Bar/None recording artists The Slip (as well as their many side projects) frequently travel nationally and internationally. Therefore Marc Friedman, the band’s multi-instrumentalist with whom I shared an airplane row for the flight out of SXSW, was the perfect musician-on-the-go to investigate for possible “gadget addictions”. An admitted “late bloomer” to the world of mobile devices, Marc seems to have his habit under control, with the exception of a fondness for playing the Blackberry version of Katamari Damacy. Check out our conversation in the video below. → Read More
While the SXSW Interactive Conference concluded days ago and is likely only a faint, buzzed memory in the minds of its tech-savvy attendees, the Music side of SXSW just closed shop today. I made it almost all the way through the epic music showcase, leaving within a few hours of the brutal, bitter end but not before speaking with several musicians about the ways that mobile devices have affected them. I spoke first with Cody Votolato, the guitarist for the indie rockband TELEKINESIS. A super nice guy, Cody lent some insight into passing the time in a tour bus playing Angry Birds and staying connected to contacts, family and friends. Video below. → Read More
Ubisoft consistently brings the funny. The publisher will release the PC version Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, also known as Assassin’s Creed II 2, next week. The “deluxe” edition edition of the game contains an mp3 version of the soundtrack. So far, so good. Ubisoft has made the “deluxe” items available to download for people who’ve pre-ordered the game, that is, if you’ve pre-ordered this edition you can download the mp3 soundtrack right now. Upon inspecting the metadata of those mp3 files it was discovered that they’ve been re-encoded from a readily available pirated FLAC version of the game’s soundtrack, available at your friendly neighborhood BitTorrent site. Hilarious. → Read More
Now that iTunes allows for subscriptions, more and more magazines are putting out iPad apps. The best ones offer new experiences beyond what amounts to turning the iPad into a fancy PDF viewer. This week, Spin magazine is releasing its very first iPad app (iTunes link) which production director Dylan Boelte recently demoed for me (see video).
It’s a magazine app in that includes a digital version of the current issue (which you can buy for $1.99 per issue or $7.99 for a year’s subscription), and it includes other bells and whistles such as recent top stories from the Website and exclusive behind the scenes videos from Spin’s rockstar photo shoots. But it’s also a music app. Each issue comes with a playlist of about 60 songs hand-selected by Spin’s music editors. The songs can be fully streamed in the app. You can listen to them while you are flipping through the magazine or send them to your speakers with Airplay. You can also pay extra to download them. → Read More
Nimbit, a direct-to-fan marketing, sales and distribution platform for musicians, announced today that it has closed a $1.25 million series A investment round. The round was led by Common Angels and Hub Angels and, according to VP of Marketing Carl Jacobson, will be used to ramp up the company’s hiring efforts.
Nimbit adds to the cumulative $3.5 million of seed funding it raised during three prior seed rounds beginning in May of 2006. The seed rounds were also led by Common Angels and Hub Angels, with LaunchCapital and Rose Tech Ventures contributing.
Founded in 2002, the Massachusetts-based Nimbit is a one-stop shop for musicians looking to manage their own direct-to-fan marketing and commercial music efforts. And though Jacobson said that Nimbit may have been “a little early to the party”, there has been quite a bit of buzz in the last few years concerning shifts in music marketing and distribution — like the success of Radiohead’s releasing “In Rainbows” direct to fans via their website, for example — and it now seems that the market may be ready to adopt the direct-to-fan model. → Read More
“I Need A Doctor” is the second single from Dr. Dre’s upcoming album Detox, which has been in development, I think, for 400 years. It feel like that anyway. You’ve seen the Grammy performance, but have you seen the official music video? More importantly, have you seen the blindingly obvious product placement featuring good ol’ HP? → Read More
Ron & Fez just opened with the show a Radiohead song, and my first thought was, “Oh, man, did they break up?” Nope. Phew! But the band will release a new album, The King of Limbs, this Saturday. Exciting, sure. But wait, what’s this? It seems Radiohead has done away with the “pay-what-you-like” gimmick that generated so much heat for its previous album, 2007′s In Rainbows. What gives? → Read More
A recent study suggests that the music industry has done such a good job pushing people toward legal services (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify, etc.) that online music piracy has all but disappeared. While it’s probably true that the proliferation of legal alternatives has made illegal methods less attractive—why run the risk of contracting malware trying to download the new Sei A album from a shady source when you can just as easily download it from iTunes?—the idea that music piracy has “disappeared” is probably a bit overenthusiastic. → Read More
It’s only fair that after giving the music industry in general a hard time, I should acknowledge when they do something right. Universal Music Group has just donated a huge collection of recordings from the 1930s and 40s to the Library of Congress, where they will be available to be listened to for free. The collection includes iconic, rare, and never-digitized tracks from the jazz and pre-rock period. → Read More
The Pew Internet organization put out results of a survey on how many people pay for digital content online. The study found that 65 percent of people online have paid to download some form of digital content or for a subscription to a digital media service. The survey excluded physical goods bought online and was focussed only on digital content such as music, software, news, and other online or electronic publications.
For those who do spend money online on digital media, most spend between $1 and $10 a month, with 68 percent spending less than $30 a month. (You can see the distribution of amount spend in the chart above). The two kinds of digital goods people are most willing to pay for by far are music and software. One third of respondents (33 percent) say they have paid for either digital music or software online. And 21 percent have paid for mobile apps. So if you combine mobile apps and other forms of software, that is the largest single category even accounting for overlap in the numbers. Paying for digital games comes in fourth at 19 percent.
What about digital newspapers or magazines behind paywalls or for sale for tablets like the iPad? → Read More
What’s the best streaming music service around? My guess would be Spotify, but the only catch is that it’s not available here in the U.S. (unless you’re willing to use a European VPN). In fact, the service is so well-like, so influential that “to spotify” has now become a fully recognized word in Sweden [Swedish, obv], Spotify’s home base. → Read More
A new study, Digital Music Nation 2010, published by the British Phonographic Industry (the BPI, essentially their version of the RIAA) says that Britons download four times as many songs illegally as they do legally. That would seem to fly in the face of recent studies we’ve seen that say that as people are exposed to legal digital music alternatives (iTunes, Spotify, etc.) they tend to turn away from illegal music downloads. Again: the only way to truly eliminate music piracy is to ban music altogether. Problem solved, and we can all move on with our lives. → Read More
Apple has revealed its year-end iTunes charts, and it turns out that Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” was the single most downloaded song of the year. My first reaction was, “That’s Train singing that song, what?!” Shows how little I’m plugged in to popular culture these days. Now, if you want my opinion on who should win the Ballon d’Or, on the other hand… → Read More
It’s now a little bit easier to use Amazon MP3 with your BlackBerry. A new app, Amazon MP3 for BlackBerry, has gone into public beta and gives users access to Amazon’s entire library of 14+ million MP3s. → Read More
A new study released today seems to have confirmed what most folks had already assumed re: digital music consumption. Thumbplay Music, a cloud-based music service that has both a desktop and mobile (iPhone/Android/BlackBerry) client, reveals that 70 percent of respondents have curtailed their peer-to-peer music sharing as a result of using Thumbplay Music. In other words, when exposed to a easy-to-use, working alternative people are more than happy to move away from less legal alternatives. → Read More
The RIAA, still fighting the good fight. LimeWire as you knew it was shut down a few weeks ago because of an RIAA-secured court order. So LimeWire says, “OK, we’ll alter the application so that it complies with your wished, RIAA.” Today we’ve learnt that a new LimeWire has started to circle around the Internet, and now the RIAA is having another fit. Again: let’s just ban music altogether. It’s the best solution to this mess. → Read More
That’s that, then: the Beatles are finally on iTunes. (I guess the MP3 will live to fight another day!) It’s a big deal in the sense of, “Well, it sure took them long enough!” I mean, there was already a Beatles Rock Band video game last year, so you know it was just a matter of time until Apple secured the rights for iTunes. What I want to know is, how many of you already had the Beatles on your device prior to this morning’s announcement? That is, the Beatles being on iTunes is cool and all, sure, but you’re already spoken for. → Read More
So chances are (though I don’t buy the semaphore thing) that tomorrow will bring an announcement from Apple that they’ve finally reached an agreement with Apple Records, or EMI, or Apple Corps, or somebody, and will now be offering the Beatles catalogue on iTunes. That’s nice, but why should we care?
Being that the Beatles MP3 holdout is emblematic of the recording industry’s resistance against modern distribution methods, the way in which the Beatles discography will be made available should be telling. Here was a situation in which the labels and distributors have millions of sales at stake, and though to be fair Beatles records have been selling just fine without the benefit of legal downloads over the last decade. The powers that be must know that by agreeing to MP3 distribution, they are shifting the fulcrum. But how far? → Read More
Apple has posted a cryptic message on its Web site, teasing the world about an “exciting” iTunes announcement that’s coming tomorrow. What could it be? I saw that someone had suggested The Beatles were finally coming to iTunes, but really, who cares? If you want The Beatles on your iPhone you can grab the newly remastered albums that came out last year, “rip, mix, burn,” then off you go. Not very exciting, no. What could be exciting, though, is a streaming music service. In an instant, Apple would have killed the MP3 once and for all. You hear that? That’s the sound of the RIAA thanking Apple over and over again. → Read More
Guitar World Magazine and Agile Partners launch a new and pretty straight forward iOS app today called Guitar World Lick Of The Day. As the name suggests, the app delivers a new guitar “lick”, in the form of a video lesson, every day through a monthly subscription service. The app itself is free and comes pre-populated with several free licks so you can try it out first. You can get the app at the iTunes store by clicking this link. Here is the feature list straight from the developer website: → Read More
