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Posts Tagged ‘Song Lyrics’

Social Music Player TuneWiki Raises Funding From Motorola Ventures, Others

Social music player TuneWiki has raised an undisclosed amount of additional funding in a Series B round led by Motorola Ventures and joined by Intellect Capital Ventures, HillsVen Capital, Novel TMT and prior investor Benchmark Israel.

TuneWiki says it will use the investment to expand its product offerings for mobile platforms and the Web. The company will continue to focus on the use of song lyrics in new ways that connect music fans with new products, including an upcoming mobile game.

TuneWiki boasts apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Nokia handsets.

This is the second funding announcement for Motorola’s venture arm in a week – on Feb 2 the investor announced that it had injected extra capital into mobile barcode company Scanbuy.

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iTunes LP broken for indie record labels?

Filed under: iTunes, Music

There’s word from an indie record-label that iTunes LPs are not for the indies. Introduced at Apple’s “It’s Only Rock and Roll” event in September, the iTunes LP format adds bigger than a matchbook album art, song lyrics, video clips, and other extra content to albums sold through the iTunes store.

Brian McKinney of Chicago-based label Chocolate Lab Records saw some promise in the new format and started looking into the idea of producing for iTunes LPs himself. But the truly small labels may have a hard time getting in. McKinney spoke to the digital distribution manager at his label’s distributor, who reportedly told him that Apple charges a $10,000 production fee for iTunes LPs. $10,000 may be less than the heads of Warner Music Group, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and EMI spend on breakfast, but could be cost prohibitive for the little label that could (if it had $10,000 handy for each of its acts).

But it’s not just the cost that prohibits the little labels. According to McKinney, it’s also Apple. McKinney says his dude in distribution was told “that LPs aren’t being offered to indies and that there are only about 12 LPs being offered right now.”

“Foul, foul, filth and foul,” cries Cult of Mac’s Pete Mortensen. Like a financial analyst moving a stock from “buy” to “sell,” Mortensen says iTunes LP has gone from “the first digital album good enough to criticize,” to “the first major content misstep in the history of the iTunes Store.” Assuming that Chocolate Lab’s distributor info is on the up-and-up, Mortensen thinks iTunes LP is “less a new format for music than it is a new form of paid advertising on the iTunes store.”

Continue reading iTunes LP broken for indie record labels?

TUAWiTunes LP broken for indie record labels? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Translation Party: Tapping Into Google Translate’s Untold Creative Genius

Anyone who has ever used Google’s automated translation service knows that it’s not exactly perfect — generally you’ll wind up with words that are close approximations of what you started with, but Google inevitably decides to change the meaning of at least a few sentences, just for kicks. Today, there’s a new site that taps into Google Translate’s under-appreciated creativity and magnifies it to the point of greatness : Translation Party!.

The site is incredibly simple: you enter any English phrase you can think of, and it uses Google’s automated translator to convert it into Japanese. And then it translates it back into English. And back into Japanese. At each step along the way, the words you began with gradually take shape to form something entirely different and (hopefully) awesome. The retranslations continue until you reach what the site calls ‘equilibrium’, when the English and Japanese words translate back and forth into exactly the same thing. Fortunately, it usually takes at least a few steps for your words to reach equilibrium, and the resulting sentences are often hilarious.

There really isn’t much else to do on the site, but it’s definitely a great way to kill some time. Movie quotes and song lyrics seems to work best. You can also check out a list of some of the results other people are generating by clicking the “crash other parties” at the bottom of the page.

Enjoy it. And October 5 power, to please.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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