Posts Tagged ‘Downloading Music’

Prince says Internet is Over

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

For some time now, Prince has liked to do things differently. You may recall when he changed his name to a symbol, and then back again. In 2007, he banned YouTube, eBay and Pirate Bay for their users sharing his music and threatened lawsuits. He won’t even play nice with eMusic or iTunes. He doesn’t even have an official website!

He recently gave an interview (of sorts) to the British publication the Daily Mirror, where he’ll be releasing his CD for free. That’s right, his new album 20TEN will be inserted into the Daily Mirror for free in the UK and in other publications throughout Europe. He may or may not let Warner Bros. records distribute the album in the U.S. – he might still be angry with them.

He told the Daily Mirror’s Peter Willis, “The Internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it, and then they get angry when they can’t get it.”

He isn’t a fan of digital gadgets either. “All these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

“The internet’s like MTV,” the star said to the Mirror’s correspondent. “At one time, MTV was hip, and suddenly it became outdated.” This quote was responded to in a Mashable.com article with the question:

“Suddenly,” a.k.a. around the time the Internet started taking off, perhaps?

While MTV continues to evolve and incorporate the use of the internet (see MTV.com) Prince’s record sales have declined. See an assessment on Prince.org and see if you think his hatred of delivering and promoting his music with internet speed have anything to do with it!

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Music and New Media Frontier

Friday, June 4th, 2010

If you haven’t noticed, the music industry has changed. It’s challenging to go to a store and find an artist’s album to buy on CD anymore. Because of that, music industry managers like the guys who rep Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber are looking for ways to make the most of new-new media. 

Troy Carter is Lady Gaga’s manager and Scooter Braun manages Justin Bieber. Together, they presented a panel “Success Strategies for Musicians in the Digital Era,” at the recent TechCrunch Disrupt Conference.  What qualifies them? Both know the power of social media to build a following for their artists. On Twitter, Lady Gaga has 4.3 million followers, Bieber has 2.8 million. On YouTube, combined viewing of Lady Gaga’s top three videos just passed the one billion views mark, and Bieber’s VEVO channel shows 380 million views. 

They’re hoping to strike up some partnerships with the up-and-coming platforms to truly redefine the music industry. Braun said backstage after the panel,  “I went out and flew out to San Francisco and spent two weeks just meeting with new, young entrepreneurs out there because I want to know who’s next and [I] realized that the power that our artists have created for themselves on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube are very, very valuable for launching these new platforms.” TechCrunch reported that Braun sees it as a symbiotic relationship in which the artist brings visibility to a company and gains a new way to engage fans.

Check out the video interview on TechCrunch’s site, and see if you can come up with the next big thing to deliver music to the world with internet speed!

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Control the Radio with Internet Speed

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Remember the old days when you had to call in using a phone to make a request to your favorite radio station?  Even with newer ways to connect to your favorite frequency, how can you be sure your little meager request will mean something to them? 

If your favorite radio station happens to be Live 105 in San Francisco, you’ll know that your expressed preference for a song means something.  They just announced that starting this Monday, every weekday from 8 pm to midnight, Live 105 will be using Jelli to set their playlists every weekday. 

Jelli.net is a user-controlled online streaming service – TechCruch describes it as “sort of a Digg for streaming music, or a group-controlled Pandora.” In case you don’t get the references:

Digg (http://www.digg.com) is a user driven social content website. Everything on Digg is user-submitted. After you submit content, other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives enough Diggs, it’s promoted to the front page.

Pandora (http://www.pandora.com/)lets you type in the name of an artist or song to get started with your own customizable internet radio station. Although stations start with a single artist or song, users can add additional songs and artists to tune their stations to their liking. Pandora also offers recommendations to help you generate personalized streaming radio for your computer, mobile phone or home entertainment system.

Jelli uses internet crowdsourcing and group empowerment to lobby and affect change over songs played at different radio stations. Users vote songs up or down to create and alter the playlist, but that’s not all! They also get a limited number of Rockets and Bombs to move music more definitively up and down the list. And we hear the chat area gets lively!  It’s radio, but created with internet speed!

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The Small Carbon Footprint of Digital Music

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

A new study has found that the carbon footprint of downloading music is substantially less than buying compact discs.  But of course, there are many factors to consider. 

Green Inc., a New York Times blog about energy, the environment and the bottom line, offers a graph that shows the largest carbon footprint is created when CDs are sold in retail stores—taking into account the production of CD and the case, transportation to a retail store and sometimes a warehouse too that use energy themselves. The next largest footprint is created when someone orders a CD online and has it sent by air to their home, followed closely by ground shipping, which of course includes the additional shipping packaging. 

It would take less that half of the energy that retail sales take if someone were to download the music and then burn it onto a CD themselves. But if they were to only download it, the size of the carbon footprint is reduced by about 80% from retail. 

There are some variables that weren’t included in the study, but should be considered by those music lovers who want to be eco-friendly.  If a customer drives to the store, the carbon impace is greater than if he or she walks. Walking would create a footprint almost equal to downloading and burning your own CD. 

Other considerations include large file sizes, which can require extra energy for downloading, depending on your download speed. And then there’s the carbon impact involved with CD players and digital music devices like mp3 players to consider.  Ultimately, each of us needs to weigh the pros and cons of making the most of internet speed   and our personal carbon footprint for ourselves.

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Free and Legal Music Downloads Part Three

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

In a search for “free legal music downloads” it was difficult finding anything truly user-friendly and attractive. The first result was Spiral Frog.com, which linked to MyMojo.com and didn’t offer much in the way of explanation. EMusic.com was the second result, but upon going to the site, you can see the free music is incentive to take a paid membership.  The third result was a site offering reviews on sites to download music legally. Their number one editor’s choice was MP3 Download Net, followed by Rhapsody, Flickr Music, Napster and Music Platinum.

Napster explains “You may play any particular song up to three (3) times, after which you will need to subscribe to Napster or purchase the song to play it in full again. In addition, you may only play an aggregate of twenty-five Streams in any given month. To buy a song or subscribe, you need to download our player software.”

Last.fm offers internet radio. Their FAQ tells us, “Last.fm is a music service that lets you discover new music you like, based on the music you already listen to. You can either listen to all sorts of radio stations – on the website or with our Last.fm Scrobbler (desktop player) – or to previews in either full-length or as 30 second samples….”  Although they caution that in certain countries the radio feature is a subscriber service only.

Of course, perhaps the best way to obtain music without the fear of fines is to pay for them on sites like iTunes. Many of the above and previously mentioned services offer free trials, so it may be worth it to find the service that works best for your musical needs to deliver your favorite tunes with internet speed.

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Downloading Music via P2P

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

With the recent judgment against a woman who shared 24 songs on the Kazaa peer-to-peer (or P2P) network to the tune of $1.92 million, we thought it was time to look a little closer at music downloading. 

In October of 2007, Jammie Thomas was ordered to pay the record industry a mere $222,000, which comes to $9,250 per song shared. At the time, many said it was excessive.

But now, after a retrial, the price has gone up to $80,000 per song. She says getting their money would be like “squeezing blood from a turnip,” but an article from Ars Technica (Latin for “the art of technology”) tells us about her options from here.

We suppose the point is to make an example of her to stop people from so willingly sharing music freely. 

She used Kazaa, a peer-to-peer file sharing application commonly used to exchange MP3 music files over the Internet, though it can also be used to exchange other file types, such as videos, applications, and documents. Peer-to-peer allows internet users to transfer files directly, rather than through the use of a website or directory. So even though Jammie only shared 24 songs, any number of people could have downloaded them to their computers for free, making the cost of a 99-cent song rise exponentially, which may be why Kazaa has been the target of many copyright-related lawsuits.

Other P2P networks include Bit Torrent, Gnutella, and Napster, and since none of them go through official channels sanctioned by the music industry, there is no way to properly pay the companies for their products—which they don’t like.

In future posts, we’ll look at other ways to utilize internet speed for music downloading in ways that are less dangerous.

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