Research Songsmith. What is Songsmith? Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer’s voice. Just choose a musical style, sing into your PC’s microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you. Then share your songs with your friends and family, post your songs online, or create your own music videos. The video on this page demonstrates Songsmith at work in the classroom; in fact Songsmith is free for teachers to use in their classrooms. Where can I get it? A free trial download is available on our download page. What if I don’t know how to write music? Songsmith is for you. What if I do know how to write music? Songsmith is for you too. MOG Launches Ad Network, Columbia Records Exec Joins Board. Mog, a platform for music blogs with backing from Universal and Sony BMG, is launching an ad network dubbed MOG Music Network. In conjunction with the announcement, MOG is also adding experienced record producer Rick Rubin to its Board of Directors.
MOG Music Network will allow partner blogs to embed widgets that display content from other blogs, and will also allow bloggers to have their own posts syndicated to Mog.com. The network will also allow bloggers to customize the ads that appear on their sites, and to generate revenues greater than what they’d get from a typical ad network like Google AdSense. Partners will be able to participate in a 50/50 rev share agreement on a CPM basis. MOG Music Network, which CEO David Hyman has described as a “Federated Media for music sites”, will include 30 partner sites at launch. MOG is instituting an application process to help ensure the quality of partner sites, though it intends to cater to small and large sites alike. Neil Young on Stage at Java One. Neil Young Announces Collected Work With Dynamic Updates from th. I'm here at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco where Neil Young, legendary rocker and the provider of the soundtrack to my early 20's, is announcing a very cool project with Sun Microsystems.
For the first time, Young's entire collection of published media will be available for purchase, beginning today with the first of five volumes. Young's collected works after more than 40 years of making music and film would be a massive enough project - but the most interesting part of the announcement is that the media will be delivered on Blu-ray Disks that will check for updates when new content is available and download it to your local device. See also our interview with Neil Young, done after his keynote presentation.
New media of all sorts will be added to the collection over time; Young encouraged the use of the PS3 gaming device as the optimal way to capture and enjoy the collection. You can see Young's website for the entire project here. Continued below Blu-ray The Conference. No Depression: Grant's Rants. Blog Archive » Reducing Back to Art. I’ve been in the music business for about two years now, nearly two and a quarter. So long as I’ve been in this business, there has been discussion about the issues of piracy, value and monetary exchange in a world rapidly converting to digital distribution. These discussions have been rooted primarily in the protection of a cluster of data here known as an “album” and the mechanism by which one can assure that the value proposition of an album as it existed in the physical realm translates to the digital.
Various ways were attempted to ensure this, such as imposing an analog to physical limitations (proximal, temporal) using rights management (in various forms, both physical and digital). ie: restricting movement of a file was analogous to geographic distance limitations of a physical product. It could only exist in one place at once. These mechanisms attempted to translate the physical and linear into the non-linear and metaphysical. It did not work. I think this is the wrong focus. Digital music: 2007 year in review. Ditching DRM, new mobile offerings, pay-what-you-want and other alternative business models — one word to sum up activity in the digital music space in 2007: “experimentation”.
In this post we look back at 2007 through the lens of last100’s coverage, highlighting some of the important stories and trends, and how they point to what we might expect for digital music in 2008. Also see: Internet TV: 2007 year in review Ditching DRM It all started back in February when Apple CEO Steve Jobs published his now famous open letter titled ‘Thoughts on Music‘. In it he explained the major labels’ thinking behind their support for Digital Rights Management (DRM), and that it hadn’t worked to stop piracy. Instead, argued Jobs, DRM was harming consumer interests, since, along with other restrictions, music bought from competing stores won’t play on all devices.
In an impassioned plea to the major labels, Jobs wrote: What can we expect in 2008? Mobile music stores and services. Moving The Goalposts. I love Billy Bragg, his attitude, his on the sleeves politics, his music, everything about him. So I read his op-ed in today’s Times with interest. In it he argues that Bebo, which may or may not have built it’s audience on the backs of artists who uploaded their music for free consumption, should have shared some of their $850mm payday with those artists. I think that specific suggestion is not workable for a host of reasons, but his basic point – that creative artists (whether they be musicians, filmmakers, screenwriters, painters, poets, etc, etc) need a way to make money online and they don’t have one – is directionally correct.
Some of my favorite bloggers have already weighed in on the discussion. Arrington in his classic in your face fashion feels no sympathy and argues that online is the best promotion that an artist can find in today’s world. Mike is right, but the problem is "promoting what? " Nick Carr, predictably, takes the opposing view and says: I know one thing for sure.