Dave Haynes

I’ve been busy working on a new project with a friend and it’s now ready for launch. MusicPlus1.net is the invite-only network for music industry execs and media professionals to connect with others, exchange ideas, get the latest industry news or find a new job. Think Facebook vs. LinkedIn but for the music industry.

It has been an interesting project to put together and I’m looking forward to seeing where it will go. For invites leave a comment or msg me. If you’re already a member and reading this post then feedback is always welcome too.

SoundCloud have just announced their deployment of the latest release of what is shaping up to be an amazing service. I’m even more excited because they’ve named the release ‘Rupert’ in homage to one of my all time favourite artists Photek aka Rupert Parkes, best know for his slick, intricate and thought-laden drum’n'bass movements. And the same adjectives could quite easily be used when describing Soundcloud. For the uninitiated, Soundcloud is a web service that allows artists and producers to upload their own music and share with their peers. Eric from Soundcloud summed it up when we caught up for a chat on Skype a few months ago:

“SoundCloud is a hangout and platform for musicians and small labels to host, send and distribute their tracks to friends and fans. Our philosophy is, upload your master (or any format/quality you want) to the cloud once, then share&distribute from there. It’s really solving the current mess of yousendit/sendspace/zshare craziness on the one hand and the cumbersomeness of myspace on the other. it’s trying to be much slicker than both…and to do more for the people using it.”

One of the features that makes this service standout for me is the concept of ‘timed’ commenting. Users and listeners can directly comment on the track from within the waveform displayed of the track. So lets say you spot a nice sample within the track you can simply insert your comment at this point. Up until now these tracks were displayed only on the artist’s own page on Soundcloud but with the launch of the latest release users now have the ability to embed these waveforms anywhere on the web (eg. your Myspace, blog, website, forums).

They have also introduced the Soundcloud ‘DropBox’ (nice intercapping guys). The DropBox is embedded on to your blog/website and allows anybody to send you a track in a very ’slick’ way. This is gonna be a killer service for A&R heads and music bloggers.

I’m very excited about the future for Soundcloud. Eric and his team really ‘get it’ and it’s good to see such a high degree of craftsmanship. As a non-artist or producer I’m don’t get the full benefits of the service but I’m eagerly awaiting what else they might have in store and will be spreading the word wherever I can.

Soundcloud is currently still in beta but I have 20 invites for anyone who wants to take a closer look and get their music into the cloud. In the meantime check out a track from Eric Wahlforss himself aka Forss.

Via Joelaz, here’s how to harvest those creative juices…

Image via Wikipedia

It was reported over the weekend that Warner Music Group (WMG) has pulled out of Last.fm. For clarification, that means it has pulled their music from the on-demand streaming service that is just one part of Last.fm’s service. The dispute appears to revolve around the fact that Last.fm are not paying enough money per stream. However, the conspiracy theorist in me wonders whether their decision to pull out and play hardball was made a lot easier by the fact that WMG is an investor in US-based rival Imeem and is about to put in a second round of financing.

I use Last.fm almost everyday and love the service but despite a small amount of disappointment that Warner looks to be taking the first move in a mutually unbeneficial battle my strongest feeling (from a personal user perspective) is one of ‘Warner’s loss, not mine’.

I could be wrong but I don’t think I’ve ever streamed a Warner track on demand from Last.fm and I don’t envisage that I would want to in the near future. What a lot of people miss and what I’ve tried to explain to friends when championing the service is that for me almost 90% of value of Last.fm is the data it allows me to store about the music I’ve played and the music my friends have played. I use that data on a number of different services to broadcast my musical tastes and to help serve me with better recommendations and personalized services based around those tastes.

If I want to stream a track online I’ll either do so on Napster, from my online music locker, or from Songza / HypeMachine / Seeqpod. There’s several on-demand streaming services to choose from and I’m sure we’ll see more emerge in the next year or so, but what makes Last.fm unique and so valuable to me is my data.

Image via Wikipedia

Dubber makes an interesting post over at New Music Strategies on the importance for artists and bands to be listed on Wikipedia. It’s not something that I’d thought of before but there’s definitely a point to be made here. Many sites are now referencing and scraping sources like Wikipedia. They know that the data contained is well structured, easily accessible and would be great to use in their new wbe site / service / app etc. For example, a website like gig-recommender Songkick crawls websites like Wikipedia and music blogs to pick up related artists based on positive or negative associations between the bands. And as someone points out in the comments of Dubber’s aforementioned post I’m sure that for many lazy or time-strapped journalists Wikipedia is often their first and last point of reference.
Let’s not get carried away here, tending to your Wikipedia entry isn’t really gonna make you instantly more successful but is definitely something that needs thinking about. There are a lot of small things that labels and artists can easily do that all make a small amount of differentce. Having worked with labels and artists for many years now, I know that a lot of them aren’t even doing the basics.

Pandora launched a desktop application for its personalised radio service today taking it out of the browser and onto my desktop. It’s built on Adobe AIR the same technology that powers my much loved and used Twitter client - Twhirl

Luckily I have a little workaround to avoid the UK restrictions on the service (which has irritated some people) and I’ve been using it all day and overall I’m quite impressed and is definitely something I’ll continue to use. I love Pandora and it’s great to use when you don’t want the hassle of picking something out to play or you just want something that fits a certain mood. The app has come into some love, some criticism and some mixed reactions, so here’s a quick summary of the pros and cons.

THE PROS

The major advantage is that you don’t have to being running a tab in your browser all day for Pandora. If you’re anything like me then you’re running Firefox and probably have about 4 or 5 different windows open at any one time. It’s nice to free up a bit of room in the browser. This makes a lot of sense and is part of a general future trend that we’ll see towards web applications on the desktop and SSB’s (Site Specific Browser) a concept I first got my head round when looking at Mozilla’s Prism project. It’s nice to be able to have a direct shortcut to run Pandora from my desktop and be able to minimize it to the system tray. This Adobe Air app also adds some nice functionality via a contextual menu that pops up when you right click on the icon that is displayed in your system tray. For example you can pause / resume and view what track is playing.

THE CONS

On the other hand I think more could have been achieved here. The app essentially just looks like Pandora does in a browser window. This is largely due to Pandora’s dilemma with advertisers. Why would advertisers pay for real estate on Pandora if all their users are just passively listening via a minimized app sitting in the system tray? And without advertising Pandora would likely shut down. At least Pandora have the decency to explain this in their post about the new Pandora Desktop Beta.

One big caveat: it’s important to understand that at Pandora we have big licensing and streaming bills to pay and from the beginning we’ve been working hard to figure out that piece of the puzzle. That means that advertising is an integral part of the Pandora experience and in an effort to keep the advertising as unobtrusive as possible we’ve focused on graphical ads rather than audio ads. The one downside to that is that we need lots of pixels to run the ads, so one thing you’ll find with the desktop app is it’s not some tiny little widget. As nice as that would be, it would make it basically impossible for us to cover our costs with advertising.

This is going to be a big issue for all similar music services going forward. If you’re going to offer a smart, sleek and discrete service and you’re not inserting ads into the audio stream then you’re faced with the problem of how to serve up other types of advertising and banners.

In any case it will be interesting to see just how this particular app develops. As Tom, CTO at Pandora explains:

… this is just a start for us — just a baby step. The benefits over the website are in fact pretty modest right now to be sure but we wanted to get it out there both to start getting feedback and to gauge demand.