Musicane

I just started to dig into Musicane, which is basically a platform for independent artists to embed and sell their content directly from their sites (or others via a viral embeddable player widget).

For those of you that know me for a long time, you may remember my brief foray into the label side of the business with Prodigal Sun Records - which I started in 1994 and ran while I was in grad. school. Well, my one an only artist - Biohio - is long gone (although you can still find the guys kicking around in bands like Emmet Swimming, Quitter UK and The Device.), but I used their debut album as my guinea pig. Check it out below...

Buying Guide: Online Music Services (PC Magazine)

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ZDM/story?id=2693675

Nice coverage of Music Now, with it being heralded as a "standout service". The conclusion being:

"Unlike its rivals, Music Now requires no client software. All you need is a browser, and you can play any song or playlist in the entire catalog. You can listen at the office, a friend's house, or a Web café as easily as at home. The music videos are a great addition, and the new XM Radio section really rounds out the service. Unfortunately, you don't get remote access to your locally stored music library, and support for the Firefox browser is weak."

Rick's points are valid, but in the meantime if you are looking for remote access to files - I'd suggest checking out the latest build of Winamp, which integrates Orb's great remote access services.

iPhone

Cnet is reporting that Taiwanese ODM, HonHai, has received an order for 12 million iPhones from Apple. They further speculate that the phone will be an unlocked GSM phone that would work out-of-the-box with a T-Mobile or Cingular GSM card. Only downside to that approach.... no contract means no hardware subsidy. So be prepared to pay full price for the iPhone (expected in Q107).

Real should buy MusicGremlin

Someone asked me the other day what I thought of MusicGremlin. Fact is, I think they've got a pretty killer little wifi media player grafted on to a fairly standard MusicNet-powered service. The devices does everything that Zune wants to do - but doesn't yet. A little company like MusicGremlin is never going to be able to compete on the same marketing scale as Apple, Microsoft or even Napster. Which is sad because I hate to see good products and services wither on the vine.

So, Real should take the cash from $700million dollar settlement from Microsoft and acquire the little company with the Zune-killer. Wouldn't that be sweet revenge for Real? Use Microsoft's money and MSN's ad placements (part of the settlement) to buy the device that does well the one thing Zune gets most hammered for.... direct-to-device dowloads and device-to-device sharing. They could also totally abandon Windows Media DRM (Plays For Sure) in favor of their own (like they have done with SanDisk).

Real could then subsidize the hardware when users commits to a year or more of Rhapsody-to-Go. I'm sure I'm not saying anything that others haven't said (or may be considering for all I know). But as a consumer, I'd buy it.

Tags: real+musicgremlin+rhapsody

A VC: Yottamusic - Rhapsody The Way I've Always Wanted It

A VC: Yottamusic - Rhapsody The Way I've Always Wanted It: "A service called Yottamusic launched. Yottamusic is basically a new front end on top of Rhapsody which has opened its web service."

I'm guessing that this can't be monetized beyond the affiliate dollars? Once/if advertising starts getting added, then the wrath of the labels will be felt as they demand their pound of flesh. I would actually think this would make Rhapsody nervous and potentially curb their openness in the future.

Project Playlist

This comes from a Webjay competitor called Project Playlist. Looks to essentially search for hosted MP3s, then lets the user create a playlist out of them, and then embed the player into your site of choice.

Here's a random one:

The site is an absolute mess - there are ads everywhere and you search is less than useful. But...


UPDATE: I got rid of it, it didn't seem to have a way to turn Autoplay off and it was really starting to get annoying.

MyStrands : M-Chart Generator

Everyone is doing scrobbling and embeddable widgets now, and MyStrands is no exception.

M-Chart by MyStrands

Firefox 2.0 & Performancing Extension

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about writetomyblog.com. Performancing is another tool that looks pretty useful in this regard. It runs as a Firefox extenstion and makes it really easy to post and comment about a page in an easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor that essentially pops open as a drawer from the bottom of your Firefox window.

You can drag and drop images right from the page into your post (see below), which is really nice.

They've got some other analysis tools, but if/once I ever move to Firefox full-time, I'll look more into it. Right now, I'm also running IE7 (which I like) because some of my favorite destinations don't yet work in FFX (due to ActiveX implementations), but hopefully soon I will be able to settle on one browser and stick with it.

powered by performancing firefox

powered by performancing firefox

Borat Deleted Scenes

Entertainment Weekly asked the question whether the Borat movie is the "funniest movie of all time, or just the most offensive?". I say... "can't it be both?".

Finetune

This process of building a playlist/station is a bit tedious (search/add, search/add, search/add), but the result is pretty cool. I manually entered about 30 of the tracks - of the 45 required - to build a "playlist", and then let the "I'm Lazy" button fill out the rest. I can only assume that the 45 track minimum is so that they can adhere to DMCA business rules (and hence a lower royalty rate). I'm no lawyer, but I'm not sure if this actually complies to the letter of DMCA anyway since I can skip an unlimited number of times.

GigaOM » Price Hikes For Yahoo Music

GigaOM » Price Hikes For Yahoo Music: "On November 14, 2006, the cost of a new Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscription will increase from $6.99 to $8.99 per month. Despite this price increase, Yahoo! Music Unlimited will still offer the lowest price of any major subscription music service — now with a catalog of more than 2 million songs!"

Hmmm... Yahoo Music is struggling and Napster is rumored to be up for sale. The winds of change....

Howard Stern reaches out to new Internet audience - Yahoo! News

Howard Stern reaches out to new Internet audience - Yahoo! News: "The new service offers more than 75 channels of CD-quality programming over the Internet -- without the need to buy a Sirius satellite receiver -- for a monthly subscription fee of $12.95, the company said in a press release."

You've got to really love talk radio to pay $13/month for 75 channels of one-to-many programming. For less than that I can get true, personalized, one-to-one music programming of more than 2.5 million tracks....

WriteToMyBlog

I found a couple cool new web apps this week. The first, Competitio.us, is a collaborative competitve analysis tool. It seems like it could be valuable for multiple team members to update news, feature matrices adn messages. I'm starting to play with it now, and it seems promising.

The next, is WriteToMyBlog (which I'm using to write this post). It is basically an advanced WYSIWYG editor that can be used for multiple blogging platforms (including sending a single post to multiple blogs simultaneously). It appears to be a much more robust editor than Blogger has (not sure about the others). Easy inclusion of tables, flash files, custom javascript pop-up controls, code cleaner, spell-checker, and more.

?

Tags: cool+tools

New Winamp Player Emerges - Computing News - Digital Trends

New Winamp Player Emerges - Computing News - Digital Trends: "AOL has debuted their new Winamp media player, this time with support for pictures, video and other AOL services."

Naplinks

Pop-Up Test

Click here to listen to a good Stereophonics tune.

Chat: The Long Tail - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

Fireside Chat: The Long Tail - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals): "The Chatters
Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and Editor of Wired
Dave Goldberg, General Manager of Yahoo Music
Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product Strategy at Yahoo
Tim Quirk, VP of Music Content and Programming at Rhapsody
(Moderated by Matt and Jason from 37signals)

Topic: The Long Tail
The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. In this chat, the participants discuss the impact of the tail, mass amateurization, the role of reviews/recommendations, and how, in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people."

I haven't read this yet, so I'm posting it here because... 1) It looks like it will be an interesting read, and 2) To remind myself to read it. Let me know if it is any good. :-)

PokerBlog.com: Shout Out to Extended Family

charliebigtime's blog | PokerBlog.com: "Shannon Shorr will not become a household name if he wins tomorrow but he will return home with over $900k..."

As long as I'm throwing out props to my friends, might as well throw my extended family in here too. It tunrs out that my step-cousin* (figure that one out) is a poker whiz-kid... he was in the World Series of Poker, but was disappointed when he busted out in about 500th place (still out of 9K, not bad at all). The cool thing is that still translated into about a $20K purse. Sounds like somewhat on a whim he entered the $10K Bellagio tourney, and has been on fire... today he is playing at the final table with the opportunity to take in almost $1 million. Not bad for a 21-year old kid... eh?! I can't say that I know him (I probably last saw him when he was a really little kid), but it's still cool to follow nonetheless.

Check him out and read his blog if you are into poker.

www.shannonshorr.com

He is WAY better at keeping his blog up-to-date then I am. :-)

* My maternal grandfather's stepson's (my step-uncle's) son. Make sense??!

UPDATE: He won! Payday for Shannon was $960,000. I'm in the wrong business.... :-)

PopMatters: Arthur Lee

So a good friend of mine just wrote a killer review/commentary on Arthur Lee on Popmatters. Gotta be honest, I had no idea who he was, but now I'll go give him (and his band "Love") a listen.

Apple signals iPod phone in works; 2007 debut seen | Chicago Tribune

Apple signals iPod phone in works; 2007 debut seen | Chicago Tribune: "Apple Computer Inc., known for its secrecy about new products, gave the strongest signal yet it's working on an iPod phone that analysts said could be released early next year."