Category: Digital Music
YouTube blocks music videos in Britain
YouTube, the fantastically popular video streaming service owned by Google, is in the midst of payment renegotiations with the Performing Rights Society, an agency formerly known as the MCPS PRS Alliance that collects royalties for songwriters across both digital and traditional media.
That renegotiation isn’t going too well. Talks have completely broken down, and YouTube has vowed to block British viewers from watching all “Premium” (i.e. major label) music videos from next Monday.
It’ll be possible to get round the block with a proxy server, I suspect, but the vast majority of people will suddenly wonder why their favourite band’s videos have suddenly been removed from the service.
It’s almost certainly just a strongarmed negotiating tactic from Google, and for PRS’ part they’ve asked the site to reinstate the videos until an agreement can be reached. But at the same time, Google’s trying to use its clout to bring down rates that have caused the exit of Pandora from Britain, as well as the despair of many other streaming services.
YouTube claims that PRS are responsible, saying that they’re asking for “many, many factors” more money than their previous agreement. PRS, on the other hand, say Google is trying to drive down payments despite its traffic having grown further.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens here – whether PRS will balk and cave in to a hail of bad publicity that will arise next Monday. The organisation is notoriously tenacious, though, and the whole situation could devolve into a staring match. In that case, consumers will just vote with their feet and go elsewhere – to competitors like Vimeo and MySpace video.
(via Epicenter)
Spotify gets hacked
Revolutionary digital music streaming service Spotify has revealed a serious security breach that affected its servers before December 19th last year. The company thought that it had managed to fix it before any damage was done, but last week Spotify found out that “a group” of some sort had managed to gain access to information necessary to guess passwords.
Although security breaches are par for the course at most internet startups, so far Spotify had managed to avoid them. It’s almost a rite of passage for new companies. The company is recommending that anyone who hasn’t changed their password since December 19th to change it immediately, and is emailing all its users to that effect.
Official Spotify Blog
Nokia wants to ditch DRM from Comes With Music
Nokia’s “Comes With Music” service, which offers unlimited music for a small amount bundled into the price of the of your phone, is unfortunately hobbled with DRM.
The ways things are set up means that any tracks you download are locked to one handset and one PC and if you want to do anything else, then…. well, you can’t do anything else.
However, Nokia doesn’t want it that way. Nokia understands that music should, in its very nature, be sharable with people you love. That’s why it wants to get rid of the DRM. Nokia’s director of global digital music retail, Adam Mirabella says:
“We have dialogues going with all of our partners and Digital Rights Management-free is also on the roadmap for the future integration of Comes With Music.”
Don’t hold your breath – I doubt we’ll see this for at least a year – but it’d certainly be nice, and would certainly make me retract most of my criticism of the service.
(via Music Ally)
Bebo and Slicethepie announce partnership
Second-tier social network Bebo and innovative fan-funding mechanic Slicethepie have got together to offer an attractive proposition for both Bebo users and bands using the Slicethepie service.
Slicethepie works by crowd-sourcing the A&R process, something that I strongly advocated in my series of posts on innovating digital music. People can invest in bands, and once a band has enough to make an album, any investors get a share of the revenues from selling that album, as well as a credit .
The partnership means that Bebo users will be able to review and rate content on the service, and will be paid a small fee for doing so. Bands that get financed via the Bebo showcase will gain a promotional package that Bebo claims is worth £50k, that’ll include an album launch party, promotion on the Bebo homepage, and exposure to major label A&Rs.
The first “Scout Room” on Bebo will go live this month, so if you’re in a band, it’s definitely worth a look. Just make sure you’ve got a strong presence on Bebo too. What does Bebo get out of it? More bands on a service that’s struggling to compete with Myspace, let alone Facebook’s dominance of the sector.
Spotify signs up a quarter of a million UK users, and 800,000 a million users worldwide
Ad-supported streaming music service Spotify has managed to recruit a quarter of a million UK users to its excellent music service. It’s a nice milestone for the service which is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in digital music for a long time.
But Spotify isn’t resting on its laurels. On its official blog, the company is inviting users to hassle their favourite bands and labels to join the service. They recommend hunting down a band’s label, cross-referencing it with their uber-list of labels they have deals with, and if it doesn’t match, then asking them to email [email protected].
What are you missing that you want to hear on the service? Go hunt them down, and then tell us in the comments below.
(via NMA)
The Revolution Will Be Streaming
This is my 1,000th post on Tech Digest. My first was about Robopong, and I have no idea what my last will be about, but this one’s about the economics of free music, which is a subject that I’ve touched on many times while writing here. It’s about how a free download turned me into a massive fan of a band.
Yesterday, personalized streaming radio site Last.fm announced on Twitter, that its free downloads page was back. It’s a page, which can be found here, that lists a bunch of tracks that bands have decided to give away, for promotional purposes. According to the old thinking prevalent among record companies, a download = a lost sale. In this case, a download led me to a whole lot more than that.
The download in question is a song called, wonderfully, “The Revolution Will Be Streaming“, a nod to Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 classic “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised“. It’s by an American post-rock band that I hadn’t previously heard of called Saxon Shore.
My eye was caught by the title, and I downloaded it on the off-chance I’d like it. I did like it, a lot, and after a few listens, I headed over to Amazon. The band’s got a few tracks available on the download store, but the album featuring “The Revolution Will Be Streaming”, “The Exquisite Death of Saxon Shore” wasn’t. So I bought the CD instead. On import.
Because the album has to be sent over from the states, I’m looking at a couple of weeks before I can listen to the damn thing. So I checked Spotify. The band isn’t there, sadly. I realized that when it does arrive, all I’m going to do is rip it to high-bitrate MP3 and put in on my Zune, so my next step was to head right over to the Pirate Bay and see if I could find it.
Turns out that the site doesn’t (at the time of searching, anyway). Luckily I’ve got other sources, so I grabbed it from another tracker and this morning on the bus on the way into the office, a bizarre and unexpected diversion around the back roads of King’s Cross was made all the more lovely by Saxon Shore’s wonderful album.
The band doesn’t seem to be touring at the moment, but when they show up in London, I’ll definitely be there and I’m fully intending to drag down as many of my post-rock-friendly friends as I can. I might well buy a t-shirt, and when I’ve fully digested this album, if I’m still loving it then there’s a good chance I’ll buy some of the older ones.
Now, I’m not pretending that there’s millions of people doing what I did above. Nor am I pretending that this would work just as well if every band in the world started giving away tracks. But if Saxon Shore hadn’t given away that song, then they wouldn’t have gained me as a fan. That’s why free music works, why music blogs are the best way to find new bands, and why free music isn’t the devaluing of art that some claim it is.
I welcome your comments and thoughts on the above, but before you do, go listen to the track in question. You can stream it from Last.fm here. The revolution will indeed be streaming, it would appear.
Apple explores new music options – iTunes Pass
This is what I like to see – innovative new ways of buying music that encourages people to actually spend money on bands they love. Venturebeat reports that Apple is experimenting with something called iTunes Pass, which allows fans to buy a pass for a certain group or artist and then get everything that artist releases for a given time period.
Apple’s piloting it with Depeche Mode. You can buy a pass for $19 and you’ll get the band’s new single right now, the album when it comes out, and some other exclusive tracks too. You’ll also get any videos and artwork that the band puts out before June 16th, which is when the pass expires.
All the content you get is DRM-free, though it will show up in Apple’s AAC format. Apple also guarantees that the value of the pass won’t exceed the value of the individual items, so you’re getting a good deal however you look at it.
For my favourite bands, I’d definitely sign up for this. For stuff I’m less excited about, I wouldn’t, but that’s not really the point of the scheme. It’s about making fans feel special, giving bands a greater connection to those people, and maybe actually making some money off music again. Good work, Apple.
Is it something you’d use? What bands would you sign up for if they were offered? Let us know in the comments.
(via Venturebeat)
Last.fm accused of handing U2 album leak user data to the RIAA
If you’ve been listening to a leaked copy of U2’s “No Line on the Horizon”, then it’s possible that the RIAA know exactly who you are, if you believe Techcrunch who got all in a tizzy on Friday over the suggestion that Last.fm has been handing over listener data to the record company.
Last.fm immediately denied the accusations, saying:
I’d like to issue a full and categorical denial of this. We’ve never had any request for such data by anyone, and if we did we wouldn’t consent to it.
Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we’d never personally identify our users to a third party – that goes against everything we stand for.
The RIAA followed that up, with:
“[We’re] not sure where that rumor came from. It’s not true.”
So you’re probably safe for now, but given how much personal data many people share on Last.fm, if you’re one of the first with a copy of a leaked album, then you might want to be careful about scrobbling that fact. Just a thought.
VIDEO: Spotify iPhone application in action
Digital Buzzard’s managed to get hold of a video of a Spotify iPhone application in action. We’ve been aware of the iPhone app being in development for a while, as well as an S60 app, and presumably an Android one, but we haven’t seen it running before now.
As you can imagine, it looks fantastic. It promises to give you access to over-the-air streaming of Spotify’s entire music library, as well as playlist access. Best of all, you’ll be able to cache playlists while in Wi-Fi areas so that you’ll be able to play them back when you’re on the go. Initially it’ll only be available to Premium users (presumably because it’s tricky to work out how to serve ads in cached mode).
But the big question here is “will Apple let them do it?”. This service completely replaces everything that the iTunes store does on the device, offering on-demand access to songs. We’ve seen what happens when companies try to improve existing iPhone functionality.
That said, Last.fm exists happily on the device. The difference might be that the Last.fm application won’t let you listen to tracks on-demand, just offers you various radio stations based on your listening habits. It won’t cache songs, either.
Proper streaming mobile music is the holy grail for a lot of people. Already I barely listen to my MP3 collection on my PC any more, relying almost totally on Spotify. If I could get it on my mobile phone, too, reliably, then my Zune might end up totally retired.
(via Digital Buzzard)
Spotify is wonderful, but it has five problems
It’s no secret that I love, adore, and worship Spotify. It’s far and away my favourite piece of software that’s emerged over the last year. The reason I love it so much is its simplicity, and the way it does nearly everything exactly right. You can see exactly why I love it from my original writeup here.
Yesterday, Spotify removed its invitation-only status in the UK. It’s been possible to sign up without an invite, via a bit of URL trickery, for a little while, but now it’s open to anyone. Go get your sisters, brothers, parents and neighbors signed up – they’ll love it. However, Spotify, for all its awesomeness, isn’t quite perfect. Here’s five reasons why.
