David Emery Online

We’re going to see big brand after big brand trying their hand at music over the next few years I think, until people realise that putting out singles doesn’t sell more soda.

That’s the problem here, of course – not the potential conflict between music and ‘selling out’ which has never been a real issue (they’ve never had a problem getting musicians to pimp Pepsi, have they?).

Absolutely brilliant:

Very nifty javascript parallax effect – I can’t wait to use this on something…

In the US, the next two weeks are traditionally the slowest of the year. Plenty of vacations, half-day Fridays, casual Mondays, martini Tuesdays… you get the idea.

What if you and your team went against type? What if you spend the two weeks while your competition (and the forces for the status quo) are snoozing—and turn it into a completed project?

Or, how about you don’t do that and take some time off, which is far more important then yet another project and exactly what I’m doing right now.

The number one rule for BitTorrent users is: Share. If you don’t share – upload files to others – your download speeds will reduce dramatically. This means that it could take hours instead of minutes to download an album from your favorite BitTorrent site. What Playlouder will offer is a highly degraded version of BitTorrent, and subscribers will not be able to get the great download speeds they are so accustomed to.

I wondered the exact same thing when I first heard of Playlouder’s plans. They offer a ‘legal p2p’ model, where for a flat fee to your ISP you get to download as much music of p2p sites as you can, legally. The catch is it won’t actually work – the p2p traffic is restricted to within their closed network, so for any sharing to work the original uploader must be on the closed network as well, which is extremely unlikely.

Legal p2p actually manages to be no p2p, in this case – a fairly novel way of removing the illegal downloading problem…

Peter Saville, who was responsible for the cover art on albums by New Order and Roxy Music, has declared the artistic medium dead.

Saville blamed technological advances, such as iPods, for the decline in popularity of cover art.

I noticed the other day that with the way I have iTunes configured – using coverflow view – I actually get album artwork larger then a CD, so I hardly think the medium is dying. Also, I think the possibilities of things like individual artwork for each track and websites-as-album-booklets (like minotaurshock.com) mean there’s scope for a lot more innovation now in this medium.

Today I’d like to talk a little about copyright, Flickr, fair use and thumbnails.

On the XL Recordings website that we launched back in March we pull in news, videos and photos from a variety of sources in a tumblelog-style. Most of these are from sources we run or control like band websites, myspaces, youtube profiles or from sites we have good relationships with. The only exception of that is the photos we pull in from Flickr, which mostly come in from the main Flickr groups for each artist (here’s Radiohead’s one, for example).

When we designed the site I was very wary about making some kind of semi-official spam-blog – a spam-blog being a blog packed with advertising that passes off someone else’s content as their own, normally using an RSS feed. So, to that end we made sure that it was really obvious where the content was coming from and added prominent links back to the original sources. In the case of photos, we only use 75×75 pixel thumbnail, each of which links back to the original photo on Flickr. I thought we had stuck a good balance between respecting the authors of the original content and finding the most interesting content relating to our bands.

However, a group of photographers on Flickr (mostly) think otherwise:

Concert Photography / Discuss / xlrecordings.com – have a read, it’s quite interesting the range of different viewpoints that come through.

Now, I’m not one to piss people off on the internet (at least when it comes to things like this) so I’ve made it so we now don’t pull from any public groups – instead we’re going to set up additional groups for each band that state clearly that any photos posted to that group will also go on the XL site (example). It seems like a reasonable compromise, although it’s a slight shame as obviously we’re not going to have so many photos on the site.

This is such a grey area, I think – from a legal point of view less so, as any fair use exemptions that their are don’t really think in terms of photo thumbnails and links back to the original site. However, I think what we were doing was entirely reasonable; it would have been completely different if we were using full size photos, not linking back to Flickr or trying to pass them off as our own. I’d be really interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this.

Really interesting stuff – I particularly like the object removal demo (fast forward to 5:58 to see it):

Let’s start with the bad news. Beginning today, Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number.

Twitter needs a business model, stat.

In fact, I’m surprised they didn’t take this opportunity to roll out a similar ‘pro’ scheme to Flickr, where you can get SMS updates and maybe no API rate limits for $29.99/year. I think for twitter it could really work, especially considering that – due to the high API usage amongst the userbase – traditional banner/adwords based advertising models may well not work that well. It still mystifies me that they haven’t tried that yet though – surely it wouldn’t hurt?

We’ve just launched a new site for Minotaur Shock which has a bit of a different twist – he’s rated and priced each track differently, based on criteria like ‘Musical Difficulty’ and ‘Computer Crash rating’:

The record company that releases my music, whilst steeped in history and home to a lot of my favourite records, spunks a lot of money on lavish felt-lined gilded box-sets made by nimble-fingered faerie folk who live in the woods. This means that artistes such as Minotaur Shock who will only ever sell a limited amount of records (because discerning listeners like yourselves are few and far between), do not command the same kind of influence over the Powers That Be and their kingdom of jewel-case goblins.

Consequently, this release, the third album proper I have created as Minotaur Shock, is no longer an album in the physical sense, it is content. Not content as in satisfied, but content as in digital bits and binary bobs. Now, you may think that I am less than enthusiastic about this, but you’d be mistaken. After initially being a bit miffed (I’m being honest; we’re all friends here), I started to think about the nature of an album, and how the way people listen and use it is changing.

The site also features some beautiful illustrations for each track, and utterly gratuitous slidey javascript stuff – well worth a look.