It looks like (CEO) Randy Falco's NBC connections finally paid off for something...
Yahoo May Be Looking To Buy Israel’s FoxyTunes: "Rumors popped up here in Silicon Valley that Yahoo is in negotiations to buy Israel-based FoxyTunes."
I mentioned in my previous post about Yahoo's new strategy reminded me a lot of Foxytunes' approach. Perhaps I was more right than I knew at the time...
For Those About To Rock Club, We Salute You - washingtonpost.com: "Getting four ultra-busy guys together every week doesn't happen easily. After his initial plea for regular rock-and-roll meet-ups was welcomed with open arms, Andelman fleshed out his plan, suggesting that each week, one member would research and select a band. But the concept that sounded great in an e-mail could very well have failed. (How often do people plan to get together regularly, only to meet sporadically, if at all?)"
The weeks rolled by and the guys went out, wrote reviews and went out again. Amazingly, the whole thing worked. The secret to Rock Club's success? 'We see a wide range of bands,' says Fintel, a consultant. 'And we've gone to all kinds of venues: the Black Cat, 9:30 club, Rock and Roll Hotel, Velvet Lounge, Verizon Center, DAR, Wonderland. And we even braved a snowstorm to see [New York band] the Mooney Suzuki.'"
Amusingly enough, it turns out that one of the guys (follow the link in the blockquote above to read the whole story) actually has a kid in the same class as one of my music-loving buddies. So, sure enough we are now trying to figure out how we get our asses off the couch and out to more shows. I'm not going to fool myself into thinking I'd be up for this once a week, but maybe once a quarter to start.... if it goes well (and as the kids get older) maybe we can crank it up to once a month.
Here are some tips for setting up your own Rock Club, and don't forget the "rules"...
"The Rules of Rock Club were drafted and ratified: Shows were to cost no more than $20; the person who picked a concert would write a review on the blog; no wives or girlfriends allowed."
Who's in?! :-)
Sony BMG Will Allow Amazon to Sell Its Music Without DRM | Listening Post from Wired.com: "Sony BMG made history Thursday by becoming the fourth and final major label to allow its music to be sold without digital rights management, issuing a announcement that Amazon.com's MP3 store would start carrying music from the label by the end of this month."
Phew, disaster averted....
Here's what it does:
- Link to MP3s in your web page. These can be anywhere on the web.
- Add a line of code to insert our Javascript library. We host this, so you just have to point to our URL.
- Working play buttons appear next to MP3s.
More information can be found here:
http://yahoomediaplayer.wikia.com
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/01/post.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/08/yahoo-releases-browser-based-mp3-player/
My first impressions are very positive. As a blogger it will make my life easier since I just embed the player code once into the body of my page, and then just drop the MP3 links anywhere on the page and they automagically get a play icon (and get playlisted).
It also is supporting some open standards (under the covers) in the form of XSPF playlists - I assume in a future release I will be able to hit a page that uses this player and download the XSPF playlist file to take with me - where I can then decide to either have it continue to resolve to the original source files or to a catalog of my choice (e.g. a subscription catalog, my local library, etc.). Check out the work going on at OpenMediaWeb that Yahoo is also heavily involved in and this previous conversation around playlist portability.
Yahoo gets their piece by linking off to a Yahoo Search based on the metadata keywords.
All-in-all, it strikes me as a web-based client version of Foxytunes. I've always been a fan of Foxytunes, and you can see my previous coverage of them here. In fact, I would not be surprised to see Yahoo Search evolve to have "artist pages" that suck in related content from the artist from all over the web - photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube, free-range MP3s (similar to the way AOL just starting doing), Wikipedia-based bios, etc. very much like FoxyTunes Planet.
The downside? Well, if you are "playing a page" you are basically tied to that page as long as you want to keep listening. The easy way around that is to open a new tab instead of refreshing the current page you are on. Not a huge deal, but you may often find yourself accidentally turning the music off if you follow another link on the page that you are playing (if that link doesn't target a new browser window/tab). The other downside that I noticed when I first implemented it, is that in a heavily widgetized page, you may have to wait a while for the javascript to load.
I speculated about 6 months ago that Yahoo was up to something based on the previous Webjay work of Lucas Gonze. It looks to have evolved a bit since then, but I think understand where the are going and I applaud it.
In honor of this new player, I've got a new Song of the Day to share too.
Thanks to Redboy I just discovered The Big Sleep. This song is off their soon-to-be-released album, and I'm diggin' it.
I'm not going to make predictions on the work that I'm doing (it wouldn't be so much a prediction as a breach of confidentiality) but look for some very cool things out of MyStrands in 2008 too. :-)
What do you guys think? Anything to add? Anything that jumps out as you as "are you smoking crack?!".
Musicpass: "New York, NY - Monday, January 7, 2008 -- SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT today announced the launch of Platinum MusicPass, a series of digital album cards that enable consumers to download full-length albums, and in many cases special bonus content, in the form of high-quality MP3 files. The first 37 titles in the series, which represent musical genres ranging from Rock and Pop to R&B and Country, will debut on January 15th, 2008 and by the end of the month will be available at 4,500 retail outlets across the United States. In Canada, MusicPass will debut in late January of 2008.
UPDATE: So, ValleyWag *doesn't* think this idea is crazy (at least for the labels and artists). But the more I think about this the dumber it seems to me...
Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM: "In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony (SNE) and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of its collection available without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software some time in the first quarter, according to people familiar with the matter.
Sony BMG would become the last of the top four music labels to drop DRM, following Warner Music Group (WMG), which in late December said it would sell DRM-free songs through Amazon.com's (AMZN) digital music store. EMI and Vivendi's Universal Music Group announced their plans for DRM-free downloads earlier in 2007."
Time to buy Amazon stock?
UPDATE: I just saw TechCrunch's headline (also referencing our favorite witch-melting ditty). I swear I didn't see that before I posted, but I get a kick out of the fact that so many people have that same view of (and imagery) of DRM...
I'm not sure what the difference is between the public and non-public APIs (or how YottaMusic got access to the non-public ones in the first place). But, it's unfortunate, I thought highly of YottaMusic and I think Rhapsody could have learned a thing or two from them. In fact, they should have bought them and leveraged their talent to finally RE-introduce some better community features into the Rhapsody service.
Rhapsody had, in fact, introduced some new community features (music profiles) last year but then rolled them back - rumor is that they way the feature was architected was not able to scale and was straining the whole service. I don't know if this is accurate or not, but I would love to see them make a reappearance. It's been over 6 months since they were yanked. Anyone from Rhapsody want to provide a more detailed update than this one?
 | Cat Power - Sea of Love |  |
 | ||
 | Found at skreemr.com |  |
It was almost too good for the soundtrack, it actually took my attention away from the movie as I sat there and said... "whoa, I've got to get this soundtrack!".
I never knew that I had such at thing for Cat Power, but this is the second time this winter where one of her songs has literally reached out from a soundtrack (or commercial) and made me sit up and take notice.
Out of those above, I've got to say that right now Manchester Orchestra may take the top spot for me this year. Here they are performing "Wolves at Night" on Letterman:
And there are still some gems that I listen to a lot from last year's best-of list.
Michael Robertson . com: "Far from a breakthrough, it is a death sentence for Imeem. Under a dark cloud of looming lawsuits, Imeem entered into a crushing financial agreement that allows them to survive as long as venture capital money continues to flow into the company, but spells almost certain financial calamity once outside funding halts. Reporters classified the deal as a 'license' with 'advertising revenue sharing', implying it is a new structure from the labels. A more accurate description would be an ownership position with substantial upfront payments, plus required ongoing payments regardless of revenue generated by Imeem. To put it another way, it is the same onerous deal labels have foisted on digital music companies for the last decade."
If you buy into the picture that Michael paints, it sounds like the Imeem folks had their back up against the wall. Either get sued out of existence, or sign up for financial commitments that are impossible to meet. The only happy ending? Sell, sell, sell! But to who? The labels already basically own them, and who else would want to buy such a money losing venture?
Michael's is obviously just one opinion based on information that he has been able to scrape together from his industry contacts, but I find it fascinating nonetheless.
AOL Music launched their new Song pages this week (part of a rolling relaunch of the site), and I applaud the direction they are going lately (disregarding the overzealous ads I talked about a couple of weeks ago).
The legal mucketymucks over there have been slowly loosening their collars a bit and letting the product folks actually compete with the smaller players who don't ask permission, but rather forgiveness. First was the AIMtunes plug-in earlier this fall - which, to be honest, I was shocked that Legal let them launch. Now comes the new AOL Music song pages/player which includes a stay of execution for the once great - now on respiratory - AOL search property of SingingFish.
Basically, when you search for a song at AOL Music they first try to fulfill that request with a licensed/promotional copy of the song that they have secured from the labels. The new piece of the puzzle is that if they don't have it, they will present you a list of free-range MP3 search results. Those results are presented with a white play icon (versus blue icon of the AOL catalog songs)... click on it and it presents a list of possible matches that you can select and play.
They also do a nice job of merging the two sources.
Both official content and free-range MP3s are played back in the same pop-up player, and the assets can be mixed in the queue.
Next they need to be able to let users create a mixed playlist that they can embed and share... but I'm sure that is coming.
Shoutouts to Georgina, Grant and Dan.
The downside? The SingingFish fish ship basically has no captain. It used to be great but there is no one steering the ship anymore. AOL should reinvest in this (or similar) platform because right now too many songs are presented as being "found" but the links are dead. Let's hope they do... otherwise there is always Skreemr, Seeqpod and MP3Realm.
Scott Kveton · Portable Playlist and other POSH-ibilities Meetup: "Before the panel both Tom and I were chatting about how there is really only one big problem that both Pandora and MyStrands face: catalog resolution. This is a huge problem that consumes quite a bit of developer time in both of our camps. Unfortunately, every playlist format out there simply punts on this problem. They point at some “resource” that is the catalog entry. Now, from a portability standpoint that’s great and I can appreciate the why’s of why you’d do that."
Follow the link to the full post, and then you can follow it up with Lucas Gonze's (creator of Webjay, author of XSPF and now part of Yahoo Music) post too.
the Wordpress of Lucas Gonze: "Or is the real problem still economic and not technical? Are there features which it would be profitable to support which entail portability? The problem isn’t how to enable portability, it’s why a business would want that. The status quo is lack of portability, with each music service an island. This sector as a whole hasn’t developed into a collective ecosystem, and businesses which do invest in portable identifiers don’t stand to gain any value until other businesses join them."
Also check out the comment threads on both posts too... the conversation continues there.
You Can't Touch the Untouchable - The Big Sleep
