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Sony’s Connect Music Offers Little Value

The Washington Posts’ Rob Pegoraro is pretty critical of Sony’s continuing mistakes in digital music…Hard to blame him, this sounds like a painful system to use, even if the price is right on the players and media. Why bother?

But the store’s advertised selection of “more than 500,000” songs is missing a concert stage’s worth of major artists — to name a handful, Missy Elliott, Norah Jones, the Replacements, Liz Phair and Los Lobos. Even some of Sony’s own artists are largely absent: Connect’s Bruce Springsteen collection consists of a measly nine albums, not counting a few re-releases.

The tool you must use to download and manage your purchases, Sony’s Sonic Stage (Windows 98 SE or newer), is a bloated, bug-ridden beast of a program. It ploddingly searches through the store’s catalogue as if it were a card catalogue, while its space-wasting interface requires constant scrolling within its own window. It can’t copy CDs in MP3 format, and it defaults to storing music in an invisible, deeply buried sub-directory.

…

Connect permits an unlimited number of transfers to portable players — except for songs from Warner Music Group’s labels, which are restricted to three transfers. Ever.

Similar control-freak behavior ensues when you move purchased songs to the other two PCs you’re allotted at any one time: Those copies lose all their transfer and CD-burning permissions. Sony says an upcoming software update will restore transfer rights, but not disc burning, to those copies.

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You want fries with that?

I hear you man, but Steve Jobs seems to be thoroughly against streaming services believing that consumer want to own their music, not rent it. Perhaps the iMix addition is a taste though and if enough people take part, Apple will get that people want even more interaction with the music. For now though if you like iTunes and the iPod, you need to appreciate the island you are on. I like it… it’s a beautiful island. 😉

Of course, I love all of these services. But I don’t want 10 digital audio services. I want one. For now, its iTunes. So I want iTunes to integrate Rhapsody-like streaming, Mixmatcher-like playlist sharing, Musicmobs or TuneCircle-like social networking. That’s what Apple needs to do for me. [A VC]

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U of IL launches iTunes Recomendation Site

Works for both Mac and Windows…

“The Music Recommendation System is an automated system that provides music recommendations specifically tailored to each user to find new music that they might like. This system operates by taking ratings from your own iTunes playlists and comparing them against other users who have used the recommendation system.” [MacSlash]

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Britney live… I’ll pass

So we just finished a movie (Intolerable Cruelty) and decided to tune a bit before bed and discovered that Britney’s show is on again “Live”…

Hard to call it live at all. Sure she’s on stage (and yes I know it was really last week), but it is a lame performance. The music was less than… the dancing was far from entertaining and the overall show was just bad. It was kind of like watching a car wreck though… just had to know how much worse it could get – at least for a few minutes. After two songs (don’t know either one, not a fan if you could not tell) we’d had more than enough.

One final thought – If you know you are not going to sing and just lipsync, you should try and work the kinks out with the soundsystem so when the camera zooms in really close, you at least try to trick us into thinking sound is coming from your mouth.

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Rock and Roll Remotely

I knew Regal Cinema was looking to get into expanding the pre-show entertainment at the movies, but this is a whole new take on what you can do at the theater. I caught myself thinking this would actually be a cool thing for someone in my situation (young baby makes getting to a concert impossible given the nature of the concert atmosphere) and going to the movies is already something I know we can handle having done so a bunch of times. The theaters already have great sound and picture and unless you get good seats you are pretty much watching on a screen anyway – at least at the big shows. Who knows… this just might work.

Rock’n’Roll Multiplex. So, now you have a choice. You can fork over $49.50 for a nosebleed seat to see Prince live at Staples Arena in L.A., or you can splurge a big fifteen bucks to see the same concert simulcast live at any of 40 Regal Cinema movie theaters, reports Eleena De Lisser in The Wall Street Journal. [reveries – cool news of the day]

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SoftSqueeze

If you like your SliMp3 or Sqeezebox and have wanted to be able to sync the music with your computer’s MP3 player, now you can…

SoftSqueeze is a software implementation of the Squeezebox allowing your PC to stream the same music as your Squeezebox. SoftSqueeze has been implemented in Java, allowing it to work on Windows, Linux and Macs. This project has only just started, but already an alpha version has been released… [SoftSqueeze]

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Dave Grohl on Paris Hilton

PARIS HILTON Her forthcoming singing debut: sign of the apocalypse or inevitable career move? Perhaps both. Either way, this baby’s going to get some serious play on this D.J.’s deck — right alongside Divine’s cover of “Name Game” and Steve Martin’s “King Tut.” Granted, I haven’t heard it yet, but I’m looking forward to this like I look forward to the next Christopher Guest movie. And she’s already made the video! [NYT Playlist]

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Record Stores: We’re Fine, Thanks

The recording industry may protest, but some owners of independent music stores say file trading is good for business. Katie Dean reports from the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. [Wired News]

Take Hoodlums Music, located on the Arizona State University campus, which opened during the heyday of Napster. One might think Net-savvy students would ignore the shop in favor of free downloads.

“It’s a myth,” said Steve Wiley, co-owner of the store. “We see them wanting to buy music.”

High prices, rather than file sharing, are what usually stop a kid from buying a CD, Wiley said.

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The Sound of a Paradigm Shift

Maybe we add our finished song in a DRM (Digital Rights Management) format to our label’s syndication feed of what’s new — the pay-subscription service we run to which only college radio stations can subscribe. Why do they subscribe and why do we need a “label?”? Maybe “tastemaker” weblogs or other types of sites will appear. Maybe a label is simply somebody who recommends songs and forms a reputation or even “a brand”? for their services. Really, the distribution and marketing is wide open. On “Grey Tuesday” it was a volunteer effort; not everyone is going to want to host files and increase their bandwidth bills for the benefit of “the music.”? Will labels pay for weblog distribution? Can Google Ads serve as effective advertising for new music, or will something else take their place? iTunes, while a pleasure to use, is very difficult to browse. Perhaps Apple could be convinced to open their framework to allow something beyond iTunes links and operate more on the Amazon referral and API model. The direction this will take is completely up in the air. [halfass]

Thanks to A VC for the link…

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‘HP Music’ goes live, Apple offers iTunes for HP

I don’t know about you, but this feels pretty damn corporate and cold too me… not like it should be… fun! I realize the service is Apple’s but the HP site certainly stays well within the corporate standard. You’d think this would be a case where you might want to bend the rules a bit…

HP yesterday launched a website for HP Music, its forthcoming music download service based on iTunes… [MacNN]

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Quite the move…

Pop star George Michael abandons the music business in order to release his songs online for free instead. [BBC News]

The multi-millionaire singer said he will never make another album for sale in record shops because he does not need the cash and does not enjoy fame.

Fans will be given the option to make donations online in exchange for downloading the tracks, and the proceeds will be given to charity.

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Music swappers face home invasion

The homes of online pop-swappers could be raided if a new European directive gets voted into law. [BBC News]

The directive allows companies to raid homes, seize property and ask courts to freeze bank accounts to protect trademarks or intellectual property they believe are being abused or stolen.

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Virgin to launch music jukebox, Net music store

I like the idea of using the store to distribute and promote the service, but wonder why they would not develop a way for customers to also download to supported devices. Maybe they are working on it and things will be reported on later… Too bad this is not a deal with Apple and the iPod… that would be a major win for many happy podders, but it will work with WMA files instead.

British billionaire Richard Branson’s latest company, Virgin Digital, is developing its own digital jukebox and online music store with music delivery company MusicNet that will be available by the end of August. [CNET News.com – Entertainment & Media]

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Some Like It Hot

OK, P2P is ‘piracy.’ But Hollywood, radio, cable TV and, yes, even the music industry all sprang from different forms of thievery. By Lawrence Lessig from Wired magazine. [Wired News]

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Free the Grey Album!

I received this email last week and have decided to go Grey…

We noticed you linked to a story about the Grey Album. It seems like copies of the Grey Album are definitely making their way to people who want them, but we thought it was vitally important that we *insist* on sample-based musicians’ right to create, and on the public’s right to hear the amazing music they make. EMI wasn’t just trying to stop DJ DM from selling the album, they sent cease and desist letters to some websites that were making it available for free. EMI acted to stop people from hearing this piece of fun and inventive music, and that’s just not right.

So we’re organizing an online-protest of sorts–called “Grey Tuesday”–to take a stand and pretend, even if only for 24 hours, that we don’t live in a culture where the legal environment ensnares musicians. The idea is that this Tuesday, February 24th, as many sites as possible mirror the Grey Album and/or turn their page “grayscale” (i.e. no color) for the day. We’re also calling for people connected to independent radio stations (college, commercial, internet) to get the entire Grey Album played at some point on Tuesday (possibly along with the Beatles and Jay-Z sources).

We’ve been pretty successful so far with our attempts to provoke debate about sampling and copyright. Check out this article from Wired that we got going or have a look at our press page. We’re pretty confident that, if there’s a reasonable level of participation, we can translate this “online event” into some serious coverage in mainstream press that tons of regular people will read.

And what regular people think about sampling and copyright matters, especially when the future of the music industry is almost entirely up for grabs.

So please, check it out: http://greytuesday.org
and email us to join: greytuesday@downhillbattle.org