Just to make it clear that although I the Eat Me, Drink Me leak, I do not advocate stealing music, here's a picture of me enjoying my legally purchased copy of that very album:
And what did Interscope come up with to encourage us in the UK not to settle for the leaked version? Two utterly abysmal lounge /dance remixes of Heart Shaped Glasses.
I have a huge collection of CDs, in the vicinity of 900 albums of multiple genres. I have ripped each and every one onto my PC so that I can enjoy those tracks on my pc, on the road, on my mp3 player and on my hifi.
For a long time, I have longed for the perfect online equivalent to purchasing CDs. I want the music in any format and bitrate I choose, correctly labelled, without DRM and at a price that allows me to keep buying in large volumes (and not get angry about the fact that often, 1/2 or more of an album is absolute crap). AllofMP3.com was the perfect incarnation of the online music service. It was designed to give the customer exactly whatever he/she wanted. It even allowed you to sample stream the music prior to purchase.
I have reviewed most other alternatives on the market today and they are all found wanting in some form. Usually they are too expensive, itunes being a case in point.
The sad reality is the perfect online service exists already, but it will be marginalised by the corporates that dont understand the changing needs of the market. They have yet to come to terms with the need to move to high volume, low cost and low gp model that is required. Obviously artists need to be compensated and so too the labels, but a new model is required in order to foster an online service like allofmp3.
I have no doubt that allofmp3 will be pushed out of the way, but I believe strongly that in a few years, we will have a service that is its equivalent in every way, and we will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about.
The way to resurect music sales is to give the customer what they want, at a price point that they cant refuse. They will end up buying whole albums for download without thinking twice, rather than using p2p services or purchasing traditional cd's.
While doing yet again a search for companies or institutes, i.e. a attendant, possibly related to what I'm looking for (automated music similarity analysis) I got one big step forward finding projects at the Fraunhofer IDMT (Institute Digital Media Technologies) that sound really interesting. What I'm interested in is doing some sort of wave form analysis and find different characteristics, different descriptive measures that make two music pieces "sound similar" independent of genre, same artist or whatever and those that make two other pieces different. Most interesting would be to derive them from how we humans would decide it which, of course, is not always deterministic, i.e. fuzzy. The long term dream would be to have an automate find the right music for a given emotional atmosphere, e.g. candle lite dinner, BBQ, reception event...
Deriving from the system created finding similar music works, in short, in three steps:
In a Trent Reznor has expanded on his about the behaviour of record labels and gone as far as to indicate an intention to leave Interscope as soon as possible. He says that he is contractually obligated to deliver one more album to Interscope, but if he could he would cut out the labels altogether and sell the next Nine Inch Nails record online for a meagre $4. (He went as far as to note that consumers would be able to download the record at "as high a bit-rate as you want", a detail I greatly appreciate.)
Since MySpace and Snocap to allow artists to sell DRM free music direct to consumers I've been disappointed with the uptake. I was looking forward to being able to buy tracks from all those great unsigned bands I've come across on MySpace, but months later, it's still a rarity to see the Snocap player on a band's profile. Hopefully Reznor's stand will encourage more artists to go down the direct to consumers route.
I was talking to a very accomplished producer the other day. This guy has worked with some the biggest names in Hip-Hop and R&B. His most recent Major Label project was on John Legends "Get Lifted" CD. So naturally I have respect for his ability and music Biz acumen.
After he tested my skills to determine if I was worthy of his conversation, he said something to me that made me judge his worthiness to speak to me.
We were discussing Digital Music Management. During our talk, we covered the basics; BDS, Sound-Scan, and record sales. I was able to hold my own [me being an expert in the music biz and all] but he lost ground in my opinion when he said that still thinks that analog music production is still the best way to go.
Of course, trying to be respectful of such an accomlished individual who was gracing me with his thoughts and opinions, I tried not to tell him that he sounds like a broken record. I didn't tell him that he is like the T-Rex - bound for extencttion.
Digital is the way to go.
It seems that Pandora, the internet radio station has finally lost it's valiant battle against international licensing constraints. They've had who had to cut off listeners of its internet radio service due to them not being US residents. The company is now pushing for effective, established and centralised licensing bodies worldwide.
, the Deputy GM of Edelman's Madria office received the following notification today. The UK manages to squeeze through the draconian US laws; unfortunately, the rest of Europe is not so lucky...
Dear Pandora listener,
Today we have some extremely disappointing news to share with you. Due to international licensing constraints, we are deeply, deeply sorry to say that we must begin proactively preventing access to Pandora's streaming service for most countries outside of the U.S. It is difficult to convey just how disappointing this is for us. Our vision remains to eventually make Pandora a truly global service, but for the time being, we can no longer continue as we have been. As a small company, the best chance we have of realizing our dream of Pandora all around the world is to grow as the licensing landscape allows. We show your IP address is '85.62.33.130', which indicates you are listening from Spain. If you believe you are seeing this by mistake, we offer our sincere apologies and ask that you please reply to this email.
Delivery of Pandora is based on proper licensing from the people who created the music - we have always believed in honoring the guidelines as determined by legislators and regulators, artists and songwriters, and the labels and publishers they work with. In the U.S. there is a federal statute that provides this license for all the music streamed on Pandora. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the U.S. and there is no global licensing organization to enable us to legitimately offer Pandora around the world.
Other than in the U.K., we have not yet been able to make significant progress in our efforts to obtain a sufficient number of international licenses at terms that would enable us to run a viable business. The volume of listening on Pandora makes it a very expensive service to run. Streaming costs are very high, and since our inception, we have been making publishing and performance royalty payments for every song we play. Until now, we have not been able to tell where a listener is based, relying only on zip code information provided upon registration. We are now able to recognize a listener's country of origin based on the IP address from which they are accessing the service. Consequently, on May 3rd, we will begin blocking access to Pandora to listeners from your country. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
We will be posting updates on our blog regarding our ongoing effort to launch in other countries, so please stay in touch. We will keep a record of your existing stations and bookmarked artists and songs, so that when we are able to launch in your country, they will be waiting for you. We deeply share your sense of disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.
-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)
One of the reasons I continue to buy CD's and haven't yet switched to buying music from download services is that I love album art. One of the reasons the replacement of vinyl with CD's and cassette tapes is so lamented is the fact the packaging is so much smaller and therefore the art work printed on it can't be as detailed. Now that with have distribution of music through Internet downloading, which of course requires no packaging, then I guess that's the end of album art altogether, right? Well... hopefully not, as with a little bit of imagination, the opposite could be true. Computers, as digital photographs would agree, are actually very good at displaying graphics. Why not use this capability to provide vivid and detailed artwork to accompany the albums we buy on-line?
Currently, a lot of media software is capable of associating a small thumbnail of an album cover with the tracks in that album. The approach is generally to have a record of what the CD packaging is like. Why not cut out is CD packaging middleman, and produce graphics that take advantage of the rich graphical capabilities of modern computers? Then we could begin to enjoy album art as high resolution graphics suitable for viewing at full screen.
My point is that the end of physical music packaging doesn't have to mean the end of album art; on the contrary, it could spell its return.
If someone is interested in archiving your audio CD collection in a really save manner to get rid of them after the encoding, or I should say transcoding process you might want to have a look at . Neil Popham, by the way, wrote some features for the APEv2 tagging tool . His guide utilizes Windows batch scripts, adds tags and employs for parity information. The later is needed to overcome seldom yet possible bit failures which would compromise an ape file. The ripping is done with , the meanwhile well-known audio CD accurate ripping tool by Andre Wiethoff.