>Pictured above: what happens to CDM readership if I go on a bizarre tangent for too long, or take too much . Erm, and it also happens to be CDM readers’ favorite new software of 2007: Ableton Live 7.
To all of our readers here at Create Digital Music, thank you for 2007. It’s been fantastic to sit at the helm of CDM and get to hear from all of you, from news tips to musical and technological projects, and get to meet you out in the world (at Macworld San Francisco, Maker Faire San Mateo, Handmade Music events here in New York with Etsy and Make, in Chicago at a demo swap, and even in Australia at a coffee shop).
I’m wrapping our own 2007 in review story, but which stories did Webizens choose as the most significant? Here’s 2007 by the numbers, according to our server. First, the most visited stories of the year:
Top Ten Stories By Visit
The top ten start out with Yamaha’s unveiling of the long-awaited TENORI-ON instrument, a tool for mobile recording, a terrific free tool for Windows, and an unusual DJ take on mobile music players. Apple’s Logic Studio manages not to sneak into the top ten, I suspect because it can’t compete with apps that run on two platforms instead of one. But Reason 4 falls just short of matching CDM reader favorite Ableton Live:
Photo: , who has lots of other wonderful instruments in his galleries on Flickr.
The Martenot is a bit like the Theremin’s sexy, friendly younger sister. If the Theremin is a tricky-to-drive race car, the Martenot is a sleek, road-ready coupe. (Okay, I’ve been watching way, way too much .)
Anyway, the Martenot gets way too little credit. It’s played the theme from Star Trek. (Not a Theremin.) It’s played Radiohead. It’s played some really gorgeous Messiaen. Martenot met Theremin and the two went on to direct the course of electrified music in the 20th Century.
The Martenot has gotten a lovely round-up on MetaFilter:
… and you can read more at , or even . (Those over the age of 25, you can explain the retro appeal of these early treeware Wikipedias.)
Andrew Cordani of sends this our way, and just at the right time — the Martenot is a terrific example of the kind of thing you can do with continuous controllers, like ribbons. So go pick up that free ribbon circuit kit and get with the inventing! Come on, "will exercise more" is no fun as a New Years’ resolution, is it? How about "will build my own Martenot"?
Reuters - There is a reason people still buy CDs
more than they do digital albums. Actually there are several,
but viruses that come along with music via peer-to-peer sites
(P2P) and a concern over digital rights management (DRM) aren't
the only culprits.
Now they're claiming . How the hell else was I supposed to populate my iPod? Buy each of the 1,000 tracks I have on it from the iTunes store for $0.99 each, for a total cost of $990 to fill an 8GB iPod? And whoa to those who have iPod's with 60GB drives, it'd cost about $7,920 to fill one of those babies.
While I'm on the subject, iTunes makes it REALLY easy to rip a CD. Just pop one in the drive and it automatically rips the tracks to digital form so that iTunes can play it. And burning a CD is as easy as dragging tracks to a playlist. Yet I haven't seen the RIAA go after Apple, I suppose it wouldn't be nice to bite the hand that feeds you.
Because the only place where the record industry is making any money these days is online sales. The thing about online sales is that you don't have to buy a whole crap CD just for one song you might want to hear. Instead you just get the individual track.
And that buck a track is WAY too high. More realistic costs in my opinion would be about 25 cents a track. After all, the recording industry doesn't have the overhead expenses associated with pressing of CD's. And they really don't have much in the way of marketing expenses either.
Very Interesting to see the latest announcement from in which they told the world that
"Warner joins EMI, Universal Music Group nd a pack of independent labels that sell so-called digital rights management-free music in Amazon MP3, at the company's music store."
It will be interesting to see how DRM-based services will be able to compete.. When purchasing from those services, it was always a complain how hard it was to keep play back on multiple devices, or when upgrading to new computers... - ugh! --
Glad to see the music publishers are swinging back to the original purpose of digital content! -
Now talk about the long tail of the music catalogs - that is totally endless, and hope profitable for Amazon.com! Yeah!
AP - In the weeks leading to Christmas, an online wine retailer gave 15 percent discounts to anyone who sent in a photo of its newspaper ad snapped with a camera phone.
Reuters - Like it or not, major record
companies are expected to continue drafting their artist
contracts so that labels share a piece of most -- if not all --
of the artists' rights in all types of revenue streams, not
just record sales, but also concert tickets and t-shirts.
NewsFactor - In yet another step away from the digital-rights-management ties that bind, Warner Music inked a deal with Amazon.com on Thursday to sell songs and albums without copyright protections.
InfoWorld - Amazon.com has added songs from Warner Music Group to the range it sells as MP3 files without DRM (digital rights management), the companies said Friday.
