OnTour is a Mac™ and PC compatible widget that retrieves concert listings for your town and highlights those that match the artists in your digital music library. Search results also includes links for tickets, maps, directions, artist discography and a link to your prefered online music store where you can listen to and download tracks. OnTour works great as a music discovery tool.

Another  entrant on the concert recommendation scene comes in the form of Ontour which provides a freely downloadable widget that supplies targeted information. By the looks of things it doesn’t also provide targeted ads (I swear I’ve never played an Avril Lavigne track in my life - though, come to think of it, my 9 year old daughter did talk enthusiastically about her the other day - is web 2.0 stretching its tendrils into the offline space??) Of the My Artists visible in the above screenshot, Mika, Ash and Captain (I’ve never heard of the latter) are artists entirely absent from my music library, but I have already bought myself tickets to Young Gods and would count myself as a fan of Van the Man and John Martyn so the service gets a provisional thumbs up. Time will tell if it continues to be of use.

If this service operates in the background it would be good to see a way for it to catch a user’s attention outside of the widget environment - I only very rarely use widgets on OSX. Usefully, Ontour allows users to add artists absent from their music library:

Links: Ontour
Via: Digital Music News

Share this post:

It’s time to stand and salute Carrie Underwood, for it is she who’s responsible for the first ever (iTunes) digital download to enter the US top 10. The song which I’ve not had the fortune to hear yet is apparently a cover of a Pretenders song. It guess it was never going to be the much more appropriately titled Sign ‘o’ the Times by Prince…

Link: Carrie Underwood website
Via: Gizmodo

Share this post:

• How to access Pandora from outside the US (Frantic Industries) - "This is the Internet, and it?s easy to be a hacker nowadays, so here?s a couple of services you can use to access Pandora from wherever you are"
• Pacemaker: 120GB Pocket DJ MP3 Player (Create Digital Music) - Surely vapourware, but tasty-looking eye candy for sure…
• Stream your music with Orb (Lifehacker) - "You don’t need to spend a dime to stream your music library to another PC. All you need is Orb, a free service that turns your system into a killer MP3 server."
• More Labels Question eMusic Payouts (hypebot) -
• Used CD Sales Laws Go Insane (Listening Post, Wired Blogs) - "You’ll need to be thumbprinted and present a driver’s license before selling CDs in Florida and Utah as required by a new law that has already passed in those states."
• Idea: The Digital Jewel Box (Ironic Sans) - "I just hate how much space all those jewel boxes and liner note inserts take up. So how about making a Digital Jewel Box?"
• New Model for Sharing: Free Music With Ads (New York Times) - "For years, music labels have been trying to prevent fans from downloading their songs on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Now, some of them would like to encourage people to listen to music that way ? provided they view some advertising first."
• Distrust fuels piracy (Variety) - "Young people prefer to download film and music illegally because they don’t think that the biz is capable of giving bang for their buck." Via BoingBoing
• Critical Metrics - "Critical Metrics keeps track of recommendations and playlists across all media so you can easily find, try, and buy the best new music."

Share this post:

Click for full size image version

Visualising information is a fascinating area and, as much of a fan as I am of Last.fm, the user charts tend to be a pretty uninspiring sight. Long-term users’ charts like my own also tend to be fairly static. If Last.fm were to employ the services of Lee Byron, things might be rather different:

Algorithmically generated posters based on statistical information provided by Last.fm software. Every song listened to by a particular user over an eighteen month period of time is recorded and used to create the visualization. Each colored band represents a musical artist, progressing left to right through the eighteen month span growing wider when listening was more frequent, and skinnier when it was not. The hue of the artist represents the time of the first listen for the particular user: cooler colors represent artists who have been listened to for a long period of time while warmer colors represent artists who are more recent in the user’s listening habits.

How nice to have your Last.fm personal homepage with this information presented in Flash allowing you to interact with all that data and/or project it as a gradually morphing illustration of the music you’re listening to… With at least 15 million users, Last.fm would need to do some serious hardware upgrades, but it would be music geek heaven. Following links from Lee Byron’s initial page leads to a rather lovely interactive graph of Artist Popularity Over Time (warning: Applet, which seems to only intermittently play nicely with Firefox on OSX):

Click for full size image version

Links: Lee Byron/megamu, Last.fm, Information Aesthetics
Via: Mediaor

Share this post:

• Pandora no longer available for non US and UK users (Me The Geek) - Ouch.
• A look at personal music-streaming service MediaMaster (ars technica) - Free, unlimited (?) music storage and streaming service.
• New scheme could boost online music services in Europe (Playlist) - Good news: "Providers of online music services in Europe should benefit from a new one-stop licensing system aimed at simplifying the complex process of obtaining music distribution rights across the continent."
• More RIAA shenanigans (Daily Kos) - The RIAA has apparently secured the right to collect royalties on all songs regardless of who controls the copyright. The RIAA has secured legal authority to administer a compulsory license that covers all recorded music.
• Can Music Survive Inside the Big Box? (Wall Street Journal) - Good, sobering article on the control exercised by the likes of WalMart in the US: responsible for at least 65% of music sales (including online), up from 20% a decade ago.

Share this post:

Is there no stopping Last.fm? Following on from recent news of partnerships with some of the top four major record labels comes news of a global chart show. All power to their elbow, though I’m not sure Channel 4 is currently a big player in radio:

The Worldwide Chart will showcase the top tracks from Last.fm’s European, Asian and US charts. The station currently has 20m active users from over 232 countries and is available in 11 languages. Channel 4 Radio DJs will also begin ‘scrobbling’ their playlists, allowing Last.fm users to track and share their selected music.

Link: New Media Exchange article, via Digg

Share this post: