This is a great article from Mashable.com. My personal favorite is the site for Citizen Cope. His site does a great job of cleaning up MySpace’s default design without straying too far from the original, which can confuse fans.
And don’t forget to check out FoxyMelody’s souped up profile at myspace.com/foxymelody
AudioTuts nails the description of Digital Rights Management software calling it: “the most pointless innovation of the digital age”.
With that in mind, they’ve compiled a listing of the 5 Biggest DRM Debacles. Relive the glory days of companies inadvertently destroying all of their customers music and investing millions of R&D dollars in suing one another.
iTunes has just announced that they have launched a new way for artists to be found on iTunes, and it couldn’t be easier. Simply type
www.itunes.com/artistname
into your browser. It will bring you straight to the page. If you have a specific album in mind, the url is
www.itunes.com/artistname/albumname
No more iTunes link maker, no more using their questionable search engine. This is going to be a great help to musicians whose music is on iTunes.
This is a great publicity stunt by independent musician Josh Pyke. He had a boat built modelled after his guitar and rode it around Sydney Harbor in Australia.
You can read all about it at Wired’s Listening Post.
"If I hear banjos I'm out of here..."
Why is this a great PR stunt? Well, for one, I am talking about it right now, and until now I have had no idea who Josh Pyke is. What does this mean for you? Well, take a lesson from Pyke, and think of something you can do to get the attention of the press (something postive, please. there is enough horrible stuff on the news today).
Universal Music Chief and admitted technophobe Doug Morris babbling about technology, furthering proof that he has no idea what he is talking about. My favorite claim: that the labels will figure out DRM.
This simply won’t happen. For every super programmer the labels hire to perfect DRM, there is a small army of 14 year old hackers ready to destroy it. The last time the major labels touted their superior DRM on a new generation of CDs and challenged anyone to break it, it took roughly 45 minutes for a hacker to bust it open using nothing more than a magic marker.
Anyhow, read more on Doug Morris here.
Profiles Take Two: Doug Morris Talks Technology… Again — Digital Music News
Given their huge success of the iPod almost everyone in the free white headphoned world is familiar with the Apple iTunes music store. Less well known to musicians is the other Apple digital marketplace, the iPhone Apps store.
Like the music store, the App Store has seen massive success and driven thousands of dollars in sales to individual developers and given the nature of iPhone itself, there have been a number of releases that have crossed the musical divide.
We present these applications here both because they are interesting from a music generation perspective, but because they represent a genuinely new outlet for musical creation and distribution.
RJDJ is a generative music application, mixing together ambient sounds with mathematically generated music “scenes” to create dynamic soundtrack as you run through life.
RjDj explanation in 6 min
Newtonica is a combination japanese disco ball techno game puzzle game where you try and stop cubes from hitting your Newtonica cube and in doing so you augment the rhythms of ht e the underlying tracks. Don’t ask me what the crazy blue cucumber guy is in the video.
Quote: “You have to touch space chicks for bonus points.”
MixMeister Scratch is a DJ Scratchpad on the iPhone where you can pull in different sound samples and then run your greasy finger “back and forth, back and forth, making it skeratch” to generate scratching sounds.
Germans MixMastering the hell out of their iPhone
BtBx “give you instant access to the world of electronic music with big drum sounds and acid-style synthesizers”, and while it won’t turn you an overnight success, you could probably drop something, bang wildly at the commands think you were.
BtBx (”BeatBox”)
iDrum has currently released two different versions of their beat generation software, the: “Club Edition” and the “Hip Hop” addition.
While the application itself is pretty solid, you keenly feel the lack of deep bass with iPhone.
On October 15th there will be a panel discussion “Music Makers and Technology Shakers” taking place in San Francisco. Principals from Sellaband, WBR, KCRW and a few independent artists will be discussing current trends in music (as much as systemic disruption and everyone flailing about madly trying to hold onto the past can be called a “trend”) and alternative business models.
Technorati Tags: music women technology
For those interested in how to get the most money for their music sales, there are worse places to start than the NY Times Freakonomics blog.
They’ve run a series of interesting articles on new and innovative pricing strategies for downloadable music:
It’s interesting to note that they’ve had some troubles with their writing about the different strategies and at one point commented that: “I guess we should give up pop singers and stick to crack dealers, real-estate agents, and poker cheats. “
PopMatters pushed out an article today examining the potential effects of the recession and economic decline on the music business. It’s basically the same advice that everybody is getting today: “tighten your belts, stock up on Ramen”, but directed specifically at the working musician.
The most important thing you might be able to do now as a performer is to be practical and realistic. You’re not gonna sell as many albums or shirts or tickets as you did before so you’re gonna have to scale back. That doesn’t mean that you should take down your MySpace page or take your songs off of iTunes or withdraw from imeem, last.fm or elsewhere. You’ll have to scale back on costs such as production or the amount of touring you do (instead targeting areas that you’re comfortable with) and what you offer for sale. You’ll also keep your eyes and ears open for other opportunities that come up online or offline as technology is still marching ahead with new ideas.
I think it’s important to keep in mind as well that nobody (not even the Nobel prize winning economists) really knows how the economic shake up is going to play out and given the broad range of predictions (a minor Carteresque stagflation style downturn to a serious Mad Max eating roadkill for dinner recession), it’s probably best to keep moving forward for the time being.
Digital Music News HypeBot
