Muxtape Shuts Down
Muxtape was a service that was rapidly gaining popularity until it was suddenly shut down. Valleywag notes the fun music website's RIAA problem.
Muxtape, a New York-based online-music startup much favored by the Tumblr set, has shut down its website, citing a "problem" with the RIAA, a music-industry organization which polices copyright. Could it have anything to do with the ease with which users can download music files from the site, despite founder Justin Ouellette's efforts to block them? The company blog elaborates, barely: "No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned."A long note on Muxtape website now says the website will be relaunching in the future but as a service for bands.
Muxtape is relaunching as a service exclusively for bands, offering an extremely powerful platform with unheard-of simplicity for artists to thrive on the internet. Musicians in 2008 without access to a full time web developer have few options when it comes to establishing themselves online, but their needs often revolve around a common set of problems. The new Muxtape will allow bands to upload their own music and offer an embeddable player that works anywhere on the web, in addition to the original muxtape format. Bands will be able to assemble an attractive profile with simple modules that enable optional functionality such as a calendar, photos, comments, downloads and sales, or anything else they need. The system has been built from the ground up to be extended infinitely and is wrapped in a template system that will be open to CSS designers. There will be more details soon. The beta is still private at the moment, but that will change in the coming weeks.An Ars Technica article lists a few alternatives. They include Songza.com, Favtape and Mixtube.
Posted on September 27, 2008
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Rick Astley Interview About Rickrolls
Rickrolling was very big on April Fool's Day. YouTube even rickrolled people who were clicking on its featured videos. For the very few who don't know rickrolling is when someone tricks you into clicking on a link that takes you to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video. Astley told Web Scout that if he was a young kid looking at his old song today he would think it was pretty naff.
For his part, Astley was nothing if not modest about his new cultural role. "If this had happened around some kind of rock song, with a lyric that really meant something -- a Bruce Springsteen, "God bless America" ... or an anti-something kind of song, I could kind of understand that," Astley said. "But for something as, and I don't mean to belittle it, because I still think it's a great pop song, but it's a pop song; do you know what I mean? It doesn't have any kind of weight behind it, as such. But maybe that's the irony of it."Rick Astley seems to be taking it very well. If "Never Gonna Give You Up" was a bad song it probably wouldn't be such a popular choice for something like a rickroll. It's the fact that the song gets your head - it is both catchy and cheesy - that makes it the perfect music video to trick someone into viewing.
Astley would never put the song down, mind you. It's just that, as he says, "If I was a young kid now looking at that song, I'd have to say I'd think it was pretty naff, really."
(Wikipedia on "naff": British slang for "something which is seen to be particularly 'cheesy' or 'tacky' or in otherwise poor aesthetic taste.") "For me it's a good example of what some of the '80s were about in that pop sort of music way. A bit like you could say Debbie Gibson was absolutely massive, but if you look back at it now ... do you know what I mean?"
Posted on April 5, 2008
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Internet Spurs Dance Fads
The Internet is helping dance fads to take off according to this WSJ video. In the past it was parties and dance tv shows like American Bandstand that helped dance fads take off. The article also mentions the Soulja Boy Tell'em - Crank That hit. The WSJ is certainly correct about this trend. If you don't believe them then just look at the 27 million views and counting that the Soulja Boy instructional dance video has received. The article says this is a trend and savvy bands will be trying to be a part of it with clever choreography.Posted on February 12, 2008
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Writers Write, Inc. Launches Music Blog
Writers Write, Inc., the parent company of SurfersSurf.com, has announced the launch of SingersSing.com. SingersSing.com is a daily musc blog featuring music news and music video clips. Recent posts include:
Singers Sing also has a twitter feed located here.
Posted on July 2, 2007
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Twelve Music Social Networks
Everyone has heard of the big social networks like Facebook and MySpace buat some of the niche music social networks are starting to get very popular as well. Mashable has a post that describes what they claim are the twelve best music social network. Here is a list of the music social networks discussed on Mashable's post. Unless you are really into music you probably haven't visited them all.Last.fm was recently acquired by CBS and it is has 15 million users. iLike has generated a lot of buzz lately because iLike's widget has been very popular on Facebook. MySpace technically could be included in the list since it is used frequently for music and music was one of the main reasons MySpace became so popular.
Posted on June 23, 2007
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ZonTube Mashes Amazon and YouTube
ZonTube is a handy website that mashes results from Amazon.com's music store with videos on YouTube.com. Search for an artist and then select an album from that artist and ZonTube will show you a list of songs from the album. Each song that has YouTube videos available will have a link next to it that shows you the videos from YouTube. Some of the videos on youTube are made by fans and some of them are the official videos for the song. Lifehacker explains how you would find music videos for the songs from Norah Jones' latest album.
Say you're looking for the new Norah Jones album and would like to see if there's a music video out yet for any of the songs. You can use ZonTube to instantly find out if Norah indeed has released any music vids for every song on her album, and watch them right there within ZonTube. ZonTube is organized into categories from Alternative Rock to Soundtracks (with sub-categories for each); you can also click on the frequently updated New Releases to find out what's up and coming.Some of the more popular artists have more videos on YouTube. For example, Britney Spears' Oops!... I Did It Again album has YouTube videos for pratically every song on the album. You can see the ZonTube page for this album here.
Posted on January 23, 2007
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New Social Network Targets Music Lovers
A new social network called MOG has debuted that unites people based on their tastes in music.
MOG is a new social network that helps people find other people that have similar tastes in music. If you look at some of the random MOG shots on MOG's homepage it shows a photograph of the person and lists a few of their favorite bands. You can learn more about MOG in the faq.Social networks have been expanding at a quick pace lately. Recently, new networks have launched in specific categories like autos, kids and soccer. Even Martha Stewart's company has a social network in the pipeline.
Posted on June 22, 2006
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Viacom's Video Mixer
B2Day blogs about a Viacom website that includes a useful video tool called Video Mixer. Video Mixer lets you mix clips from the N's shows, like Degrassi and O'Grady, with music and graphics.
It is dead-simple, but it gives you enough functionality (you can lay down one of four music tracks, put in transitions between scenes, and add graphics) to create fun, viral video clips. (Here's mine). Then once you e-mail that, an ad from Skittles is inserted in front of your mashup. It's the perfect media microchunk. Media companies need to provide more tools like this to help raise the bar for consumer-generated video.Many film and tv studios offers stills and desktop pictures on their websites. B2Day is right that they should also be offering video mixing tools as well.
Posted on March 29, 2006
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Songbird 0.1 Officially Hatched
There is a lot of buzz about Songbird now that Songbird 0.1 Proof-of-Concept has officially hatched. Songbird is an open source web music player built from Firefox's browser engine.
Songbird plays the Web. Play any MP3 on the Web without leaving the page. Songbird can view Web pages as dynamic playlists that it can play, save, or automatically download every day.Inevitable LLC, the developers of Songbird, have many plans for the music player. Some of the future plans can be found here. (Via Boing Boing)
Songbird plays your music too. Songbird has all the features you expect in a desktop media player. And Songbird constantly improves. Like Firefox, Songbird's features may be improved with user installed and contributed cross-platform extensions.
Posted on February 8, 2006
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Yahoo Acquires WebJay
Yahoo has acquired WebJay, a website that lets people create and share playlists. WebJay defines playlists as "playable lists of links to audio (mp3, real etc.) and/or video files, for your media player (Real, Quicktime, WMP etc.)" Yahoo's Music Blog says they were interested in WebJay as well the creator Lucas Gonze who will now be working for Yahoo. (Via Jeremy Zawodny)
Posted on January 9, 2006
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Yahoo Launches Audio Search
Yahoo has launched a beta of its new audio search which it says searches through 50 million audio files for podcasts, music, speeches, interviews, newscasts, jokes and sound effects. The song results are linked to stores where people can purchase the song but they do offer short samples provided by Loudeye. (Via B2Day)Posted on August 6, 2005
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Musipedia's Melody Search
Musipedia, an online music encylopedia, has an interesting search tool called the melody search. People can search for popular songs, folk songs, hymns, carols, national anthems and classical music. The search results include a short MIDI file version of the music. For example
search popular music for Jurassic and you will be given a short
midi of the Jurassic Park Theme by composer John Williams. Searches can be performed using keywords (text) or by using the Parsons Code. An explanation of the Parsons code can be found here. Posted on July 14, 2005
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Mercora Music Search
Mercora.com has launched a new music search engine that searches live music. Mercora says it searches over 25,000 active channels. Searches can be run for artist, genre or DJ. Biography, photograph and podcast searches can also be run from Mercora. (Via B2Day)Posted on June 20, 2005
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Track iTunes
TunesTracker, a tool that alerts you when the iTunes Music Store has new music of interest to you, has added new features including composer and title searches, rss feeds and artist information. TunesTracker has also added a News Roundup page which gathers headlines from several iTunes-related blogs, news sources, and software sites.Posted on March 10, 2005
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