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Posts Tagged ‘musicians’

Cartoon: The Winter of Our Dis-content

Have you noticed that we aren’t writers any more? Or filmmakers, or video producers, or even musicians or cartoonists? We’re content-creators.

Way too often, I hear Web folks talk about “content” as some kind of undifferentiated commodity: “Yep, figger we’re gonna need ten, maybe twelve kilos o’ content for that page. You got a bulk discount?” Back a cargo truck up to the content silo, fill her up and you’ve got yourself a website.

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But there’s actually something interesting about the term – once I get past my visions of container ships laden with content, plying the seven seas. It’s a way of dismissing the value of individual creativity, sure. But it can also be a way of capturing the idea that so many of us now communicate in different media, and that digital technology has gone a long way toward democratizing personal expression.

How about you? When you hear “content”, do you think of the lorem ipsum that fills in the space between the revenue-generating ads… or something else?

More Noise to Signal.

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LoKast launches a ‘disposable social network” for sharing media from your iPhone

There are a number of companies at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin offering their own way of sharing your location with friends. LoKast, an app from a company called NearVerse, is launching a mobile app with a compelling spin on that idea — instead of sharing your location with people elsewhere, you share media with people in the same location.

In other words, when you open the LoKast app, you get a list of anyone else who also has LoKast open in your proximity (about 300 feet). When you click on their profile, you can see and download any content they’ve uploaded for sharing, including contacts, photos, songs, videos, and links. For example, if you’re at a conference, you might share the contact information of yourself and business partners, so anyone else at the conference knows how to reach you. Or if you’re at a concert, you could bring a favorite playlist, which all the other concert attendees would be able to view. And users could tailor the content they’re sharing to the occasion.

Co-founder Boris Bogatin describes LoKast as a way to link our online and physical activities.

“We’re doing all this internet stuff, we do internet or we do physical, but we don’t do both,” Bogatin said. “But the physical stuff is so powerful and rich.”

Philadelphia-based NearVerse has paid particular attention to the music side of the app. In most cases, you’re not sharing complete songs, but rather short clips and a link to purchase the song on iTunes. But musicians can also create accounts on LoKast where they make their songs available for free download. So if a band threw a promotional concert, they wouldn’t have to give out demo CDs. Instead they just ask everyone to download the songs from their LoKast portal. Then when all those fans wgo to other events, they could offer those songs as free downloads to other people, allowing the music to spread.

As part of its launch, NearVerse is announcing partnerships with music distribution companies The Orchard, IODA and Monalis 360. The model extends to promotional movie clips, which is why NearVerse is also partnering with Magnolia Pictures.

Beyond making money from music purchases, Bogatin said he sees LoKast as a platform for sharing content in other apps, though he didn’t offer many details. He added that LoKast will be adding app-sharing soon, which also provides revenue opportunities.

One of the big challenges with this kind of media-sharing app is speed. If it takes minutes to download a song or contact information, no one’s going to use it. But when the NearVerse team gave me a demo at South by Southwest (where there are lots of iPhone users competing for network bandwidth), the app seemed very responsive, with updates reflected immediately between phones and most (not all) downloads taking only seconds. You can download LoKast from the App Store here.

NearVerse has raised venture funding, but it hasn’t announced the details yet.

Tags: LoKast

Companies: NearVerse

People: Boris Bogatin

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The future of the music albums? Check out RjDj’s Little Boots app

In an age when tracks can be copied or streamed at virtually no cost, what extras can musicians add to make a living?

A London- and New York-based startup called RjDj is experimenting with one answer. RjDj is taking albums from electronic artists like Little Boots and Air and creating reactive music experiences from them through iPhone apps. RjDj launched one this week with Little Boots, a British electropop artist who made her name by posting YouTube videos of herself playing experimental instruments like the Tenori-On.

What’s reactive music? It’s a type of music that’s different every single time you play it. The phone’s microphone picks up sounds from your environment while the accelerometer takes in the movement of your phone. RjDj’s app can incorporate both into the track, making each time you play a song entirely unique. The startup launched its own free app last year that offers an ever-changing variety of tracks and effects.

With the Little Boots collaboration, RjDj tooks three tracks from her already released album and turned them into a $2.99 app where you can apply effects to each song. One track focuses on accelerometer movement and sounds more agitated depending on how fast you’re walking or how much you’re shaking the phone. Another takes in sounds from your environment, like chatter from people around you in a cafe, and infuses them into the song. The effects range from being almost indetectable on some tracks to being completely transformative on others.

In the same way that sites like YouTube and social networks have handed people the tools to create experiences rather than passively consume them, RjDj is trying to allow music fans to influence the tracks they’re listening to. Fans can share unique instances of the generative Little Boots track and upload them to RJDJ’s site.

The company has also done its own take on headphone parties, where attendees listen to RjDj tracks while a person dubbed the “reality jockey” plays with different effects.

Although RjDj is working with well-known electronic artists to create apps, the company doesn’t see them as their only business model. RjDj is pioneering the use of PD (or PureData), a graphical programming language, and applying it to music composition to create reactive sound tracks. Composing music with PD looks like the rather intimidating flowchart to the right. RJDJ is working on software with a more consumer-friendly user interface that may be released next spring. (If you’re interested, here’s a tutorial on how to hack RjDj’s software with PD.)

The company is the brainchild of Last.fm co-founder Michael Breidenbruecker and boasts funding from former Last.fm chairman Stefan Glaenzer and Seedcamp founder Saul Klein.

At this point, RjDj caters to more of a niche community, but its thinking may contain several hints about the future direction of the music industry.

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Laying down tracks on the go with an iPhone and a browser

Back in the day, the multitrack tool of choice for bedroom Springsteens was an analog four-track recorder from companies like Tascam. But with the advent of cheap laptops and powerful digital tools like ProTools, Logic, and Garageband, even the cheapest guitar slinger moved his workstation to the computer.

The new solutions were a huge step forward for home studio enthusiasts, but new digital recording tools are going beyond the computer—into the pocket and onto the Web. The increasing power of smartphones means that musicians can now carry a complete digital scratch pad in their pockets, while moving the recording application to the Web allows simple collaboration with anyone from around the world, lowers the cost of entry, and provides access to a mixing console from any computer on the planet.

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Tweeting from the field: Sports meet social media

Social media, for all its downfalls, has proven to be a powerful tool for organizations to interact directly with customers and fans. This is especially true for athletes, musicians, and other celebrities—people love communicating directly with their favorite icons via Twitter and Facebook. The celebrities seem to enjoy it, too. Just look at the camaraderie that THE_REAL_SHAQ (Shaquille O’Neal) has built on Twitter. Even I follow him, and I don’t care about basketball anymore.

Unfortunately for professional athletes, their respective sports leagues haven’t always been receptive to this whole social media “thing.” Like many corporate overlords, some sports leagues have run screaming from the idea of allowing their assets—that is, the players—to tell the world what’s going on right this minute, especially if this minute is happening during a game or at a team’s facility. 

Other leagues, however, have embraced the world of social media as a way to generate more interest and ultimately a larger fanbase. Which American sports leagues get it, and which need to be hit with a social networking clue-by-four?

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Video: Mysterious Eigenharp offers blinkenlight sitar looks, chilled-out Moby grooves

There was a time when instruments were limited by their shapes, strings, valves. Today they’re only limited by human creativity, and we’d have to say the folks at Eigen Labs certainly aren’t lacking in that department — they seem to have a bountiful supply of buttons and LEDs, too. Eigen has given birth to the eigenharp, an instrument that is still largely mysterious, but as you can see in the first video below it seems to allow musicians to loop samples, finger drum, and even play like an oboe. The second video shows off the thing’s sequencer, a combination of features that could make this the perfect electronica accompaniment for your next sit-in. Exactly what else it can do remains to be seen, but we’ll probably go ahead and wait for for the four-button Guitar Hero version.

Continue reading Video: Mysterious Eigenharp offers blinkenlight sitar looks, chilled-out Moby grooves

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Video: Mysterious Eigenharp offers blinkenlight sitar looks, chilled-out Moby grooves originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Next Big Sound: Actionable Intelligence About Music Fans’ Online Activities

Musicians do battle with the Internet in one way or another every day.

Now that many have moved beyond piracy concerns as a primary issue, they are looking at how to increase pageviews, prompt virality, and stimulate interaction. The better part of action is knowledge, and one of the simplest, newest ways for artists to get more knowledge about their fans’ activities online is through the Next Big Sound, a site that tracks a lot more than just pageviews, digging a little deeper to display listens, likes, and adds.

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Right now, Next Big Sound tracks plays, views, fans, comments, and other data for almost half a million artists across major properties, including iTunes, Facebook, and Twitter.

For those who need to grab data for multiple artists (hello, young record label social media intern!), NBS provides daily or weekly emails and/or RSS feeds.

The app doesn’t seem to show stats for specific tracks, so this isn’t the place to go to suss out your new single. And pageviews are only tracked for MySpace (a.k.a. the sad little website where bands go to die). Mentions on Twitter are not tracked, either.

But the greatest sin the NBS team committed was not including YouTube in their tracking of comments, favorites, subscriptions, and page views. Nowadays, YouTube is the new MTV; music fans will very often search for and listen to new or favorite music on that site rather than a music-only site.

Currently, the site is free with no mention of premium options to be released.

The Boulder-based NBS team is part of the TechStars program there. We interviewed them on video about a month ago when they had just decided to completely change their site model.

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UK men pirate more than women; everyone confused over rights

British men are much more willing to pirate online music and video content than women, according to the results of a new survey. UK-based IT services company Telindus has released a report that examines the attitudes of adults in the UK when it comes to music and film rights online, noting that many users are confused over intellectual property rights and believe that once content is posted online, it’s essentially a “free for all.”

According to Telindus’ survey of 2,000 UK adults, a full 50 percent of men who download various media said that they never paid for content online, compared to 38 percent of women. Don’t get too worked up over this battle of the sexes, though—neither number is particularly good for content owners. Three out of five (60 percent, for those keeping track) adults said they didn’t believe musicians should profit from their music and videos being downloaded online, and more than two-thirds said the same of TV and filmmakers.

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