Magnatune unveils two new subscription plans May 7, 2008
Posted by Wade Rockett in Marketing, Music.Tags: drm, drmfree, magnatune, podsafe, proartist, procustomer, professorarmchair, royaltyfree
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Speaking of music subscription plans, Magnatune - which offers high quality DRM-free music downloads and podsafe licensing - announced two new ways to enjoy their music this morning:
Now available for the very first time, Magnatune Memberships allows you to hear Magnatune music without any announcements or interruptions between songs! Starting at just $9 a month, you can stream over 500 albums and mixes into iTunes or player of your choice. Listen online all day, every day wherever you are. For serious audiophiles, we recommend our Download Membership, an “all you can eat” plan that lets you download any of our music, whenever you like, as many times as you like, and in any format, including CD quality WAVs. BONUS: BOTH PLANS include access to our new two hour, talk-free podcasts.
I checked out the details of the two plans. For $9 a month you can stream the company’s entire catalog of music, and for $18 a month you can download the company’s entire catalog of music. Let me repeat that part: for $18 a month, you can download every album on the site to your computer. (Magnatune only asks that you not strain its servers by using a downloading robot.) You also get access to streaming audio and members-only music podcasts. Under both plans, 50% of your subscription fee goes to the musicians whose songs you downloaded and/or streamed. Pretty sweet.
I do not recognize a single one of the artists listed on the site. But what I do recognize is if I really want to expand my musical horizons, Magnatune is a great way to go - particularly if I want to explore baroque, classical, medieval, and electronic music. And there are some fascinating oddities, such as Professor Armchair and his “demented 19th century children’s music“.
I’ll have to think about whether membership is right for me, or whether I’d prefer to cherry-pick tracks that I like. But I’m really impressed with the company’s pro-customer, pro-artist policies.
eMusic rolls back the Stones: why you must own your music May 6, 2008
Posted by Wade Rockett in Music, Technology.add a comment
Tech podcasts frequently debate the best model for consuming digital music via the Web. Is it buying and downloading songs and albums, as with Amazon and iTunes? Is it a subscription model with unlimited access to an entire catalog of songs as long as you pay a monthly fee? Or is it a hybrid such as eMusic, where you pay the service a fee in exchange for a certain number of monthly downloads?
Usually these discussions end with someone saying, “Well, the perfect setup would be a subscription service where you had unlimited access to all of the music that’s out there. It would supply you with music the way the water company supplies you with water. Then there would be no need to own anything.”
The sudden removal of the Rolling Stones catalog from eMusic less than a month after it was uploaded is a great example of why that proposed model gives me the heebie jeebies as a consumer: If I don’t own my music, then someone else does. And they can turn off the tap any time they please.
Thankfully I grabbed three Stones albums before eMusic’s deal with ABKCO went pear-shaped and it had to pull the entire catalog. Once again the message from the music industry is unmistakable: fans don’t matter anymore, lawyers do.
It’s getting to the point where I can’t buy music at all anymore without feeling bad about it. Like the joy has been sucked out of the whole thing.
Feh.
These Rolling Stones boys are pretty good, though.
A Call to Service to All Seattle Area Guitarists April 5, 2008
Posted by Wade Rockett in Music.add a comment
This notice was in the latest e-newsletter from the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum:
New York composer Glenn Branca seeks 80 guitarists and 20 bass players to volunteer for his upcoming monumental performance of “Symphony No.13 (Hallucination City),” on May 16, 2008, for the Seattle Art Museum’s Party in the Park, a fundraising event celebrating the museum’s 75th anniversary.
Musicians must be able to read standard staff notation and follow a part measure by measure. Additionally, all musicians must be able to attend rehearsals from 11:00 am to 9:00 pm on May 14 and 15, and a sound check on the afternoon of May 16. For more information about volunteering as a musician contact glenn@glennbranca.com
OMG ROLLING STONES EMUSIC April 4, 2008
Posted by Wade Rockett in Music.2 comments
This just landed in my inbox. More e-mail like this, please, world.
And I just resubscribed to the service, too. Nice timing. But man, where to start?
MTV circa 1983 on Google Video January 30, 2008
Posted by Wade Rockett in Music.Tags: 1980s, mtv
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Three hours of MTV captured on VHS back in the day and uploaded to Google Video. Weirdly, that Night Ranger video was my first glimpse ever of MTV. Heck, maybe this moment is EXACTLY when I first started watching.
(Via Wil Wheaton)
Abandoned Project: my 1987 rap album June 25, 2007
Posted by Wade Rockett in Music.Tags: 1980s, Abandoned Projects, Corey Haim
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Welcome to Abandoned Projects Week! I was going to post about fairly recent projects that I might conceivably still feel responsible for, but this one is such a classic that I couldn’t resist.
Forward into the past!
The Project
Yeahhh boy-ee! It’s the summer of 1987, and I am so down with the hip hop that I’m bustin’ out rhymes like Capone doin’ crimes! Which is to say that I am writing rap lyrics and occasionally inflicting them on friends. A germ of an idea forms: maybe I could record my own rap album.
I realized at the time what a ridiculous idea it was. But that was exactly what appealed to me. I love stupid, grandiose projects. When I heard that some college students were translating the Bible into Klingon I thought, “Of course! Why wouldn’t you translate the Bible into Klingon?”
Why it was abandoned
It turned out that recording studios were expensive. And they were run by people who might make me feel like a real idiot for doing this. And what would I do about backing tracks? Would I have to become my own DJ, too?
Also, what on earth was I going to do with the (no doubt terrible) finished product?
I came to my senses and spent the summer hanging out at the 7-11, playing Bubble Bobble and eating Klondike bars.
Now, 20 years later, the situation would be completely different. Book time at a recording studio? Pfft. I would just open GarageBand on my iBook, call up some beats, and lay down a few tracks. Then I’d create a MySpace page and upload the results.
Hell, it would probably attract fans nowadays. Strange, sad, wrong fans, but fans nonetheless.
It’s pronounced “ING-vay” June 15, 2007
Posted by Wade Rockett in Music.add a comment
eMusic.com provides a 1,200 word artist’s bio for Yngwie Malmsteen.
DRM-free music on iTunes May 30, 2007
Posted by Wade Rockett in Apple, Music.add a comment
It happened today! Sweet, sweet, high-quality DRM-free music on iTunes. They got the Stones, Dean Martin, David Bowie…the only less than awesome thing is that buying stuff isn’t, um, exactly working for me. Probably the system’s overloaded by music-loving geeks.
There are three songs I’ve already bought that are currently available for me to upgrade at 30 cents a song: Blondie’s “Sunday Girl”, Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy”, and Lily Allen’s “LDN”.
Jay Inslee’s “Save Internet radio” bill April 30, 2007
Posted by Wade Rockett in Music.add a comment
My representative, ladies and gentlemen! Fighting to keep Net radio alive.
In March, the [Copyright Royalty Board] drastically increased royalty rates for webcasters – starting retroactively at $0.0008 per song in 2006 and climbing to $0.0019 per song in 2010. Though it costs only fractions of a penny per song, the change amounts to a 300 percent cost increase for the largest webcasters and up to a 1200 percent increase for smaller operations.
…The Inslee-Manzullo Internet Radio Equality Act, H.R. 2060, would provide royalty parity for Internet radio providers. It would vacate the CRB’s March 2 decision and apply the same royalty rate-setting standard to commercial Internet radio, as well as satellite radio, cable radio and jukeboxes. A transition rate of 7.5 percent of revenue would be set through 2010.
Check out SaveNetRadio.org
RIP, Don Ho April 17, 2007
Posted by Wade Rockett in Music.add a comment
When I was eight years old and stationed in the Philippines, “Tiny Bubbles” was huge. We boys wanted to be cool and casual like Don Ho. (We also wanted to be lightning fast and deadly like Bruce Lee. Kids want to be lots of stuff, not all of it consistent.)
Funny how 76 used to seem unbelievably ancient to me. Now that it’s only 36 years away from my age now, it seems a little close for comfort.
