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For the ones like me who appreciate the sound difference between a flat 128kbps music file (AAC, mp3, mp4, wmv or other formats) and a 320kbps quality of a normal CD, the news this week that EMI Music launches DRM-free superior sound quality downloads across its entire digital repertoire is great news, not only because major record companies will (finally!) be offering downloadable music files without DRM encoding - the stuff which makes it nearly impossible to move purchased songs from one computer or music player or mobile phone to another. It’s extra nice because major players in the music industry will start to offer songs that will sound a lot better.

As a passionate music lover, the listening experience of for example Petroushka by Igor Stravinsky on a good quality sound system is not comparable with the same music crapped into a 128kbps mp3 or mp4 file, whatever the soundsystem may be you’re going to play that file on. I remember lively the first time I heard Petroushka on vinyl performed by the legendary Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra on a good sound system blew me completely away. With digital music surrounding us everyday, you’d almost forget about the quality of a listening experience - just try to mix some mp3 songs with a vinyl recording and you’ll see what I hear
But any good music deserves a great quality listening experience whether it’s Philip Glass, Devotchka or the Cold War Kids, I’m listening to while writing this. So what does this weeks’ anouncement means for consumers and the business?

EMI Group’s announcement of February 14 - revenues for the financial year ending 31 March 2007 expected to decline by around 15% and Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Music might have accelerated the need for change but Eric Nicoli, CEO of the EMI Group is now taking the lead in what we digital music consumers have been waiting for for quite a while now. In only a couple of weeks time, EMI Music announced a multi-product content partnership with last.fm, the deal with Apple’s iTunes this week, and also announced “The Good, The Bad & The Queen” to become the first EMI album to be made available for download in a new DRM-free, high quality MP3 format. The first major record label listening to its’ consumers?

At CTIA, Nicoli listed a 3-step test that all consumer products should be able to pass, and that he thought was lacking in the wireless world (source GigaOM):

1. Give them something that is good value for money
2. Make something that is functional and works on practical level
3. Make something that is simple to use and easy to understand

Something the operators should have figured out by now but it’s where Apple is seeing the opportunity with the iPhone (to be released in June in US). Now is the Apple’s anouncement of Higher Quality DRM-Free Music from EMI Available on iTunes another leap ahead for Silicon Valley’s “rebel with a cause” Steve Jobs? The recent anouncement of Microsoft’s Mobile DRM system ‘PlayReady‘ - that will allow the use of commercial content on multiple different devices for a single fee comes basically way too late. Steve sets the tone, once again since he entered the music business.

Regular M-Trends readers know my early rants on this subject, for newbies read About digital music distribution to family targets and Mobile Music For Families. No thanks! both written in 2005. Knowing this, one can imagine I was really excited to try out my first DRM FREE download. Also I have been stopping to buy songs on iTunes lately since I just could not play them on my Nokia Nseries phones and wanted to make sure the DRM free and higher quality downloads were not only working as a multi-service or platform but also multi-device, you know the real thing we have been looking for. I downloaded a 320kbps mp3 file straight from The Good, The Bad & The Queen website, beamed from my laptop to our home PC and to my Nokia N80i and it works, hurray!

And where do we leave the independent record labels? EMI and Apple knew that progressive independant labels were already offering DRM free higher quality songs on their portal and that’s exactly where new opportunities lie for the smaller labels such as Sonar Kollektiv. I’m buying regularely music from their online shop since I cannot find it elsewhere and it has a lot of music of my taste. Smaller labels can build around their brand image and create a different added value to their audience.

Anyway, this decision is going to dramatically change the digital music landscape and may hopefully encourage other major labels to abandon DRM. This is not killing business, it is changing the way we do business. Consumers will be the winners. Free at last!

This morning I received a box from a friend with some new released cd’s of my favourite artists. Pretty old skool this may seem, and it definately is to us people used to watch trends daily surrounded by the latest mobile tech. But this present brought me a particular pleasure I haven’t felt for a while - think music discovery coming from a friend who knows your personal taste better than yourself

I don’t know about your climate but here in Barcelona summer has started since a while and the package happened to contain my coming summertune that made my day: “Throw It All Away” from Zero 7. The tune has everything a summertune should have: instantly regognisable, infectuous fresh up-beat tempo bringing you in an immediate summer feeling mood. This tune has the voice of Sia Furler’s (picture) to make it perfect.

I beamed it immediately to my mobile memory stick to hit the streets with it and go and enjoy the newly discovered tune and share this nice music with some friends - good music just initiates to be shared, isn’t it?

While on my way, I started thinking of it as my mobile summertune, since I’m going to carry the song with me and listen to it while on the move and share it with my friends in different places on different devices. This reminded me I needed to check how we can enjoy this kind of pleasures in a mobile music distribution environment.

I checked the Mobile Jukebox from T-Mobile this time (see image above) and ra-ra-ra (Flemish expression to express surprise). Just watch the little icons… unlimited play (got it?), 10 x burn and 8 x copy to mobile… Now that’s nicely packaged but frankly is this a solution to put numbers on the copies and put the accent to “unlimited play”?

I think I’m going to buy the vinyl of “The Garden” (whole album), share the price with my friends if needed and make as many copies as we like to copy to our devices, and I think this is what smart youngsters are doing these days and use their mobile to sms eachother the place of the party!

BTW: the whole story above of beaming to my mobile was just imagined… In real I got restricted by DRM!

But for the fans, do check the video, it’s great!

* Picture of Zero 7’s Sia Furler © Bilboard

It has been a while since I wrote on mobile music applications; not the ones as we know of them now - simple OTA downloads of ring-, real- and mp3 tones, but the ones that are just coming to the mobile market and are using new, innovative technology to create different business models for the mobile music scene. In a few years from here, buying music will be a complete digital process and the mobile is going to play a crucial part in this. For the readers missing this point, feel free to browse my archives, category mobile music.

One of the companies I discovered last year was Musicstrands. At first that time, I thought another social music service like Last.fm and Pandora, build on collaborative filtering and recommendation technologies to make you discover new music. An sich, to me, the way to go if you’re considering digital music distribution for the coming years. But MusicStrands is different in the way they choose resolutely for Mobile. I got really interested in what they do when I saw their Music Guru demo-presentation during 3GSM, a conceptual prototype of a next generation 3G/PC music player, developed jointly by Vodafone Group R&D, MusicStrands and Adobe. I wrote about that in my 3GSM Afterwrap.

Last weeks’ article from Carlo in Business 2.0 “Your Wireless Future” mentioned them again so I went to visit Musicstrands‘ website for an update. I must admit, I liked the progress and the new stuff I could do with it on my cell phone.

You can download the MyStrands plugin for iTunes, join the community, create your own playlists (or upload existing ones), tag your music and share it with others and receive recommendations form others. A lot of new stuff has been added lately like Playlist builder, tagcloud, m-charts, world map. Check it out!

Check also their MusicStrands Labs and discover their experiments with Music Discovery through Web 2.0 Mashups:

“With these collections of mashups, you are able to discover multi-media content related to your favourite artist/s. Just write down an artist name and click Go. We will fetch the artist biography from Wikipedia, photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube, posts from Technorati, personal goals from 43things, and events from Upcoming. You can then use recommended artists from MusicStrands to continue the experience and enjoy more multi-media content for those suggested artists.”

Way to go!

Discover MyStrands Mobile, it works on Symbian, Windows Mobile, Smartphones, Java phones, and soon, BREW. You can download the Windows or Java client versions here or visit mobile.musicstrands.com directly from your mobile. Here’s what you get once you created your profile. I leave the discovery process for you to discover

MuscStrands created OpenStrands Public API, a set of web services for developers interested in adding MusicStrands functionality to their non-commercial applications, the obligatory smart move for every self-respecting software development company.

I tried out probably everything I could during a weekend and got all excited about the progress, specifically in the mobile field, everything run smoothly. What MusicStrands offers the mobile industry is desktop, website, and mobile discovery solutions, that work synchronised, and work independently.

After having tried all the goodies, I wondered how MusicStrands positions itself against the ones as last.fm and Pandora including iTunes - they recommend tunes nowadays too, so I asked the guys behind MusicStrands and got in touch with Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria, Vice President, Communication at Musicstrands, he was very helpful giving feedback on my curiosity.

On the question how MusicStrands differs from VisualRadio he answered: “Visual Radio is not a personalized service. MusicStrands builds the technology to provide personalized mobile radios, based on the specific tastes of individuals and groups (plus other functionalities). So I would say these are two different services.”

Asking Gabriel about the key differences with services like last.fm and Pandora, he says:

“last-fm — offers weekly artist recommendations, based on the entire profile of a user; - last.fm does not understand the context of users, most of us have eclectic tastes in music (we may like both Mozart and AC/DC, but never listen to them together) and listen to specific artists or songs at specific moments. Last.fm fails to understand this, and contextual recommendations are critical for the mobile industry (recommend me what I want to listen to NOW, although I like AC/DC, I may not feel like listening to them now). MusicStrands recommends songs, artists and albums. Last.fm recommends artists. And they can only do that weekly. We do that instantly, whenever a recommendation is needed.

Pandora offers currently 400,000 songs and we offer today 6Million and are growing rapidly thanks to our Indy project. Pandora is a group of experts defining similarity; at MusicStrands, it is the community that decides that 2 songs are similar. Their approach is not scalable (because it requires “expert” intervention), MusicStrands’ technology has been designed to scale, to be able to recommend millions of different items to millions of different individuals.”

More on his vision of MusicStrands, as opposed to other technologies:

“It’s all about discovering music and rediscovering your own music library and manage your content.

The idea is to provide contextual music recommendations. Additionally, MusicStrands wants not just to push music, but to help people pull, decide what they may like, and therefore we provide people with tools to dig into the long tail, allowing people to guide the recommender towards the music that each of us might enjoy most. If you don’t like what you get, you can keep digging into the music universe. (by playing with “My recommendations” at the website). Additionally, any independent artist can upload their music, or information about their music, for free to MusicStrands and get discovered!

Many people have told us that their problem is not to find new music, but to manage and rediscover all the music that they already have. And that is why we have the playlist builder, as a way to help people dig into their own music library, as an easy way to fill their iPods.”

In relation if MusicStrands should consider iTunes as a ‘mobile competitor’, Gabriel was pretty straightforward:

“Our technology is scalable, reflects tastes of people, understands context, mobile+online+desktop synchronized solutions work together and independently, and is designed to facilitate the creation of mobile communities around music. I believe social recommendation and discovery technologies will become critical differentiators for online and mobile services. With regard to iTunes mobile presence, there is in fact a lot of room for improvement by building more intelligent mp3 players, with and without connectivity.”

“I truly believe we are approaching a uniquely wonderful age to be a music fan”, I believe so too!

One last thing: the first thing I did - and I normally do - when opening iTunes (now with MyStrands plugin) was playing one of my favourite podcasts in iTunes. This functionality currently doesn’t exist with MusciStrands but I think it would be great to recognise the tunes from a radio podcast and getrecommendations and find out immediately about the tunes playing. I’m sure I would buy immediately some of the weekly tunes played at the Basic Soul podcasts from Simon Harrisson.

BTW: have you noticed that a lot of the great tunes these days are available ONLY on vinyl?

… but that’s for another post!

Creative Commons weblog anounced the Crammed Discs Remix Contest, a project idea I helped incepting for Crammed Discs early last year during our MuLiMob project collaboration.

The Creative Commons remix contest is organised in conjunction with Crammed Discs over at the Creative Commons community remix site, ccMixter. Crammed artists Cibelle, DJ Dolores, and Apollo Nove — some of Brazil’s most innovative contemporary musicians — are offering new sounds online under a Creative Commons BY-NC license, so people throughout the world can legally use them in remixes, mash-ups, and new compositions. Nine winning remixes will appear on a Crammed/ccMixter EP project to be sold online through digital music stores.

Participating is easy: read the official rules of the contest. (Also available for download as a PDF), download the audio sources, make your remix and upload your mix to ccMixter under a CC BY-NC license between April 26, 2006 and May 24, 2006.

Go to the Crammed Discs Remix Contest pages for all details and separated audio elements downloads of Cibelle’s “Noite de Carnaval,” DJ Dolores’s “Sanidade,” and Apollo Nove’s “Yage Cameras”.

I was particulary interested in the artists view on remixing content. Check this out from the Crammed Discs Remix Contest pages:

“The whole process of making music has changed. The very concept of composition now extends to the creation of sounds and textures. I’m very curious to see how other people will use and manipulate my sounds and how they will use them as tools to create new music.” — Cibelle

“I like the idea of giving people the opportunity to hear what I hear when I’m producing — a separate candomblé percussion track or some painstakingly constructed soundscape. If mixing is part of the compositional process, it’s only natural that I try sharing the compositional responsibilities with anyone interested in taking them on.” — Apollo Nove

“This is what every intelligent musician should do. The idea is to share and allow one’s work to be cut up, reinvented and — who knows — transformed into something even better than the original. This isn’t about generosity; it’s about inventing new ways of creating musical products that go well beyond the world of physical carriers like vinyl and CDs.” — DJ Dolores

The nine winning remixes will appear on a Crammed/ccMixter remix compilation, to be sold online through digital music stores. What are your waiting for? Your chance to engage in a creative dialogue with Crammed Discs artists Cibelle, DJ Dolores, and Apollo Nove and get your mix of their work on theCrammed/ccMixter remix EP!

Great work from Mia Garlick from Creative Commons and Marc Hollander over at Crammed Discs and their respective teams!

I do hope by the time the Crammed/ccMixter remix EP comes out I can download the tracks entirely to my mobile, makes me think on Creative Commons licenses for mobile and the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) Initiative, I wonder what happened to that initiative?

Tags: creative commons crammed discs cc mixter cibelle dj dolores apollo nove remix

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