#music (595 links)
- Said the Gramophone: BEST SONGS OF 2011 saidthegramophone.com
- The Amen break: Just a sample | The Economist economist.com
- Best ambient albums of all times scaruffi.com
I'd argue with a few of these (Transglobal Underground? Throbbing Pouch? Deep Forest?) but lots of goodness elsewhere in the list.
"Until now, the argument in favor of streaming had broadly been that on-demand services fill the same sort of function as radio: a discovery system that leads to purchasing. But the NPD and NARM numbers suggest that, for many people at least, the opposite is true — having music streamed on demand made them less likely to purchase." It's getting harder to stomach Spotify and other streaming services with any hat on.
- Library and Local Files - Spotify spotify.com
- The Loudness Wars: Is Music's Noisy Arms Race Over? - Mike Barthel - Entertainment - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
I want graphs, dammit.
- The Wheels Of Steel: An Ode To Turntables (in HTML) schillmania.com
Pretty flipping amazing.
anytwopoints: Forever Sound.... me new thing. Synth pulse ish. Hmm? http://soundcloud.com/foreversound
- wahwah.fm | the music around you wahwah.fm
An upcoming music service, based on your smartphone. With wahwah.fm, you listen to your music and broadcast it at the same time.
- A Paper Record Player : Kelli Anderson kellianderson.com
- ODD FUTURE WOLF GANG KILL THEM ALL - AUSTRALIA • Small Night In smallnightin.com
Forum post with 'entire discography with download links and artwork'. Missing some newer releases, though.
That's quite a lot.
- RFID Record Player | Flickr - Photo Sharing! flickr.com
Rather fine indeed.
- Desert discs: how mobile phones are at the root of Saharan music | Music | guardian.co.uk guardian.co.uk
However eclectic your music collection, it would still need to go some way to match the sheer range of tracks shared by villagers swapping songs via Bluetooth and Sim card in the Sahara. Bollywood classics, Algerian Rai, Kuduro, French ballads – this is just a sample grab of the kind of sounds doing the rounds there, many of which can be found on Music from Saharan Cellphones, a mixtape put together by Portland-based blogger Christopher Kirkley.
Unexpected. "In Sweden, both Sony and UMG are making more money from Spotify than from any other retailer – online or offline."
- Linked Data at the Guardian | Open Platform | guardian.co.uk guardian.co.uk
"In the MusicBrainz/Wikipedia case, there is a deeper semantic option. DBTune.org provide awesome music datasets, among which is a MusicBrainz SPARQL service that contains relations identifying DBpedia entities, and consequently Wikipedia data, with MusicBrainz entities. A little bit of painful SPARQL, and your application is suitably enriched. And you are a happy developer because you have confidence in the join." Hawt. Hard.
- New Music Strategies: Myspace – now with glitter newmusicstrategies.com
That message again, just so we’re clear – now every frickin’ band on the planet is making money for the major record labels. [...] The fact remains that in order to be fixed, the whole Myspace architecture has to be rebuilt from scratch, and they’re not going to do that. [...] My expectations were very low, and they have not been raised but confirmed. My account is closed. Tom is not my friend.
What should other artists do? Well, I'm not really bothered. The sad truth is that almost everything almost every artist tries to earn money will fail. This has nothing to do with the internet, of course. Consider the remarkable statement from Alanis Morissette's attorney at the Future of Music Conference: 97% of the artists signed to a major label before Napster earned $600 or less a year from it. And these were the lucky lotto winners, the tiny fraction of 1% who made it to a record deal. Almost every artist who sets out to earn a living from art won't get there (for me, it took 19 years before I could afford to quit my day job), whether or not they give away their work, sign to a label, or stick it through every letterbox in Zone 1.
- Musicity : Welcome london.musicity.info
a programme of curated music that sits at the intersection of sound, architecture and experience
- Sound Archive bl.uk
UK independent record label people - please consider sending yr releases to the British Library Sound Archive -
- Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch hypermammut.sourceforge.net
- MuckWork - we do your dirty work muckwork.com
From Derek Sivers: "assistants to do your uncreative dirty work, so you can do what only you can do".
- EPM Podcast #11 - Kone-R epm-music.com
Techno mix from and interview with Russ. "I think with Uncharted it's a lot to do with the people. I refuse to work with anyone who isn't on my wavelength. I do this because I love it so why would I want to spend time arguing with someone or being suspicious of them or they of me? It's a very honest and down-to-earth bunch of people, they are all a pleasure to know and to work with and of course they're all extremely talented." Yes.
- Kone-R In the Mix for Flomotion | Postbocks.com postbocks.com
Kone-R in the mix for Nick Luscombe's Flomotion radio:
- Kempa.com » Vinyl Data kempa.com
There were a handful of records released in the late 70′s and early 80′s that contained computer programs as part of the audio. This is totally insane, and totally great.
The idea is similar to the notion of Free Software, and like with freeware, the word “free”refers to freedom, not price. Specifically, Free Music means that any individual has the freedom of copying, distributing, and modifying music for personal, noncommercial purposes. Free Music does not mean that record labels and musicians cannot charge for records, tapes, CDs, or files.
A mobile web app that connects music to places. Point your mobile browser to m.spotisquare.com. You can just use Spotisquare to check-in on Foursquare, but it also connects Foursquare venues with Spotify playlists. When you find a venue that has a Spotify playlist, you can listen to it in Spotify, and also add your own songs to it.
- Bandcamp API « Bandcamp Tech bandcamptech.wordpress.com
With version 1 of the API you can query artists’ discographies and get the information you need to write a custom embedded audio player, with metadata such as track credits and lyrics.
- Spotify - the next generation - Spotify spotify.com
New Spotify with a number of interesting new features.
- The Cynical Musician » What the “new music experts” don’t tell you. thecynicalmusician.com
- How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online? | Information Is Beautiful informationisbeautiful.net
How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online?
- RootMusic - BandPages on Facebook rootmusic.com
- Bandcamp for Drummers | Bandcamp bandcamp.com
- Why records DO all sound the same | Word Magazine wordmagazine.co.uk
"There's a little-watched video on Maroon Five's YouTube channel which documents the torturous, tedious process of crafting an instantly forgettable mainstream radio hit. It's fourteen minutes of elegantly dishevelled chaps sitting in leather sofas, playing $15,000 vintage guitars next to $200,000 studio consoles, staring at notepads and endlessly discussing how little they like the track (called Makes Me Wonder), and how it doesn't have a chorus. Even edited down, the tedium is mind-boggling as they play the same lame riff over and over and over again. At one point, singer Adam Levine says: "I'm sick of trying to engineer songs to be hits." But that's exactly he proceeds to do."
In mid-December 2009 I set out to ask a few of my favorite record labels (including Ad Noiseam, Herb, Hidden Shoal, Highpoint Lowlife and n5MD) some general questions about their operation and uncovered responses that exceeded expectations. Find out some of the inner-workings of these imprints, how they view demo's, release material and relate to their roster of musical and visual talent.
- The Loudness War Analyzed « Music Machinery musicmachinery.com
I’m interested in looking at the loudness for the recordings of a number of artists to see how wide-spread this loudness war really is. To do this I used the Echo Nest remix API and a bit of Python to collect and plot loudness for a set of recordings. I did two experiments. First I looked at the loudness for music by some of my favorite or well known artists. Then I looked at loudness over a large collection of music.
- In Search of the Click Track labs.echonest.com
Use this application to look at tempo plots for any song to see which bands have a machine controlling the heartbeat of the band. Type in the name of an artist and/or track and get a click plot of the track. If a machine is setting the beat for the song, the click plot will show only small deviations from the average tempo. A flat line means a machine is setting the beat.
- The Echo Nest : The Musical Brain developer.echonest.com
Lots of rather exciting music analysis APIs.
- Holodeckapp holodeckapp.com
Create your own site with music from SoundCloud, gigs from Songkick or Last.fm, news/posts from Tumblr.
- Rock Band Network for Dummies? - MTT - Music Think Tank musicthinktank.com
"Authoring your first song requires a deep skill set and 60-80 hours of focused effort." Oh. Well. In that case, maybe not.
- BBC News - Video games recognised by Ivor Novello awards news.bbc.co.uk
Writing music for games also requires a number of specialist skills compared with conventional film scoring, such as non-linear and multi-layered composition.
- Turn Me Up! | Bringing Dynamics Back To Music turnmeup.org
A non-profit music industry organization campaigning to give artists back the choice to release more dynamic records.