passed by both the House Of Commons [who will doubtless chew it up a bit more before it hits the real world] and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth – whose approval is usually a matter of protocol, but who knows; she might be a big fan of bit torrent sites… Her Navy is bigger than any pirate’s.

A Private Orchard

TechCrunch reports an offer from Dimensional to buy all outstanding stock of our digital music distribution competitor The Orchard, whose operation currently has offices in 25 countries, and is losing $17.5 million dollars a year. The purchase offer is for $2.05 per share of common stock, valuing the company at $12.8 million, about 28% of their annual revenue of $45 million. Rumours also abound of a merger between The Orchard and eMusic, which would see the vertical value chain completed, from artist to store – seemingly a simple and sensible synergy, but since eMusic is also rumoured to be for sale predicting where the chips will fall may be difficult. Private owners of The Orchard will have a lot of cost cutting to do whatever the case, so look to see a lot of those international offices closed down, and a consolidation of revenue streams and staffing before long.

Guvera Announce US Launch Date

Ad-supported music and digital content service Guvera has set the date for going live in the States as 30th March. The service, named for the bloody-handed revolutionary icon Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara [wiki here, tl;dr we should all strive for personal fulfilment and be nice communists, but sometimes it's ok to shoot people in the head if they betray you] – aims to instigate a ‘revolution’ in the media industry by getting advertisers to pay for content delivered to consumers, who have chosen the advertiser whose branding they find least offensive/interruptive. This may not be quite the paradigm shift that they seem to think, but their beta service has been up and running for a couple of months in Australia now, and has been successful enough for them to roll out the full scale launch. They have deals in place with Universal Music Group, EMI Music and IODA offering consumers ‘free but paid for’ legal downloads from their full music libraries, but concerns abound as to whether they’ll be able to pay for them in the long term and on the grand scale that they hope for. Another streaming service in the States means that Spotify, bogged down making their platform profitable in Europe, will find the marketplace that bit more crowded if and when they finally get their stall laid out in the US, but they will have had the headstart in refining the user experience and gathering advertisers to their service. There is a future for online ad-supported music streaming, the appetite is strongly apparent, but it will be a hotly contested race to become the dominant provider, and Guvera have yet to prove themselves against the competition.

Internet Music Radio Continues Strong Growth

Just as consumers are increasingly purchasing their music in digital form, from online music stores like iTunes, Amazon and eMusic (a trend digital music distributors like us rely on for the future of our business), radio audiences are moving online. A study published recently by Bridge Rating, company that:

“provides guidance services to media companies and investment firms seeking immediate and timely behavioral data related to media use.”

covering consumer use of satellite radio, Internet radio, MP3 players, Podcasting and mobile media consumption. They forecast that online ‘radio’ audience will grow to 77m by 2015. Their figures draw from both online only stations like Pandora and Yahoo Music, and simulcast stations (those that also broadcast over the airwaves) – see their graph for comparative growth rates.

So why are users migrating? The cost of a radio is minimal, compared to the cost of a computer, or even to a broadband subscription, and anywhere you can pick up the internet, you can pick up an FM signal. If it were the case that people were just using their computers as a convenient method of accessing the radio content, because their speakers are hooked up to it, signal is poor or they’re out of range, then simulcast stations wouldn’t be seeing a stagnation of or negative growth. Instead it seems likely that users are usign alternative music streaming services becaused of the greater interactivity and enhaned services like forums and playlist sharing that surround the musical core  of the online channels, just as they surround music stores like Spotify (which runs it’s own nascent radio platform). If it is this rather than the inherent quality of the radio content itself that is drawing users online, then what does the future hold for premium airwave radio providers like Sirius XM? Will their hold on the car dashboard be enough to save them from their competitors? Not if Pandora have anything to do with it, as their contract with Ford to build in-dash controls to interact with their service shows. The increasing prevalence of smart phones and mobile internet devices also means that anyone with a stereo jack cable can use their existing car stereo to access their own music collection and playlists.

Streaming Radio Stations On the Rise – Jelli Attracts $2 Million In Funding

Internet radio has had a couple of boosts recently, first the deals that Pandora struck with Ford and Pioneer to get their service into thousands of car dashboards, and now web radio/streaming service Jelli getting funding from a group of tech savvy investors including Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, Zappos.com COO Alfred Lin and Apollo Group founder Peter Sperling. Jelli streams music online through its own ‘stations’ 24/7, and already has content deals in place with a large number of FM and AM stations, mostly through a partnership with Triton Digital, whose air-transmitted station affiliations leading into 2010 now exceed 5,000 – up 50 percent from a year ago. Jelli’s system allows users to upvote or downvote songs on a particular channel, the most popular of which get onto the playlist and go out in real time. This has been proven to work on the web, and now Jelli are taking over slots on air stations, such as San Francisco’s 105.3 fm. Users do have to be logged in to vote on tracks though, so if you’re in the car listening you need to have someone to put your votes in using your iPhone…