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Started by Jason Herskowitz. Last reply by Jason Herskowitz Aug 20 2008.
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 Dave Haynes. Last reply by Jason Herskowitz Aug 20 2008.
great site. Are many people still frequenting Mediaor? Read More »
During the Boston Music Hack Day, 30 or 40 music hacks were produced. One phenomenal hack was Rob Oshshorn’s Outlier FM. Rob’s goal for the weekend was to utilize technology to search for beauty and surprise in even the most overproduced popular music. He approached this problem by searching musical content for the audio that “exists outside of a song’s constructed and statistical conventions”.
With Outlier FM rob can deconstruct a song into musical atoms, filter away the most common elements, leaving behind the non-conformist bits of music. This yields strange, unpredictable minimal techno-sounding music.
So how does it work? Well, first Outlier FM uses the Echo Nest analyzer to break a song down into the smallest segments. You can then visualize these segments using numerous filters and layout schemes to give you an idea of what the unusual audio segments are:
Next, you can filter out clusters of self-similar segments, leaving just the outliers:
Finally you can order, visualize and render that segments to yield interesting music:
Here’s an example of Outlier FM applied to Here’ Comes the Sun:
Rob’s hack was an amazing weekend effort, he combined music analysis and visualization into a tool that can be used to make interesting sounds. Outlier.fm was voted the best hack for the music hack day weekend. Rob chose as his prize the Sun Ultra 24 workstation with flat panel display donated by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. Here’s Rob receiving his prize from Sun.
Congrats to Rob for a well done hack!
Lady Gaga's dress probably cost more than her payout for 1 million plays on Spotify.
When Pandora and Last.fm arrived on the scene and Spotify was still just a twinkle in Daniel Ek’s eye, many independent artists and fans looked to online music streaming as a new beginning. These services promised a more democratic approach to music discovery than traditional radio and offered the chance to wash away the stains of payola and corruption that have marred broadcast industry for decades. Now, even as the RIAA is poised to drive the last stake into terrestrial radio, the future of streaming as a viable revenue source for artists is not looking as bright as it once did.
Spotify, for all the media coverage it receives, is still fairly new. New enough that until about midway through 2009 very few people had any concrete numbers to discuss regarding the artists’ share of royalties. When the checks finally did begin to arrive at least one Swedish artist expressed outrage at the amount, saying that he had “earned as much in six months as a BUSKER could earn in a day.”
Even artists at the top of the international charts are feeling stiffed by their cut. Lady Gaga has sold over 4 million albums and enjoys the fruits of pervasive rotation on radio stations across the world. She is certainly not hurting for cash. Yet, according to TorrentFreak, this is no thanks to Spotify:
Lady Gaga’s track “Poker Face” was one of the most popular tracks during a five month period on Spotify and was played more than a million times. So how much money does she get paid by STIM (the Swedish Performing Rights Society) for this massive achievement?
SEK 1150 – that’s around $167 or roughly 113 Euros.
One-hundred and sixty-seven dollars. Lady Gaga probably couldn’t buy a pair of shoes for that amount. Where is all the money going?
Well, that question assumes that money is being made and right now there isn’t much indication that this is the case. As I’ve written before, Spotify continues to struggle to convert users to premium subscriptions. Spotify’s current model depends on these subscriptions because ads can’t float the platform alone. This concern has led the major labels to the delay Spotify’s US launch (which was scheduled to take place last week.)
Spotify founder Daniel Ek
“We think Spotify is a great service but they’re going to have to convince us they can convert enough people from free to paid subscriptions to make it worth our while,” one label revealed in a recent Finacial Times piece. “As an ad-supported service the economics don’t work at all.”
The labels are able to have this kind of influence over what Spotify can and can’t do in part because the 4 majors own about 18% of the company. Sony BMG bought the largest chunk - 5.8% – for 2,935 Euros, while EMI received the smallest – 1.9% – for the measly sum of 980 Euros. In other words, Spotify sold any hopes for a more indie-friendly alternative for a grand total of 8318 Euros.
The Guardian.uk discussed the labels involvement in Spotify back in August and came to the same conclusion:
On Spotify, it seems, artists are not equal. There are indie labels that, as opposed to the majors and Merlin members, receive no advance, receive no minimum per stream and only get a 50% share of ad revenue on a pro-rata basis (which so far has amounted to next to nothing). Incidentally, when I asked a Spotify rep if they would feature music by unsigned artists the way We7 does, he said no, but that all they would need to do was to sign up to a label and they’d get on the site.
No label, no Spotify. If you are on an indie label you can get on the service but don’t count on seeing any revenue. With Lady Gaga only earning about $1 for every 6,000 plays I can only imagine what the indies are receiving with significantly less favorable deals.
Looks like the independent music community’s hopes that the death of traditional radio and the rise of online streaming would usher in a new era of equality were premature. On a more positive note, the space is still very young and the kinks are being ironed out. Unfortunately, artists not getting paid is a pretty big kink.
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Music is too expensive to be free and too free to be expensive on a song-by-song basis, because on-demand music licensing rates are becoming too high for advertising to cover — as shown once again by imeem’s recent sale to MySpace at a heavy discount. This could be a boost to playlist sharing sites because they are cheaper to operate.
Muxtape tried a similar approach but failed after negotiations with the RIAA broke down last summer. Another online playlist sharing company, 8tracks, which also launched in 2008, hopes to continue blazing that trail. The site redoubling its efforts over the weekend with the release of an open API that lets web and mobile-app developers integrate playlist creation and consumption into their own products, and plans to monetize this broader distribution of its user-generated playlists in the first quarter of next year — most likely using Google AdSense for Audio ads.
“In the near term, we want to achieve broad distribution,” 8tracks founder and CEO David Porter told wired.com “The combination of an ‘open’ platform for people to create playlists (what we do already) with an open API so developers can add playback/access to a variety of third-party destinations should help us do this.”
He plans to add a premium DJ subscription option to 8tracks in the next two months, which helped his former employer Live365 reach profitability in 2005 (Porter was head business development). In addition, he hopes the new playlist API — and the company’s as-yet-unreleased iPhone app, which it built with that API — will greatly increase the size of an audience to which it plans to advertise starting early next year.
“We’ll very likely tap the new Google AdSense for Audio program when we introduce ads in Q1 next year,” Porter told Wired.com, and his plan holds promise. Most people would probably not sit through a pre-roll audio ad in order to hear a single track. Sandwiched in between eight songs, an audio ad becomes less of an annoyance. And we already know advertisers like to reach people who listen to programmed music. As Porter pointed out, “the global radio sector ($38 billion) is 2X the size of the recorded music sector.”
On the cost side, going the playlist (rather than on-demand) route greatly reduces the royalty payments 8Tracks must pay to copyright holders. The service doesn’t allow users to hear any song when they want it — although it does let you search for other people’s playlists by song or artist — so it qualifies for small webcasters’ webcasting rates. Copyright holders charge sites like imeem so much for on-demand music is because it’s becoming “substitutional” for the act of buying music. If you can hear any song immediately through a web browser or smart phone app, the thinking goes, you will stop buying music. Playlist services, on the other hand, encourage you to pay for a music subscription or buy songs if you want to hear them whenever you want.
If 8tracks realizes its monetization dreams next year and becomes a “large webcaster” with more than $1.25 million in revenue, it will have to pay a higher rate, but Porter says it can handle that.
“While this 1/10th of a cent rate is still pretty expensive compared with traditional radio … and satellite or cable … it is a viable rate even with just advertising, if executed well,” said Porter. “Case in point: Pandora will likely be profitable on a monthly basis in next few months.”
Here’s an eight-song playlist I whipped up on 8tracks this morning so you can see one in action, if you’re not familiar with the service.
(Full disclosure: the band Javelin consists of my brother and cousin.)
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This week there are four newcomers in the top 10 including ‘Gamer,’ which ended up as the second most downloaded movie on BitTorrent this week.
The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.
RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
| Ranking | (last week) | Movie | Rating / Trailer |
|---|---|---|---|
| torrentfreak.com | |||
| 1 | (3) | 2012 (CAM/TS) | 6.7 / trailer |
| 2 | (…) | Gamer | 6.0 / trailer |
| 3 | (1) | Funny People | 7.2 / trailer |
| 4 | (7) | Inglourious Basterds | 8.6 / trailer |
| 5 | (4) | Zombieland (R5) | 8.2 / trailer |
| 6 | (2) | The Hangover | 8.0 / trailer |
| 7 | (…) | Pandorum | 7.1 / trailer |
| 8 | (6) | Surrogates (R5) | 6.5 / trailer |
| 9 | (…) | Ninja | ?.? / trailer |
| 10 | (…) | Saw VI (R5) | 6.5 / trailer |
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
In this gues post Topspin's Ian Rogers continues to make good on his promise to blog about his experiences as the manager of Get Busy Committee. In this post, he goes back to before the new album's release and takes a look at how it was recorded.
As I’ve mentioned, by the time I came into the Get Busy Committee project the record was finished, so I was and will be mostly be talking about the marketing and distribution of the record, not the recording process. But it was occurring to me that this was an interesting part of the story and worth including. It’s not news that you can record on your computer these days, but personally I was surprised when they told me they made the record on Acid, and at the end of the project Apathy saved us some money by mastering it himself instead of sending it off to a third party to do the mastering. So I thought I’d ask the band a few questions about how, technically, they recorded the album. I grabbed them for a few minutes last weekend before a photo shoot, and just before I became a feverish, useless lump. The results are below, transcribed dutifully by Aidan Nulman. Thanks, Aidan!
Ian: So how did you record this album, technically? Did you guys spend a million dollars, book a month at the Record Plant…
Apathy: Yeah, you know. G4s, Lamborghinis, that’s how we do it basically.
Ryu: For the next record we’re renting a G5, calling it The Mile High Club.
Apathy: Yup. We recorded the whole thing on a plane. Mile High Club, coming soon… Nah…
[back to serious tone]
the thing is is that we’ve all been signed to majors, we’ve all worked in the biggest studios — crazy, elaborate, fancy studios — and you don’t get as much of a vibe as when you’re chilling at the crib, hanging out, and working out of the home studio. And that’s what we prefer. When it comes down to the thing of “if I had to work in some crazy-fly, super Dr. Dre studio or work at Scoop’s crib,” I’d rather work at Scoop’s crib ‘cuz we’re gonna be more productive, gonna catch a better vibe.
Ryu: We were just telling Scoop yesterday, “do not get rid of this apartment.”
Scoop: Yeah, we gotta keep the apartment, keep it a full-time studio.
Ryu: I don’t care if we gotta buy the whole building out.
Scoop: Yeah.
Ryu: You gotta keep that place ‘cuz…
Scoop: [Otherwise] the vibe will be gone.
Ryu: We vibe out at our studio in Reseda, and at Scoop’s crib. That’s where we do everything.
Ian: And whose studio is that in Reseda?
Ryu: It’s the Styles of Beyond studio. It’s Cheapshot, Vince Skully, myself, Sean Berman, you know, we’ve been recording there for a long time.
Ian: So you’re making the beats and whatnot at Scoop’s and then going and recording the vocals in Reseda?
Ryu: Both.
Scoop: We’re doing both at my crib. Everything was set up so we could do it at my house ‘cuz we had the full studio there. When Ap comes into town, we just all get together and work on stuff until… we were in the studio yesterday until, like, 4 in the morning or something.
Ryu: Scoop and Ap use Acid, so they’re on the same program, so that works out.
Apathy: The computer program: Acid…
Scoop: Not the drug.
Apathy: …not the mental-stimulation acid.
Ryu: (to Apathy) See? I didn’t even elaborate. I was going to leave it up to them.
Ian: That was my next question: on the technical side, are strictly using Acid to make the beats?
Apathy: Yeah, strictly. I started off making everything in Acid: we record in Acid, we mix in Acid, we use it in correlation with Soundforge.
Scoop: Everything, including effects. It definitely has a unique sound when you hear the record; there’s nothing that sounds like it recording-wise.
Ryu: Not everything was made in Acid though. We used Reason sometimes, too.
Scoop: Reason, yeah. For the next album, we’re going to experiment with more stuff. But we definitely had a certain sound we wanted to use. And it definitely was easy [to collaborate with Apathy], because we were working on the same stuff. We’d just bounce records back and forth to each other.
Ryu: Using a, what, a little Roland NT-1000 mic?
Scoop: Yup.
Ryu: That’s it.
Scoop: Just keep it moving.
Ryu: We don’t even care if it sounds messed up. We don’t care if the shit ain’t even plugged in correctly.
Scoop: Yeah, it can sound any way it sounds.
Ryu: My Little Razorblade is probably the worst recording ever. The vocals are all blown out.
Apathy: Our vocals are blown and it just sounds like shit, but I love it. You know, that’s the thing, a lot of people go crazy, they’re fanatical about sound quality but their songs suck. You can have your thing sounding all pristine, but your songs are boring and they suck.
Apathy: Yeah, straight up. If you listen to old Wu-Tang Clan, you’ll hear a lot of errors in it, you’ll hear a lot of flaws, but that’s what’s hot about it. You listen to an old Raekwon or GZA album, it’s grimy and it’s fucked up, but that’s what’s hot about it.
Scoop: I mean, a lot of people think that you need a big [sic] thousand-dollar studio to make a hit record, and really it’s not about the wand, it’s about the magician. So, you know…
Ryu: I wish I had a thousand-dollar studio.
Apathy: I wish I had a thousand-dollar wand.
Ian: As I was writing about releasing this record on my blog, it was occurring to me that there’s a similar story on the recording. It’s not like you guys borrowed money to record this, like some label owns part of it; it’s something that you guys have been working for almost a year, right? In your spare time, and across the country, and for essentially no money. Your own time, and your own investment, and your own studio.
Ryu: We’ve been recording the same way since the ’90s. Even when we were on majors, we still just did it our way because that’s just the way we’re comfortable.
Apathy: There was a time when I was on Atlantic and I had a big studio blocked out, and I was over here in LA recording for, like a month, and it was just whatever. And then as soon as I go home and I’m chilling in my bedroom with my setup, I start producing all this crazy stuff, and it comes out a lot better.
Ian: How long have you guys been essentially computer nerds with recording? Recording on programs like Acid?
Scoop: Years. I’ve been on it for years. For about 10, 11 years now.
Ian: Did it change things for you?
Apathy: 110%, man. It was completely… I have so much control, now. Back in the day, you had to do things through the ASR-10 and sequence things a certain way. Now I have control over every little second.
Scoop: [Previously] you could only do like, 10 seconds of a sample on certain machines. You couldn’t do what you can do nowadays, like take a sound and manipulate it into a whole different sound; take the voices out of the instrumental and just have the, you know, the sounds of the drums. There’s all kinds of stuff you can do.
Apathy: Not only that, but for all the producer nerds out there: I have, when I work in Acid, I have a drum beat, or I have a 4-bar break looped, or the drums, or whatever, I can have the entire sample underneath and view each part and jump around to each part like you jump around on a record. So I can mess with whatever, do whatever, and manipulate it. So it’s just control. Constant control.
Scoop: That’s the thing about computers: you can see it. You can actually see the audio. Cut it where you want to cut it.
Apathy: I think there’s a big thing, though. Even though a lot of people produce with computers, you can line up your snare visually to how that one looks, but it’s still super-important to listen to it. And sometimes, sight is deceiving. You look at certain things, and you’ve still got a…
Scoop: Sometimes you’ve got to put it a certain way, and it lands a certain way.
Apathy: Yup.
Ian: And, Scoop, is this the way you do it for everything you produce? I mean, if you’re producing for Snoop or The Game, anything’s any different?
Scoop: Yeah, I mean, it’s the same thing. I’ll bring a set-up to the studio, a portable set-up, just make a beat off of anything. A lot of the computer programs nowadays, you can just bring it, set it up, and dump it down to Pro Tools or whatever the case is. You can just make a beat off of a keyboard. I mean, whatever sounds good, man.
Ian: Alright. Any other words of wisdom for anybody out there who’s interested in making a record?
Apathy: No. Don’t.
Ryu: No.
Apathy: Don’t make a record.
Ryu: Yeah, it’s the worst way to try to make a living.
Apathy: There’s more people onstage than in the audience nowadays.
Ian: Why do you guys do it if it sucks?
Apathy: We do it ‘cuz it’s too late, we fucked everything else up. So this is what we’re stuck with.
Ryu: We still didn’t graduate yet, so our options are limited.
Apathy: Rap or McDonald’s? Ehhh, let’s go to rap for now. McDonald’s will always be there.
Ian: Perfect.Listen to Get Busy Committee’s Uzi Does It in the streaming player below. If you like what you hear, buy the album direct from the artist in a limited edition Uzi-shaped USB flash drive, here.
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p2pnet news view Open Source:- An interesting new twist, linked to The Pirate Bay’s decision to go magnetic, has surfaced.
“openSUSE is a free and Linux-based operating system for your PC, Laptop or Server,” says the download site. “You can surf the web, manage your e-mails and photos, do office work, play videos or music and have a lot of fun! – it states, going on:
“openSUSE 11.2 is finally out! The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of openSUSE 11.2. openSUSE 11.2 includes new versions of GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, the Linux kernel, and many, many more updates and improvements.”
Great. But what you don’t get is DHT support.
Said the TPB blog recently »»»
Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.
By moving to a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+ PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), BitTorrent will become less vulnerable to downtime and outages:
FileShare Freaks has a great write-up on Magnet Links, and meanwhile, DHT is short for Distributed Hash Table and “Following in the footsteps of Ubuntu, OpenSUSE recently decided to include Transmission as the default BitTorrent client,” says TorrentFreak, going on:
“However, the addition of Transmission to openSUSE was not straightforward. Since Transmission comes with DHT support — a technology that helps BitTorrent users to find peers — Novell thought that the application could possibly make openSUSE liable for copyright infringement under German law.
To avoid legal problems, “Novell and openSUSE therefore decided to ship the operating system with a DHT-less version of Transmission while they tried to work out a solution with their lawyer,” says the story.
Does Novell have “legitimate concerns, or was maybe a little paranoid in handling the DHT issue”? – it wonders, adding:
“That said, if BitTorrent indeed comes to rely more on trackerless torrents and DHT in the future, could BitTorrent clients potentially become a target for the entertainment industry?”
Stay tuned.
p2pnet isn’t a business. It’s a commitment. If it has value for you, please thelp me keep it online. Cheers! And thanks : )
(If you don’t fancy online payments, please email me at p2pnet @ shaw dot ca and I’ll send you my snail-mail address.)
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
go magnetic – The Pirate Bay goes magnetic, November 17, 2009
TorrentFreak – Novell Strips BitTorrent DHT Technology from openSUSE, November 22, 2009
Says TPB blog »»»
Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.
By moving to a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), BitTorrent will become less vulnerable to downtime and outages:
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- “A 16-year Gold Coast kid is promoting the theft of music with his new site Vye Music,” says Undercover.com in Australia.
But, “With the help of close friends and family, 16-year-old Charles Allatt, has launched Vye Music, an online meta search app for music files around the Net,” says DigitalBeat.
“The site pulls search results from other music sites … sites which in turn index hundreds of thousands of sites, blogs and artist pages.”
Says Charles on VyeMusic.com, “Vye Music lets you stream full length tracks, share them with your friends and family over social networks, or with a direct link, discover new artists through its similar artists feature, create personal libraries of your favourite tracks, and play them as a list, and even download entire DRM-free music tracks.”
Letting users share and download music for free “is what got Napster in trouble for copyright violations back in 2001 and led to the end of that free service,” says DigitalBeat, continuing »»»
But Allatt claims that the distinction between his website and Napster is that his site is legal, despite the download availability. (An inability to download music has been the legal distinction that other sites in the music-sharing space have used to stay out of court. Streaming is considered a broadcast — as in radio — whereas downloading is a product, something that was well-defined during the Napster trials.)
Allatt says that as a search engine, “Vye Music permits users to download the content, operating under the premise that exterior copyright controls (ie. the copyright compliance of our APIs and content hosters) as well as users’ own judgment will let users stay well within the law.”
In other words, Vye doesn’t actually have any direct control over the content that appears on the site. The control is with the ultimate host of the music being streamed or downloaded. Vye merely links to those hosts through a search index. Allatt does say he plans to comply with copyright law: “DMCA takedown notices are forwarded to the relevant API providers, and the direct hosts of content wherever possible.”
Will Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music look upon Charles’ foray into the world of online music with kindly eyes, praising him for helping people to find their music online?
Says Undercover.com, “It seems bizarre that in the footsteps of Napster, the Kazaa that another company, let alone an Australian company, would even consider waving this so blatantly in the face of the music industry.
“No doubt the music industry won’t sit by for long and let Vye grow. It looks on the surface to be a very well run operation using the face of a 16-year to project some sense of innocence. That may just be a matter for the court to decide.”
Stay tuned.
p2pnet isn’t a business. It’s a commitment. If it has value for you, please think about helping me keep it online. Cheers! And thanks.
(If you don’t fancy online payments, please email me at p2pnet @ shaw dot ca and I’ll send you my snail-mail address.)
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Undercover.com – Gold Coast Kid Makes It Easier To Steal Music, November 23, 2009
DigitalBeat – 16-yr old launches Vye music-sharing site. Another Napster?
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