This email just arrived in my inbox:

First, I wanted to thank you again for the support last week. It was absolutely overwhelming. More than 200,000 Pandora listeners contacted their congressional representatives! The entire fax infrastructure on Capitol Hill ground to a halt. We had to deliver faxes manually - literally boxes full of them were delivered to every office in the Capitol building.The result has been swift and dramatic: more than a million people have already joined the cause! There is now a bill just being introduced called the “Internet Radio Equality Act” to fix the problem and save Internet radio -and Pandora- from obliteration.

This certainly sounds hopeful.

Links: Full email text, Savenetradio.org.

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• ATRACLife » Sony to Release B100 Series Drag and Drop Walkman - Way too late…
• iTunes, subscriptions, and getting it right (Playlist:) - Decent opinion piece.
• Takara Tomy’s Transformers earphones (Engadget) - More classy headphones that would probably make your ears drop off…
• iTunes - iTunes Store - iPod Games (Apple) - "Sure, you can play iQuiz for hours of fun. But you can also become the quizmaster by creating your own custom trivia packs, syncing them from iTunes to your iPod, then sharing them with others."
• Apple iQuiz (iLounge) - Looks like Apple have done a fair amount of work with this game, features a number of subjects - TV and film as well as music. Also offers the ability for users to develop and share their own quizzes.

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TechCrunch reports that as of today a large proportion of songs on Yahoo Music (Yahoo claims 400,000) now contain lyrics. This is the result of a deal with Gracenote and is the first time lyrics have been legally published in this way online. I hope this represents the first step towards providing the level of information that is currently supplied on current CD releases. I really do want to know who played bass, who produced, who did the artwork, etc. Perhaps I’m something of a music geek, but it’s these details that provide the connections and facilitate personal journeys of discovery, which surely ultimately benefits the record companies in revenue. Though I’m not sure how Yahoo compile the chart, they have a top 10 most popular lyrics - unfortunately Morrissey and Scott Walker’s rightful places are occupied by Norah Jones and Justin Timberlake.

iTunes added a section for lyrics, but the only way it can be accessed is by selecting an individual music file, choosing Get Info from the File menu and clicking the relevant tab - unfortunately much too much trouble to bother doing. Let’s hope one day they’ll make it easier to view such details. What’s frustrating is that providing space and access for this information would appear to be a straightforward task. As with Last.fm’s user-generated concert listings, I’m sure a music metadata ecosystem would quickly appear to fill the gaps.

In related news, community metadata organisation MusicBrainz has just announced that Google has doubled its annual pledge to the the princely sum of $30,000.

Links: Yahoo Music’s Lyrics page, TechCrunch report, MusicBrainz announcement,

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• New Model for Sharing: Free Music With Ads (New York Times
• Middio - Uniting music videos - “Middio goes through the trouble of finding and properly tagging [YouTube] music videos already floating around the web so that you don’t have to.”
• iTunes Store a greater cash crop than Apple implies? (AppleInsider) - “Although Apple has repeatedly said that its iTunes Store operates at “just above break even,” a thorough analysis of the service’s economics suggests it turns a profit roughly in line with the company average.”
• Amazon readying DRM-free online music store? (Engadget) - TimesOnline, Amazon is ready “to launch an online music store next month”.
• Snapp Radio - Mashup of Radio Paradise, last.fm and Flickr. Listen to music from Radio Paradise or last.fm, Snapp Radio collects images from Flickr related to the music you’re listening to and displays as slideshow.
• Last.fm - Lessons from building the World’s largest social music platform (SlideShare) - Presentation at the Future of Web Apps Conference 2007 in London.

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• Gigpedia.com - "Rule #2 states; if you talk about an amazing live music experience, it is your duty to back it up with a link to where it can be accessed (audio or video)."
• MyStrands - Social Recommendation and Discovery -
• MediaMaster takes your music library online (Webware) - "MediaMaster gives users free storage space to upload their tunes and listen to them anywhere they have Internet access."
• blog.SLMusic.org - Knowledgeable blog by Second Life musician
• Scouta: scouting is better than searching! - "Scouta is the new way to get relevant online content. It?s the bold new way for you to get personal recommendations to suit your interests and tastes."
• MojoLondon: Suck Uk A?Z CD Dividers - "Alphabetise your Compact Disk collection with these CD dividers. 26 Polypropylene dividers printed both sides with thousands of band names" Lovely.
• Last.tv - "Last.tv is your personal channel with non-stop music videos. Fill in a last.fm username to get a stream of that person’s music." Pretty good it is too! (via City of Sound I think)
• Apple Could Launch Subscription Service for the iPhone (Wired News) - Speculation…
• Australian CD sales up by more than a quarter in 2006 (p2pnet) - Australian Record Industry Association reports music sales in 2006 shows growth in overall volume of sales (up by 7 million or 27%) - who knew?
• NAB President: XM-Sirius Merger “Not About the Consumer” (Gizmodo) - Stateside shenanigans about the future of satellite radio.
• The downing of Internet radio (Playlist) - "The Copyright Royalty Board?s rates are effective only in the U.S. I?d take a cue from pirate radio and spammers and take my business beyond the influence of the CRB and RIAA."
• Pandora Co-Founder Gives Two Reasons Why Royalty Decision Sucks (Gizmodo) -
• 16GB Flash Memory Coming To MP3 Players This Fall (Mediaor) -
• The songbird who’s outselling Take That with her homemade album (This is London) - "I set up my own record label called Blueberry Pie and just got the music out there. It’s pretty easy. Anyone can do it."
• Last.fm Partners with IODA - Even More Music on Last.fm (Mashable) - "IODA?s full catalog, which includes over 800,000 tracks, will be accessible to Last.fm members, and over 24,000 PromoTracks will be available for free on-demand streaming and download."

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• Daring Fireball: Some Facts About AAC - Well-argued defence of Apple’s AAC format against claims that it deliberately practices an anti-competitive iPod lock-in policy.
• MediaMaster: Access Your Music Library Online (TechCrunch) - "MediaMaster is a new web service that, like Faces and Oboe, let?s users upload music from their hard drive and listen to it online."
• TEAC’s bone conducting HP-F100 headphones (Engadget) - More bone conducting h’phones!
• Finetune Desktop streams music, taps into iTunes (Playlist) - "Finetune announces the launch of preview release of Finetune Desktop, an application that enables you to stream music from the online service to your Mac or PC."
• Apple: 100 million iPods sold, and counting (Playlist) - "Apple on Monday announced that the 100 millionth iPod has been sold. Apple claims that the iPod is the fastest-selling music player in history."
• A Music Device That Can Play, Oh, 2 Million Songs or So (New York Times) - "The player gives owners the ability to stream Yahoo Music?s catalog of more than two million songs without having to put the tunes onto a computer first."
• David Byrne Journal: 4.1.07: Your Government Working for You - Fairly lengthy dissection of the Copyright Royalty Board proposed increase in performance royalty rates from Mr Byrne.
• phling! (Cool Hunting) - "phling! is a new mobile service that lets you tune in to the music stored on your computer (PC only for the time being) from wherever you are."
• iPod ready Fireplace (Newlaunches) - "The new FRP-4300 Fireplace comes loaded with an iPod Station with 4"x9" Flat Speakers and a remote. The rectangular base and the arch are easy to assemble." NOT posted on April 1st!
• Music to feed advertisers (Guardian Unlimited) - "Each of Ricall.com’s four million tracks has a musical fingerprint listing attributes like tempo, instrument, demographics and mood."

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• Hydrogenaudio Forums - “The audio technologist’s resource”
• Apple’s long shadow over mobile music (CNET News) - “I think 2007 will be a huge year for mobile music,” said John Burris, vice president of data services at Sprint. But the most talked-about device at the three-day Mobile Music conference was Apple’s iPhone.”
• Grooveshark Private Beta - “Users can also sell the music of other artists via PayPal. In this sense, Grooveshark works much like eBay. Grooveshark tracks the best users so you know who can be trusted to deliver quality content.”
• Brussels threatens Apple with £330m fine for music pricing (Times Online) - “Apple faces a fine of more than £300 million after the European Commission issued a formal objection to the higher prices it charges to download music from iTunes in Britain compared with the Continent.” About time!
• Peer-to-Peer Downloaders Gorge on Songs (New York Times) - “Peer-to-peer networks yielded five billion downloads in 2006, whereas 509 million songs were downloaded from iTunes-style services.”

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The web has been positively buzzing with speculation since the announcement of an imminent EMI/Apple “exciting new digital offering”. Would it be the Beatles back-catalogue made available on the iTunes Music Store or something else? Turns out it’s the latter - EMI will be making it’s entire catalogue available via iTMS without DRM restrictions. It’s the first of the mega-corporates to take the leap and it’s difficult to imagine that Steve Jobs wasn’t aware of this when he made his own call for the abolition of DRM.

Everything isn’t quite glory and light: it appears that the deal is $0.99 for tracks locked with DRM and AAC encrypted at 128kbps or $1.29 without DRM at 256kbps. Given Apple’s emphasis upon simplicity, this is a rather surprising move.

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• Edison and the music biz: nothing’s changed (Boing Boing) - “Edison was adamant that Edison recordings would be played only on Edison phonographs”
• Temco HG40SAN-TBT Bone conduction headphones (Newlaunches.com) - More bone conduction headphones - I love ‘em!
• Bebo opens music store (Guardian Unlimited Music) - “Social networking website Bebo is introducing a music download service allowing bands to sell music. It will allow bands to upload and sell four tracks, with the band keeping 70% of the revenue.” That’s a much better than average cut.
• Sony ditches demo tapes (MacUser) - “SonyBMG, the world’s second-biggest music company, has announced it will only accept demos sent through two web sites it has set up - one for users to upload conventional demos, and one through which they should blog about their work.” Yet another sign of the times.
• JVC floating MP3 player (Newlaunches.com) - “JVC Japan has announced the XA-AW33 a waterproof MP3 player. This cone shaped DAP floats around in the tub playing your favourite tunes so you can relax after a hard day’s work.” I want one!
• SellABand Music Model Gaining Traction (TechCrunch) - New business model: “Artists sign up and upload some of their music. Users listen to it. If they like it, they pay $10. If a band reaches $50,000 in donations, SellABand helps them record an album with a studio and expert producer.”
• RIAA Lawsuit Decision Matrix (Gizmodo) - Amusing flowchart - I particularly like the ‘twiddle moustache’ part!
• Apple introduces ‘Complete My Album’ on iTunes (Playlist) - More details on the iTMS discount now offered by Apple to enable whole albums to be bought at a discount when certain tracks have already been purchased. I wonder how this will affect album sales overall.

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Noting that today is April Fool’s Day, I’m nervous that everything I read will be some form of prank. This story, however, was printed in the UK’s The Independent newspaper a few days ago, so I’m trusting that it’s true. Despite that, there’s a somewhat comic edge to the article’s headline, whatever time of year it is: ‘Rough Trade opens massive record shop to fight internet‘. It conjures images of Don Quixote tilting at windmills or King Canute ordering the waves to stop.

Rough Trade was established in 1976 as a shop and two years later as a record label (for further details read their own succinct history). The new store will occupy 5,000 square feet of floorspace London’s East End, which will make it Britain’s biggest music shop. Brick Lane is currently one of London’s most fashionable areas, second only to neighbouring Hoxton/Shoreditch. Given current developments, it’s a brave move, but I’ll be cheering them on.

(Rough Trade also offer an interesting recommendation service in the form of The Album Club and an online MP3 store, Rough Trade Digital, both of which I intend to cover in the not too distant future.)

Link: Independent news story
Link: Rough Trade
Via: Dissensus

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