Music

The awesome, humorous data visualizations of music/concerts by Andrew Kuo, who posts his work at earlboykins.blogspot.com, were recently highlighted in The New York Times.

(from NYT graphic) Hat tip: Information Aesthetics

Sony’s proprietary-format music store fails miserably.

The Sony Connect experiment is about to get, well, disconnected: it will be winding down its music and video services in the next couple of months, and focus on servicing the Playstation group on the technical needs…

• Badly Drawn Boy : KEXP Session
• Nirvana : Rough Tapes, a bootleg of outtakes and demos.
• The Fall : Peel Session, 1978
• Tortoise : 2007 Bonnaroo Set
• The Bats : The Law of Things

Some Polvo singles.

1990/91 demos, outtakes and rehearsals from Spirtualized.

Amiina, better-known as Sigur Rós’ string section, has a few tracks from their debut record streaming from an e-card.

Apple launches “iTunes Plus”, the name given to the DRM-free section/tracks at the iTMS. The shortlist:

_256 kbps AAC encoding
_$1.29/song
_need updated version of iTunes (7.2)
_Account info still embedded in the non-DRM tracks. Additional info at TUAW.

Screenshots and walkthrough at Engadget.

Steve Jobs live from D2007.

Notable:
_YouTube on your Apple TV—software update coming soon.
_3rd-Party iPhone apps probably in the future.

we’ll find a way to let 3rd parties write apps and still preserve security on the iPhone. But until we find that way we can’t compromise the security of the phone.

I’ve used 3rd party apps… the more you add, the more your phone crashes. No one’s perfect, and we’d sure like our phone not to crash once a day. If you can just be a little more patient with us I think everyone can get what they want.

Apple also releases a 160GB built-to-order Apple TV for $399. The Apple TV takes a beating in Fortune.

Pandora announces a slew of features/products—a deal with sprint, a re-vamped web site, and a wi-fi device that essentially amounts to an Internet-based digital radio.

Let’s hope Pandora isn’t killed off by proposed new Internet streaming royalties. In the last few days, there have been glimmers of hope:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A group backed by the record industry that collects Internet music royalties said on Tuesday it would defer new copyright-payment rates for small Webcasters who claim the new payments would bankrupt them.

Miranda July “stars” in a new Blonde Redhead video, Directed by Mike Mills. Quicktime here.

Press release.

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 16, 2007–Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced it will launch a digital music store later this year offering millions of songs in the DRM-free MP3 format from more than 12,000 record labels. EMI Music’s digital catalog is the latest addition to the store. Every song and album in the Amazon.com digital music store will be available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. Amazon’s DRM-free MP3s will free customers to play their music on virtually any of their personal devices — including PCs, Macs(TM), iPods(TM), Zunes(TM), Zens(TM) — and to burn songs to CDs for personal use.

“The MTV of Web 2.0?”—that remains to be seen, but LastFM is close to rolling out it’s video-related features, according to NewTeeVee.

According to this Billboard story, at least four Indie labels are planning to remove their catalogs from eMusic, citing pricing concerns. Much more at Paid Content.

via The Workbook Project

Another interesting music visualization/recommendation project, using LastFM data

NewTeeVee lists what it thinks are the 10 most useful Yahoo Pipes data mashups for video and music.

from MacNN

A message reportedly sent to partners encourages interested music labels to speak with Apple about changing their offerings to a format without digital rights management, reflecting the changes prompted by the EMI deal early this month.

“Many of you have reached out to iTunes to find out how you can make your songs available higher quality and DRM-free,” the note said. “Starting next month, iTunes will begin offering higher-quality, DRM-free music and DRM-free music videos to all customers.”

This comes as Apple is about to begin re-negotiating it’s licensing deals with the major labels.