For years it’s been common for people posting to music-related email lists and forums to sign-off with a note saying “now playing” (abbreviated to “np”) followed by the title of the album they had on while composing the message. It’s a way of adding a personal touch, disclosing a bit more of your musical identity, […]
Music and Multimedia
Update on playlist services
In preparing the White Bicycles playlist yesterday, I revisited a subset of the playlist services that I reviewed last year and in January. Here are some notes on what’s changed, plus some notes on different contexts for searching for tracks.
Visualisation of music collections
The picture on the left is an annotated version of a possible visualisation of someone’s music collection, as proposed and described in a research paper available from Musicstrands. The segments in the circle represent different genres of music within the collection; the distance of each track (represented by dots) from the centre shows how old […]
Copyright infringement in shared playlists: don’t blame the carrier?
When I created a playlist on Webjay last year, I noted the varying legal statuses of the recordings I included — from public domain to creative commons to promotional ‘giveaway’ — including one I deleted when I knew it was not authorised and had read Webjay’s legal guidance. This Reuters article seems aimed at stirring […]
Music recommendation data spread about
Having written last month about Pandora apparently opening up, and having drawn comparisons with Last.fm, two music services have licensed some of the Last.fm data to add recommendations to their sites. Download store and magazine site TuneTribe.com is perhaps the less interesting example. Their home page now has a search facility “powered by Last.fm”. Provided […]
Musicube sharing of BBC listening profiles
Through Radio 1, the BBC has introduced a Flash interface to its on-demand ‘listen again’ feature, which enables listeners both to personalise the user interface they use to access radio programmes, and to share this interface with their friends. My personal ‘musicube’ is shown below. The elements I got to specify are the genres included […]
Something fishy about MusicStrands recommendations
When I reviewed MusicStrands at the end of last year, I noted something odd about the recommendations that the system gave me. I started entering a playlist that I’d already entered on several other similar services (including Art of the Mix, Mixmatcher, FIQL and GoFish). When I was half-way through entering the playlist on MusicStrands, […]
Is Pandora opening up?
There’s an interesting press release about Pandora and Friendster hooking up together to bring a social dimension to Pandora’s ‘personal radio stations’. (The press release currently appears on Friendster’s site, but not on Pandora’s — not sure if there’s any significance in that.) Bringing Friendster and Pandora together takes the experience to another level: Friendster […]
Radio feature on Audio Branding
BBC Radio 4 broadcast a feature on audio branding today, based around interviews with three of the speakers — Dan Jackson, Martyn Ware and Alasdair Scott — at the event I chaired last week. For the next week (until 9 March) you can hear the feature via this page, then it will move to this […]
Is it the music or the player that’s free?
Eleven months ago, when writing about Magnatune’s TunePlug USB Drive that comes pre-loaded with music, I asked the question, “is it possible that we’ll start to see promotional products that bundle player and music at prices little more than you would normally pay for the music alone?” Now that Dixons is offering a 512MB MP3 […]