At last weekend’s Amsterdam Music Hack Day the Echno Nest guys announced their new and extended API. The song API looks like it could be a lot of fun, allowing not only searches for songs by title/artist, but also similarity, loudness, tempo and a range of other attributes.
According to leaked documents obtained by The Times, the UK government is planning a green (discussion/consultation) paper proposing strong action against “illegal file-sharing.” According to the leaked documents they want ISPs to take the primary responsibility for monitoring usage and to ban any of their users who continually share copyrighted materials without permission. Whatever your position on copyright enforcement in a digital age, this is a ludicrous idea. Logistically such proposals will be almost impossible to enforce effectively. Setting aside the issue that many of us encrypt as much as possible of the data going out from our computers, it will effectively require ISPs to monitor all traffic going through their networks in a far more intrusive way than they currently do. ...
The past few years have seen the English-language Ruby book market explode. Before the phenomenal success of Rails it was perfectly possible to own every available title (and not use much storage space), but now that would be quite a challenge and lead to considerable redundancy. Having worked my way through quite a few Rails books of late, reading Practical Ruby Projects—a Ruby book that doesn’t even mention web frameworks—was both a pleasant diversion and a highly illuminating experience. ...
Discussion about the future of the music industry abounds. Whether it’s advice for artists or labels, discussions of the release of new technologies, or predictions for the future, there’s a lot of it out there. It’s good to get a range of perspectives, but until now it’s been hard to know where to get started if you want to delve into that world. Today I’m announcing the launch of Future Music Talk, a site pulling together blog entries from a range of thinkers and practitioners. For those familiar with such things it’s a variant of the Planet-style sites so popular in the web development community (it’s powered by Planet Venus). ...
Whether or not you should build your own social networking site and/or make use of sites like facebook is currently a hot topic within the not-for-profit web developer/consultant world. The launch of sites like Amnesty International’s “unsubscribed”, which bears many hallmarks of a social networking site, combined with growing attention for facebook campaigns and tools like SuperBadger bring the options and potential into clear focus. Elizabeth Dunn’s post last month " social networks, walled gardens, and decision trees" makes a compelling argument that non-profits should be focussing on these questions now even if they’re not key for their current audience: sooner or later they will be and you don’t want to be playing catchup. ...
The content on this blog has been a bit more diverse of late and while I tend to take the approach that if I enjoy some of the content on a blog I might as well keep an eye on all of their content to get a more rounded view of the writer, I recognise that some readers may not be interested in tracking everything. As a result I’ve added separate feeds for my two key consulting foci. So if you’re just here for musings on music on the web, you might want to grab this feed and if you’re looking for thinking on the web and other technology for charities, campaigns and other non-profits then you’ll want this one. The main feed remains at its existing location. ...
There have been rumours upon rumours that facebook was going to launch something for musicians soon, and that they were also readying a new advertising system. Today it turned out that not only were they doing both, but both are part of the same strategy. Announced by Leah Perlman on the Facebook blog, facebook’s new ads system breaks down into two parts: “Brands” can now create Facebook Pages, which combine some of the functionality of a personal profile with that of a group. For “brand” you can also read company, artist, campaign, or nearly anything else that might want to advertise. “Social Ads” allow Facebook to target ads at people based on their friends’ activities. So if I were to make a certain purchase, mark myself a fan of a band, or rent a given DVD, and facebook knows about it, facebook could tell my friends about that and sell them a related product. David Emery was quick to write up some thoughts on how this development could impact and help bands. While the immediate option to create a clear presence for something people might be “passionate about” is clearly significant, he’s absolutely right that it’s the “Social Ads” that have the potential to truly change the social advertising game as they leverage data more completely than has been done before. The intrusive possibility of them is potentially quite scary and as clear leaders in the field, we can only hope that facebook are making privacy central to this new approach. ...
I usually try not to post twice in a day, particularly not on the same topic (there is more techie content coming soon, honest) but this has the potential to be big news: the Danish branch of the International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers “has seriously proposed allowing unrestricted downloads of music over peer-to-peer networks, in exchange for a modest monthly fee to be charged to all ISP users.” Andy Oram notes: ...
There are many good reasons to make sure that your web presence follows the advertising maxim “if you’re not everywhere, you’re nowhere.” For one thing, it makes it very hard for people to miss you, but increasingly it also means that as web sites become more and more interconnected, your profile will rise still higher. The latest example of interconnectedness comes as last.fm announce they’re going to be hooking in youtube videos alongside their own video service. So all those musicians who have videos over at youtube will now have them represented at last.fm too, making their profiles all the richer and more compelling. ...
The rumours of MySpace launching a platform or API have been floating for quite some time, but now as reported on the O’Reilly Radar they have been confirmed. Over the next two months they are going to increase third-party access to their site. First, they are going to highlight the thousands of widgets that have been on their site for years now. This should be released in the next couple of weeks. I am assuming that it will go beyond the FIM’s Spring Widget Gallery. Second, they are going to offer an API for applications to all developers. However, these applications are going to be sandboxed initially and 1-2 million users will have access to them. If the users deem the applications safe and useful they’ll be available to all users. Developers will be able to advertise in their applications. ...