…the web scene will remain a niche culture because there is no big money to be made here’. Even if a musician becomes famous thanks to virtual label, a large record label will rush in and offer a juicy contract…

Si basa sui contenuti audio protetti da licenze Creative Commons ed è un semplice ma funzionale sequencer che permette a chiunque di creare musica in pochi minuti, assemblando campionamenti e loops o registrando i suoni in proprio.

Drawing from an early-adopter survey conducted through Gartner, report co-authors Derek Slater, a Harvard senior and Berkman student fellow, and Mike McGuire, a Gartner Research Director, find that consumer-to-consumer recommendation tools, like playlists, enable consumers to actively present their individual tastes to each other and are becoming increasingly common. According to survey results, nearly 20 percent of online music listeners reported listening to music via playlists at least five days a week and more than 25 percent of online music listeners listened to music via playlists 1-4 days a week.

Early-adopters’ current use of recommendation tools drives Slater and McGuire to predict that by 2010 twenty-five percent of online music store transactions will be driven directly from consumer-to-consumer taste-sharing applications, such as playlist publishing and ranking tools either built into online music stores or external sites.

Liberamente scaricabile qui.

Apple have announced that they passed 200 million downloads in European iTunes Music Stores. This is a pretty impressive number and actually just 3 million below the 203 million that Jupiter had internally forecasted they would reach by August. However, despite its impressive scale the 200 million indicates that Apple have actually been selling at a relatively flat rate of a little over 11 million a month since December 2005, when they had hit 110 million. And, more pertinently, the rate of growth is lower than the over 13 million monthly downloads they had between September and December 2005. There is of course a lot of seasonality involved there, so not too much should be read into the decline. However the key take away here is that despite Apple being the dominant European digital music store, growth is solid rather than astronomic. Which partially justifies Jupiter’s conservative stance on the prospects of digital music: we don’t think that the CD is about to disappear under a wave of downloading. Also, on a global basis, the ratio between the installed base of iPods and total iTunes tracks downloaded is now a fifth lower than at the start of 2005. Which illustrates the hierarchy of importance between the iPod and the digital music market.

Non è certo una novità il fatto che in media gli ipod contengano solo poche tracce acquistate dall’ iTunes Music Store.

Un paio di note, la prima piuttosto negativa, visto che parla di pesanti limitazioni alla capacità di sharing, la seconda in parte positiva, visto che prevede licenze flessibili ed in evoluzione.

But unlike the early P2P space, this sharing will have limitations. Early speculation is that this community-sharing feature would be limited to 10 users in the same hot spot at a time. Virgin Records executive VP Jeff Kempler, while not confirming any specific details of the pending service, says a degree of “controlled sharing” is necessary, as is a willingness to experiment with new business models.
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“We’re going to have to think about evolving licensing schemes that have some flexibility in them,” he says. “There’s going to be a balancing of the benefits of discovery and remuneration of paid content acquisition.”

The hallmark characteristics of the New Medium are:

Each is migrating towards whatever mix of content most precisely matches her own uniquely individual needs and interests. This is why more than one billion consumers have migrated into the New Medium; it allows them more precise satisfaction of their needs and interests. They didn’t migrate into the New Medium to read, see, or hear a Mass Medium package of information online — information they were receiving from traditional Mass Medium vehicles in more readily usable forms.
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Within the next ten years, most New Medium consumers will be receiving information from each’s choice of myriad broadcasters and publishers, perhaps too many for any individual consumer to name or even realize. (Early adopters of tag-driven XML, advanced RSS, and ‘peer-to-peer’ technologies have already begun making such use). Because these many consumers will be sharing content choices and control with all publisher and broadcasters, the New Medium serves not just a ‘one-to-one’ or ‘one-to-many’ medium but a ‘many-to-many’ one.

Comunque, non viviamo in un mondo ideale, quindi ben vengano certi tentativi di migliorare le tecnologie esistenti e renderle maggiormente compatibili: su Visionblog l’intervista a Giuseppe Facchetti, chief technology officer di Sun Italia.

Su eBay è infatti presente un’asta per l’utilizzo commerciale esclusivo, per un solo anno, del pezzo in questione.

Dubito che questa sia la soluzione definitiva per un corretto sfruttamento dei diritti commerciali in un network di produzione, semplicemente perché ha poco senso concedere i diritti in esclusiva.
Sono comunque da accogliere favorevolmente sperimentazioni di questo tipo; ma rimangono ancora molte tappe (e molte lobby) prima di arrivare ad un sistema efficiente di gestione del diritto d’autore, idealmente basato su un sistema informatico automatizzato.

Paul Lamere è un ricercatore della Sun Microsystems, a capo del progetto Search Inside The Music.

The goal of the ‘Search Inside the Music’ project is to explore new methods of categorizing, indexing and organizing large collections of music to allow more effective ways of searching through these collections. This project will extend music search to search ‘inside the music’, that is, to search not just titles, keywords and artists, but to search music by music content and context. We want to help people find and organize their music based on all of of the properties of the music including such properties such as acoustic similarity, mood, lyrics, musical theme, melody, tempo, rhythm, and instrumentation.

We are currently focusing on two areas: using acoustic similarity to help people find music that ’sounds similar’ to music that they already like, and using social data to recommend and organize music based upon the listening habits of people with similar musical tastes.

Qualcosa di simile a Pandora.

Come sempre, si cerca di sfruttare le caratteristiche sociali del network per far emergere autonomamente i gusti degli utenti. E’ impossibile, per una macchina, capire e giudicare una qualunque espressione artistica. Al contrario, il software è capace di amplificare esponenzialmente le nostre capacità di gestione dei dati, indicizzando e catalogando librerie musicali sempre più grandi.