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Started by Jason Herskowitz. Last reply by David Rose Jan 30.
I've listed the sources that I currently aggregate for mediaor's "tail" in the sidebar. Are there are any other sources that you guys would like to see added (or removed)? Read More »
Started by bryon Oct 14 2007
I became agitated when I read the wikipedia article for pop music (specifically the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs). Is it just me or should there be a real difference between pop music and popular music (... Read More »
Tagged: classification, pop, genre, music
-- Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) launches video on Messenger Users will now be able to watch video clips with their network of friends while chatting via Windows Live Messenger, reports Reuters. Messenger TV will offer content from MSN Video including MTV shows and music clips from providers such as Sony (NYSE: SNE) BMG. Launched in 20 countries, including many European countries, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Brazil, Canada and Mexico—but not the US—the company hopes to amp up users' social experience.
-- Oprah's XM (NSDQ: XMSR) Radio show available online: Some episodes of Oprah Winfrey's XM Radio show, Soul Series are now available on Oprah.com as streaming video and free video podcasts, with the podcasts also offered by xmradio.com and the iTunes Store. The show can also be found on its own branded channel on XM Radio Online, which complements the existing "Oprah & Friends" channel offered to XMRO and XM Radio subscribers. Release.
-- Complex Media expands network: Complex Media will launch two new websites in addition to the four sites it added with its latest acquisition of PlanetXbox360.com and new partnerships with OnSmash.com, Karmaloop and Eckotv.com. With the new ComplexVideo.com and DasGamer.com, the network will expand its gaming, music, video, style and lifestyle content geared towards men aged 18-34. The company also has custom video and static content for AT&T (NYSE: T), Pepsi, Southern Comfort and Mountain Dew currently in the works.
-- New poll shows few Americans view TV online: Entertainment Weekly just conducted a poll of 1,000 adults to determine common TV viewing behaviors and found that only 1 percent said they "most often" view TV shows by downloading or streaming them online. 58 percent of Bittorrent users use the site once or more per week; 52 percent of YouTube users said they use the site once or more per week; 51 percent of Hulu users use Hulu once or more a week; and 45 percent of network site users use sites like ABC.com once or more a week. Other findings reveal 60 percent still watch their favorite shows live. Fourteen percent digitally video record these shows and watch them later in the week, while 9 percent of DVR users watch the show the same day it airs.
As promised, NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) did not host the usual bombastic stage show for this year's upfront. Instead, attendees had to navigate through a crowded maze of lights and plasma screens that had the feeling of being trapped in a Radio Shack theme park. From there, the throng moved on to the bar at Rockefeller Center's rink, which was covered by a huge white tent to shield the party from the rain.
NBC had some TV-related digital news today, highlighting plans to premiere additional webisodes of The Office and Heroes in July, a new Saturday Night Live political site and more community based features. On the mobile front, NBC will create 30 show WAP sites with recaps, quizzes and over 500 short-form streaming clips. Release.
-- Saving money, trying something new: Advertisers' views on the proceeding were mixed. While in line near a stage featuring performers from the game show American Gladiators, one media buyer said this all seemed "over the top, but not in the usual way. This isn't making a good impression, but I hope they at least saved some money." Another media buyer tried to be philosophical. "I don't think this is the kind of thing I would like to bring clients to, but given the stresses of the economy and the impact from the writers strike, you have to give them credit for attempting to do something different. The upfront was invented for a different media universe. It needs to be updated. And you can't move forward without trying something else."
-- Upfront 2009: falafel stand meetup: In an attempt to provide some star power to the event, Conan O'Brien was introduced by NBC News anchor Brian Williams. O'Brien, who will move to Hollywood to take over Jay Leno's role as host of The Tonight Show, took a look back at how times have changed during his tenure at NBC. O'Brien: "When I first started at this company, 15 years ago, NBC's upfronts were held at prestigious Avery Fisher Hall. Then, they moved to Radio City Music Hall, a beautiful majestic palace. Now, we're all standing a in soggy tent outside the NBC store. I hope you'll join us at next year's upfronts at the falafel stand on 49th St." (Video is here.)
-- Zucker and Michaels: I spoke to Jeff Zucker, NBC Universal's president and CEO, who said that the scaled- down presentation this year was the best way to show off the entire NBCU range of properties: "Everybody thinks about NBC, but they sometimes forget the huge array of other content NBCU has. We have so many different assets and we just wanted to expose them to a little bit of everything. Digital is changing the way we do business. And doing it right is what we all have to do to survive." Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live, also said that the web has had a huge influence on the show: "The Digital Shorts were key to relating the show to the internet, but the way the show is set up is meant to take advantage of viewers' habits. Each skit is short and self-contained. The web will continue to be very important to us. I don't think anyone over the age of 12 comes home and puts their TV on before their computer."
Related
The Telegraph just reported that EMI will cut another 1,000 jobs. Those cuts are on top of previously announced plans to cut between 1,500 and 2,000 jobs. About 2,000 jobs -- down from 4,5000 when EMI was purchased -- will remain after the next round of cuts are made.
People familiar with the situation said Mr Hands was looking to cut more jobs at the company because, even after the round of redundancies announced in January, the business will still have more employees generating less revenues than its competitors at Warner Music and Universal.Insiders speculated that the next job cuts will come in waves throughout the year.
From where I sit, it appears Terra Firma head Guy Hands is content to starve the beast rather than gain strength. For all its talk of improving A&R, which would impact its top line in the coming years, EMI seems to want the same bottom line simply through lower spending. It would have to be a far more efficient operation than currently exists. Cut just enough and EMI should be able to properly develop its artists. Cut too much and it will be undermanned and unable to realize its artists' potential. The wild card is EMI's future organizational structure and creative vision for monetizing its recordings. Just how the company will do more with less is quite a big question mark.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio
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As our network blog AltSearchEngines reported this morning, the long-awaited and much hyped natural language processing search engine Powerset launched this morning. Kind of. For now, the search service only uses Wikipedia and Freebase as source material for answers to your query. So it's not really fair to compare it to Google yet, but this is a search engine, and that means it will always be held to the gold standard set by the market leader.
Comparing the two is tricky, since Google searches the entire web and Powerset only processes two sites. The admittedly not very scientific method that we came up with was to compare a handful of searches on Powerset, to the results for the same query on Google restricted to "site:wikipedia.org."
Powerset does some interesting things with general queries, such as displaying "Factz," which is an ontology showing various concepts related to your query and how they relate to one another, or "Dossiers," which are a summary of key information about your query. Sometimes it yields some odd results (such as this query for "ants" for which the key finding is that ants are "a fictional race from the video game Crash Twinsanity.") However, the real promise of NLP search engines, in our opinion, is that users will be able to make search queries using natural language -- or in other words, by asking a question. So we chose a few questions at random -- things we knew Wikipedia would have answers for -- and threw them at both Powerset and Google.
Powerset's answer for this query was curious. The number one result comes from the Wikipedia entry for dental floss and highlights this line: "It was around this time, however, that Dr. Charles C. Bass developed nylon floss." Charles Bass, however, is not the correct answer. Earlier in the same article is this line, "Levi Spear Parmly, a dentist from New Orleans, is credited with inventing the first form of dental floss." Why didn't Powerset find it? It's second results, which comes from a Wikipedia entry on scientific achievements from the year 1815, correctly highlights Parmly as the inventor.
Google performed poorly for this query. The same 1815 article is identified in the sixth spot on the results, with the sentence mentioning Levi Spear Parmly highlighted, but the first few results aren't even close. Even though that's not as impressive as Powerset's results, both would require a user to click through to the article to verify the answer (because Powerset returned two different answers), and is scrolling to the 6th spot really that taxing? Taxing enough to make you switch to a new search engine? Interestingly, this query set loose on all of Google does quite well, returning the correct answer in a link to a trivia site in the first result.
Not surprisingly, both Google and Powerset nail this one. Both point to the Wikipedia entry on Paris, France in the number one spot with the sentence, "Paris is the capital of France" highlighted.
This is a fundamentally more challenging query, because there are a large number of cities and towns called "Paris" in the world. And not surprisingly, neither search engine gives what we would call a "perfect" result.
Both return the article on Paris, France first. On Google, that's followed but a handful of other articles about the city and one about Paris, Tennessee. On Powerset, the second article is about Paris Hilton -- um? -- followed by one about Paris, Texas, and in fourth place the most helpful article it could have returned, the disambiguation page on Wikipedia for Paris. (Oddly, with the question mark, the query returned "Paris, Missouri" from Freebase, and without the question mark it returned "Paris, Texas.")
On Google at large, the results focus almost exclusively on Paris, France.
It would seem that both search engines generally understand that "where is Paris" means that Paris is a place (though upon reflection, perhaps we could have been searching for the location of Paris Hilton...), but neither recognize very well that it could mean any number of different places.
Both Powerset and Google correctly call up the article about this fictional character in their first spot, but Google actually does a better job of highlighting who he is. Compare:
Google has the name of both shows in which the character appears in their excerpt, while Powerset's excerpt is made up of information about the series' that only someone who already knew the character would understand (without clicking through to read the full article) -- and it doesn't differentiate between the two -- before the ellipses the excerpt is talking about "Friends" and after it is talk about "Joey."
Google at large also finds the Wikipedia article first with the same excerpt -- it also finds clips of the show on YouTube, and the actor's (Matt LeBlanc) IMDB entry, as well the official site for the spin-off "Joey."
This was really just a very quick and informal test, and we barely put Powerset through its paces. But our first snap impressions are that Powerset doesn't do a markedly better job of finding answers than Google for most queries. Some might argue that we didn't play to Powerset's strengths and frame our queries properly, or search for things obscure enough to notice any differentiation. But the promise of natural language search is that people don't have to learn how to search -- they can just ask questions as they normally would. We also can't expect that everything they're going to look for will be obscure and hard to find via traditional search engines -- more often than not, they probably won't be.
Powerset will have an immense uphill battle to make any sort of dent in the search market. Google controls 67% of searches in the US, and the top 4 search engines make up about 98% of searches. If Google remains "good enough," Powerset will have a hard time convincing people to switch. It will be easier to make a judgment about the company's future as a real Google competitor once it is crawling more than two sites, however.
What do you think about Powerset? Impressed? Not impressed? Let us know in the comments below.
In an article about digital music, Wired editor Nancy Miller proclaimed the CD to be "dead and gone" and advised record labels on how best to sell their products. "At a certain point record companies are going to have to go with what is the cheapest way of distribution, and that's digital," she said.
That's especially funny because the previous paragraphs had quotes from record store owners -- the people that sell CDs -- that pained a different, more realistic picture. For example:
I really wasn't concerned with loss of sales because Radiohead is the kind of band whose fans want the physical album as well," said Lee Wolfson, owner of independent Tampa music shop Vinyl Fever. "I knew we'd sell plenty of the CDs when it became available.
Some people -- maybe not the Wired crowd who live in a digital silo -- still want and purchase CDs. Some consumers still want a physical product, and music companies and retailers are still very much in the business of selling physical product.
No, the CD is not dead. Sales are down, true, and many retailers are shifting floor space to other products. But the CD is far from dead. According to RIAA figures, 511 million CDs (net) were shipped last year.
Journalists are too dazzled by the efficiencies of digital distribution and tend to ignore the diversity of consumer preferences. Music distribution is not one single, cheapest route. Wired blogger Eliot Van Buskirk said as much when Radiohead signed a deal to release the CD version of In Rainbows, the album that originally got a tip-jar release. While the digital release grabbed on the headlines, "there's still a great deal of money to be made by letting unconnected music fans purchase this album," he wrote. (Truth be told, it's not just the unconnected fans who are buying physical formats.) Heck, Van Buskirk has even written about vinyl's resurgence. C'mon, Wired. Now we're up to two physical formats that are obviously not "dead and gone."
Labels, keep on pressing CDs and LPs. Physical products and physical distribution are not going to go extinct any time soon. Retail will continue to be gloomy but there will be outlets to sell your physical product, and there will continue to be distributors to get your product into those stores. The bottom line is nobody should mistake digital adoption for complete physical abandonment.
Jason Herskowitz
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