Slashdot Mirror

http://www.pandora.com/
http://www.last.fm/

Enjoy.

You're talking about free full-length streams?

Right now (supposedly) there's free.napster.com, last.fm, and lala.com, but I've only had success with the first. The other two don't seem to have much of a selection. When I try to stream an album, they'll give me a couple songs from it, or 30s samples only, or something like that.

colon open bracket, is that you?! I love your stuff!

I wish he made the sequel: _The Neighbor Of The Beast_.

Somebody beat him to it.

I thought the Air would come from Venus.

That would be cool if they used your friends and such to suggest you new people to become friends with, à la Last.fm, with people instead of music.

Well to LastNig.ht. According to your Facebook profile, you recently "hooked up" with Sally, Michelle and Brandy. LastNig.ht BETA suggests you to try to hook up with the following people : Stacy. Pam. Jeff.

Last.fm has... so the floodgates may not have been opened, but they are letting the light shine through. Just enough to draw the masses... will they then slowly close back the doors and raise rates, or will they let us bask in the very limited glow? The current Last.fm deal is only a beta, once it's over, the music is only free for download or listen with a subscription. Meh, sadly even I can't complain at this point. I always said I would never pay for downloaded music, and to this day I have not, but perhaps its just too convenient and a good model to pass up. Especially with all the perks Last.fm provides....

http://last.fm/ is also a great source for discovering music.

If each individual item within a copyrighted work is copyrighted, then how would we ever legalize mash-ups and re-mixes

The composite work is legal if, and only if, the copyright holders of each component specifically allow you to use it in this way. A technique that has been used to great effect to enable people like RedHat etc. to put together a large collection of components and release a composite work commonly called a 'Linux distribution'. Because that is how the copyright holders of the original components wanted their software to be used.

Yes - I know this isn't possible with most of the multimedia content currently available, because the copyright holders explicitly say they don't want you to use their content in this way. So don't use their content, use something else. If the original artists/producers do want people to use their content in this way, then it is up to them to license it in a way that allows it. Yes - I know that this isn't possible at the moment, but it could be.

Think of it this way. Mash-ups, re-mixes, reviews etc all bring the original work to attention of the public. Fairly soon, if something isn't on the net, then people won't hear about it, and the best way to get something on the net will be to allow people to use it, share it, quote it and refer to it in these kind of ways.

A few years ago, almost all the commercial software producers were hostile to open source software. Now they are falling over each other to be open and sharing, because it is what their customers want, and people are seriously beginning to ask how the closed source software companies are going to make money in a few years time.

I don't think it needs a change in the law, I think it needs a change in the mindset of the users and artists/producers. Already some artists are starting to question the role of the large record companies, and choosing to release their work under their own terms. If people like mash-ups and re-mixes, then songs released under mash-up and re-mix friendly terms will get more exposure, more publicity and more sales.

You might want access to a specific piece of content, but you have to respect the wishes of the original creator (even if the original artist chose to sign over the copyright to a large corporation, they made the choice and we have to stick with that). Saying "No - I don't want to use any of the music already available under the creative commons or similar licenses, I must have access to that (restrictive licensed) piece of music." isn't going to help.

Imagine what would happen if a film studio released the trailer for a new film under the Creative Common license. Everyone would be putting bits of it up on their blog and posting copies of it to YouTube - generating a huge amount of publicity for the film.

A huge amount of music is available from sites like LastFM, because the artists or record labels have chosen to share the music in this way. And it works too, I have discovered quite a few new artists by listening to them on LastFM and gone on to buy their albums.

In a few years time, if it isn't available in a mash-up remix friendly way, then kids won't put it on their myspace sites, and if it isn't on myspace (or whatever the latest networking site is) then kids won't hear about it. Artists and record labels who don't license their content in a friendly way will just get left behind.

There's a song by Lou Barlow that suggests that same thing! http://www.last.fm/music/Lou+Barlow/_/Mary

Then use http://www.last.fm/
AFAIK they are UK based.

How is it different from Last.fm?

>Downloads a bunch of random stuff for you directly from the publisher, and you rate it. Then it downloads more stuff based on what you like, and what other users who liked that like. Fun :)

Sounds like last.fm.

Most of the RIAA labels are limited to 30 second clips (unfortunately), but some of the same tracks and artists are available as 'live' tracks. The RIAA does not own live tracks unless they themselves published it. Some artists encourage taping of their shows and so there is a wealth of 'bootleg' show recordings.

http://last.fm/ - Client is a decent streamer and the tags/social recommends are nice.
http://betterpropaganda.com/ - MP3 stream updated regularly with new and intresting music
Also very important, friends that are more into the "scene" than I :)

last.fm

"Health Clubs"

Such an emerging band should sign up with something like Magnatune. They do the "promotion" and promote a "mentorship" attribute to the commercial transaction. I think they should merge with last.fm but the latter were bought out by a major so I donìt see it happening... e

(I'll post anonymously only to preserve the mods I already gave here)

Have you checked out your own page on Last.fm? You have 379 plays right now, 90 listeners, a band description and someone registered a gig you had. There are also a couple of pics. So you might want to advertise your new EP there, add a link to the donation page on your site, and more people will pay for your music. I'm listening to it BTW and I'm liking it, although PayPal is a big turnoff for me, but I could maybe donate a couple of dollars. Advertising on last.fm is relatively cheap, and if you want to be known by more people, that's a good way to start.

I personally view pirating business/development tools for private use as free publicity and training

My music discovery process: I simply download what I happen to come across when I feel curious. I rarely hunt down any specific genre, song, group or whatever. I do not crave music and I rarely bother hunting down even songs I like in any form... so, queuing up in music stores or browsing through Apple's catalog is not something I could be bothered with. When I download stuff, it is mostly only because I can and felt like it - there is not much of an a-priori intention behind it.

I personally view pirating business/development tools for private use as free publicity and training

My music discovery process: I simply download what I happen to come across when I feel curious. I rarely hunt down any specific genre, song, group or whatever. I do not crave music and I rarely bother hunting down even songs I like in any form... so, queuing up in music stores or browsing through Apple's catalog is not something I could be bothered with. When I download stuff, it is mostly only because I can and felt like it - there is not much of an a-priori intention behind it.

Hmm, that sounds very interesting, and very close to what I was thinking about this. I wrote a short story which summarizes the concept, it is called "Intelligence grows on trees". Basically, it is the same thing, but the difference is that I consider one's ability to "measure" possible outcomes to be proportional with one's intelligence, rather than one's level of optimism.

In other words, it's not a matter of feeling positive or negative about something, but a matter of being able to predict that event. Some things are "feeling-agnostic" and there is no reason for us to feel bad or good about them; emotions should not be involved.

Optimism or pessimism is a high-level protocol, stacked on top of other things. Reality does not care how you feel about it, so in the end you are a "winner" if you can rationally deal with things, rather than emotionally treat them as good/bad.

You might also be interested in this book, which is very good: The brain - a decoded enigma. And there are a couple of other examples on my site, which illustrate how math can be applied to life (most of the stories are about social relationships).


I've always considered myself an optimist, yet I always try to find potential flaws in all my plans which means (according to the author of the book you mentioned) that I am a pessimist. Could that be true? Or maybe we are dealing with different definitions for 'optimism' and 'pessimism'.

I thought this could have a connection with music; so I made a little experiment, and created an account on last.fm, to see what statistics says about my favourite music. It turns out that Moby's "Why does my heart feel so bad?" (along with other similar songs by Moby) is top rated in my list. Hmmm.. so... am I still an optimist?

I've used Jaiku. It's like a combination of Twitter and an aggregated feed publisher. You can register all your 'places' on the net, and it publishes a consolidated RSS feed about your activities. For example, you can add your del.icio.us bookmarks, your Flickr photo stream, your last.fm 'recently played' music, or any other feed (say from your blog), and any updates to any of these are published as one combined feed. You can add other Jaiku users as friends and view similar updates from them.
They provide a mobile application (Nokia S60 3rd ed. is supported currently, don't know about others) that lets you publish messages like Twitter. This also integrates with the phonebook, so you can enter the Jaiku ID for your friends, and get an update of what they're doing. The mobile app only shows what updates your friends have made to Jaiku, i.e. it won't provide details of their other feeds.
It's an interesting app, somewhat like Facebook's 'news' page, lets you publish minute by minute details of whatever you're doing-if you're so inclined. And of course, your Jaiku page is accessible by anyone, so much for privacy.

Facebook used to be great -- a prime example of exactly how you want to build a website. They knew their purpose, and the satisfied that purpose well. Their forays into other areas that were relevant also proved to be a considerable success, photo sharing being the most obvious example. Events were also revamped to the degree where they were actually useful (and of course, they're quite relevant to Facbook's original goals)

As time went on, they grew too greedy. Their "blogging" and "bookmark sharing" components didn't achieve nearly as much success -- anyone wanting either feature was already on digg, del.icio.us, livejounal, etc... Undeterred by these two failures, they opened up the floodgates to the filth and scum of the internet (I'm talking about AOL and MySpace -- not High-Schoolers)

The App platform in one fell swoop eliminated every single competitive advantage Facebook once had, and completely erased its identity. Even the goons in charge of facebook have gone as far to openly say that it's nothing more than a way for them to make money, and a platform for others to do the same. (Seriously -- read the developer documentation!)

So what you end up with are the Vampires, Zombies, giant smiley-faces, and spam invites. I had the misfortune of viewing a profile with a goatse app in it. That said, there are a few nice apps -- the ability to tie into Last.Fm was an obvious one, and the 'Graffiti' application can be fun when used in moderation.

Everything else can go for all I care. I can't stand the applications and groups whose sole purpose is to invite as many people as possible to them, nor can I stand the asshats who invite every single one of their 'friends' to their party, regardless of whether they actually live in the same country or not.

> And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think I'd like nothing more than the complete breakdown of the music industry so that you'd actually have to go out to bars to hear people play

Why would _you_ have to? There would always be a lot of those who are eager to try new stuff and tell the world of it. If you're none of these, no problem - you will know their opinion, and the opinion of the masses.. and given that you usually know what kind of music you like, something like http://last.fm/ would easily let you keep up with time.

The other good part is that most of the 'promotion' crap that involves sticking bad songs into our ears would be gone. Part of the problem with the today's music industry is that bands and performers being hyped are often outright sub par, because they somehow can afford 'promotion', and the better ones that are out there often just can't compete. This way, overall music quality available would improve as well.

That Radiohead decision along with things like http://www.sellaband.com/ are hopefully signs of the new musical industry. Die evil eMpTyV.

I had a fairly straight-forward time cruising over there to browse some Paul Van Dyk for my DRM unencumbered collection. However, Amazon still needs to work on it:

- Amarok can't handle the preview song format/mu3/url/whatever.
- If I buy an album, I want a zip file, not some silly downloader tool (kubuntu here)
- I don't want to go through several steps (card, billing address) to purchase each track
- I'd prefer Ogg or Flac, being a spoiled magnatune cumstomer. :-)
- The buy button is too far away from the track name - too easy to buy the wrong track.
- Ideally, they would do some deal with http://www.last.fm/ to integrate some better functionality into the web interface.

In a nutshell, make it more like magnatune!

http://last.fm/

I know it's doable, but Amarok is the only Free application that I know of to allow this without resorting to figuring out how the files are renamed (or, indeed, WHY they are renamed). When I had to backup a coworkers iPod (formatted for Mac), and did not yet have a running Amarok on my laptop, it was a challenge in finding the Demo copy of the program that crashed least, and getting it backed up before the demo expired. What a mess. As I mentioned elsewhere, I do like my Macs and iPod (and you can scrobble from it), but some of Apple's decisions just baffle me. I think it's because I didn't "switch" from Windows, but from Linux, and none of these features would have gone down like this in an open source project, because open source people aren't trying to tie you to their platform, they're trying to make their platform as interoperable as possible.

Can you scrobble from it? My iPod works well with Amarok and iTunes to upload my recently played tracks. Actually, better with Amarok because I didn't have to create a smart playlist on it, it "Just Worked", not like Apple's solution.

I'd consider something other than an iPod if it would keep stats and stuff. It's not important, in the grand scheme of things, but you kind of get hooked in a geeky way on getting stats of everything you do. I know RockBox will do this with some apps, but I don't know if it's worth the hassle. I have an Archos that GMINI 120 that if it wasn't "almost supported", would have Rockbox on it, but it's probably too old for them to complete the port now.

reminds me of barbara brockhaus

I would argue that people in cities are *less* likely to be comfortable with the idea of shifting authority to government.
Just look at the current political situation - on which side of the political spectrum is this administration, which has done more to grab government authority than almost any other administration in history? Can you imagine a liberal president saying he/she has the right to lock someone up indefinitely just because they say so? Can you think of anything that is more "government authority" than that level of autocratic control over someone's personal liberty?

Lately I've been using Billy to play my mp3 collection. Billy uses less than 2MBs of RAM even with tens of thousands of entries in a playlist. Billy can scroll through large playlists without any lag, skipping or waiting.

Billy starts instantly (even with large playlists) and sits unobtrusively in my system tray. It does what I need it to do, uses almost 0 resources and it stays out of my way. What more can you ask for?

I don't have anything to do with Billy, other than being a very happy user.

I hear that there is an actively maintained app that is similar to Billy, but has more features (including scrobbling) callled DéKiBulle. I haven't used it much, but it was nice enough when I used it.

No guitar virtuosity? Are you joking?

Here try this: Necrophagist - Stabwound

Or this if you prefer cheesy: Dragonforce - Fury of the Storm (sorry, couldn't find a good mp3 of it)

Or for something different I just discovered yesterday: Direwolf - Final Flight

There's plenty of good music around (virtuosic or not), you just need to look a bit...

Where do http://www.last.fm/ and http://www.projectplaylist.com/ compare to deezer?

http://www.last.fm/user/Wal_Mart

The internet has undoubtedly reduced the number (and quality) of superstars and celebrities out there (you can also blame the record industry and clearchannel for the quality plunging through the floor).

On the other hand, music as a whole has benefitted greatly and considerably increased in diversity. Chances are that there are more than a few bands that match your tastes out there, and odds are that they actually have a pretty significant following.

Over the past few years, the indie circuit has become more and more and more diverse to encompass just about every genre, and has even spawned a few genres of its own (or at the very least, greatly popularized previously obscure styles such as Post-Rock and french-influenced funk/electronica a la Justice).

Quite a few artists that have risen up through the indie circuit over the past few years are currently considered to be amongst the most talented popular musicians of our generation -- Sufjan Stevens stands out in particular as being an absolute genius. I have a feeling that Sam Beam of Iron & Wine will likely receive quite a bit of attention once his new album is out.

This past year alone is pretty widely considered to have been one of the best ever for the independent music scene, and has arguably produced as many memorable albums as all of the 90s did. Artists and Albums that have risen through the indie circuit, standing out as being particularly fantastic to my mind include (in no particular order) The Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie, The Decemberists, Of Montreal, Iron & Wine, Sufjan Stevens, Calexico, Spoon, Final Fantasy, Patrick Wolf, Andrew Bird, Feist, The National, Bright Eyes, Okkervil River, Neutral Milk Hotel, 65daysofstatic, Justice, LCD Soundsystem, Jose Gonzalez, Josh Ritter, Elliot Smith, Nick Drake, and the list goes on and on....

The awesome bit is that the above list encompasses almost every genre imaginiable. Apart from the usual Indie Rock, there's some electronica, a few singer-songwriters, a folk musician, a southwestern ensemble, two solo violinists, an instrumental post-rock band, and some electronica.

The music industry seems to have lost the ability to find people these days who make both good celebrities and good musicians. David Bowie stands out as doing a particularly good job of both. Other "superstars" of today have indeed climbed to the top purely on accord of their own talent -- Coldplay and U2 stand out in this regard, and seeing Mark Konpfler perform with a few former members of the Dire Straits a few years back was an absolutely amazing experience. Apart from that, though, the top 10 is more or less absolute garbage.

Elton can say what he wants, but the music scene is the absolute best it's been during my lifetime.

Things like Last.fm are changing the way people find new music and people are finding music that they actually like... and it's probably not Elton John.

Admittedly, it's not fabulous, but I have made music with DNA sources for a while. The example below uses an incomplete strand of smilodon DNA from La Brea for the torn arpeggio throughout the song. Another one uses a strand of 5-HT serotonin

http://www.last.fm/music/Lucite.org/_/Chocolatefac e

Translating standard DNA descriptions to MIDI is not difficult, and not a new idea. There used to be some old Apple and DOS programs for doing it as well. If I continue to to make such music, is there any way I could conceivable get in trouble?

*****

LOCUS S46659 132 bp DNA linear MAM 08-MAY-1993
DEFINITION 12S rRNA [Smilodon fatalis=saber-toothed cats, Mitochondrial, 132
nt].
ACCESSION S46659
VERSION S46659.1 GI:257782
KEYWORDS .
SOURCE mitochondrion Smilodon fatalis (saber-toothed cat)
ORGANISM Smilodon fatalis
Eukaryota; Metazoa; Chordata; Craniata; Vertebrata; Euteleostomi;
Mammalia; Eutheria; Carnivora; Fissipedia; Felidae; Smilodon.
REFERENCE 1 (bases 1 to 132)
AUTHORS Janczewski,D.N., Yuhki,N., Gilbert,D.A., Jefferson,G.T. and
O'Brien,S.J.
TITLE Molecular phylogenetic inference from saber-toothed cat fossils of
Rancho La Brea
JOURNAL Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 89 (20), 9769-9773 (1992)
MEDLINE 93028544
PUBMED 1409696
REMARK GenBank staff at the National Library of Medicine created this
entry [NCBI gibbsq 115817] from the original journal article.
This sequence comes from Fig. 1.
FEATURES Location/Qualifiers
source 1..132 /organism="Smilodon fatalis" /organelle="mitochondrion" /mol_type="genomic DNA" /db_xref="taxon:13266"
gene 1..132 /gene="12S rRNA"
rRNA 1..132 /gene="12S rRNA" /note="12S"
BASE COUNT 32 a 22 c 33 g 45 t
ORIGIN
1 tttatcgatt atagaacagg ctcctctaga gggatgtaaa gcaccgccaa gtcctttgag
61 ttttaagctg ttgctagtag ttctctggcg gatagttttg tttagggtaa ctatctaagt
121 ttagggctaa gc //

Basically, the users of these services are suffering today all due to this. And the stations are shifting blame to legislation (as always - and probably justifiably so). I agree it's a drag that these charges are doubling in such a short time -- but at the same time, this has been a reality outside of the US for years.

I agree that the SoundExchange deal is pretty ridiculous. I think it should all go through BMI/SESAC/ASCAP like normal radio royalty distribution - since it makes sense, and right bands get their (not quite) fair share. Anyone heard why this isn't the case?

Thanks for the recommendation. Khonnor sounds pretty sweet (from the 30 second samples at least!)

Electronica and (non-vocal) post-rock are both sort of coming back into the limelight thanks to the internet, for the simple reason that their audiences are somewhat smaller than for mainstream music. Pink Floyd sort of played around with the genre way back, but it wasn't until the past few years that bands like Mogwai, Amon Tobin, Boards of Candada, Explosions in the Sky, or 65daysofstatic really found the sort of fanbase to establish themselves.

If you want to poke around and look for music that suits your tastes, I highly recommend Last.FM, which is a gigantic music recommendation engine that is pretty good at finding stuff that matches your tastes. Likewise, (although on a more limited scope), Pandora is great to find new music.

Pitchfork Media is often regarded as being the bible for independent music. Be warned, however, that they're extremely pretentious, and somewhat persnickety when it comes to their reviews. They've completely panned some of my favorite albums. However, an album that gets an extremely favorable review on Pitchfork is something that is definitely worth checking out. (Also be warned of a inexplicably huge pro-Radiohead bias)

Stereogum is also another great blog for keeping track of the indie scene.

Of course, don't let this be your only guide. Friends are a great way for finding new music, and occasionally you just stumble upon something relatively unknown, and yet extremely awesome.

Or looking at the top 10 tracks at last.fm! haha. Ooh, apparently Oasis has a new song called Wonderwall, I should do a review on it!

Perhaps one reason behind the decline in music sales is due to easy ways on the internet to find niche artists. Some years ago, I liked the stereotypical, popular bands, but after discovering new material through sites such as Pandora and last.fm (and perhaps from becoming more mature) I now like much more niche bands. I suspect that this happening on a large scale is the reason that the 'safe bet' strategy is not working for the music industry any more.

Joe Satriani is coming to kill us ?

I always suspected he was a maniacal killer in disguise!

boycott the mafiaa bastards
creative commons music is fine, we don't need to be pushed around just to enjoy music!
http://www.garageband.com/
http://www.jamendo.com/en/
http://ccmixter.org/
http://www.last.fm/
http://www.myownmusic.de/

and a link collection (in german)
http://netzpolitik.org/ccwiki/index.php/CC-Musik

Big box retailers are interested in volume and marginal pricing. The range of music they pick, the bands that get prominent shelf space and the albums that appear in the advertising will all be driven by the bottom line.

No - if we want diverse musical forms to survive the big box stores, it will be despite them, not because of them.

Small dealers will help - but at best they can only provide small niche markets. Internet sites tied to such retailers may help a lot. For me though, the future of diverse music depends on the internet providing the resources to find out about less known bands and albums and hear stuff I can't hear on the radio. But right now, the Internet Radio station is on the brink of an extinction event. So support Save Net Radio before it really is too late.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

If you haven't already, please consider joining the Rhythmbox group on Last.fm

And the answer is: no, you can't buy cool

Ah cool, I shall have to explore the site.

I have recently started using http://www.last.fm/ which is a really cool site. It uses your music library to generate recommendations and even a radio station (all for free) based on what other people with similar music to you also have (and a bunch of other factors I think).

But I'll have to investigate this site also as it seems to take a more blog-orientated approach.