cmj music marathon

‘ll be attending this year’s CMJ Festival in New York City, which takes place on October 21 through October 25th. Check out CMJ.com for more information.

I’ll also be on the panel, “Web 2.0, Music 2.0 and the Blog Factor,” which takes place on Thursday, October 23rd at 12:30 pm in Rm. 905 of NYU’s Kimmel Center on Washington Square.

8tracks

Have you ever just wanted to upload your own MP3’s to an easy to use web site, program those tracks sequentially, then send all your friends a link to listen your custom mix? Well, now you can with 8tracks, a new service providing anyone with the ability to become their own play list master and superstar online radio DJ.

Sure, you can go to iTunes and download music, but how do you share legally with friends without having to worry about the dreaded RIAA or their sinister cousin, SoundExchange, from draining your bank account with legal fees?

After all, you thought it was okay to uploaded your grandmother’s fav Frank Sinatra track to your blog so she could listen on the laptop you bought her for Christmas. Maybe that’s a little extreme, but you get the point. Sharing music is illegal and there are a few companies now trying to solve that problem.

The recent buzz has been focused on Muxtape.com, a simple service catering to the music discovery and play list creation community. Despite the cool factor, it’s a pretty rudimentary tool with few community tools and other features available to create a network around your play lists. Another major issue with Muxtape is that anyone can right-click on a track title from within the services pages and actually download the music files. That puts the service squarely in the legal grey area. Internet music strategists are watching to see how far Muxtape will get before hitting the legal wall.

Many web developers have been implementing an open source solution, the XSPF Music Player, into their clients web pages. Mostly, record labels who need a player and own their own content, which they can stream legally since they own the rights. Although a decent solution, there’s a bit of a learning curve on the technology side.

First, you have to upload your tracks to a server. Well, that’s if you have or rent server space in the first place. Although some fifteen year-old’s know how to FTP, it’s not the majority. Second, you have to edit a configuration file to point to the folder where your tracks reside, in order for the player to load files for playback. And third, you have to embed the player in your web page, social network or blog. That can be a challenge for 90 percent of the population who want to create mixes, but have no HTML skills, since you have to create the embed code yourself, instead of someone providing an embed code for you.

Of course, streaming music over the Internet without a license is a no-no. It’s surely a buzz kill when the summons shows up in your snail mailbox and you have to ask mom for $20K for to cover your lawyer costs.

8tracks Web Site

Leave it do David Porter, CEO and founder of 8tracks (http://www.8tracks.com), to figure out a way to create and share play lists legally. A former player over at Live365,, the Internet’s first successful user generated streaming radio service, David knows the ins and outs of streaming radio operations and Internet licensing parameters. Seizing the opportunity to create an elegant solution that would be easy to use while protecting users legally, he and some friends banded together to launch the service, which is coming out of its private beta on Friday, August 8.

(Before I go any further, let me disclose that I am an adviser to 8tracks for the DJ market.)

I’ve been playing with the service from its alpha to beta and now the public release. It’s a really neat and I’m sure it will be a hit. As always with bootstrapped start-ups, there are features yet to be implemented, but the basics are there and new tools will be rolled out over the next 6 months.

It’s pretty simple to use. Just register and then start creating your mix by uploading a minimum of 8 individual tracks, which is approximately 30 minutes of music. You can upload more if you like, but 8 tracks is the minimum, mainly for legal reasons and branding purposes. No one track can be over twenty minutes long and you can’t play two tracks by the same artist from the same album. Another legality, but that’s okay because your playing DJ, not record label A&R executive.

The cool thing about 8tracks is that you can also browse other users play lists and drag and drop their tracks into your mixes. This is the ultimate mash-up for online radio programming. Don’t feel like uploading today, simply search within 8tracks for music you like, create a new play list based on those selections and then publish and share your mix.

Files encoded as MP3 must be used, as other formats will not work. You can’t, for example, upload music from your iTunes library. You must convert it to MP3 first, by burning your tracks to CD then ripping them back down to your computer in MP3 format…but don’t tell anyone we told you how to do that.

Once you create your playlist, you can use your mouse to drag and drop titles in the order you want. After  you’ve done that, it’s as simple as sending out the URL provided to share your mix with your friends. They can either visit the URL you’ve sent them by email or you can publish your player to your web site, blog or social network and drive people there. That way, you can promote yourself in one place, without having to drive people somewhere else just to hear your mix.

David Porter says, “8tracks believes handcrafted music programming trumps algorithms. Think radio in the 1970s, mixtapes in the 1980s, and DJ culture of the 1990s through today. DJs share their talent in taste making, providing exposure for artists. Listeners get a unique blend of word-of-mouth sharing and radio programming — long the trusted means for music discovery — on a global scale.”

The company will most likely monetize the service with a mix of advertising and tiered services. For the time being, the goal is to get user adoption while working on a parallel track to implement the revenue model. Initially, the service has an affiliate relationship with Amazon.com, which may also be expanded to other services, like Emusic or Beatport, as the need arises. Users can purchase any track, as long as they are available through Amazon.com.

I’m working with 8tracks to create DJ-centric tools to allow professional DJs expanded capabilities. Those type of special DJ features will come down the road. For now, test out the service and let the guys at 8tracks know what you think through the prominent, red “feedback” tab provided.

Check out our first mixes on the 8tracks service:

http://8tracks.com/djtonyz/sounds-of-erotic-disco

http://8tracks.com/djtonyz/netmixcom-internet-radio

If you’re like me and are immersed in social networking and Web 2.0, then you should know what Twitter is. For those of you who don’t, I’ll try to explain it in as simple terms as possible.

Twitter allows you to “micro-blog.” That is, to create a profile on Twitter.com and the constantly feed it with your current thoughts in 140 characters or less. There are no photos, no video–it’s simply just a running text feed of your current status. Sort of like your Facebook feed, but you can port your Twitter status updates into Facebook and other social networks, while you can’t yet do the reverse with your MySpace or Facebook status updates.

With Twitter, you can follow people’s feeds and they can follow yours. I’m following a few hundred digerati, DJs and music industry professionals and have reached over 1,000 posts. Twitter has become such a phenomenon, that the site has had difficulty as of late staying online. The criticism is that they built the site using Ruby On Rails server technology, which is said to not scale as efficiently as other technologies available. Nevertheless, Twitter just raised a $15 Million round of funding and that should quiet the critics and hopefully smooth out their operations.

What’s great about Twitter is that people from all over the world are already jumping on the bandwagon, typing in the minutiae of their lives. My girlfriend, Missy, thinks Twitter is useless. That is, until a blogger in Egypt twittered that he’d been unfairly arrested. The “twitterspehere” the blogger operates in quickly came to his rescue. That changed Missy’s mind (for now). That is, until she sees me post something about her…lol.

Anyway, the point of the story. Yes…I’m getting to the point here, is that the user @aztrovoi contacted me through Twitter–all the way from Mexico. Who knew I had fans in Mexico!

Why the “@” symbol? Twitter uses the “@” symbol to allow sending direct messages to folks. So, if you want to post and address your post to me so that I see it in my “Replies” box, just put the “@” symbol in front of my user name: djtonyz. The message will go to both community and me.

The power of Web 2.0 is amazing. So many of my friends and colleagues are now following my updates through Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and many other networks I’m part of. This gives me the ability to communicate what’s happening in my world everyday, and helps all my contacts stay up on my status.

Sure, it’s a lot of work constantly managing your online life. But, the means justifies the end! As I begin to build my off line DJ career again, all these tools have become necessary to promote and market oneself. You have to take advantage of them, because that’s where the people are.

As you can see from the Netmix blog updates and sidebar, I mainly use Twitter as a quick communication tool that resides somewhere between the world of an IM, an email and a blog post depending upon how you look at it. It’s the world of “micro-blogging,” a form of blogging that takes place in around 140 characters or less.

Surely, many early adopters of Twitter know about Pownce and its other competitor, Jaiku. Although Twitter is extremely popular, Pownce takes the strategy one step further by allowing file sharing and video posts.

I’ve found that on Twitter, the network I’ve built so far is mainly DJs who are early adopters and web development industry folks I like to follow whose kernels of insight I generally find useful to add to my knowledge base. I’ve been a little afraid of Pownce after getting a few invites this week from spammers, which I don’t seem to get as much of from Twitter. However, I’m willing to give Pownce a shot, mainly to distribute my mix shows to a built-in community; much like I do on Facebook. I’d like to see them add a similar Flash audio player to Pownce in the same way Facebook recently enabled which has allowed me to simply post a link to my mix on someone’s profile page, where they can play the show (hosted on my server) immediately without having to download it. That’s a pretty neat feature of Facebook, which MySpace or Bebo have yet to implement.

Pownce was co-founded by Kevin Rose, a co-founder of Digg.com, the popular bookmarking site. So, it’s got some leverage behind it. Oddly enough, when I was in San Francisco for Web 2.0 Expo, Digg folk were using Twitter. That seemed to be the main form of communication. Twitter is having its fair share of issues with the Ruby On Rails framework it relies upon. Over the past week, the site has been hit with a number of outages. If that continues, look for Pownce to become quietly take the lead in the space. Twitter has got to get a hold on their issues. One of the main architects at Twitter, Blaine Cooke, recently broke with the company and word on the street is that they are going to build out the next version in PHP, which should be more stable and scalable, which depends on your viewpoint, but I’ll leave that up to the experts to figure out.

On the Powce site, you’ll find a set of Tools & Apps already being implemented to interface with other services like TypePad and even Drupal, two popular open source CMS platforms. And, you can add most of your social networks to the sidebar as well as web sites you want to promote or be associated with.

For me, Facebook is far and away a better platform to promote my DJ work. The group features are much cleaner and the simplicity of the interface is what continues to attract me to the site. I’m on another 60 or so social networks anyway, so why do I prefer Facebook over the others? It seems as if Facebook is now becoming the spot for a higher level of discourse than MySpace. On Facebook, there seem to lengthier conversations taking place, whereas on MySpace you have short bursts of promotion and it’s difficult to add friends of friends because of the lack of AJAX technology that makes clicking around in Facebook a bit more intuitive than MySpace. I think these new, micro-blogging services will bridge the gap somehow.

Jaiku’s website seems to still be in beta mode. You’re allowed only so many invites and at this point, it all has to be done by email, unlike Pownce which provides tie-in to all the major services, including Facebook and Gmail among others. The interesting take-a-way from Jaiku, is that the site allows you to add RSS feeds from a variety of services, as well as importing you blog postings via RSS, which allows for the ability to micro-blog your main blog postings. You can also set up Groups around a common theme, which should help build the community. I added DJs and Tech House to see who would join the party, which would make it easier to find and follow others.

All the services allow you micro-blog to your IM account. That’s a neat feature, but once I don’t use much at this point. I’m sure my friends don’t mind following me outside of IM, but inside IM would probably get annoying after a while. I mean…who has the time? LOL. If you have time for Twitter, then you have time for just about anything that comes down the road.

But I could be wrong and have been before. It’s just what I feel I’m getting out of it for me that counts the most.

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Amit Gindha from the New Tech Meetup Group in NYC sent this to me today. I was surprised to see myself on camera at the Web 2.0 Expo. Didn’t think I’d make the cut.

Okay, so the last few days have been slow on the Netmix front. Reason: I’ve been finishing up some homework for the end of the semester at NYU, where I’m taking classes towards a degree in Digital Communications and Media. Trying to consult to clients, get my DJ career back on track, go to school and be a great boyfriend to my girlfriend, Missy, certainly doesn’t leave a lot of room for much more. However, since I’m enjoying the independent freelance life and am between projects, it’s given me some downtime to think through some new ideas I’m putting in the pipeline.

First, I launched a splash page for my Product Development consulting company, NetmixMedia.com, which will also develop internal projects that I’ll cover to follow. NetmixMedia will specialize in Information Architecture, Usability and People-centered design of Web 2.0 sites and applications. I’m working with a LAMP, Flash, Flex and Ruby developers to execute exciting media projects for our clients. We just finished up a blog-a-zine project for a major media company and wrapped up a fix for a project for Pepsi Cola. The next project starts up in a few weeks and we’re fielding calls from a number of other organizations. Feel free to contact me with your RFP at info@netmixmedia.com.

Going out to Web 2.0 in San Francisco was incredibly inspiring. I also just joined a new Facebook group, Ultra Light Startups, which held its first meeting this week at the offices of Rose Ventures, a angel investment firm that operates Angelsoft, a web site that helps angel groups organize and search for new projects to invest in.

I’ve been working lately with a great group of guys who manage an offshore team and we’ve been discussing the opportunity to work together to build some cool applications for the DJ market. I’ve got a couple of things in mind that I’d love to launch in an “ultra light” kind of way and I’m looking for DJs, developers and other web savvy DJ culture oriented individuals who want to join in the fun and work together to bring this project out in a “Twitter-esque” manner. I’m already talking to some friends in San Francisco and a few here in New York. It’s exciting to have that bug again and I’m gearing up to bring the idea to market.

The domain I’ll be launching that will service the DJ market is DJGig.com. It’s not live yet. It’s in the planning stages now and there are a few hurdles to jump over before I get it up and running.

The second domain is EroticDisco.com. That’ll be a web site featuring the world’s hottest (as in looks and sex appeal) DJs. I may keep it all female or I may decide to open it up to men as well, to serve the both the ladies and the gay market. It’ll be tough because men who love to look at women won’t necessarily want to see male DJs on the home page, so it may have to have a dual entry page so we can keep things separate and cater to both audiences.

So, all you hot (looking) female and male Djs out there who want to submit photos or video, the rules will be no nudity (want to keep this clean as I can possibly keep it while pushing the envelope, of course) and the shots must be highly stylized and be in a nightlife environment. It’s about DJs and nightlife, so it has to be in that setting only. No bedrooms, no street shots. Nightclubs and lounges are the only acceptable environments.

As the blog grows, I will be producing a calendar and possibly a digital movie release for download. All entrants will have to sign agreements and once we select the top photos or videos for the calendar and digital movie release, we’ll negotiate licensing fees.

I’m just waiting on the designs from a young, talented designer from New York, Ann Li. Once those are approved, I’ll be integrating the theme into Wordpress and off we go. Stay tuned for more on this and other news.

Peace,

Tony Z.

Wired interviews Muxtape founder, Justin Ouellete, but the issue of legality is skirted around like an 8-year old running from the rubber ball in a game of playground bombardment.

I’ve tried out Muxtape, but it’s too eclectic for me. Most of the programmers (regular Joe’s and Susie’s) who are creating their Muxtapes are pretty esoteric. I haven’t yet had the chance to find a Muxtape with the latest tech house vibes, nor can I easily find one because the site doesn’t break out any genres or any other filters for that matter.

It’s great for music discovery, but if you’re not into the broad discovery category, than it may fall short for you. However, if you’re like most Muxtapers, you’ll appreciate the high level of sophistication that goes into making the most obscure mixes possible. Good luck finding what you want to listen to. You pretty much have to sit back and let it be presented to you. Sort of like that good’ol standby…the RADIO! Remember that technology? Well…it’s coming back in more ways than one.

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