e-Consultancy reports that Last.fm is planning the imminent launch of a music video service. Interestingly, initial content will be provided by independent labels like Warp, NinjaTune and Mute with plans to introduce more mainstream fare in the coming months. The service will inevitably be personalised as per Last.fm’s streamed radio.  They claim that file quality will be double that of YouTube.

This will likely reduce visitor figures for the recently announced Last.tv which sought to offer a similar service using Last.fm data combined with YouTube content.

Links: e-Consultancy article, Last.fm, Last.tv

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Proposed laws in Florida and Utah intended to curb the resale of stolen goods will impact significantly upon the market for used CDs and DVDs:

The new legislation requires all stores buying second-hand merchandise for resale to apply for a permit, would be required to thumb-print CD sellers and get a copy of their state-issued identity documents, such as a driver’s license. Furthermore, stores could only issue store credit — not pay cash — in exchange for traded CDs, and then would be required to hold them for a 30-day period, before re-selling them.

The number of shops in London selling used CDs has plummeted in recent years. In the unlikely event that similar legislation were to be enacted here in the UK, it would certainly hammer home the final nail in the offline market.

Link: Billboard article

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• 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."

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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

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• 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.

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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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