New Music Strategies

Web and New Media: Sharing and streaming video

2006-03-08T15:57:00.000Z

See Web and New Media: Sharing and streaming video for the full post.

Webcasting rates

2005-12-15T16:52:00.000Z

It's American, but still interesting reading...
Summary of the Determination of the Librarian of Congress on Rates and Terms for Webcasting and Ephemeral Recordings
Also: http://www.copyright.gov/carp/

Web and New Media: Web video and FLV encoders

2005-12-08T15:47:00.000Z

Web and New Media: Web video and FLV encoders

The death of music radio?

2005-12-05T20:23:00.000Z

Headline results from a recent piece of commercial research raise some interesting questions about whether the listenership for music radio is likely to disappear. The press release is at www.bridgeratings.com - the background at http://www-cntv.usc.edu/friends_alumni/MMS091505.pdf

Quoting the Bridge ratings press release:

85% of the total sample would choose their MP3 player over traditional radio as their preferred option for music.

* There is a clear generational difference between 12-17 and 18-24 year olds.

* For music listening, the Internet is preferred over traditional radio.

* MP3 use far out-paces radio use.

When given a choice between listening to music over the Internet or traditional radio stations, 54% prefer the Internet while 30% prefer radio.

This preference is more pronounced among 18-24 year olds.

Whether it is bad news for music radio, I'm not so sure.

Firstly, what the figures do reveal is that the internet is not being used mainly to access programming from over-the-air music stations. This is more than just a new form of distribution.

Secondly, while those interviewed liked MP3 players and the form of music choice it gives, they also clearly like finding new music to put on the players, and don't find radio always offers them this. However, the commentary suggests that those interviewed liked the ideas of Pod-casting.

Whether this just reflects the respondents wanting to show how trendy and techno-savvy they were, or whether this actually represented listening practices is a key question in my mind. Download charts still tend to reflect radio playlists to a large degree, even if the differences are in themselves very interesting.

What the headline figures don't tell us (and I don't know if this question was ever asked, because I can't get at the full research) is why there is a preference for online music sources, over over-the-air radio (or its internet simulcast).

Could it be that music radio is still caught in a Hotelling nightmare of middle market safe playlists, when the web offers vast quantity and the opportunity to get individualised listening? Perhaps music radio is under threat because its not currently about music, and that's what a proportion of potential listeners want.

Surely the danger for music radio is that not enough people in radio are thinking fast enough? The internet turns the logic of radio economics on its head, and the web offers a degree of accessibility, new commercial models, and interactivity that should be exciting us, not making us fearful.

On the other hand when I surf for music (although I think the idea of surfing is now redundant) I constantly see opportunities for the application of music radio programming skills, and the ability of a good presenter to communicate.

So some of the basic practices of music radio have a new more interesting home if only radio people understood the way the new forms of distribution work as a political economy and a culture.

I've met lots of professional radio people who understand that they provide content, not broadcasts. But unless they understand that that does not mean just distributing current radio output on line (with a few add-ons, and the odd Pod-cast) then the future of music will not be nurtured by radio people.

Tim Wall
Chair, Radio Studies Network; Radio Scholar, UCE in Birmingham;
Director, Online Music Enterprise project

Web and New Media: TV shows on the web in America

2005-11-18T11:50:00.000Z

Web and New Media: TV shows on the web in America

Web and New Media: A resource for those wanting to learn to stream

2005-11-17T16:19:00.000Z

Web and New Media: A resource for those wanting to learn to stream

You may find this useful...

2005-11-14T10:54:00.000Z

I recently set up a blog for the web and new media part of the department - you'll find tips on web design, new media theory, and anything else remotely useful to those interested in, well, web and new media...

Easy Audio Blogging for a Virtual Radio Station

2005-07-20T09:46:00.000+01:00

MediaOnline: Easy Audio Blogging for a Virtual Radio Station

Next iTunes to support podcasts

2005-05-27T09:52:00.000+01:00

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4575075.stm:

Next iTunes to support podcasts

+ Apple says the next version of its iTunes music management program
will give people a way to find and subscribe to podcasts, MP3 audio files online.

Podcasts are downloadable "radio shows" that can be created and listened to by anyone with the right equipment.

Listeners subscribe to shows for free, the latest of which is sent automatically to digital music players.

Free programs have been built to do this already, but now Apple says iTunes will have this function built in.

"With the next version of iTunes, due within 60 days, there will now be an easy way for everyone to find and subscribe to podcasts", Apple said in a statement.

Apple chief Steve Jobs was demonstrating the functionality at a technology conference in the US.

The demo showed how the program lets people access, organise and sync- up podcasts to any digital music player.

Including this functionality into iTunes opens up the possibility of selling podcasts, just like music.

Podcasts have grown quickly in popularity with many of the millions of portable digital music player owners who want to listen to a range of audio, not just music.
But they have also become popular because anyone with a microphone, computer, software and a net connection, can produce one themselves.

Their rising popularity is challenging conventional radio's broadcasting and business model. As a result, many radio stations globally are making their shows available as podcasts too - in downloadable MP3 format.

The BBC recently made 20 radio broadcasts available as podcasts, and several radio stations in the US, including the digital radio network Sirius, use podcasts as part of their broadcasts.

US politicians are experimenting with podcasting after finding success with blogs during the presidential elections. Virgin Radio has also made talk-based segments of its breakfast show available as podcasts.

+ iPod not necessary

Despite its name, podcasts are not exclusive or tied to iPods in any way.

Currently, people who want to listen to the thousands of podcasts that are available - from fishing shows, work-outs, comedy sketches, to gadget news - use third party programs, such as iPodder.

Listeners can tell the program details of the shows they want to listen to. This usually comes in the form of a "feed" URL.

The iPodder, or similar application, detect the links to the shows and automatically download them.

People can then use music jukebox applications, such as Windows Media Player or iTunes, to send the most recent files to music players once connected to a computer. This is called "auto-syncing".

Podcasting is seen as an example of "time-shifted" content. This is a buzzword in the technology industry which describes taking digital content and playing it when and where you want.

The BBC is currently trialling its own multimedia jukebox program, called the Interactive Media Player (iMP).

It lets people catch up and download TV and radio programmes they may have missed up to seven days after they have been broadcast.

The iPod generation remain friends after a break-up

2005-05-10T20:22:00.000+01:00

Speaking to a friend of mine at the weekend who recently split up with her boyfriend, I ask whether they had any disagreements over splitting the record collection. "No," she replied. "It wasn't an issue. Because I have an iPod we could both have the collection". In fact, the only physical artefacts that she did take with her were seven CDs - three of which were compilations created by yours truly, and so (I like to hope) with some importance emotionally and in terms of the mix, but not as a physical artefact.

EMI signs up for 'authorized' online music sharing

2005-05-06T00:32:00.000+01:00

The world's third-largest music company, EMI Group Plc (EMI.L: Quote, Profile, Research) , has signed a deal with Snocap, a technology firm that is working to create a legal peer-to-peer music-sharing network.

Snocap, headed by Napster founder Shawn Fanning, identifies songs by their digital "fingerprints" and determines how copyright holders want them to be used. For example, a music label could authorize an up-and-coming single to be freely distributed, or to play three times before requiring payment.

Read the full article.

UK public pays too much for too little

2005-04-23T09:33:00.000+01:00

From PC Pro News:

The new issue of PC Pro, which goes on general sale today, includes a headline-grabbing exposé of the UK's online music market. It reveals what many have suspected for some time: that the British public is being asked to pay too much money for tracks, that the music is often poorly encoded, and that the limitations over what people can and can't do with the tracks are strict to the point of draconian.

'What people don't understand is that when they buy an iPod or other digital music player, they're being tied into a system,' believes Deputy Labs Editor, Nick Ross. 'Many of our readers have already been caught out, buying tracks but being unable to play them on their player.'

Read the full article here.

BBC to Podcast more

2005-04-16T21:27:00.000+01:00

BBC to podcast up to 20 more programmes including Today and Radio 1 speech highlights

The BBC is to podcast up to 20 more radio shows – including sections of the Today programme and selected Radio 1 speech content - as it extends its download trial, it was announced today.

Speaking at Music Radio 2005, Simon Nelson, Controller of BBC Radio and Music Interactive, revealed that more programmes - including those listed below - will be available to download and podcast at bbc.co.uk/radio until the end of the year, following the popularity of the BBC's previous downloading trial.

Read the full article.

The Long Tail predicts the death of mass media

2005-04-13T09:24:00.000+01:00

Mainstream Media Meltdown

In the spirit of endism, here's a list of all the forms of major media and how they're trending. Make of it what you will.

Flat to Down to Way Down:

* Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
* Television: network TV's audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
* Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
* Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
* Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!)
* Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole

Up:

* Movies: 2004 was another record year, both for theaters and DVDs
* Videogames: even in the last year of this generation of consoles, sales hit a new record
* Web: online ads will grow 30% this year, breaking $10 billion (5.4% of all advertising)

Read the whole post here.

BlogMatrix Releases Sparks! 2.0 for Podcasters

2005-03-29T09:50:00.000+01:00

Practically a copied out press release, but may be an interesting product:

"BlogMatrix Sparks! allows podcasters to:

- Record podcasts directly on their computer with a microphone and a mouse click
- Mix music with the podcast.
- Record up to 8 tracks for a single podcast.
- Automatically store their podcasts on the BlogMatrix server for others to enjoy"

Won't somebody think of the orphan music?

2005-03-26T12:53:00.000Z

From the Centre for the Study of the Public Domain:

"Orphan Works" probably comprise the majority of the record of 20th century culture. These works are still presumably under copyright (only works published before 1923 are conclusively in the public domain), but the copyright owner cannot be found. The default response of archivists, libraries, film restorers, artists, scholars, educators, publishers, and others is to drop copyrighted work unless it is clearly in the public domain. As a result, orphan works are not used in new creative efforts or made available to the public due to uncertainty over their copyright status, even when there is no longer anyone claiming copyright ownership, or the owner no longer has any objection to such use.

Podcast Music Licensing Not as Financially Daunting as Bloggers Surmise?

2005-03-26T12:13:00.000Z

While the post is completely Ameri-centric, it's worth noting that all of the major rights organisations worldwide have reciprocal agreements, so this is probably as good a guideline as you're likely to find - for now.

There promises to be a follow-up, and the comments at the bottom of the article are worth reading for a fuller understanding of the issue - but this is a great place to start:

Licensing music for podcasting is a perfect example of how real world legal models must be reformed in the wake of emerging technology. As the Cyberspace community members' ability to create a podcast increases with time and technology, the explosion of podcasting is imminent. While many consider podcasts to be digital download, there is also the view that they are broadcasts, and as such, performing rights organizations want to tap this new revenue stream for their members...

Read the full article here

Wireless in Whiteapple

2005-03-25T22:28:00.000Z

So, now you can set your iTunes on play in one part of the house and listen on your Hi Fi somewhere else. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last few days after installing Apple’s AirPort Express Base Station. It’s a Wi Fi device and will set you back £88.99 (or $129.00) but is only usable by Mac owners.

It is simplicity itself. Plug it into the power point, plug in a mini jack and plug the other end into the amplifier. Sit at your computer and set the base station up as a Wi Fi network, or part of your existing one, then go to iTunes which now allows you to select to play your music via the network, as an alternative to your computer. I then play on party shuffle and retire to the living room to listen. You can then listen to anything from your entire music library.

Compared to the other Wi Fi devices we are trialling it is so straight forward. The files are compressed in my library, and so the quality is not as good as CDs or vinyl, but for ‘background’ listening it’s ideal. And you can listen to any radio station or pod =cast that you’ve set up on iTunes. All the benefits of iTunes in another room, and on a good sound system.

It’s got to be the future for music listening, then, doesn’t it. Well no. My biggest frustration is that I have to go upstairs to my computer to read what’s playing. Now of course if you’ve got only a few MP3’s (as I’ll call all compressed music files for convenience) you’ll know what is playing by listening. However, at the moment I’m trying listening to several CDs worth of tracks I don’t know on shuffle, rather than using my usual ‘CD on repeat approach’. (I posted an earlier blog about this, which you’ll have to read to make sense of my point here). And this takes a whole dimension about listening to music away from me. Perhaps that’s good. Perhaps I don’t always need to construct my listening around placing single tracks in my musical map, but that’s what I do! And now we have the second problem. I don’t particularly want to hear the current track (80s dance doesn’t fit with the 60s Jazz and Cuban Son that had been running before) it’s spoilt the ambience. But I’m not going all the way upstairs to change the track. All the time I keep thinking: well I’ve got all these tracks on my iPod, it would have been earier just to plug that into the Hi Fi (as I often do). In fact weighing this all up, for £20 less I could have 240 tracks on Ipod shuffle or for £50 more I could have 5000 tracks and I can also take the music on the train, or to work, or anywhere.

The Airport does other things, though. I can use it as a print server for a USB printer and share printing facilities with other computers in the house on the network. I can also connect it to the broadband line and then wireless all Macs with Airport cards and all other computers with an equivalent Wi Fi card. But I just don’t understand this. You could think of this as a Swiss army knife for Apple computers (thanks for the analogy, Nick), but it’s a real pain setting up the Airport Express base station every time you want a new function. I’m not sure how Apple think this will work. If I want to use it as an access point I need it in the room where my broadband router is (the loft), if I want it to network the printer I’ll need it in my office, and if I want it to be a wireless link for music it needs to be in the living room. And I’ve actually already got an access point and a network print server (oh, and an iPod). And I just have to change this track it’s unlistenable!!!!!! See what I mean!

So, it does the job of wireless music really simply, but you need an Apple computer and iTunes, and you can’t see or control the music easily, and wireless music networks may not be what you need.

Can IRiver Become an IPod Killer?

2005-03-25T00:42:00.000Z

In the digital music player market things are getting more competitive by the day. At last week's CeBIT trade show in Hanover, Germany, there was no shortage of new music or multimedia players from companies from around the world--and each company hopes that their product is the "IPod killer."

Read the full article.

O-Journalism: Free media storage - or free video and audio

2005-03-23T09:24:00.000Z

O-Journalism: Free media storage - or free video and audio: "Online media site Ourmedia has launched to embarrassing success. They 'provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software', but perhaps more importantly, 'A condition of posting material is that contributors must share their work. Reworking or remixing content is permitted including the use of 'snippets' of copyrighted work, although 'infringement and illegal misappropriation' are not be allowed.' The site even has RSS feeds updating on new content. [source: journalism.co.uk]

It looks like a particularly useful site on two fronts: firstly, as a place for bloggers and webspace-starved web designers to host - and showcase - images, audio and video; and secondly, as a place to find copyright-free materials."

So what else does it do?

2005-03-23T07:17:00.000Z

From the Seattle Times:

Wireless Industry Itching To Get Piece of Online Music Pie

The Apple iPod is a small, simple-to-use white box that can store and play back thousands of songs.

But that's it; that's all it can do, says the wireless industry, which is betting it can build a strong contender by adding those features to a cell phone that already places calls, takes pictures and links to the Internet.

The wireless industry focused on music services and hardware Monday, the first day of the annual Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association wireless conference in New Orleans. Judging by vendors and others at the conference, streaming music to the phone is one technology that may reach a wide array of consumers by the end of the year.

Read the full article.

"Burn CDs of my shit if you can't afford it..."

2005-03-23T07:13:00.000Z

From Australian IT:

Sour notes for online music players
Andrew Colley
MARCH 22, 2005

Legal music download sites are having a hard time in the face of competition from piracy and artists releasing their music for free download.

MAT Cheetham (aka Cheeky), the lead MC with Downsyde, a Western Australia hip-hop outfit, says the band's attitude to music copyright can be summed up neatly in one of its lyrics: "Dedicating this to the less fortunate – burn CDs of my shit if you can't afford it."

That's not the message that Australia's online music businesses want to fans to hear.

Read the full article.

Oooh... Nanocasting

2005-03-23T07:11:00.000Z

The following has been cut and paste from a press release:

Podcasting to Nanocasting Alliance Aims to Separate Internet Radio Hype From the Real Promise

Edited by Christopher Simmons
Staff Writer, Send2Press.com

Event will bring together sober and experienced business minds

LOS ANGELES, Calif. /Send2Press Newswire/ -- Guerrilla Marketing International and Jackstreet Media announced more details of the five city conference - scheduled for Orlando, Las Vegas, San Francisco, New Orleans and Vancouver - as part of the Guerrilla Marketing Business University Tour. The sessions will zero in on the business fundamentals of podcasting and examine the broader issue of "Nanocasting" - the term for commercial podcasting that targets other niche communities beyond Ipodders. The sessions will examine real life applications of Nanocasting deployed in business scenarios and examine the real world value of Internet radio as a business tool and a business model.

"Nanocasting refers to the programming produced for the smallest, most narrowly but clearly defined target audience. This is the audience that is most interested in the type of programming and from a marketing standpoint, the audience that is most likely to buy related products," said Jay Conrad Levinson, the founder of the Guerrilla Marketing concept. "Internet radio makes reaching these affinity groups economically viable in ways that broadcasting can't match, so there are some real possibilities here. Our aim is to bring together some bright, experienced and committed people to find the best approaches," said Levinson.

The program is being held at upscale hotels, limited to 200 people, and priced at $3,997 to attract serious business people and media entrepreneurs.

"Podcasters got it right. Internet radio is about affinity groups and niche communities that are passionate about something....beer or God or whatever. Podcasting, by definition, targets the community of Ipodders - which by some estimates number about 22 million in total," said Errol St. Clair Smith, Director of Guerrilla Marketing Radio and founder of Jackstreet Media. "But the total universe of people with broadband access who can tune into Internet radio via their PCs is over 150 million, and there are all sorts of affinity groups and online communities that are ripe for this application. Nanocasting includes them all - from podcasters to beercasting to Godcasting. Nanocasting first defines the affinity group then asks, what is the right business model for reaching this affinity group using Internet radio," said Smith.

"iPod Shuffle" is now a radio playlist

2005-03-23T07:07:00.000Z

Can radio get any more random? Yes
By Dean Johnson
BOSTON HERALD
Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Is Boston radio ready for ``Jack'' or ``Ben''?

Those are the nicknames for a new free-for-all format spanning 30 years of pop music that has already popped up in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, among other cities. It has been described as radio's version of an iPod on shuffle mode, with an emphasis on '80s hits. Now there are rumors the music-heavy format may be due for Washington, D.C., and . . . Boston?

That's what the publication Inside Radio pitched yesterday. Since ``Ben'' went on the air this week at a Greater Media-owned station in Philly (the name perhaps a play on Ben Franklin), IR wondered if one of the local Greater Media properties such as WROR-FM (105.7) or WBOS-FM (92.9) might be ready to take the plunge. Greater Media didn't return the Herald's calls yesterday.

Here's a recent set list on ``Ben'' (no one can explain the Jack moniker): Jessica Simpson/Grateful Dead/New Order. Or how about: Peter Gabriel/OutKast/Guns 'N Roses/the Village People/the Clash. OK, here's one more: Shawn Colvin/the Bee Gees/Suzanne Vega. Now here's a new name suggestion for the format: train-wreck radio.

Warner Brothers Sponsors Podcaster

2005-03-23T06:55:00.000Z

Major label uses RSS feeds as a promotional tool:

After getting into some trouble for its early marketing practices in the blogosphere, Warner Brothers Records is dipping its toes in the blog waters once again. The company will sponsor podcasts of the Eric Rice Show and provide exclusive audio content from one of its bands.

The Eric Rice Show, which is produced by Rice and three of his colleagues, features audio musings on entertainment, technology, and culture. Podcasting, the practice of publishing extended audio recordings in a Web feed format, still reaches a very small audience, but many expect it to take off as digital music players proliferate. Financial terms of the deal with Warner Brothers weren't disclosed.

Read the full article.

Incidentally, am I the only one who's noticed that the two highest-profile podcasting geeks are Curry and Rice?

Music industry pins hope on new format

2005-03-22T16:55:00.000Z

Music industry puts its hopes on double-sided discs with video
By Robert Levine The New York Times
Monday, March 21, 2005

When Matchbox 20's lead singer, Rob Thomas, was planning his first solo release late last year, he thought about ways to make the album a better value, in part to entice consumers who might be tempted to download his songs illegally.

"Obviously I don't want people to download my album," he said. "But you can't just complain that people are downloading music and not do anything."

In the past couple of years, some artists have included a second disc with bonus songs or a short DVD in order to win over potential file-sharers.

But Thomas's "Something to Be," set for released April 19 by Atlantic, part of Warner Music Group, is among the first by a major artist to be released only on DualDisc, a format being introduced by the major labels that includes a traditional CD on one side of a disc and DVD content on the other. The DVD side includes the same album mixed in 5.1 surround sound so that it can be heard through home theater systems, as well as about 20 minutes of video - in Thomas's case, some documentary footage.

At a time when the music business is still suing illegal file-sharers whom, the industry claims, are costing it sales, the major music labels are hoping the DualDisc format will give them a multimedia carrot that can be used along with the legal stick. Because DualDisc albums have additional content but sell in most stores for only a dollar or two more than traditional CDs, they are marketed as a better value.

Read the full article.

How TPM can lead to DRM

2005-03-21T09:49:00.000Z

Very interesting article from Bill Thompson about how TPMs - Trusted Platform Modules - which are aimed at making your computer more secure from viruses and theft at a hardware level - may end up restricting what we can do with the media on our PC. Key (lengthy) quote:

"Because the trusted computing base is also used to make digital rights management (DRM) systems more secure, this will give content providers a lot more control over what we can do with music, movies and books that we have bought from them.

"We have seen recently how allowing digital rights management services into our lives can lead to unwelcome consequences.

"Users of Apple's iTunes used to be able to stream the music they had brought to up to five other iTunes users, a great way of letting your mates discover your music collection. Apple has changed some of the streaming capabilities

"But the latest version of iTunes limits this capability, just as an earlier upgrade reduced the number of times you could burn a selected playlist of purchased songs to a CD.

"Another took away the ability to play songs downloaded from Real's Harmony service on your iPod.

"...Similarly, users of TiVo digital video recorders have found that they cannot record some shows, and other programmes that they have recorded are automatically deleted after a day."

But Thompson argues that the moves will not work because "in order for the purchaser to view the content it has to be unlocked. Once it is unlocked then someone, somewhere, will figure out a way to make a copy of the unlocked version. And once an unlocked version leaks onto the network it will be uncontrollable."

K.I.S.S or Why I Want My iPod Back

2005-03-16T01:12:00.000Z

I've been using an Archos GMini 400 for nearly a month now. Looking at the webpage specs (once you turn the annoying music off) it looks like a very impressive little device: 20GB storage, not only plays music files but video,photo, games and can act as a portable hardrive. When you first get it out of the box and start copying files over it seems wonderfull. I simply pluged the device into USB and it showed up as a drive with premade folders for Music, Video and Photo. I eagerly transfered over my entire digital music collection (yes it's under 20GB!) a handfull of JPG's from my compact digtal camera and an episode of the Simpsons.*

* Using handy compression tool.

Thins are still looking good as you start up the unit. You are greeted with a colourfull loading screen and the front end of some kind of embedded O/S. All the Icons you would need greet you on the front page. Perfect. Time to navigate to some music. I click "Music" and I am presented with the option to browse by the usual categories - Artist, Album, Genre etc...

This is where things all begin to go wrong. The buttons on the unit do different things at seemingly random times. What took you back one level in the file system previously now takes you back to the start screen. Being counter intuitive is bad enough but the O/S seems sluggish when dealing with large file lists (like perhaps nearly 20GB of music) One miss pressed key means enduring the painfully slow scroll speed through your list of files again. (4 attempts to get to Stevie Ray Vaughan will make you choose BB King instead)

Having finally got to the artist I want then the album I find that, instead of being sorted by track number, the songs are sorted alphabetically. I suffered with this for days. It drove me mad and I began to realise how much value I attach to being able to listen to a whole album in one sitting in the order it was intended. (My bus journey to work lasts about one album).

Eventually I found a setting to sort the ARCHLibary. This is the system the GMini seems to use for reading mp3 tags and sorting music. I ran a manual sort and magic my albums where listed by track not alphabet! Joy didn't last too long when I realised it only applied to some albums and that the manual process had to run every time the unit had been connected to a PC.

I couldn't figure out the problem. "Tag your mp3's properly!" some people cried. Well they all work fine in iTunes and on my iPod. This is where I was ready to give up and switch back to the iPod. I don't care that it doesn't have a colour screen. The interface is simple. It's easy, there are no un-neccasry layers of complication (embedded GUI = overkill?). I don't want to spend forever with the device in my hand trying to make it work, I want it tucked away in my pocket and music in my ears. Also whenever I plug my iPod into my PC it syncs with iTunes. No dragging and dropping here.

I didn't give up on the GMini. I renamed ALL my mp3's to (track)-(title)-(artist)-(album).mp3 and this seems to have sorted out the track orders. It was a great deal of work to get something working the way I wanted it. So eventually I have music working in a way I will accept (this is only as of last week I might add).

The other features. Well, I've tried them because they are there not because I really think they are usefull. Photo viewing is ok to check basic things like exposure and composition (not really focus) and the built in compact flash reader means that had I been out wandering with my digital camera and filled a card up I could copy it to the unit. I don't see any serious photographers buying the GMini for this feature, it's a nice extra but the screen doesn't quite cut it.

Video playback is possible through the onboard screen and headphones or through the A/V out socket onto a TV. The screen isnt bad for it's size but I would not have the patience to watch much on it. However, as a a digtial video player plugged into my widesreen TV it was great. Using the cables supplied I plugged into my front A/V sockets and sat back and enjoyed an episode of the Simpsons I had never seen.

Conclusion

The nature of this device did not subtlely change or improve the way in which I listen to music. It hindered it, it got in the way. The extra features are useless beyond curiosity for me - I have specific devices already for video and photo. A simple interface with no whistles and bells is what I need not a sluggish all-in-one GUI/OS. Simply put I don't want the technology to be obvious. I want it to be sitting in my pocket sending music I have chosen to my ears. Once the layers between me and the music become more complex, the more frustrated I become. Technology should be transparent to those who don't care how it works. Everything should just have a "Make it Go!" button for the majority of people and perhaps a smaller "Tell Me How it Works" button for those of us that way inclined.

Online Music Enterprise podcast

2005-03-14T14:08:00.000Z

One of the things we're keen to do as part of the Online Music Enterprise project is to have interesting conversations - and we plan to podcast as many of those as seems practical. The side benefit of this is that we get to test out the equipment required to do that podcasting, and this experience should inform our broader research into the production of web-audio.

As an introduction to that process, I talked to Tim Wall, the project director, and asked him to explain the project.

You can get this and all the latest podcasts as they come out by subscribing to the feed. Just cut and paste this URL into your chosen podcast software (try iPodder or Doppler):

http://feeds.feedburner.com/NewMusicStrategies

Or you can just download the mp3 here.

The podcast was recorded straight onto a laptop running ProTools, via an M-Box. Tim was speaking into an AKG D660S and I had an Electro-Voice RE27 microphone. No EQ, but I compressed the audio before mixdown, and then converted the resultant WAV file to a 48kbps mp3 using dbPowerAmp.

It was lunchtime in the staff lounge.

Pareidolia and random play

2005-03-14T09:48:00.000Z

There is something about an mp3 player's random play that can produce moments of unexpected serendipitous beauty: the perfect mix of two tracks that you either would never have thought have putting together, or the chance combination of two tracks that you very much would. "How does it know," you're tempted to ask, "that those are two of my favourite tracks?" "What are the chances of that happening?"

If you see something mystical in this, there's a word for it: pareidolia. As this blog defines it: "the erroneous or fanciful perception of a pattern or meaning in something that is actually ambiguous or random." To my experience, it doesn't happen often enough to be other than a coincidence. Perhaps I have too much fluff on my player, although there have been times when it seems stuck in a Britpop mood, or it's played two tracks in a row by the same artist, or a few tracks from the last year. But just as often I'm flicking forward for a track that suits my mood, cursing its obstinacy.

In praise of shuffle: a short essay on the iPod shuffle (part one)

2005-03-12T09:10:00.000Z

I’ve been using an iPod for nearly three years, now. What appealed to me was the sheer capacity. I’ve long used personal stereos (Walkman, and then a minidisk player) and played tapes and then CDs in the car. All that travelling time could be converted into listening time, but it always had the downside of having to keep changing the tape or CD. Of course that’s what you did at home, and these were improvements on having to keep getting up at the end of a vinyl LP side, or a vinyl single to access some more music. But when travelling one always had to carry the extra cassettes disks or CDs. I figured why not have a sizable collection on the player.

But something strange happened. I started listening to music in a completely different way.

I used to make tapes up specially for travelling. Well, I’d usually do a tape for someone else and then play it until I knew the changes off by heart (and then they could have it). And I’d think long and hard about how I’d programme it. Just like a radio programme. I even prided myself at getting to the end of the tape just at the end of a piece of music. Fading a track out was a sign of poor technical programming. The thing I enjoyed most, though, was thinking about what track to programme with which, exploring ways to make links between artists and styles of music, or the feel of one track with another.

The iPod should be ideal for this. With lots of tracks to choose from I should be able to try out permutation after permutation on my desktop iTunes and then download it to my iPod. Funny thing is I’ve only ever created two play lists. I quickly produced a stress-reducing play list of mellow listening, and one for my partner who wanted to use my iPod but wanted to make sure she never listened to anything she didn’t know.

Instead I always have the iPod on shuffle. It’s the element of surprise, and of serendipity. The thousand tracks of my 5gig iPod gives the kind of variety I look for, but now the music rolls through without predetermination on musicological grounds. I know I’ll like it (I selected the tracks for iTunes), but I don’t know which track, or mood, or juxtaposition will come up. Of course sometimes it’s awful. Miles blows that poignant melancholy last note and then some crude piece of jump up slams in (that’ll have to go!). But often two tracks just meld, or contrast beautifully, or pleasurably jar me from a muzak moment. The music is re-contextualised from the album in which it was first released to breath anew. So much so I don’t sometimes recognise something: can’t quite place it in the elaborate cannon I’ve established in my head from all that information I’ve learnt and that’s triggered y the visuals of the record art and the mine of information. Now it’s just the sound and me. But I’m going to have to look, to read the track details, or I won’t know if I’m allowed to like it so much.

Now, this all well and good because I’ve done quite a lot of pre-selecting. In my mind a thousand tracks is not that many, and I’ve chosen them as individual tracks from CDs and soon filled the available space. So of course I need more space. More desktop hard disk; more iPod capacity; and more tracks. With the capacity of a 250 gig desktop drive, 10x rip speed and a 40gig iPod I don’t need to select tracks. I can just rip the while CD and (I say to myself) clear the tracks that don’t work as I go along. Oh, and while I’m at it I’ll rip a few CDs from else where, just to get to know them. Now this is another new departure. At the moment I’m MP3ing (well AACing) the six albums I bought yesterday, and then they’ll be on my iPod. Now this is a change. When I buy something new I usually play it over and over in CD order while I read the artwork (you know what I mean), maybe read something about the artist, go back and listen to their earlier work. This is important work because I then know the tracks, their context in the CD, and their place in my mind map of music. What happens when I’m listening to music not on the cartograph? How will it make sense?

What’s more I quickly knew all the 1000 tracks on the iPod, even though I changed them regularly. After all I had selected them from that carefully mapped idea I had of music. With 8000 it is harder to learn, and I’m not sure why some of them are on there other than it was easy.

And you know, sometimes I don’t even look to see what I’m listening to.

Virgin DJs to podcast

2005-03-09T09:52:00.000Z

To quote:

"Virgin Radio is taking its breakfast show directly to the iPod generation by launching a daily "podcast".

"Pete Mitchell and Geoff Lloyd's breakfast show will be the station's first foray into the emerging world of podcasting, and is believed to be the first daily show to be made available in this format from one of the major radio groups."

Playlists are for creating, not listening to

2005-03-08T12:15:00.000Z

My playlists are a process, not a product. Pick a year, skip through the albums, and pick the best track off each: hey presto - a playlist.

Move on.

So far, having created playlists for every year from 1991-1997 and 2001-2004, I've not yet actually gotten around to listening to them. Having said that, I've burned them to CD and have listened to those in the car (1995 is quite a good year, by the way).

Once I've finished the 90s and 00s, the plan is to move on to previous decades. From there, perhaps an ultimate Best Of All Years, a refined list of all the above.

And then perhaps I can finally listen to them.

Yet another new way of listening

2005-03-08T12:09:00.000Z

Still using my 60GB Zen Xtra, and still finding new ways of listening to music. The latest one is this: I listen on random, but I'm waiting for an artist to appear that I feel like listening to. Yesterday morning tracks by a number of artists passed me by before Broadcast made me stop the random and play their albums: just the kind of dreamy quality I needed to take me away. Then last night, a Smashing Pumpkins track made me search under Artist and play five albums' worth of tracks on random: a harsher sound that worked perfectly on the 10.05 train.

Five online mistakes bands make

2005-03-07T16:59:00.000Z

Great blog post about the worst sins a band or indie label can commit when trying to promote themselves online.

Email to Tim Wall

2005-03-06T00:33:00.000Z

> AAC is clearly better quality, but are there
> any disadvantages? Do all the players we
> have purchased play AAC?

Tim,

Yes there are, and no they don't.

But it's even more complicated than that. I prefer AAC as a file format. However, I tend to use mp3 far more often. I'm hoping to shift completely to Ogg Vorbis as long as the compatibility gets up to scratch - and my collection is a mixture of all three. I'd say about 85% of them are mp3s, of which about two thirds are encoded at 128kbps and the rest are at higher rates (mostly my new default, 192k)..

I also have WAV files that I use for certain things, I try to avoid WMA files - and FLAC scares me a little bit - though the audophiles seem to really like it (it's a lossless codec). So I'm watching to see which way these things are going. Ogg Vorbis is about to get interesting. AAC works best with Macs - and there are a lot of (mainly PC) based players that can't deal with AAC.

WinAmp and iTunes are the most freely convertible players. iTunes has the better search and database functionality - important for large collections.

AAC+ really impresses me (the 'plus' is the next gen version - very good for streaming high quality at low bandwidths), but mp3 is the one thing that everything can do without fuss. Sony tried to go without it and opted for their proprietary ATRAC format (that nobody uses) and entirely lost the portable music player market to Apple. Not because AAC was better (though it is) but because iPods can do mp3s (and the interface software is a work of genius).

Mp3s are particularly handy for dragging and dropping into multitrack software. AAC files won't do that for me in Audacity or in Cool Edit. Not sure about ProTools. I have my doubts.

I used to encode at 128kbps (okay for making radio shows and the single most common encode rate), but that was when drive space was a real issue. Anybody who enjoys listening to music will tell you that 128's too low. I've gone up to 192, which is fine for most listening purposes and is still a major space saving.

It bugs me that my music files aren't all in the same format. I shouldn't even notice, but I do think about that. Digital cameras could all settle on JPEG - why can't music players settle on something?

For the radio shows I make, a 128kbps mp3 is still way better than what the output of an FM processor sounds like, so from a purely production perspective, I'm okay with the fact that most of my music is less than perfect quality.

I can hear the problems with 128k when listening by myself in a quiet room or on good headphones - but on the bus with earbuds, or with other people around and wine being consumed, I can't tell the difference at all.

So - the advice:

If you're just going to play back off your Mac and swap files to the laptop, or listen on your iPod, then use AAC. For most of your purposes, you're going to be fine with 128kbps AAC (the iTunes default) - or better yet, chage the settings to 192kbps - and I challenge you to hear the difference between that and a CD. You might, but you'd have to work pretty hard at it in comparison tests.

However, if you think you might do something else with your music - like share with PC users, use a different portable player or serve media through the house on anything other than the Apple AirTunes product, then stay away from AAC, even though it's clearly the better of the two.

Some portable players won't do AAC - and the wireless players are a problem. My Phillips Streamium can't do them and nor can your Netgear MP101.

I have a lot of AAC files that I can only listen to via iTunes (one of three main music playback software programs I regularly use) and that won't stream wirelessly to my stereo. I'm considering running a conversion overnight just for the streamium compatibility thing. Then again, I might be doing a mass convert to Ogg Vorbis on the forthcoming version, if it turns out to be as universally wonderful as promised - so I'm a bit bewildered.

Fed James again today. He came around for a few hours this afternoon to celebrate and finish off last night's successful wireless setup. To talk me through the process, we used Skype again, which I'm completely sold on - and it's just been incorporated into Motorola's newest phone (there go the Telco monopolies). Better than phone or text chat - James was able to talk, type and show me solutions on the go as we worked, and we could wander away and do stuff we needed to do without feeling rude. There's a research project in Skype just waiting to happen.

Anyhow, having marvelled at our cleverness at sorting the wireless networking thing (we actually had to hack my broadband router at one point - BT had literally broken the device's functionality to make 'ordinary' use fairly easy, wireless access impossible and their own proprietary software mandatory), after lunch we got to work on trying to make the Phillips streamium thing work properly.

The media server software that it comes with is complete shit. It's supposed to be a background piece of software, but it uses all the system resources, regularly freezing and crashing the machine. It's not just me either - this is on all the media-server discussion boards online, but Phillips don't acknowledge it as an issue.

So we looked for other options. The next one was a UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) media server called Allegro - which was good, but could not read iTunes databases as big as the one I have. 14 songs, fine. 26,000 songs - "invalid database". Only found that out after restoring IP addresses in the unhelpful Advanced Settings part.

Ended up with a piece of free German software called TwonkyVision Music Server. Stupid name. It's not intuitive to set up either. It doesn't have browse buttons so you can find the folder the music lives in. You have to type in the directory path. That said, it more or less works, though you have to pay for an upgrade (around 15 Euros) to the full Media Server version if you want it to be able to allow iTunes playlists to be selectable from the Streamium box.

That sounds like the ideal solution. Scrolling in alphabetical order one artist at a time is no more help than a shelf full of CDs. As things are, these wireless audio boxes are for people with 20 discs in their collection.

You can tell it's a technology designed to make way for video delivery (which it is apparently absolutely fine for) - and isn't really that good for music. I'm pretty taken by the idea of the AirTunes after all this. If interacting with the device is going to be such a pain with the teeny screens and the slow alphabetical drudge through the list of artists, then just take that all away and let me make playlists in advance in a bit of software that I know works..

None of this stuff - the wireless networking, the media serving or even choosing the correct file types for personal music libraries - is within the grasp of the average user. We really are getting on board at the beginning and striking all of the teething problems. I haven't been to bed before 1am for a week, just trying to get compatible media interoperation with two XP machines, a router and a streaming music box.

This should not be this difficult. I have several blog posts to compose out of all this. It's just a matter of separating out the issues.

Paul Long loaned me a cassette. I marvel at its simplicity.

Cheers,

Dubber

BPI finds new revenue stream

2005-03-05T10:48:00.000Z

It looks as though the BPI has found a new revenue stream to make up for their alleged loss of earnings: lawsuits settled by the parents of filesharing teens. This article from the BBC website:

Music industry 'nails UK pirates'

"It was likely some parents settled for their children, the BPI said"

The UK music industry has claimed victory in its first battle with illegal file-sharers after 23 people paid £50,000 to settle out of court. The UK internet users, ranging from a student to a local councillor, have admitted putting out up to 9,000 songs each for other fans to download.

Digital radios outsell analogue

2005-03-03T07:49:00.000Z

Latest radio news from the BBC:

Sales of digital radios have outstripped the demand for traditional sets for the first time, leading UK high street store Dixons has said.

Figures reveal a surge in demand in its shops in the run-up to Christmas, with the first week in January seeing more digital radios bought than analogue.

In total more radios are currently being sold in Dixons than in 1985.

So... not only are digital radio selling more than analogue radios - MORE radios are being sold BECAUSE of digital radio.

Read the full article.

Streaming format wars

2005-03-02T22:29:00.000Z

I've been involved in online conversations about streaming media formats (mp3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, Real, Windows Media and so on...), and along the way the inventor of the Ogg format has become peripherally involved. I thought it might be worth noting some of his observations that were posted in response to some public mailing list questions:

> Most say that a 48kb/s AACplus sounds better than a 128kb/s MP3

That's claiming a bit much. Even against the original Blade (MP3 encoder) this would require not paying much attention. What's true is that the artifacts sound very different, so if you're listening for mp3-like high-end problems, you probably won't hear them.

> which would put Ogg Vorbis at around 96kb/s IMO.

Not really. 64kbps Ogg is still a little better than the 48kbps AAC+SBR we're talking about.

That's not to say the low bitrate AAC+SBR isn't very good; as a new codec, it's quite an improvement to classic AAC at low bitrates. But many of the press-release claims are (understandibly) pushing the envelope of what is really believable.

Also, it's absolutely true that at the lowest bitrates (32/48kbps) AAC+SBR currently has a decent edge over Vorbis low bitrate. Everyone is still moving forward and the lead changes back and forth. The low bitrate race is pretty much down to new AAC and Ogg these days. At low bitrate, AAC is ahead, at mid-bitrate Vorbis is still leading.

> Is there anything that can be done to bring Ogg Vorbis up to this type of
> quality in the future, or is it about as good as it's ever going to be?

Of course. Development of these things tends to move forward in bursts. I've done little Vorbis research work since 1.0 as there have been other things to do. I'll get back to it if only because it's what I'm best at and audio codec research feels good ;-)

> I would rather use patent free and open codecs, but this type of bitrate
> saving, particularly for streaming, cannot be ignored, and I'm concerned
> that this will slow the uptake of Ogg Vorbis and may reverse it's
> popularity in time.

The bitrate savings isn't as big as you fear and we'll take the lead back again. Everyone is improving. Who would have ever thought back in '98 that LAME would get as good as it is today? I'm curiously surprised that AAC hasn't moved forward farther than it has...

Monty

---------------------------------------
And here are some more responses from Monty

> Now if that is true, technically it would be possible to use the same
> technics (SBR and PS) added on Vorbis OGG.

No, because the specific SBR extensions are part of the MPEG patent pool. As it is, the current/future direction of Vorbis is to move away from a pure transform-domain encoding anyway. SBR would still be applicable, but some of the same mechanics would be built into the rep model.

SBR's fundamental basis is 'each octave is closely related to the octave below it'. It then implements something akin to an 'exciter' that represents most of the upper part of the spectrum as a parametric set of harmonic duplications of the lower octaves.

The basic idea is both sound and one that's been underexploited (upper octaves are often harmonic duplications of lower octaves). One can take advantage of that without using SBR, and that's the direction I'm going. But there's more than the harmonic structure here; if strong tones (the harmonic structure) of the audio is subtracted out, and you're only looking at the leftover 'noise' in time, the subband
correlation is very strong in time as well. I don't know if AAC(classic)'s Temporal Noise Shaping is also exploited by the SBR extensions in any way, but I certainly plan to exploit that fact in future Vorbis.

Monty

---------------------------------------

> But, at its best, with an 'average' bit rate of 128kbps, mp3 should easily beat 48kbps aacplus. (Even at 128kbps cbr, I'd expect it to beat aacplus!)

Yes, add me as a 'me too' :-)

A decent 128kbps encoder should hand AAC+SBR its ass on a platter. Respectable 128kbps mp3 encoders are very good today. "Something is wrong".

> But at lower 'streaming radio' rates, no, Vorbis isn't the best. It
> wasn't tuned / designed for those rates.
> Roberto's 32k rate listening test didn't show Vorbis in a good light... I
> doubt a 48k test would be much different.
>
> Also, I faintly remember there were some comments after the test.
>
> I think that maybe they used some poor settings or some resample
> issues or something. The result was that vorbis might not have been at its best.

Speculation aside, I would not have expected Vorbis to fare well at 32kbps. It simply wasn't tuned/designed for it. Vorbis (as it is now) was designed to scale down to ~64kbs at a time when mp3 wasn't yet respectable below 192kbps. Today's AAC is not actually the same codec as the AAC everyone remembers from three years ago; they're different, related but incompatable codecs taped together in a new
package under the original name. No worries, we will update Vorbis similarly and keep the same name so no one knows the difference :-)

Monty

Watch this space...

Summer of podjacking

2005-02-26T23:30:00.000Z

A note from a friend in New Zealand I've been keeping in touch with over this. He's a music buff, broadcaster and the editor of NetGuide magazine:

I have been doing Podjacking every day the last month in my morning train ride and walks to work. I was interested to researching your comment about whether all Ipodders had interesting music. I jack about four people a day on average -one morning 7. So far I have not heard anything really mainstream but then it could be that Ipodders I have come across tend to be passionate enough about music to buy an Ipod and many interestingly are 30 plus because of the price of the bigger Ipods. Music has ranged from Kronos quartet (50ish year old) to System of a down (20 something) to obscure electronica (mid 30s). The only "disappointment" was U2 (22 year old female).

Not this podjacking - but this one.

Winamp gets all legal

2005-02-21T10:00:00.000Z

Lengthy quote from this CNET article about AOL's moves to re-program Winamp so it can't be used to help crack copy-protected music downloads:

"The company's Winamp software was identified by bloggers this week as part of a process that transformed copy-protected music downloads into songs that could be burned by the thousand to CD. The tool had potentially affected any subscription service that used Microsoft's media format, including Napster, Virgin Music and even America Online's own music subscription plan.

"AOL programmers are taking a series of steps to prevent its software from being used in this way, a representative said."

Of couse the beauty is, millions will still possess the existing version without upgrading. And somehow I don't think they'll be queueing up to upgrade for this feature...

Zen Xtra and me - some reflections

2005-02-18T15:11:00.000Z

I have been using the 30GB Creative Zen Xtra for 11 months - and the 60GB model for under a month, with significant effects on my consumption of music.

The most notable change has been in my perception of the CD as an artefact. Within the first months of use I realised that CDs were going to go the same way as vinyl, and therefore I should sell a reasonable proportion of mine while they still had value. The decision was made easier by limitations of space and the fact that my consumption of music has mostly been on the move rather than in a domestic setting.

At the same time my consumption of music increased, and I was more likely to buy CDs in the week of their release, as I knew I could sell them quickly for near to the purchase price. I would make a decision in the first couple of listens whether this was an 'artefact' that I would like to possess in five years' time, or 'filler' that meant less. Interpol, Elliott Smith and Franz Ferdinand stayed at home; Razorlight and Devendra Banhart went straight on Amazon. Dogs Die In Hot Cars I kept because the sleeve included the lyrics. I did, however, keep back up copies of most CDs.

'Filler' music has taken on more importance generally, and the range of music that I listen to has broadened, because there is no longer the value judgement in deciding 'what to take to play on my walkman' or indeed 'what CDs to put in the most accessible spot in the cabinet'. I bought a Bollywood 3-disc set not because I expected to listen to it in its entirety, but because I looked forward to the experience of a Bollywood track popping up when I least expected it. I scoured music library shelves for the first time in years for classic artists I didn't like enough to buy, and for compilations containing particular gems (girl groups of the 60s, for instance). I cherry-picked, ripped and downloaded, then waited for the one-in-8,000 chance for it to pop up. Now that I have another 30GB to play with I have also started looking into spoken word.

My appetite for new tracks has become something in and of itself. I will listen to anything without prejudice for those one-track gems; I will rip any CD that passes through my hands; new albums barely get a few listens. The sheer range of choice - around 800 albums - means I too often go for the 'Play Any Track' option. This has its own effect: some tracks can sound significantly different when placed between others - generally for the better, but occasionally for the worse, particularly those tracks which rely on a general mood (the rawness of the White Stripes springs to mind).

Sad to say, the Playlist facility brought out my anorak tendencies as I began making playlists for 2002, for 1991, and so on. This moved on to arbitrary themes, as I realised the Find facility on the file management software Creative MediaSource allowed me to easily find songs with key words. I made playlists for 'animals', 'colours', 'numbers', 'seasons', 'days', 'vehicles' and both male and female names. Please forgive me. (But do make your own suggestions).

Teens Rock on the Internet

2005-02-17T11:16:00.000Z

Nielsen-Netratings report:

In December last year, almost half of all 12 – 17 year olds visited a music site, favouring Launch, Yahoo!’s music channel, and AOL’s music channel, as well as iTunes and MTV.

Read the full report (pdf).

Music makers

2005-02-17T11:12:00.000Z

From the Guardian:

Coinciding as it did with the Grammy music awards in the US, it was fitting that the 3GSM World Congress, the phone industry's big annual shindig, was dominated by music.

The mobile phone operators have seized upon downloading, uploading and playing of full-length tracks as the next big thing. Meanwhile, the handset manufacturers, always looking for a way to make their phones stand out, are integrating as many music-related features as possible into their latest kit.

Read the full article.

Particip@tions

2005-02-17T11:06:00.000Z

Announcement & Call for submissions

The third issue of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception studies, a new journal which aims to provide an on-line, interdisciplinary forum for the fields of audience and reception studies, has just come out.

Issue #3 (January, 2005) includes an editorial by Martin Barker, Desiree Boughtwood's 'View to be thin: Interrogating media's relationship to eating disorders through audience research' and Janet Staiger's 'Cabinets of transgression: Collecting and arranging Hollywood images', and various reviews.

Submissions
Particip@tions is always on the look-out for contributions from a wide range of disciplines that focus on audience research. It publishes contributions from various approaches, such as, sociology, psychology, anthropology, linguistics/discourse theory and cultural and media studies. Additionally, since important notions about audiences have emerged from outside the 'mainstream'of media audience research, Particip@tions will also publish noteworthy contributions from fields such as museum and heritage studies; literary studies; educational studies, as well as interesting contributions from fields outside academia.

Briefly -
Particip@tions aims to

publish research from different approaches, without the limitationson length and presentation of evidence which can cramp and weaken suchwork;
encourage open debate between different approaches and methodologies;
encourage collaborations across academic disciplines, areas andcountries;
provide a place where people may find materials and bibliographiesfor use in teaching, and research training;
provide a focal point for the development of the broad field,including the organization of conferences and other kinds of fora.

Particip@tions is available full-text for no charge at: http://www.participations.org/

International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics

2005-02-16T11:34:00.000Z

The International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics (MCP) is a new print journal launching with a special Double Edition in January 2005.

MCP is committed to analyzing the politics of communication(s) and cultural processes. It addresses cultural politics in their local, international and global dimensions, recognizing equally the importance of issues defined by their specific cultural geography and those which traverse cultures and nations. MCP promotes critical, in-depth, engaged research on the intersections of sociology, politics, cultural studies and media studies. MCP aims to keep academic analysis in dialogue with the practical world of communications, culture and politics.

MCP welcomes full-length research articles of up to eight thousand words and occasional short commentaries.

Inaugural double edition January 2005 with sixteen specially commissioned short essays three full-length research articles:

Yasmin Jiwani on War Talk
Vincent Mosco on Ground Zero
Martyn Lee on The Death of Radical Thought
Kwela Hermanns on IPR and Traditional Knowledge
Lena Layyusi on Power and Performativity
Mike Cormack on Gaelic Language and the Media
Eileen R Meehan on Transindustrialism and Synergy
Chinyere Stella Okunna on Invisible Women
11 further special articles plus book reviews

Submissions of papers to mcp@leeds.ac.uk

MCP published by Intellect Books: MCP website is www.intellectbooks.com/journals/mcp/index.htm

Editors: Katharine Sarikakis, University of Leeds; Karen Ross, Coventry
University; Neil Blain, University of Paisley

Dr. Katharine Sarikakis
Lecturer in Communications Policy and
Course Director MA in Communications Studies
Institute of Communications Studies
University of Leeds
Houldsworth Building
Leeds LS2 9JT
Tel: +44.113.3437603
Email: K.Sarikakis@leeds.ac.uk

Managing Editor
Media and Cultural Politics

"Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative."
Oscar Wilde

Symposium: Rhythms of the City

2005-02-16T11:28:00.000Z

Rhythms of the city
21 April 2005
Department of Sociology
City University (LONDON)

Rhythms of the city will be exploring the overlapping spatial and temporal layers of cities today. Participants will be considering a range of policy initiatives and media outputs that are somehow contributing to map out zones and times under which people come together, intersect, circulate or keep out. Rhythms of the city will also be exploring the idea that cities are sites of expression (whether material or symbolic) in which our senses and experiences are significant for understanding the city as a territorial, political and social instance. We are keen to understand how pleasure, fear and control intersect the different spatial and temporal layers of the city.

Preliminary list of participants:

Anne Cronin (Lancaster University)
Jenny Robinson (OpenUniversity)
Kevin Robins (City University)
Michael Pryke (OpenUniversity)
Mónica Degen (Brunel University)
Norma Rosso (ArtsCouncil, London)
Paul Chatterton (Leeds University)
Yanet Toirac-García(City University)
Yann Perreau(Visions of the City, Germinal Productions)

Registration and welcoming will commenced at 10:30am, followed by three sessions and a final round up discussion (ending at 5:00pm). The event will be held in the lower ground floor of the new School of Social Science building, located on the corner of St John Street and Whiskin Street opposite the main College Building entrance (For directions please refer to http://www.city.ac.uk/maps/nsq.htm).

The event is free, but registration is required. For registration details please contact Dr. Patria Román-Velázquez by Email, patria@city.ac.uk

Conference: The Local, the Regional, and the Global in the Emergence of Popular Music Cultures

2005-02-16T11:25:00.000Z

Call for papers
The Local, the Regional, and the Global in the Emergence of Popular Music Cultures
University of Copenhagen,
24-26 October 2005

Popular music has been important as a means to bring into contact local or regional cultures, sometimes creating alliances and blurring borders, sometimes underscoring local identity in contrast to supra-local levels. Such cultural processes have intensified since the 1940s, calling for a new kind of historical perspective in popular music studies in order to underline the interplay between continuity and change in popular music culture, the inspirations exchanged and the influences between cultures.

Throughout the 20th century popular musical forms have flowed from Great Britain and The USA as musicians and performers both within and outside these areas made use of imitation and copying as a means of appropriating new styles. Seemingly, this caused a strong homogenization of cultures, but the picture is more complex as conceptualisations like syncretism, transculturation and glocalisation have suggested.

This conference will address such processes and examine how the exchange between local, regional and global musics mix and interchange in dialogue as a result of political, social, and cultural encounters mediated in various ways, thus forming new possibilities for social formations and constructions of identities.

In recent years popular music studies have been informed by the theory and methodology of ethnomusicology, and the anthropological study of music has offered itself as a means of addressing the dynamic exchange between the local and the global. The possibility of applying ethnomusicological perspectives to this interchange and to the discourse on place will be one major theme of the conference.

Another major theoretical theme will be how sociological concepts like struggle, cultural field, habitus, etc., especially as they have been developed in Bourdieuian cultural theory, can be applied to the study of popular music. Such concepts thematize the interpretation of the hierarchical structures of popular cultures and the changes taking place as popular music and culture gradually have become more accepted within general culture.

The conference is part of the research project, Danish Rock Culture from the 1950’s to the 1980’s, consisting of 14 individual projects focussing on different aspects of the culture from different theoretical angles (e.g., ethnomusicology, Bourdieuian cultural theory, historiography, discourse analysis). As Denmark is a small country with a population of 5.4 million, an area of 43.000 square kilometres, and a stable political system it is an ideal object for in-depth studies of the development of a popular music culture in an everyday which is not marked by radical resistant cultures – whether left wing or nationalist – or other highly visible sites of struggle.

The aim of the conference is to investigate the complex cultural processes that have taken place in the negotiations between different music-cultural practices from a local, regional, and global perspective. The conference will present some of the results from the Danish research project, and we invite researchers who work with similar issues of local/regional/global or investigate local music cultures from other perspectives to meet in dialogue with each other about the main theoretical and empirical issues.

Papers should be kept to 20 minutes. There will be 10 minutes for questions. Abstracts of about 250 words are due Monday, May 2, and should be accompanied by a brief bio and full contact info. Email conference@rockhistorie.dk with your abstracts, as well as questions about the theme, your topic, or the conference in general. Authors will be notified of the Program Committee’s decisions by June 1. There is no participation fee.

The conference is funded by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities and organised by IASPM Norden and the Danish research project.

A description of the Danish research project can be found at http://www.rockhistorie.dk/default.asp?side=48

Further information about the conference will be posted at http://www.rockhistorie.dk/conference

________________________________

Morten Michelsen, Ph. D., Associate Professor

Department of Musicology
University of Copenhagen
Klerkegade 2
DK-1308 Copenhagen K

http://www.staff.hum.ku.dk/momich/
momich@hum.ku.dk
Phone +45 35 32 37 91
Fax +45 35 32 37 38

Conference: Young People and New Technologies

2005-02-16T11:13:00.000Z

CALL FOR PAPERS
‘Young People and New Technologies’
University College Northampton, U.K. September 7th-9th 2005
Organised by the British Sociological Association Youth Study Group.

Abstracts are invited for an interdisciplinary conference focused upon the relationships between young people and new technologies.

As the use of new media technologies has become increasingly widespread in Western societies, the significance of such new technologies for adolescents has become a crucial area of research. Whether in respect of their patterns of leisure and identity, their modes of learning and transition, or their everyday domestic lives, youth are among the heaviest and most dynamic users of a variety of new technologies, most notably perhaps, the various facets of the internet, together with mobile phones, digital television, games consoles and digital music players. At the same time however, it is clear that levels of access and use are subject to considerable variations in quantity and quality.

The conference organisers invite proposals from academics and other researchers, as well as those working with young people in a professional capacity, whether in the voluntary or state sector.

Papers should fall within the area of ‘young people and new technologies’ and we would particularly encourage contributions which address the topic from the point of view of one or more of the following categories:

* Questions of access/exclusion/inclusion
* New media, leisure and lifestyle
* Community learning/participation and ICTs
* Place, space and globalisation
* Surveillance and risk
* Use of mobile communications technologies
* Individual and/or collective use of the internet
* Youth subcultures/scenes/tribes
* Gender/sexuality
* Education/training/transitions
* Work and employment
* Gaming Cultures
* Production and marketing of ‘youth’ technologies
* Questions of policy and/or regulation
* Ethnicity and/or nation
* Methodological questions

At this stage these areas of interest are merely intended to illustrate the range of topics which may be included within the conference.

Conference streams will be decided upon subsequent to the receipt and review of abstracts.

*The deadline for abstracts is March 31st 2005*

Please send all abstracts by email to Paul Hodkinson: p.hodkinson@surrey.ac.uk

(queries about the event can be addressed to Sian Lincoln at sian.lincoln@northampton.ac.uk or Paul Hodkinson at p.hodkinson@surrey.ac.uk)

Dr Paul Hodkinson
Lecturer in Sociology
School of Human Sciences
University of Surrey
Guildford
Surrey
GU2 7XH
01483 683767

Wired News: Future of Radio Is Downloadable

2005-02-16T00:31:00.000Z

Wired News: Future of Radio Is Downloadable

MotorFM is determined to transform radio in Germany, and it thinks it has the tools to do it: MP3 downloads and songs streamed directly to mobile phones.

The first step has seen MotorFM, launched Feb. 1, abandon on-air commercials in favor of generating revenue from MP3 downloads and targeted sponsoring of its programming. The next step will be streaming audio directly to 3G cell phones and letting listeners pay for downloads by SMS text message.

Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture

2005-02-16T00:20:00.000Z

It seems that the Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture might be a good place to end up writing up this research. I note it here for later reference:

Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture (WPCC) is a peer-reviewed journal, published twice a year in hard copy and PDF format. WPCC recognises the interdisciplinary nature of the field of Media and Cultural Studies, and therefore deliberately encourages diverse methods, contexts and themes. Particular interests include, but are not limited to, work related to Popular Culture, Media Audiences, Political Economy, Promotional Culture, New Media, Political communication, Migration and Diasporic Studies.

A major goal of the WPCC is to help develop a de-westernised and transcultural sphere that engages both young and established scholars from different parts of the world in a critical debate about the relationship between communication, culture and society in the 21st Century.

WPCC invites contributions from all scholars; particularly those at the beginning of their careers.

Jazz Composer Nabs Grammy After Web-Only Sales

2005-02-15T22:46:00.000Z

Internet-only artist wins a grammy:

Jazz composer Maria Schneider took home a Grammy on Sunday for her album 'Concert in the Garden,' without selling a single copy in a record store.

Schneider, 44, financed her Grammy-winning album through a Internet-based music delivery service called ArtistShare that opens the financing of production to dedicated fans.

French consumer rights group sues over DRM

2005-02-15T09:47:00.000Z

From Silicon.com:

French consumer association UFC-Que Choisir has launched legal action over the two companies' proprietary music formats, claiming that the respective DRM used by both Sony and Apple, which means songs bought from their online song shops can't be played on other manufacturers' media players, is limiting consumers' choice.

The consumer group announced it would be taking legal action against the pair after conducting interoperability tests last year between a selection of music download services and digital music players and criticising the lack of interoperable DRM.

"The total absence of interoperability between DRM removes not only the consumer's power to independently choose their purchase and where they buy it from, but also constitutes a significant restraint on the free circulation of creative works," the group said.

Read the article.

See, want, must have

2005-02-14T21:43:00.000Z

From Gizmodo:

So here it is, the mythical iTunes phone. The Motorola E1060 will be the first Motorola handset to run the mobile Java version of iTunes that will become the default media player for future Motorola handsets.

More here:Gizmodo : The iTunes Phone

Sensational...

2005-02-14T21:36:00.000Z

How to: Burn through Napster's collection, free

Turning Napster's 14 day free trial into 252 full 80 minute CDs of free music

"Marv on record" provides the how to on some "Theoretical fun" for legally getting hundreds of Napster music CDs for the price of the blank CDs.

via BoingBoing.net

Same case, more convincingly put:

"You know, if you sign up for Napster-to-Go and don't realize that your music is going to disappear when you stop paying them money, you're not a victim of the bloodsucking media barons - you're a tard. Once, I payed the cable company $50 a month, but then I stopped paying them, and they turned off my cable! Fortunately, I was smart enough to record all my favorite episodes of That's So Raven, which was against the rules of the contract that I signed up for, but hey! Tough shit.

So here's a way to record music you're getting from Napster-to-Go into WAV files, to be burned to CDs or re-encoded to your compressed music file of choice. But you're not asserting your rights to culture; you're ripping off Napster. I mean, I don't care, I steal plenty of music, but let's be legit about this: If you have a problem with copyright laws, don't think that breaking the rules of a company that's working with the RIAA is actually changing anything except the amount of money you're giving to artists (or at least scum-sucking middle men)."

From the inimtable Gizmodo.

Artists, Musicians and the Internet

2005-02-14T15:40:00.000Z

From the Pew Internet research website:

"The first large-scale surveys of the internet’s impact on artists and musicians reveal that they are embracing the Web as a tool to improve how they make, market, and sell their creative works. They eagerly welcome new opportunities that are provided by digital technology and the internet.

At the same time, they believe that unauthorized online file sharing is wrong and that current copyright laws are appropriate, though there are some major divisions among them about what constitutes appropriate copying and sharing of digital files. Their overall judgment is that unauthorized online file-sharing does not pose a major threat to creative industries: Two-thirds of artists say peer-to-peer file sharing poses a minor threat or no threat at all to them.

Across the board, among those who are both successful and struggling, the artists and musicians we surveyed are more likely to say that the internet has made it possible for them to make more money from their art than they are to say it has made it harder to protect their work from piracy or unlawful use."

Read the report [61-page pdf link]

The last FM station

2005-02-14T15:27:00.000Z

A model worth investigating?

"Last.fm is a personalised online radio station that plays the right music to the right people. Songs spread from listener to listener.
You get your own online radio station that you can fill up with the music you like. This information is used to find users who are similar to you. With this information Last.fm can play you new artists and songs you might like..."

Visit the website.

Napster to Go invalidates RIAA's claims

2005-02-14T15:25:00.000Z

Worth thinking about:

"Another aspect of the Napster to Go model is that it shows that the RIAAs claims of a lost sale for every download to be demonstrably false. If you can download an unlimited number of songs via napster and play them for as long as you continue to subscribe, then the maximum loss the RIAA suffers from a single downloader cannot exceed $15/month no matter how many songs a person downloads."

Noted here as a revelation.

Napster gone bad

2005-02-14T15:23:00.000Z

Notes from a teacher:

Napster has gone from being bad guy in the eyes of the music industry to bad guy in the eyes of those fighting to maintain the rights the recording industry no longer wants us to have.

Napster has been rebranded as Napster to Go, a subscription based music service that allows you unlimited downloads for $15 a month. But…

Read the full post.

Yet another podcasting article

2005-02-14T15:19:00.000Z

This one from the New Jersey Star-Ledger:

The "Rock and Roll Geek Show" broadcasts twice a week from San Francisco. But you won't find its distinctive mix of good time rock 'n' roll, beer and Macworld commentary anywhere on the radio.

Read the full article.

Podcasting will beat out satellite radio

2005-02-14T15:16:00.000Z

At IRA-CAM:

A few months ago, before I knew what "podcasting" was, I argued that "broadband radio" would beat out satellite radio. After all, more content, more flexibility, and less cost usually wins over consumers. Then, after finally trying it out, I'm convinced. Sign me up over at longbets.

Podcasting is perfect. You can get the daily broadcasts of NPR shows. You can get music, and compelling amateur shows that you couldn't get on commercial radio. Maybe the best way to describe podcasting is that it's "the audio web". Meaning that all the ways the internet informs, educates, entertains, and changes your life on the browser has some kind of analog through podcasting. It's well suited for long car commutes.

Read the full post.

Linux and mp3

2005-02-14T12:45:00.000Z

Impeccable timing for this Register article given this group's discussion this morning about Linux and open source options for music distribution...

More utopian wishing for a 'wireless world'?

2005-02-14T10:59:00.000Z

That's the general upshot of this BBC article, but what caught me eye was this description of one gadget: "The Philips Wireless Music Centre burns CDs to a built-in hard drive, automatically names the MP3 files, and then distributes the audio to up to five satellite players via 802.11g, with no PC necessary." This sounds particularly like the information appliances that Donald Norman raved about in his 1998 book, The Invisible Computer (you can also read excerpts from the book at his site).

Digital music ethnoblography

2005-02-13T23:08:00.000Z

Some blogged thoughts on the impact of digital music distribution on a family:

My current family music delivery at home is the following:

- My three daughters listen while studying or playing in their room (computer, hi-fi system or mp3 player)
- My wife listens a bit everywhere in the house depending her tasks or moods (transistor radio, hi-fi or mp3 player)
- The children watch DVD movies, listen music or play Playstation games in another entertainment room
- I am listening when working in my home office (another computer or hi-fi)
- When receiveing friends or when we want to listen to music, we do it in the living room where we have another hi-fi or iPod connected to it.

Currently we have a mix of old hi-fi systems (3), transistor radios (1), computers (3), Playstation (1), DVD player (1) and mp3 players (4)… that are about 13 different audio systems in my house only. If we count in the 5 phones each family member has; that makes upto 18 music devices in my apartment only (!) I am stunned looking at it this way.

Read the whole post at Big Ideas For Small Screens.

BT Voyager Digital Media Boombox

2005-02-13T23:04:00.000Z

From Gizmodo:

The BT Voyager Digital Media Player is a simple $300 wireless audio receiver that uses a USB base station to connect to your home PC and stream audio, CDs, or internet radio as far as its wireless transmitter will allow.

Similar to many other home audio streamers, the BT Voyager unit sets itself apart mainly by using a wireless link that will not interfere with 802.11b signals (and not interoperate, for that matter). It also has dual audio ins and outs if you'd like to use it as part of a less mobile get up.

It's a little pricey, but the simplicity and portability make it unique (if you can convince them to ship it outside of the UK).

Must get myself one of those...

Billboard Goes Digital

2005-02-13T23:01:00.000Z

This from IndieMusician.com:

For the first time, Billboard magazine will include songs sold by download in its weekly calculation of the nation's top hits. The change reflects the booming popularity of digital music players like Apple's iPod, which has accounted for dramatic increases in download sales.

Billboard's Hot 100 list has always been the music industry's chief hit barometer, from the days of sheet music to 45 rpm records to now, when many people buy songs through services like iTunes. It's the list people cite when they talk about having a No. 1 hit.

The service formerly known as Launch

2005-02-13T22:59:00.000Z

Yahoo have rebranded their online music service, according to this article at CNet.com:

The service had been operating under the brand name Launch, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2001. But now, Yahoo wants to showcase all its music products and services under a single brand, the company said. The service already has begun operating with a new logo.

Yahoo Music offers streaming audio, music videos, Internet radio and news covering various genres of music.

Podcasting 101

2005-02-13T19:33:00.000Z

There's a free e-book with supporting videos being released online shortly, that promises to explain podcasting. You can sign up to get the email when the ebook is released. This blurb from the website:

Asking ANY Of These Questions?

- Just what is Podcasting and how do I do it?
- Is it just for business websites?
- How can it help me increase my profits online?
- Will it work for me?
- Can it increase awareness of my site?
- Just how much work will it require?
- How much will it cost me?
- What are the legal aspects of Podcasting?
- But I know nothing about RSS, let alone Podcasting with RSS so is this REALLY for me?

Very soon ALL these questions AND more will be answered in a FREE STEP-BY-STEP guide & supporting videos.

Go here for more details.

The Zen of Fighting iPod

2005-02-13T18:54:00.000Z

Newsweek article in which the CEO of Creative Technologies more or less declares war on Apple's iPod:

Most customers of creative Technologies don't even know it. They're the millions who have the Sound Blaster circuit boards in their PCs that process the audio boomed through the speakers. The Singapore-based company has thrown its energies into digital music players, a field it entered well before Apple's introduction of the market leader, the iPod. Nonetheless, founder and CEO Sim Wong Hoo thinks his own products—the flash-based MuVo as well as the direct iPod competitor, the Zen Micro—can hold their own with Steve Jobs...

Read the full article.

Finding Voice, Finding Hearing

2005-02-13T18:40:00.000Z

A blog that draws attention to the benefits and obstacles of using online audio from the perspective of sight-impairment links to a talk by Tom Peters (60Mb mp3 file) about accessible portable playback devices.

Interestingly, the author makes an interesting observation about the very piece of kit that I'm evaluating myself at the moment:

"For my money the MuVo Nomad, reviewed by Deborah Kendrick that is available at WalMart for about $50 or with a subscription to audible.com is the most reasonable portable mp3 player available for the blind. This unit is 128mg; the models with more memory all have screens... I like the way I can load my MuVo by treating it like just another hard drive."

Which, I have to say, is one of the things I like most about it...

The new format is NO format

2005-02-13T14:22:00.000Z

From The Day, Connecticut:

Classic-rock fan George Petersen doesn't need another copy of Pink Floyd's “Dark Side of the Moon” or Cream's “Disraeli Gears.” He has spent the past four decades buying and re-buying his favorite music in a succession of new formats: vinyl, 8-track, cassette, compact disc, Super Audio CD, DVD-Audio.

Enough is enough. The basement is full.

“We as consumers have been trained by the music industry to go out and buy a new piece of plastic every few years,” said the 51-year-old Petersen, editorial director of Mix, a San Francisco-based magazine that covers professional sound recording.

“Why do we keep buying the same things?”

It's a good question.

Now get ready for the day when you open your wallet and buy “Abbey Road” all over again.

With tonight's 47th annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles drawing attention to the ever-shifting world of the recording arts, Petersen and many other music-biz insiders agree: “The new format is no format.”

Read the full article here:
Digital Seen As The Last Format Stop

NPR report on podcasting

2005-02-13T12:50:00.000Z

US National Public Radio report on podcasting:
'PodCasting' to Music, Talk Fans Online

Contains audio and links to related NPR stories.

Napster To Go Doesn't Add Up

2005-02-12T12:59:00.000Z

From the Washington Post:

Whether you like Napster To Go, the online store's new music subscription service, depends on whether you think of it as all-you-can-eat or all-you-can-pay.

Both descriptions are accurate. For $15 a month, Napster To Go offers unlimited song downloads -- in a copy-restricted format that can be played only on Windows XP computers and some digital music players -- but these songs expire if you don't keep paying that fee each month.

Read the full article

Napster: iPod users are stupid

2005-02-12T11:22:00.000Z

Own an iPod or thinking about getting one? Think again.

Napster falls into an old marketing trap. They should know better.

Consumers Not Receptive to Music Subscriptions

2005-02-12T11:18:00.000Z

Consumers Not Receptive to Music Subscriptions

Portable music services will not have a big impact this year, according to Parks Associates’ new report Digital Music: Analysis and Forecasts. Respondents in the recent Parks Associates survey Global Digital Living strongly favored the single-track purchase model over a subscription when presented with both options. Roughly 40% said they were likely to buy songs one at a time, but only 8% were likely to use a subscription service.

Podcasting success and theory

2005-02-12T11:04:00.000Z

Michelle writes:

Blogging is to print journalism what podcasting is to broadcast journalism.

Podcasting is an “instrumentation” that was enabled by many of the same things that enabled blogging, with the addition of the portable mp3 player. The iPod, for which podcasting is putatively named, is the device that I have. Any other portable audio player will do. In fact, your PC will suffice. You don’t have to have a portable device to participate. However, the ability to take your audio programs with you anytime you pick up your iPod is extremely powerful. It releases you from your desk.

Is podcasting a killer app for the iPod? Is Podcasting the thing that will make portable digital audio players as universal as email/internet browsers made the personal computer?

It certainly could, since it capitalizes on the very powerful and basic human need of communication. It does it in a way that is really quite easy for both the listener and the speaker.

The old model of a radio personality having fans doesn’t hold up with podcasting. Podcasters view themselves as peers to their listeners, much the same way that bloggers generally view themselves as peers of their readers, who are more like collaborators than passive readers, since the threading of commentary in blogging is what gives it real power.

The word “fan” doesn’t and shouldn’t apply in podcasting, since a fan is subservient to the star. Many podcasters create talk, opinion, and/or news shows that are directly related to the email and phone calls and friends they’ve made through becoming journalists. Podcasters claim a more collaborative, democratic, decentralized, and informal environment than traditional radio personalities and broadcast journalists.

Read the full post.

Online music: behaviours and attitudes

2005-02-11T23:39:00.000Z

At Usagewatch.org:

There are very big age differences in digital music sharing and reproduction 18-24 years old (41%) burn CDs, vs. 14% of those over 25 In the same age group, 31% use file sharing programs, vs. 4% of those over 25 (data from JupiterResearch, December 2004)

Clippings

2005-02-11T21:07:00.000Z

As we go along, I'll post links to relevant articles and sites I think might be of interest to other team members, stakeholders and casual observers. Other team members will no doubt do the same. This will form an archive of bookmarks over time and a good mine for endnotes and citations later.

Today, I noticed:

PodSafe Music

Student fined for linking to mp3s on net

Mobiles not set to take over Music Players

Download & HowTo: AutoSync Podcasts in MP10

The Future of Podcasting: Mark Ramsey

Future of Music - the Celestial Jukebox

Tape Recordings are now Obsolete

The Secret History of Technology and Popular Music

Keyword: Online Music

Online Music Enterprise

2005-02-09T20:17:00.000Z

Online Music Enterprise is the first major research project for the New Music Strategies Unit.

The project is part of the Urban Cultures Research Centre, based in the department of Media and Communication, which is part of the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, one of UCE's faculties.

Keywords: Digital Media, Online Music, New Media.

We envisage a six month research period into the cutting-edge download, music programming, and streaming technologies and techniques used in music promotion and distribution in the global record industry, followed by a eighteen month period of training in these technologies and techniques for regionally-based SMEs and freelance workers.

The first part of the research involves sampling and evaluating contemporary digital music technologies, from streaming services and mp3 players to techniques such as podcasting and technologies such as the AAC-plus format.

Along the way, we will be scrapbooking related articles and posting observations and conversations about the field. We have elected to do this in a public forum, and we invite your comments.

Team members include:

Dr. Tim Wall
Dr. Paul Long
Andrew Dubber
Chris Priestman

...and an invited team of academic and technical colleagues who have an interest in related areas and who will be assisting in the research.

We have decided to blog our research, as it seems in keeping with the spirit of the project. We hope you find it as interesting as we do and look forward to your thoughts and input along the way.