iTunes' variable pricing coincides with plummeting sales

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Initial reports from major labels are suggesting that the switch to variable pricing on iTunes has been a failure. According to ‘numerous sources’ sales decreases have been seen across the board since variable pricing was implemented at Macworld back in January.

But lets remember the statisticians’ mantra – correlation is not causation. Just because sales decreases have been seen alongside the implementation of variable pricing, it doesn’t mean that the latter is causing the former.

Just as likely is the effect of services like Spotify on consumers’ music-listening habits. Although the streaming service is unavailable in the States, where these figures are mostly likely from, there are plenty of other similar applications that consumers are beginning to explore.

As people shift from ownership of music to being happy with just access when they need it, sales will decrease. On the flipside, licensing revenues skyrocket, so the same amount of cash is still floating around for music creators – this isn’t the death of the music industry.

(via Digital Music News)

YouTube's content ID system – copes with volume, but not pitch changes

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An enterprising techy in the Computer Science department at Rochester University, NY, has undertaken an investigation to find out exactly how much you have to mangle audio tracks before YouTube’s content identification system can’t recognise them any more. The findings are quite interesting.

For starters, he learnt that despite YouTube still easily recognising when a song’s volume is massively increased or decreased, it can’t cope with any pitch scaling beyond 5% or so. Also, interestingly, it only seems to recognise the first 30 seconds or so of a track.

The full analysis is right here, and there’s some fantastic comments on the white noise test video, here. Also interesting is that despite infringing copyright on the website 35 times and, at once point, 15 times in an hour, the account hasn’t been banned or removed.

Parallax

Lego Rock Band confirmed

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I know, I know. You’ve always wanted to combine your love of Lego Star Wars and Rock Band. Well, Warner hear you and they’ve got your back. The company has confirmed that it’ll be releasing Lego Rock Band later this year on Xbox 360, PS3, Wii and DS.

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Songs already confirmed for the game include Blur’s “Song 2”, Carl Douglas’ “Kung Fu Fighting”, Europe’s “The Final Countdown”, Good Charlotte’s “Boys and Girls”, and Pink’s “So What”. It’ll combine the actually-quite-funny Lego games’ humour with the gameplay of the Rock Band franchise. And you can bet it’ll be one of those circular pieces over to the left speeding towards you.

There’ll be a career mode, just like the other versions of the game, except you play as a lego minifig. Players will be able to customise their avatars, as well as customising their entourage, including roadies, managers and crew. It’ll work with existing Rock Band instruments.

(via MCV)

Timewasting website of the day: Tonematrix

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Tonematrix is a site that generates sinewaves in a pattern that you determine. If that sounds complex, then go ahead and click here, then draw something on the grid. It’s far easier to understand if you just give it a try. Far easier than understanding the developer, who says:

“The sound generation is basically a polyphone synthesizer with a simple delay with a variing read-offset to make the tones vibrating in the end.”

Despite the fact that the first thing everyone will do is draw a penis, there’s actually quite a sophisticated synth running in the background. It’s possible to make loops that sound pretty awesome. What would be even more awesome is if you could adjust the BPM on the fly. Or use it to play Battleships with a friend. Either would do.

Tonematrix (via @scdsoundsystem)

Behind the scenes at the British Music Experience

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There are condom machines in the toilets of the British Music Experience at the O2 in Greenwich. I’ve no idea why – perhaps they think their visitors will be overwhelmed with emotion after seeing Ziggy Stardust’s ‘Thin White Duke’ outfit, or Dave Hill’s “Superyob” guitar. But in actual fact, it’s gadget fanatics that are likely to be the ones excited, because the BME is one of the most gadget-filled museums in the UK.

Almost everything in the museum is interactive. Your ticket comes equipped with an RFID tag that you wave in front of exhibits that interest you. These are logged in a central database, and after your visit you can go to the BME website and view all the exhibits that you looked at online.

There’s also the option to play along on real instruments with songs you know, or record a video of yourself dancing to one of several famous historical dances. That content will be stored and can also be viewed on the website later on, so you can share your embarrassment with people across the world. You get three free iTunes downloads too, to further investigate music that you don’t know very well.

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Although it’s a great and well-connected experience, and anyone remotely interested in popular music since 1945 will find something interesting, there’s an ever so slight sense of a lack of use of the technology to its full effect. The tagging system is great, but it’d be nice to be able to explore extra content from home, rather than just reviewing the content you saw.

It’d also be great if you could do more with your recordings, getting the content out of the website. For copyright reasons, it’s impossible to do anything but stream the recording you make in the ‘Gibson Studio’ section. The British Music experience is technologically ahead of any other museum in London, but it’s still got unrealised potential.

Spotify launching API

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This is the big news that followers of Spotify have been waiting for for a little while. The revolutionary music service is launching an API “sometime this week”. It’ll give developers access to the raw workings behind the software, including its streaming facilities.

I don’t need to tell you that this is *fantastic* news. Freeing up the vast catalogue that Spotify has built up will energize developers and you’re going to suddenly see the service appearing everywhere – from phones to set-top-boxes and games consoles, but also on the web. The mobile aspect will be most interesting – anyone will be able to build their own mobile client for the service for any platform – BlackBerry, Symbian, iPhone, Android – whatever.

Also revealed by Spotify – 40,000 new users sign up each day, and users are spending on average 70 minutes listening to the service every day! That’s three lots of ads served to every user every day. Not bad!

When the API is out, we’ll scan the nascent developers scene and bring you the best of the user-built applications.

(via Guardian)

Spotify is three years old, hints at future plans

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Our favourite digital music service, Spotify, is three years old today. That seems like a lot, considering we’ve only been able to use it in the UK since October, but in that short time it’s already completely changed the way I listen to music on my PC, and made me listen to a much wider range of bands too.

To celebrate the anniversary, as well as the 40th birthday of founder Martin Lorentzon, the company has put up a blog post that talks (in somewhat vague terms) about the future direction and plans for the company.

There’s a lot of hints in the blog post about mobile devices – something that the company hasn’t been keeping very secret. Intriguingly, though, the company also mentions set-top boxes, IM, and social networks as future directions for expansion.

Spotify mentions, too, the possibilities of enhanced social features and pre-release content for premium users – something that could drive greater takeup of the subscription service. That gets interesting in the comments section – with several people saying that if the fee was halved, then they’d pay it. I wonder if they’d get twice the takeup if they chopped the price in half.

The most exciting bit, though? The closing sentence of the post – “We plan to have more detailed information for you in the next few weeks, stay tuned”. If I were a betting man, I’d put money on that being the iPhone application that we revealed in February, a leaked video demo of which is posted below.

Spotify Blog

Google launching free, legal, music downloads… in China

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Internet giant Google today launched a service that provides completely free, legal downloads of songs from all four major labels. The caveat? It’s only available in China. Damn.

There will be over 350,000 tracks available at launch, from both Chinese and Western markets. Users will be able to search by artist and song name, but also by the level of ‘beat’ in the song, and its ‘instrumentality’, whatever that is.

Google’s making the move due to massive levels of piracy in the world’s most populous country. The search engine lags behind its competitor Baidu in the country, mainly thanks to Baidu’s MP3 search functions. This launch should help Google compete in a market where 99% of music consumed is illegal.

Google’s free music service (via Reuters)

Spotify and 7Digital buddy up

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Digital music upstart-of-the-moment Spotify has added yet another revenue stream to its growing collection – users are now able to right-click tracks to buy them via 7Digital.

Currently, the click just takes you to the relevant 7Digital page for the album. In the future, however, the companies hope to allow one-click downloads in Spotify itself, as well as functionality to buy entire playlists.

This move should further silence the doubters who claim that Spotify has no business model. On the contrary, this is now a third solid way of monetising their business, after ads and premium subscriptions. I do doubt a little how much people will use the functionality, though.

Fizy – super-quick streaming of songs and music videos

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Are you a big fan of Spotify, but you’d like it to be more… illegal? Fizy is for you. It’s a super-quick website that’ll let you search for songs and music videos. I’m not kidding about super-quick, we’re talking ‘faster than searching your MP3 folder’ quick, on par with the aforementioned Spotify.

That’s not the only similarity. It’s got a very clean interface with minimal features and you can easily share tracks with other people. It claims to have more than 75 billion MP3s in its index, and you can expand or remove any videos involved.

Very impressive, and very useful for ‘do you know that song?’ moments. Not exactly a media player, though, as there’s no playlist functionality. I quite like that, though. That’s what I’ve got Spotify for.

Fizy (via @mychemtoilet)

Image courtesy of Lifehacker.