sparkplug 9 » music

Apple Said to Be in Talks to Buy Music Service Lala (Update3) – Bloomberg.com

John Koetsier — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:45:25 +0000

Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) — Apple Inc., maker of the iPod player and iTunes music software, is in talks to acquire online music service Lala, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The terms of the deal weren’t known. The people declined to be identified because talks are still in progress. Investors in Palo Alto, California-based Lala include New York-based Warner Music Group Corp., Boston-based Bain Capital Ventures and Ignition Partners in Bellevue, Washington.

The Lala service lets users listen to any song on its site once for free. Customers can then opt to buy the track for 10 cents and listen to it on the Web. The service differs from iTunes because the music is stored on servers via so-called cloud computing, instead of being downloaded to the user’s computer. If customers decide to download a track, the cost is 79 cents — compared with iTunes’ price of 69 cents to $1.29.

via Apple Said to Be in Talks to Buy Music Service Lala (Update3) – Bloomberg.com.

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Bird on a wire: simply wow

John Koetsier — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:53:27 +0000

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

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Making music with GarageBand

John Koetsier — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:03:27 +0000

We needed some music for a software product that we’re delivering to a client in a couple of weeks, so I decided to have some fun with GarageBand. Here’s the result … I call it Natural Vibes: Enjoy! Related posts:Getting Quicktime videos into Flash If Apple’s website doesn’t work on Safari, what will … AppleInsider rips Adobe AIR Related posts:

Mega Nano Hassle

John Koetsier — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 07:21:50 +0000

Having an iPod Nano can be a lot more work than you bargained for.

I got a fatboy Nano for Christmas. It’s great, sleek, beautiful, tiny, and the wretched bleeding thing does not hold all my music.

Having never had this problem before (owning both a 20GB 4th generation and a 30GB 5th generation of what is nostalgically now referred to as an iPod classic) this is causing me some serious angst. (OK, I’m lying about the angst part. Actually it’s just minor irritation, bordering on mid-level annoyance.) But in the wee, wee hours of the morning they really don’t feel too terribly dissimilar.

It turns out there is no easy way to tell the black-box machina Apple calls iTunes to “sync-up-all-the-music-that-fits-on-my-ipod, selecting-by-albums, giving-me-new-stuff (or at least a random sampling of all my music) every-single-time-I-sync.

I don’t know about you, but I find that distinctly annoying.

After all, my time is too valuable to spend manually figuring out what kind of music I want to listen to for the next few days. After spending 30 minutes on the worthless local paper, channel-surfing for an hour or so, and some impressive-looking but sadly resultless procrastination on household chores, the last thing I want to do is to make the computer do what it ought to do for me. It resembles work entirely too closely.

So: Apple. Please create a setting in the iPod prefs that does the above-mentioned task.

I would really hate to draw the conclusion that you are simply making it tough for people to own low-capacity iPods and engaging in some stealthy marketing for upmarket 160 GB versions … particularly when you’re releasing 8GB iPhones that would not hold my music collection either. That would just be cynical.

After all, if the geeks at ArsTechnica can’t figure it out either (and no, none of the suggestions there possess either of the two desired virtues of humane computing: elegance and … actual functionality), how can a mere mortal figure it out?

Thanks!

Great free track from last.fm

John Koetsier — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 05:16:11 +0000

I reconnected with last.fm after about a 2-year absence today, and last gave me a wonderful returning gift: this lovely track:

Strunz & Farah – Pasitos

If you like world music, or folk, or classical guitar … check it out. Very worthwhile!

Baffled. Utterly baffled.

John Koetsier — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:45:35 +0000

How much did you pay the music industry for the record player you bought 30 years ago? What percentage of your 15-year-old tape deck’s cost went to the music companies? And how much did the RIAA get when you bought your new Bose speakers?A big fat zero, obviously.Which is why I’m so utterly baffled by comments like this: Zucker also revealed his company had asked for a cut of iPod sales – though the company receives no dividend from sales of record or CD players.”Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of money,” he said. “They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing.” Almost. Literally. Unbelievable.What can you expect, I guess, from an industry that sues its customers, cheats its stars, eats its young talent for lunch, and is generally a disgusting, manipulative, and corrupting influence on popular culture.What a zero. Related posts:More music industry madness iTunes price increase: the story behind the story Wierd Al shows the music industry the way Related posts:

More music industry madness

John Koetsier — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 23:05:18 +0000

So, Universal wants to invent a new model for music sales:

Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest record label, is looking to mobile hardware makers to foot the bill for a free music subscription service for buyers of a certain mobile phone or music player, The Telegraph reported Saturday.

Think. What does a model where you buy a piece of music-playing equipment and then the music itself is free remind you of? Oh yes, radio!Hmm … so they’re trying to reinvent radio here? Nice “new” model here.I wonder what other parts of the radio experince they’ll try to replicate? The lousy music choice? The annoying DJs? Maybe. But there’s another piece of the radio universe that I predict will come along with the “free” music, if this model actually makes it out the door.Advertising.That’s the only way there could possibly be enough revenue in this ridiculous model to support a continual flow of new music. But isn’t the 20 minutes an hour of radio advertising one of the reasons we bought iPods in the first place?No worries. As Dr Phil would say: this dog won’t hunt.PS:Why are the labels so fixated on hardware revenues? They are constantly complaining about the money Apple makes on the iPod … but they never complained before about not getting revenue from radios and stereo equipment. If only they would fixate on being best at what they’re supposed to do: find and promote great music.

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Apple’s Sept. 5 iPod Announcement: iPod, iPhone, iPDA, iComputer, iMobile Computing

John Koetsier — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 05:05:57 +0000

Apple’s scheduled a Steptember 5th special event: “the beat goes on.”It’s obviously about iPods. My guess is that Apple’s now ready to take the next step. More to the point, the marketplace is finally ready for Apple to release the next evolution in iPod: mobile computing.You already see it in iPhone. And we know that OS X is underpinning future iPods.iPods have been carrying our calendars and notes for years. But it’s always been the sideshow, the off-off-Broadway down-the-lane-to-the-left non-attraction.I think the new iPods are going to take a huge leap in functionality. iPhone’s seamless reading of PDFs, Microsoft Office documents, and more will be part of the iPod experience.It’ll still be the entertainment hub – music, movies, podcasts – that it is. But it’s going to take the next step to a mobile computing platform that includes some of what we currently think of as “business” functionality and some of what we think of as “consumer” functionality – especially games.It would not shock me if concurrent with this unveiling of the new iPod we have an “iSDK,” a software development kit for iPhone and iPod.You read it hear first.

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Thumbs up, thumbs down: obligatory post-Jobs-keynote post

John Koetsier — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 07:41:47 +0000

I want the new iMac.
I want the new iPhoto.
I want the new iMovie.
I want the new GarageBand.
I want the new Keynote.
I want the new Numbers.
I’m not really impressed with iWeb.
Not too sure about .Mac yet.
I don’t really have a need for Pages – Word is good.

Best new iPhoto feature
Better organization of photos. Events is just brilliant … we have 14,000 photos and they’re just a complete blur. Events makes sense, and it’ll be a major enhancements. I called my wife down for that chunk of the demo, and it passed her keenly tuned BS filters. She even said “cool” a few times.

Best new iMovie features
Movie library just like photo library: one of those things that is obvious after Apple does it. Creating a movie in minutes: very needed, and very awesome.

Still needed: easier podcasting
I still think Apple needs a better podcasting tool. GarageBand is not the obvious place to go for podcasting, and it’s still not super simple and easy there, AFAIK.

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Something interesting is happening with the iTunes music store

John Koetsier — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 15:45:55 +0000

Yesterday, the news broke that Bebo is partnering with iTunes and offering songs via Apple’s store to its 30 million members. Today, Yahoo! Japan is partnering with iTunes and offering songs via Apple’s store to its members.

Interesting.

This is a new phase in iTunes, that builds on the iTunes University concept to help make iTunes ubiquitous.

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