Sony – struggling in the online music world

19 Tuesday Jun 2007

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According to Digital Music News it would seem that Sony is going to pull the plug on its online music store (Connect), and on recording facilities in LA and New York.  This hasn’t been the first concession to loss of influence in the music space with the decision to no longer develop its ATRAC compression format.

 

I think a time has come where Sony can no longer see itself as dominating & influential player in this market space, until it can come up with something revolutionary (like the original Walkman, not just evolutionary) in a manner that doesn’t look you into Sony.

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/061707connect

 

 

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Statr for Flickr

16 Saturday Jun 2007

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I came cross this cool extension for Flickr provided by http://linuxside.org which give you page view stats on a daily basis for visits to your Flickr pictures.  An example of the results can be seen below.

 

If you have a Flickr website (ours is here) then its worth checking out.

 

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Tom McRae – Shepherds Bush Empire

16 Saturday Jun 2007

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We got to see another fine performance by Tom McRae at London’s Shepherds Bush Empire as he tours supporting his latest album King Of Cards.  I managed to capture some pictures with the mobile phone – more can be seen here.

Tom McRae on stage

Tom, has over a number of albums proven himself to a fine singer songwriter. But, for me the songs taken on something special when you hear him perform them live.  Even last night, whilst suffering ‘man flu’ sounded good, and delivered the songs with passion and emotion that lyrics carry.

 

Not only does he perform well, everytime we’ve seen him, he engages with the audience joking and telling stories, something that really makes it feel that he is there for you.

 

This time around Tom’s support was Steve Reynolds, who played a great little set, and went down a treat with the audience (no mean feat for a support artists). All that and playing his guitar while struggling with a broken collar bone. Steve’s performance was engaging enough that we’ve ordered the album (another import).

 

The final gem, of the evening is picking up a EP of Tom’s that I’d not heard of – The Strongroom Sessions (autographed as well).  Having not heard about it, I thought I’d search around for it today on the web and can’t find any reference to it – is his record company letting him down?

 

 

Copy Protection Upsets Another Music Fan

14 Thursday Jun 2007

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 Following on from my earlier blog about a Crawdaddy article – here is a post from a music fan who has come against CD copy protection resulting in it breaking the CD standard (despite the CD carrying the CD logo) and no warning of copyright protection.  After the fiasco with Sony’s rootkits, you’d think that record labels may have learnt a thing or two.

Article here – Some Sort Of Copy Protection Crawling Around In The New Linkin Park CD – Idolator

 

The important thing is that the blog’s author will no longer buy music (legally atleast) from Warner Brothers.

Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM

14 Thursday Jun 2007

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As part of the work I do for SeeWhy I’ve been providing some help to the author Matt Cumberlidge who is writing a book on JBoss’ JBPM which will include details on SeeWhy (and how SeeWhy integrates with jBPM).  Matt has just kindly send us a link to the publishers site for the book which can be found at Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM. The book is expected out late July or August.

 

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Insightful, but scathing article on the state of the music industry – by Crawdaddy

14 Thursday Jun 2007

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Crawdaddy have written a good piece, albeit scathing of the state of the music industry is in. Using the actions of Paul McCartney, now releasing music through Starbucks rather than EMI, with whom he has been since the start of the Beatles recording career as a proof (backed up by an article in New Yorker by Macca himself).

 

If you don’t read the article – then just take a look at this quote:

because they [Big Four record companies] care about the marketing more than they care if the act is worth a crap to begin with. As a result, they turn and blame illegal file sharing for the decline in sales, despite the fact there are now mounds of studies showing that file sharing does not hurt sales. Some, like the writer of a recent article published in the Journal of Political Economy, even find that albums being shared on peer-to-peer networks see increased sales as a result of being shared.

 

The article can be found here: http://crawdaddy.wolfgangsvault.com/Article.aspx?id=1452

 

 

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One Little Indian go Podcasting

14 Thursday Jun 2007

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The record label One Little Indian, the home to some great artists such as  Jesse Malin, Fluke, Pernice Brothers and many others has started podcasting to help promote its artists.  The podcast is done through iTunes (click here),via a direct link from the announcement email(s) if you register for the news emails or via the Podcast Directory. The first podcast includes material from Jesse Malin.

 

 

Image Editing Freeware

13 Wednesday Jun 2007

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 There a number of small picture manipulation tasks that don’t need huge great applications such as PhotoShop or PaintShopPro such as quickly creating DVDs of your photos, looking at RAW or JPEG information. There are a lot of smaller apps on the net that provide these sort of features for a small license fee, and a few that are actually free.  Finding the free ones can be a pain, but someone has set up a neat little site – Photo-Freeware.net – Image Editing Freeware Download Source with links to the free applications and related useful information.

 

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Tori Amos – American Girl Posse

08 Friday Jun 2007

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A Little slow reviewing this – having been out for a month or two. But I  have found that Tori’s later albums take a lot longer to digest as her lyrics tend towards the obscure. Although the  subject of the opening song on latest album American Girl Posse leaves little space for misunderstanding as criticism of George Bush.

 

The album’s song fluctuate from style to style as it delivers songs from different members of the ‘posse’ which it does with a fair degree of success. It seems that its each of the songs intros provide the clearest indication of which character is performing. 

 

Unlike earlier albums the presence of the drums and guitar are a lot more noticeable giving album a more driven feel overall where as earlier albums the other instrumentation tended to be lower in the mix giving space the vocals and piano.

 

Overall not a bad album, but not Tori Amos at her best. But still distinctive and a cut above other the other ‘kookie’ female singer/songwriters.

 

 

The Great CD Digitisation

07 Thursday Jun 2007

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I came across rather interesting article about the challenges and questions involved in migrating a substantial music collection to a digitised solution which allowed the media to be streamed around the home (the article can be found here ongoing · The Great CD Migration).

 

Its a challenge that both a friend of mine and I have been dealing with for a couple of years now – both of us have significant amounts of media (legitimate I hasten to add). We’ve both arrived at slightly different solutions, but they reflect the difference in emphasis of source – one being music the other video.  But the core solution seems to be the same – a small box stashed away acting as a file server and a dedicated D/A component (Squeezebox in on case and a modified XBox in another).

 

With hard disk capacities rapidly rising the cost of a file server – we’re very close to a single drive holding 1 terabyte now. As well as the fact that the processing power of the machine doesn’t need to be powerful – a simple Pentium with the right O/S will be enough.

 

The thing that may intimidate less techie people is avoiding the loss of the digitised media once the mammoth task of conversion has been completed.  We’ve both ended up configuring the storage into a basic RAID array – so a single disk failure can be recovered from.

 

I think that as the media solutions such as slim devices becoming increasingly more mainstream it is the ease of managing things like storage that will become the next big challenge.