My book is out in the UK. If you buy it from Amazon.co.uk, you’ll make me happy. If you can add to the reviews for the book, you’ll make me even happier. I believe the book is out imminently, if not already, in the US as well — based on the Amazon.com page, where you […]
Playlists
Last.fm makes personal radio stations easily shareable
I like this. In the new beta version of Last.fm, you can now share different playlists with others via an embedded Flash player, like this: That playlist is my ‘loved tracks’ on Last.fm, but you can also hear all the artists and tracks I’ve tagged as ‘french’ or those any of my other most frequently […]
Soundflavor moves into music recommendation client software
Soundflavor is the latest playlist sharing service to move beyond just their sharing community (see my review) to offer a software download that plugs into iTunes to recommend playlists. The download is called Soundflavor DJ™, and you can download it here. I haven’t been able to try the software yet as it’s only available for […]
Playlist services: Mixlister review and FIQL re-vamp
A couple of updates about playlist services. Cloudbrain contacted me last month to let me know about about Mixlister, their new playlist sharing service. This comes at a time when GoFish has withdrawn from playlist services, FIQL and MyStrands are enhancing their offerings, and some others (e.g. Upto11) appear to have remained unchanged for the […]
Full versions of articles now available
Last year I posted teasers here about articles I had published on Word of Mouth Marketing and Playlisting and on Remix Culture (the articles were featured in Five Eight and The Spectator respectively). Their value as ‘exclusives’ has expired, so I’ve published the full version of the Word of Mouth piece on my Net, Blogs […]
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 […]
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, […]
Yahoo: music and authenticity
There have been a couple of interesting postings in the last week on the Yahoo! Music Blog — almost as interesting for their candid, open style as for their content. First, Ian C Rogers outlines the new features of the Yahoo! Music Engine. Ian’s blog post seems to take the place of a corporate press […]