TechnoCloud

Among the increasing number of ways to stream music legally (imeem, last.fm, youtube…), one service that has caught my eye is Spotify. At present a desktop application with ambitions to go multi-media, the service provides ad-supported (or ad-free for £9.99/month) European access to streamed versions from all the major music labels.

It’s iTunes-inspired interface is intuitive, with impressive artist profiles and even more impressive back catalogue. In fact it’s become something of a challenge to those I show the application to find an obscure band from their childhood not featured.

With physical music sales continuing to decline and digital sales not making up the shortfall, this service and others like it are going to accelerate that trend. Certainly, desktop-only and ad supported is not going to be for everyone, but it’s an acceptable trade-off for me, particularly if the service can go multi-media.

Interesting then to see a job posting on their site shows they are specifically looking for a Nokia S60 platform software engineer:

“We’re now looking for an outstanding software engineer who knows the ins and outs of C++ and the Nokia S60 platform like the back of his hand. You’ll help us make Spotify mobile and take part in changing the way people listen to music forever.”

Looks like Spotify mobile is coming soon.

Hats off to the New York Times’ David Pogue for this highly original piece of reporting on the iPhone hype.

To the tune of Sinatra’s famous ‘My Way’, take it away, David…

Mashing is heading for the mainstream. YouTube are set to rollout their Adobe-powered remixer, Photobucket released more Adobe-powered functionality in early 2007, not forgetting of course Jumpcut’s purchase by Yahoo last year and a number of start-ups, including Eyespot and MuveeMix.

Even with MySpace’s (FIM) purchase of Photobucket earlier this year, they still also invested in the more advanced functionality offered by Flektor, no doubt wanting their own in-house software to complement the existing Adobe deal with Photobucket.

Despite all the activity from the big players in the market, start-ups are still emerging and innovating. Among the new entrants are JamGlue (tutorial here) with an intuitive music mashing tool, similar to SpliceMusic mashing tool. It’s a familiar mixing interface, with layered timelines and drag and drop editing points, plus some handy right-mouse options in Flash to repeat and cut layers.

The community is slowly establishing itself with a reasonable level of user generated clips and samples up there to embed into your remix, plus evidence of rights management.

It’s fun and relatively easy to use, albeit sometimes frustratingly slow to load, and offers more advanced music-mashing functionality than the more video focused offerings above, suggesting it may have enough of a niche to survive.

Either way, mashing is heading for the mainstream.

Not so long ago, as I posted here, Steve Jobs was setting out a vision for a DRM-free future.  Today, the future has arrrived a little more quickly than some might have thought: Apple have announced that the entire EMI Music catalog will be available DRM-free worldwide starting in May.  The DRM-free tracks will be a little more expensive, and better quality (256kbs as opposed to 128kbs.) Click here for more information about this ground breaking move.

If there’s a more visually appealing way to discover music, I’d like to see it. Step forward, Musicovery, an evolution of the liveplasma discovery engine idea.

Navigation is through an innovative, yet intuitive, panel offering choices of genre and era, subdivided into a mood grid covering dark, energetic, positive, calm. Beyond this is a central navigation panel to select cross-genre mood and dance tempo.

The music catalogue available is of reasonable breadth, if short of exhaustive. On selecting your start point, Musicovery creates a playlist for you, illustrated through a colourful interlinked journey which you can drag to explore.

In the latest version, the e-commerce offering has been improved. You can now click through to buy the track on Amazon or iTunes and can listen to higher quality audio by paying €9.99 a year or €2 a month.

It will be interesting to see how financially viable the e-commerce options prove, but as a music discovery engine it has already expanded my horizons for one. 

After Bill Gates’ explained his view on DRM to a group of bloggers, Steve Jobs has set out his vision for a DRMless world. At first sight it might seem that they’re both saying the same thing - i.e. that as content distributors, they perceive DRM to be an impediment to progress and not in the interests of the consumer. However, this interview with Bill Gates suggests that their positions are more divergent. To be fair, the interview with Bill Gates was over a year ago and it’s possible that in the intervening period Microsoft’s experience with Zune have left him with a slightly different feeling.

Anti DRM groups, such as Defective By Design have taken the views expressed by Jobs and Gates as support for their position. For another view on what’s happening in the music industry with regards to DRM, read this, which is written from a pro-DRM stance.

Here’s an interesting application of a recommendation engine:  The Filter.  This kind of software is likely to be much more useful that the Playlist features built into your favourite media player.  It only works with iTunes and Windows XP right now, but there are versions in development for Mac and for Windows Media Player.