Freesound Project:
The Freesound Project  - a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds.

Cherrydisc Records Reformulates as All-Digital Label

Got a press release from Cherrydisc Records, announcing its reinvention as an all-digital label that is giving away  its first release: Siren Sounds by The Spaceshots. The 10-track collection is freely downloadable in MP3  (256k—nice!) by track or the whole shebang zipped. The hope is to build some loyalty with which to “enter the market”  (with a paid product or live show, presumably). They are shooting for distribution of 50,000 virtual copies. Why not?  Get yours here.

[The Digital Music Weblog]

Videora:

David Pescovitz:
From BB "band manager" John Battelle's Searchblog:

"Via PVR Blog, I see that Videora, a BitTorrent RSS reader, has launched. Om noted it here.

So why do we care? Well, I've long theorized that video over IP will come from the bottom up, as opposed to the top down, much as it has with blogs, and with music before that. This feels right along those lines."

Link (to Searchblog entry), Link (to Videora)

Rumblefish and Magnatune, music licensing and music publishing:

 

Recently I met with Rumblefish http://www.rumblefish.com/ founder Paul Anthony. His not-evil music licensing company who has managed to crack into the big league (with licenses to The Sopranos, Adidas, JCPenney and Fox Sports). I admire his commitment to not being evil, and his successful focus on high-end licensing.

Rumblefish and Magnatune will be cooperating on a number of fronts, specifically:

• Rumblefish will be  able to sell Magnatune's music through its licensing business Magnatune will develop a version of its online licensing system for Rumblefish, so that Rumblefish will have an all-online music licensing site Magnatune will be contracting to Rumblefish to do the "Publishing Administration" for our about-to-be-launched new business "Not Evil Publishing", which is a music publishing business for self-owned musicians.  More about the publishing business as that site goes live...

How to do Media RSS right:

Now I hate to say I told you so - but the hack-spirit of Podcasting just pissed me off - and now I have somewhere to point to - to show what I mean by proper architecture, well thought out designs and heaven forbid - an RSS namespace spec - which we can all hang out hats on - and move forward with.

It's called Media RSS.

Jeremy Zawodny clued me into this - and I just wanna say "RIGHT ON!"

Yahoo has started an effort to get folks to upload RSS files of their video - which means that Yahoo is jumping in - head first - into the space of open standards.

Wallah!

See that wasn't so hard?

Assuming that it's OK to call Yahoo 3rd (after MSN and Google) it's not hard to see why they're doing what they're doing.

Google is off pushing some propreitary solution onto our GODD friends down in Hollywood - I'm sure promising them a solution to that dreaded "bit torrent" download "problem they have".

Microsoft is being Microsoft - tying all their search stuff into their DRM solution - and so that leaves it to Yahoo to support and think about US.

So right on to Jeremy et al. Now the work begins.

This all leads to a bigger strategy for Yahoo - supoorting ALL SORTS of open standards. There are 50M people who use Yahoo groups. Those Groups have image galleries, events, on-going discussion threads.

Why not open those up?

And Yahoo is the leader is personalzied 'portals'. In fact they invented it! Thet started the whole My thing.

Does this mean that Yahoo will be helping us to define what Digital Lifestyle Aggregation is - moving forward?

I sure hope so!

Steve Rubel seems to grok the significance of this. This is about end-user participation. A transparent attempt at Yahoo to start over again - from scratch - just like they started out in their humble beginnings - acknowledging the importance of US attaching meta-data to our video.

So it's not JUST about the end-user content. If that content ain't indexed with meta-data - we'll never find it. I know we'll chew the shit out of this for our ourmedia.org efforts.

So there's a working site, a Yahoo group set up, a namespace spec proposed and a blog blogging about it. Please join and help us welcome Yahoo into this grand chess game we call open standards.

conversation engine: the next step:

Since the recent integration of Feedster results into the conversation engine, I stopped coding for a bit and while doing other stuff I've been thinking of how to make it more scalable, covering more weblogs, and not wasting resources in looking at pages with no meaning (read: make it more useful) --- in short, how to solve the problems I mentioned in that entry.

The crucial problem is that Feedster provides only part of the picture. Scott Rafer (Feedster CEO) mentioned in the comments that I could use the Feedster links output, which provides a list of the references to a particular weblog. This doesn't quite do what I need however. The reason is simple: Feedster indexes RSS feeds, not entire sites, and so if someone is providing summary feeds, then Feedster will not be able to find links between weblogs, even if they exist. Because, many, many weblogs provide summary feeds, it is clear that the only way to get the links between entries is to get the actual contents of the HTML page. But.

But what I can do is use Feedster as the source point for the list of pages to index. Right now I am indexing everything on a given website. This has two drawbacks. First, I am forced to download, store, and analyze, waaay more content than I need (which accounts for the small amount of sites the bot is crawling at the moment), particularly when weblogs point to other parts of a site, including Wikis, dynamic apps, etc. Second, it slows down the processing for conversations, which depends on walking the link graph between two sites. This is a problem now, but if I move in the direction of adding multiple-participant conversations (as Don suggests in a comment to my previous conv. engine post, linked above) then this will be even more important.

So.

Next step, then, is to use Feedster as the data source for the entries of a given weblog. Then download/process the pages for each entry's permalink. Then analyze that and combine the results with the Feedster information.

Stay tuned! More in the next few days.

Comment on this entry

Musicians Sing Different Tune on File Sharing:
Aside from the few who speak out publicly, musicians typically sit out the debate over file sharing. Now, a new survey has found that most artists don't view unauthorized swapping as a threat to their livelihood. -washingtonpost.com

Recognize!:

BBC Science -- Scientists believe they have worked out exactly how we recognise a face when we see it. Experts have known for some time that there is something special about faces that draws us to look at them, even after the first few hours of birth. A brain region called the fusiform face area (FFA) has been pinpointed as key. Now a team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology say in the journal Neuron that they have figured out how the FFA processes this visual information.  To find out what was going on in the brain, the researchers asked volunteers to take part in an experiment. The volunteers were asked to look at pictures of different faces and also pictures of an inanimate object - a house. At the same time, the volunteers' brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which shows up which areas of the brain are active at any given time. Some of the faces that the volunteers looked at were completely normal, while others had features that were spaced differently or had features that were replaced by those of different faces, such as a different nose or mouth. Similarly, the pictures of the houses were manipulated in the same way - differently spaced windows or different doors.  From these experiments, Galit Yovel and Nancy Kanwisher were able to confirm that it was the FFA that processed the visual information. The FFA was not activated when the volunteers looked at the pictures of houses, suggesting that it is indeed specific for faces. They also worked out that it was the face as a whole that was recognised, rather than the individual features or the relative spacing of these features. (12/06/04)

Your favorite band's website sucks:
Your favorite band's website sucks. I can't count the number of times I've wanted to share a band's great new tracks with friends over email and had to give them detailed instructions on how to navigate the flash popup (ok, first click on the band's launch panel, then look in the popup for something marked "sounds" then click that and click the stream button...what? you don't have the latest flash?), or if I love a band's music, I can't seem to find their tour dates even though I know they're on the road. Merlin drops the five golden rules for bands that do too good of a job keeping their fans from their music.

Sales summary for 2004: CD sales set to overtake downloads, licensing up, consumer sales flat:
As you can see here:

CD sales continue to increase as a percentage of total sales, and now represent 45% of Magnatune's total consumer sales. CDs are set to overtake downloads in the coming weeks. This is good, as it indicates that our customers prefer CDs, so they should be happier customers now that we offer them physical CDs to purchase.

However, the increase in CD sales comes at the expense of downloads, and so overall consumer sales (cd+downloads) has not grown, as you can see here:

The good news is that licensing has more than doubled recently, as you can see here:

We're doing a large number of music licenses to indie films (10 to 20 films per month), at the bargain rate of $44 for a festival license. The upside is if any of these films showing at film festivals get "picked up" for worldwide distribution, additional license revenue comes in, and with the number of films we're licensing to, odds are good this will start kicking in over the next 2 years. And obviously, films with our music exposes the music to ever larger audiences.

artistShare

At ArtistShare we firmly believe that the true value is found in artists and their creativity. The creative process ...   more »

Music: La Semana
Mood: amused

Also, OL, I found this picture around online...where is it from? http://www.cdbaby.com/covers/o/t/ottmar.jpg - Adam Solomon ...   more »