Music

Guy Holmes seems to have a weird take on selling records. In a piece at the Guardian about his label Gut’s experiment with releasing a single on a hybrid vinyl/CD disc he comments: The music business desperately, desperately needs to invent new formats; the CD is an antique, it’s 20 years old. With little context available it’s hard to tell why, exactly, he thinks the industry needs a new format, but my guess is he’s been looking at the figures for the bubble the music industry experienced while consumers switched from cassette and LP to CD and wants to experience them again. ...

John Gruber comments in his usual incisive way on the claims that Universal Music are looking to start their own subscription service called Total Music. For a variety of reasons, not only the technical and financial ones that John details, the plan seems like the flailing about we’ve become used to hearing from an industry staring into an abyss and refusing to acknowledge the numerous bridges all around. The original Business Week piece contains an amusing quote from Irving Azoff, who says: ...

A little blogging inertia seems to have set in over the past few months and it seems a bit late to comment on Radiohead’s approach to releasing their new album. Instead, now that the dust is settling, it seems a good time to connect it up with some commentary my friend Steve has been offering over on his blog. Steve has been doing a lot of thinking about things like the emotional connections people make with music and what the change of experience from queuing outside a record shop to freely downloading means for how people value music something that, as an independent musician, is of quite immediate importance to him. When we have a constant flow of free or nearly-free new music washing over us, it suffers from some of the same attention problem that many of us have faced since RSS allowed us to theoretically track many hundreds of web sites but we didn’t have the tools to work out how to prioritise that and what could simply be left behind. ...

One of the numerous side projects that’s been keeping me from blogging (alongside working full time and preparing for a round-the-world trip and an international move) made a quiet launch yesterday. You can find it over at shop.georgiamusicstore.com. The site is a component of a wider online presence for the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, providing e-commerce facilities for their gift shop. It went through numerous iterations as they refined how they wanted to manage stock, and now takes stock updates uploaded from CSV files for easy integration with their other back-office systems. Payments are handled through the excellent Active Merchant which makes the payment side of e-commerce development a breeze. Search come from ferret, and a little reassurance is provided by the wonderful exception_notification. ...

iConcertCal is an iTunes plugin that scans your library and produces a list of upcoming concerts that you may be interested in. It attempts to detect your city from your IP address, but that can be overridden, and the calendar itself is provided as an iTunes visualiser. The iConcertCal installer has been sitting on my desktop for a few days now, awaiting a chance to be used, so it was finally time to give it a whirl. ...

On Friday I presented a session at Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Music on indications of where the music industry might be headed. The session went well, with a reasonable turnout and some great questions, and seems to have fostered considerable further discussion. I covered the current state of the industry, subscription/download services, recommendation systems, and a few related concepts. You can find a PDF of my slides, along with a number of links at this location. ...