Today Apple released the iPhone OS update v.2.2. My favorite addition is the ability to download podcasts over the air. This seemed like a natural to me but has taken awhile to introduce. The other big component of the release is the addition of Google Street View. This gives you ability to view a panoramic image of a location you’ve searched in Google maps. A nice update indeed.
Well this is just great!! Recently I wrote about Pandora’s entry into the iPhone app market. Pandora lets you create “radio stations” of your favorite music by picking an artist and then Pandora finds other music that it thinks you will like. From there you can customize the results until you have crafted the perfect station for you.
Now it sounds like Pandora may throw in the towel, much to the consternation of its users, me included. The reason being is the fees that they are now being required to pay in order to play music online.
Last year, the Copyright Royalty Board handed down a decision that internet radio stations would have to pay a performance fee to artists each time a song is played. This is something that traditional radio currently isn’t required to do. This fee coupled with standard licensing fees means that Pandora will pay 70% of its revenue toward these requirements. All this is supposedly being done on behalf of the musicians who put so much hard work into their music. I have no doubt that musicians work hard for their money. I only doubt the sincerity of those imposing these fees.
Pandora currently has ads on its website that are part of the site design and change periodically when you input feedback on music choices. This is an unobtrusive solution to displaying the ads and are often times well designed. Pandora’s founder Tim Westergren has even suggested running audio ads periodically while listening. I don’t have a problem with this either.
A TechCrunch article over the weekend suggests that maybe Pandora should be the sacrificial lamb in this ongoing battle with the RIAA and the internet. In the article, Mike Arrington says that perhaps sacrificing Pandora will show the RIAA and the artists how wrong their position has been. I definitely agree that there is greediness although I don’t know how much of it comes from the artists. To me this just seems like an area that is being picked on out of fear.
Pandora is unlike anything else out there. Short of buying every song you might want to listen to, the ability to customize your listening is an absolute dream. The problem is that Pandora and other internet radio is a great place to find new music to which you might not otherwise be exposed. As a matter of fact, I have purchased quite a bit of music that I was exposed to through internet radio. To kill off Pandora and others who play music online is not the way to go.
Our only hope is that the powers-that-be are so stupid that they will eventually cast themselves into the pit of irrelevance.
If you’re not, you should be using Pandora. Pandora is internet radio from the Music Genome Project. The Project set out to identify attributes of songs, hundreds of them, that form the song’s gene. The result is an offering of virtually limitless music based on your preferences.
I have been enjoying Pandora through my browser for some time now. I listen as I work to songs that I like as if I had my own radio station. You pick an artist that you want and Pandora will immediately begin playing a song from that artist. From that point Pandora plays songs from other artists based on the research of the Project that it thinks you will like. You can give the song a thumbs up that will then be used to further tailor music to your taste or alternatively give it a thumbs down and that song will not be played again. You can also choose to do nothing and the song will continue in the rotation of that particular “station”. Another option is to ask that any given song not be played for a month if you get tired of it but don’t want to banish it forever.
This power has now hit the iPhone thanks to the opening of Apple’s App Store. The App Store along with the addition of v.2.0 of the iPhone OS gives iPhone users the ability to install third-party apps on the phone. The Pandora app just happens to be free (and free of ads at the moment—which is at least part of what supports it on the desktop) although most require a modest fee. All your stations you listen to in the browser version appear on the phone once you login.
I don’t think they could have done a better job implementing Pandora on the iPhone and everyone else seems to agree. Web stats show that Pandora is seeing a new user every 2 seconds. Not bad at all.
While perusing my list of people I follow on Twitter today, I came across a tweet from Alex Lindsay of the Pixel Corps. about the new annotation feature on YouTube videos. Here’s what it says…
Video Annotations are a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos! Use them to:
* Add background information about the video.
* Create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene)
* Link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video
* All of the above!You control what the annotations say, where they appear on the video, and when they appear and disappear.
Indeed, this is a great feature that has numerous possibilities for storytelling, how-to videos, and general interactivity. Below is an example:
Hit the link for a glimpse of the Psystar Mac clone. The somewhat mysterious company is selling a generic computer hacked to run Mac OS X. The systems apparently have no ability to run Software Update which means it stays as is. I suspect these machines are a way for those curious about OS X to try them out on the cheap and then possibly wipe it and install their OS of choice.
Hey there, I’m back. My apologies for falling off the grid there for a while. There has been lots going on and I’m trying to get back in a groove.
I wanted to talk about the newest addition to the sidebar of the site. There is a new icon for LinkedIn, the business oriented social networking site. You may recall my tirade on social networks not long ago. So have I changed my tune? Not really. I have contemplated what LinkedIn has to offer and want to try to make an experiment out of it.
For the most part, social networks seem to be more about entertainment than anything else and that’s fine. For me, I want to see what is possible with a site like LinkedIn and how it can help grow what I’m doing here. I see it as a perfect opportunity to use such a service to it’s potential. Taking something relatively small and making more out of it.
So, if you interested in adding to your own business circle, hit me up on LinkedIn.
Interesting article over at the New York Times about book publishers doing away with DRM on their audiobooks. Out of all the digital distribution methods, they found that the audiobooks WITHOUT DRM were the ones NOT getting pirated. Funny that CD audiobooks and DRM-decoded audiobooks were the greater source of piracy. Who knows what the numbers are, but I have to wonder if the audience for audiobooks are ones to engage in piracy in the first place.
Naturally, Apple and their dominance in online music is wrongly characterized as a hazard in the direction that book publishers might take. The reason music labels went with Apple in the first place is that they had a system that worked. Up to that point, purchasing music online was an abysmal experience. They forced Apple to use DRM and are now using it against them to bolster the position of other stores such as Amazon’s.
Nevertheless, I’m glad that book publishers are seeing the light when it comes to DRM.
Today I spotted an article on TechCrunch about a CNET story on the future of the video sharing site Revver. It seems that Revver is having a rough time of it. Revver was the first video sharing site to offer revenue share with its members. According to TechCrunch, Revver has lost over half its staff in the last 18 months and is trying to sell itself at a “bargain” price. Rough times indeed.
You may have noticed that I have a few videos that are hosted with Revver showcasing some of my background videos. The idea of video sharing sites is that you can have your videos hosted with the service and take part in their community. The upside is that you can post your uploaded videos on your own site while using their bandwidth and not killing your own. Revver was started at a time when video sharing had not taken off the way it has today. What I liked about them was the revenue sharing (although I never had any delusions that it would bring me great wealth) and most of all, their seeming friendliness to commercial use. Secondly, Revver and another personal favorite, Viddler have smaller and more focused communities than say YouTube.
This brings me to the dilemma. What happens in the event that Revver goes the way of the dodo? What will likely happen is that those videos will no longer be available. This could mean a potentially large hole in the content on one’s site and it could happen to any of the services available out there. YouTube stands the best chance of sticking around for a long time. As an alternative, you of course have the option of serving up your own videos and run the risk of huge bandwidth usage should your video become popular. While potentially expensive, this is your best option of protecting your content from becoming extinct because of the failure of a company.
When your content is of the utmost importance, be aware of the pitfalls that all this great technology brings us. Have a plan to protect what’s worth protecting.
Today I checked out a new podcast from Alex Lindsay and Scott Bourne of the Pixel Corps and Podango Productions respectively. It’s called This Week in Photography and I think it will be a great addition to my collection of podcasts. It will cover news and tips for all thing photography and will include audio, screencast, and video episodes. If you’re into photography, give it gander.
The online music game sure isn’t boring. Over the weekend the news was all about Amazon’s mp3 store going global this year. “This year” was about as specific as it got. Amazon’s store offers DRM free tracks that can be played on any device that supports mp3 and said tracks for for 89 cents a pop. All four major music labels offer tracks for the store.
This of course begs the question, what will iTunes do to combat this? Surely they can’t go on selling DRM’d tracks for a 10 cent premium over Amazon (EMI is the exception on iTunes—DRM free).For Mac users it’s especially perplexing. The deal is that people generally don’t notice DRM until it gets in their way. As an example, when using any app in the iLife suite you can use tracks purchased on iTunes. Try to use any of Apple’s corresponding pro apps and you get a big fat NO to using iTunes music. The thinking being that pro users would be using these for commercial purposes where one would need a license.
The generally held belief is that Apple has no choice but to operate in the manner that they do (Yet people still wonder what they will do about it.). That is, the labels won’t allow them to sell music without DRM. It doesn’t make sense unless you know the history. Back when the iTunes store began, there was no good alternative to legal online music. iTunes kind of saved the day by making a solution that was easy to use and offered the labels a deal they could live with in terms of copyright protection. Now that Apple is the standard in legal online music, the labels don’t like it. They want to change their deals but Apple holds firm on the simplicity of their pricing structure, 99 cents/track. If it’s true Apple is beholden to their contracts with the labels and that the terms state there must be DRM, what can they do? If the sticking point is flexible pricing in exchange for no DRM, Apple would likely be forced to give in at that point. Somehow I don’t think it’s that easy. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the music labels can be a little vindictive.
The other big news that broke this morning was Qtrax. An article from thisislondon.co.uk (latter article linked) this morning talked about Qtrax and a monumental agreement struck with all four major labels to offer free music to the masses. There is some DRM attached just for keeping track of how many times a song is downloaded. Which is bull BTW. The LITTLE catch seems to be that you can’t take it with you. As far as I could tell, you would have to listen to the music from within Qtrax’s own browser type application on your computer. You knew it had to be too good to be true, didn’t you? Well, it is on more than one level. Apparently, at least three of the labels are saying that there is no such agreement with Qtrax. NO! Really?
While the idea is intriguing, it’s not a solution to replace what we already have. I see Qtrax as a possible challenger to the likes of Pandora or Last.fm, not iTunes or even Amazon.
I’m not sure that DRM free, slightly cheaper tracks are enough to pull me away from the ease of use of iTunes. I don’t think I’m alone in this. I can do all the things I need to do with my music. People cry about DRM but how many really run into its roadblocks? With the ubiquity of the iPod and iTunes, they’ll be a tough nut to crack. No matter what solutions come around, this ought to be interesting.
