music

The simplest way to share you music via Twitter?

August 5, 2009 By Dan Thornton

In the increasingly complicated and over-populated world of Twitter applications, sometimes it’s nice to go back to something simple.

Take swg.fm for example. To share an mp3, you insert your username, the name of the artist, the songname, and click send.

And you’re then redirected to your Twitter profile with basic (editable) information for tweeting your song – and anyone clicking on the link is taken to the appropriate video (for example from Youtube) or mp3.

Here’s my test message, challenging it with the relatively obscure Varsity Drag.

And here’s my attempt to go for the ever-popular Freebird!

The secret appears to be that actually the combination of search and url shortener could really apply to anything, and music just looks cooler when you get a video appear.

Of utmost importance for businesses to remember

April 22, 2009 By Dan Thornton

There’s a great article by Umair Haque on ‘Why the war against file-sharing is unwinnable‘, which was collected in a post on Music Industry Manifesto.

And one quote particularly stood out for me as being an essential element of business:

‘No business has a right to profit, sell, or even to produce. All are privileges that society grants businesses.’

That’s why I feel discussions about newspapers, music, advertising etc sometimes miss the point. It doesn’t matter how strongly a publisher might feel newspapers are entitled to survive, or whether a prominent musician feels file sharing and digital music is hurting his future income.

It’s down to whether society, in a viable number, feel a business model has the right to profit.

In closing, Umair notes:

’21st century economics are radically decentralized. Wars against networks are unwinnable — when orthodox organizations are the ones fighting them. Only networks (or markets and communities, if you’re a long-time reader) can fight other networks.

Want a better music/media/etc. “business model”? The understanding that hierarchies are dominated by networks is the key — and the failure to understand it is exactly why the media industry is so deeply in decay.’

Blipster client will boost Blip.fm – great music microblogging

April 19, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I’ve been a longtime fan of Blip.fm for much of my musical needs – I’ve decribed it as ‘crowd sourcing John Peel‘ because it provides a great way to discover new music, compared to Last.fm, Pandora etc, which tend to operate in practice more as players of music you already like with the very occasional new song you might enjoy.

But the biggest hindrance with Blip can be going back to the website endlessly to keep entering new songs and skipping others – particularly when I’m working. Hence why I’m not sharing as much as I used to (My profile is here).

And then I discovered Blipster, via DownloadSquad.

It’s an unofficial Adobe Air client created by Leo Lobato (also on Blip.fm and Twitter). So it works for PC and Mac, assuming you’ve got Adobe Air running – and if you’re using clients for microblogging, it’s worthwhile having the discussion with your IT department if you need to!

Blipster allows you to search, listen, add contacts etc, just as you would on the site, but without necessitating tab swapping etc.

Just the thing for helping me make more use of Blip.fm on a relaxing Sunday…

The enduring power of a good mash-up…

March 17, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I dashed out in my car at lunchtime to run some errands, and while I was rushing around, this famous song was being played on the radio (it’s not the official video due to all the Youtube, PRS, music industry and other licensing restrictions.

But the lyrics forming in my head, and the video being pictured in my mind as I drove along was actually:

There’s probably a lot you could imply about original creations, payment mechanisms, and music industry copyrights etc…

I’ll just sit here chuckling and thinking about the quote on a T-shirt I bought from the National Gallery (is it just me that thinks their website is shocking?) recently – ‘Bad artists copy, Good artists steal’ – Picaso.

Internet discovery still amazes me…

March 8, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Having been active online for over a decade, I’m happy to say that I’m still pleasantly amazed by some of the things I’m able to find online.

For instance, due to the seemingly endless repeats of Scrubs on the E4 TV channel, and the fact it’s the only bearable TV show at 7pm as my son is finally going to bed, I’ve had a song from one episode stuck in my head.

I’m old enough to remember a time when that snapshot of a song would have played in my head for days, weeks or years – unless one of my real life friends happened to know what it was, or a magazine tc happened to mention it.

Image by graciepoo on Flickr (CC Licence)

Instead, a google search for ‘Scrubs, Brendan Fraser, Song’ led to to the exact tune: ‘Hold on Hope’ by Guided by Voices.

Then, thanks to Last.fm’s ‘similar artists’, I was able to listen to solo work by members of the band, and within a couple of degrees of seperation, end up at the interesting (and brilliantly-named) Psycho and the Birds side project.

Then a bit of background reading on Guided by Voices on Wikipedia (slightly more detail than Last.fm entries tend to have).

I love the internet for the things it allows me to do, not what it is.

And in a funny coincidence, my random library on Last.fm just threw up an old Lemonheads track –

After an interview in a magazine, I discovered The Lemonheads were on Taang Records, and would buy anything I found on that label without ever hearing it – leading to good stuff like The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and some absolutely terrible purchases.

Having always preferred the writing/singing of Ben Deily, who left before The Lemonheads hit mainstream success, I was idly googling his name and trying to find out about what happened after he left.

I ended up finding Ben Deily‘s website, discovering his new band, Varsity Drag, realising they were on tour in Europe, asking if if was possible to interview Ben for the online magazine I was doing at the time (see a PDF of the gig review/interview here), buying a copy of the album on CD, and a CD of a previous project I’d missed, and a T-shirt from the gig.

And it’s safe to say I’m guaranteed to be at any future European gigs/buying future CDs – particularly as my other half confessed to being rather smitten with Ben after her first pop-punk gig. And all from an imported CD from 1988 (now signed), that I bought on the strength of hearing songs by an entirely different band lineup.

To close the rambling love letter to music with some sort of point:

Somewhere in there, there’s a business model for musicians/the music industry. The internet allowed me to find a musician who wouldn’t be stocked in local music stores, read his website and blog, find out tour dates, arrange an interview, publicise his music to more people, buy physical copies as much as mementoes as to play, buy a T-shirt, and sign myself up to buy future releases, T-shirts, and see gigs whenever I can.