Tag: Music

Michael Jackson – 2015 Club Megamix by DJ MichaelAngelo & DJ DigiMark

We’re digging this 2015 video Club Megamix mashup of Michael Jackson’s greatest hits by DJs MichaelAngelo & DigiMark. Modern remixes of all songs included in this mashup give it an updated feel for dance floors everywhere.

The tracklist includes the following MJ hits:

  • PYT
  • Rock With You
  • Smooth Criminal
  • Hollywood Tonight
  • Bad
  • Black or White
  • Wanna Be Starting Something
  • Black or White
  • Somebody’s Watching Me
  • Thriller
  • Butterflies
  • Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough
  • Dancing Machine

DJs can also download the audio mp3 of this incredible Megamix.

 

Kendra Morris – I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)

If you know me and either are a friend on Facebook or follow me on the social network, then you’ll know I absolutely love the music of Kendra Morris. I first heard Kendra on NPR while driving home from work one night. Since that time, we’ve become distant buds and I’m following her from afar. Kendra just posted a new music video that was already on YouTube, but Vevo premiered it here. We’ve got the YouTube though (because we hate those nasty Vevo iframes!). Here it is “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles), directed by Rudolf Bekker and featuring Godforbid of That Handsome Devil.

If you’re in NYC this weekend, you can catch Kendra with That Handsome Devil performing at Rough Trade in Williamsburg on September 27th at 8 pm. Tickets are $15 and she goes on at 8 pm. Don’t miss it!

YouTube will try to convert music video viewers to subscribers to block ads

YouTube will attempt to monetize it’s service with paid subscriptions by asking users to pay a monthly or yearly fee to block pre-roll advertising before music videos play. Many YouTube music videos have ads that play before the video begins, which users can often times skip after a few seconds by clicking on the Skip Ad overlay that appears at the bottom right of the video window.

 

ScreenShot of YouTube video window with skip advertisement feature
Ad in video window with Skip Ad feature displayed.

Mashable writes that Google, the company that owns and operates YouTube, generated about $53B last year. Google doesn’t break out revenue for YouTube, but cites a report from The Independent, which quotes anonymous sources estimating the service added only $3.2B in to Google’s bottom line, short of analyst predictions of $5B.

To improve the numbers, Google AdSense and AdWords exec, Susan Wojcicki, took over CEO role at YouTube in February after reports indicated YouTube losing market share to AOL and Facebook, resulting in a drop in ad rates. A subscription music service is one way the company is seeking to add to their bottom line. However, many independent record labels are not happy after receiving an updated agreement reducing compensation in the future. And, in an increasingly crowded content marketplace, new content creators are finding it more difficult to find an audience and generate revenue to support programming.

More companies today are looking to the consumer to pay a subscription fee to turn off ads in content and consumers have gotten used to paying a nominal fee to block ads. However, as more services turn to this type of offering, consumers will be faced with having to decide which services they really need. YouTube is now entering a subscription world, competing with Netflix and cable television for the consumers dollar. It remains to be seen if enough people will pay to block ads on YouTube, when they already have a Spotify subscription, combined with a cable subscription (or at least high speed Internet) at home and Sirius/XM in the car.

Today, consumers are faced with an issue of privacy. Accept the freemium advertising model and agree to be tracked and targeted for ad wherever you go. There are now ad auction exchanges set up to deliver advertising to websites instantaneously as traffic ebbs and flows. Prices rise where there is more traffic and reduce where there is less. This makes Internet advertising more efficient, while at the same time putting pressure on media creators to keep eyeballs on their content. That’s why Internet meme sites like Upworthy, which promote short, viral content scientifically analyzed and optimized to constantly drive eyeballs. Users are also tricked into staying engaged by being forced to to click through page after page of images, so that the site can deliver more page refreshes to deliver more ads. It’s for this reason, it is not a stretch to see why consumers would want to pay YouTube to turn off ads. The question is, can YouTube be trusted to deliver a completely ad free experience?

When we first started paying for Cable TV, cable companies delivered ad-free programming, but soon realized they could both charge consumers for content and display ads at the same time. Given that the quality and amount of content was far more than was available on free television, cable companies got away with this for many years. But now with cable’s monthly costs reaching into the hundreds of dollars and other media competing for our attention and wallets, as well as the Internet supplying high quality content, many cable subscribers are cutting off their TV and paying only for high speed Internet access.

The same has happened at Sirius/XM. While many of the generic, programmed music channels are ad free, we’re starting to see some content creators that license content to the popular satellite radio service insert ads in their programming. Again, consumers have grown accustomed to this, so their is little outrage when it happens. However, as we make our way into a world of asking consumers to subscribe to everything, companies need to be careful about stepping over the line.

As for this blog, we do host advertising and recently turned off ad units being delivered by one of our partners, who now publish video content inside advertising blocks. Those types of ads have become intrusive and are affecting our readers ability to focus on our content, so we’ve turned them off in favor of our general Google AdSense program. That begets the question, do Internet companies really need advertising to survive?

In YouTube’s case, billions of dollars in ad revenue last year is nothing to sneeze at, but can one solely base their entire business on advertising? History has shown that diversification is critical. Finding and testing alternative revenue models is important. The over reliance on advertising without a strategy for expanding revenue in other ways is now proving troublesome for YouTube. Facebook faced this issue for the past two years and quickly found mobile revenue from ads as well as allowing anyone to place a targeted ad or promoted post to get attention to their content in Facebook would be its future. In a closed network like Facebook, controlling the ad revenue stream is different than simply selling ads to brands. They’ve created products around promoting likes and shares, which is advertising like, but also a utility for content creators who want to employ the tools to reach a wider audience. What kinds of tools can YouTube give to content creators to promote content in the YouTube network?

Lastly, it’s important to note reliance on advertising is something that our brightest minds are looking at and trying to solve. In a recent The Atlantic article, “The Internet’s Original Sin,” author and Director of Civic Media at MIT, Ethan Zuckerman, writes:

Advertising became the default business model on the web, “the entire economic foundation of our industry,” because it was the easiest model for a web startup to implement, and the easiest to market to investors. Web startups could contract their revenue growth to an ad network and focus on building an audience. If revenues were insufficient to cover the costs of providing the content or service, it didn’t matter—what mattered was audience growth, as a site with tens of millions of loyal users would surely find a way to generate revenue.

Zuckerman, who was a former employee of Tripod.com, the company that created what we now know as the pop-up ad, which is an ad placed on a pop-up page that appears on top of the content you’re viewing, says that there are two kinds of ads: expensive and cheap. The expensive ad is the one that pops up in Google when you’re ready to buy something. It’s a lead generator, which is why companies will pay top dollar to get your attention.

The cheap ad is the ad that competes for your attention with the content the user is interacting with. Those ads are obviously going to pay less to the content publisher, because interest to action is low. Therefore, web publishers must look for other ways to monetize their digital business, because we’ve gotten to a point where so much freemium content is available, advertising prices are dropping considerably and these companies will not be able to survive on ad revenue alone.

Needless to say, YouTube have their work cut out for them. We’ll be watching to see how this new ad free model plays out and how consumers adjust to companies asking them to open their wallets, instead of agreeing to view content in exchange for their eyeballs.

 

 

 

 

New Imogen Heap album – Sparks

Imogen Heap is one of our all-time favorite modern electronic music artists. We absolutely love how she blends her unique singer/songwriter vocals with the melodic patterns of downtempo electronic music (sometimes called folktronica) by incorporating beats and synths underneath her gorgeous piano patterns and bright, sweet and breathy vocals.

Imogen traveled the world recording this new album and says that there are 14 videos for all 14 songs on the album. We can’t wait to follow along and post them one at a time as they are released.

Her new album, Sparks, is now on pre-order from iTunes. You can preview it here on NPR.

Check out the album preview on YouTube.

Or, listen to the interview with Imogen Heap, “Painting Her Songs In the Air, Imogen Heap Keeps Innovating” on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.

Pre-order by clicking on this button: [itunes link=”http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/sparks-deluxe-version/id899603432?uo=4″ title=”Imogen Heap “Sparks” (Delux Edition)”]

Beauty vlogger Michelle Phan sued by Ultra Records for copyright infringement

With a subscriber base of over 6.6M on her YouTube channel, YouTube Beauty vlogger, Michelle Phan, is one of the most popular social media stars in the YouTube universe. Two of her most popular how-to videos, a “Barbie Transformation Video” and Lady Ga-Ga video have been viewed a combined total of just under 100M times. Her videos generally make use of popular EDM songs from a variety of artists and that has resulted in a lawsuit by Sony Music controlled EDM labels, Ultra Records and its associated publishing company, Ultra Music International. Filed in Los Angeles District Court, Ultra suit (Ultra International Music Publishing LLC and Ultra Records LLC v. Michelle Phan, U.S. District Court, Central District of California, No. 14-05533) claims Ms. Phan does not have the right to use Ultra Records artists music. They are suing Ms. Phan for $150,000 per infringement plus yet to be determined damages and an injunction against the use of Ultra Record’s artist’s music in her videos. In the past, Phan has used music from the label’s roster of artists, including popular EDM DJ/Producer, Kaskade. One video, “Nightlife Favorites” (1,487,180 views as of 7/20/14) features Kaskade’s 4AM.

Kaskade – 4AM

Another, “The Golden Hour” (2,492,777 views as of 7/20/14) features Kaskade and Project 46 “Last Chance.

Kaskade & Project 46 – Last Chance

Here are both videos from Michelle Phan including these songs, which are both listed in the credits under each video on their respective YouTube pages.

Michelle Phan – Nightlife Favorites

Michelle Phan – The Golden Hour

While Kaskade was severing his relationship with Ultra Records, choosing to not renew his agreement after 8-years on the label, Sony Music went on an EDM acquisition mission, acquiring, one of the the longest running independent EDM labels in the world. Ultra’s back catalog, including almost all of Kaskade’s releases on the label, now belongs to Sony Music. In a recent blog post about his frustrations with SoundCloud, the popular music sharing service known as the “YouTube of audio,” taking down both music he has a right to post and mixes and mashups deemed infringing, Kaskade said this:

“When I signed with Ultra, I kissed goodbye forever the rights to own my music. They own it. And now Sony owns them. So now Sony owns my music. I knew that going in.”

While labels like Ultra and Sony continue to control copyright in the digital age, Kaskade has recently been advocating for making music free. He’s taken an alternative position on how music should be distributed in the digital age.

Of course, with hundreds of millions of spins and the profit from YouTube including the above-mentioned songs at stake, there’s not much Kaskade can do about advocating for Ms. Phan, other than supporting her through Twitter.

 

Now, let’s focus on the reality of this situation. On one hand, you have a famous YouTube star with hundreds of millions of views on her video channel. Label video promotion consultants and the departments that hire them certainly ask for placement of these songs in popular online videos to get exposure. No matter whether the fan uses the music in videos or not, Ultra and its parent can claim payment from YouTube and performing rights organizations for those spins. YouTube has the technology to identify songs played in videos and therefore could effectively let Sony/Ultra know what music was used in which videos and how many times each video was viewed. And, we’re going to assume that YouTube has a license from Sony Music – one of the three majors – to play their music on-demand, therefore YouTube might be able to argue that it has the rights to play the music, which is why we aren’t seeing those videos being issued a takedown – just yet. But, that could change in the next couple of days.

Removing those videos would certainly be a blow to anyone hoping to derive revenue from them, so once they come down they don’t earn a penny for Ms. Phan or the labels with music being used in them. According to Ultra, the only thing Michelle Phan didn’t do was obtain a “synchronization license” from the music publisher – in this case, Ultra International Music Publishing – for the right to use the music in her instructional make-up videos. Here’s a helpful description from the ASCAP blog on sync licensing, which is why Sony/Ultra believes Ms. Phan’s videos infringe on their copyright. And, while this example if for television, it certainly applies to on-demand Internet streams from companies like YouTube as well. Todd Brabec, ASCAP Executive VP of Membership and Jeff Brabec write:

“When a producer wants to use an existing song in a network television program or weekly series, permission must, with few exceptions, be secured from the music publisher who owns the song. The producer or music supervisor of the show will decide what song they want to use in the program and the scene in which it will appear, how the song will be used (e.g., background vocal or instrumental, sung by a character on camera, over the opening or ending credits), and the media needed (e.g., free television, pay television, subscription television, pay-per-view, or basic cable).

The producer or its “music clearance” representative will then contact the publisher of the composition, negotiate a fee, and then sign what is known in the television business as a “synchronization license.””

If Michelle Phan and her video producers did not obtain a sync license but have proof that Ultra Records approached them to use their label’s artist’s music in her videos, then Sony Music and the Ultra label and publishing divisions won’t have much of a case. This is where major label interests generally conflict with the interests of independent labels and lesser-known artists who see the value in the exposure generated by being featured in a video series as popular as Ms. Phan’s. On the other hand, if Ms. Phan and her handlers ignored sync licensing rules, then she and her production company could be found liable by the court. Our money is on someone from the label giving them the music for exposure, but what do we know…heh heh!

What this amounts to is major labels continuing to assert control over their catalogs to find revenue where it may lie. With download sales declining and streaming on the rise, major labels look at licensing as contributing to their bottom line. While it’s fair to ask for compensation for music used in these YouTube videos, if its proven that the video consultants gave the music videos to Ms. Phan’s production company for promotional use and they signed waivers in that regard, Sony Music will have a difficult time proving copyright infringement.

Notice that Ultra never filed suit until after it was acquired by Sony. Remember, Ultra’s General Manager, David Waxman (who is a friend of Netmix) is also a DJ and producer. When they were independent, I don’t think Mr. Waxman would have advocated for this lawsuit, because if indies like Ultra started suing music services that give them exposure, they could risk harming those relationships over the long term. There’s not a lot of leverage.

In the indie EDM world, it’s probably not the best form to start suing others who are promoting your music. Once word gets out, you risk losing opportunities to sign high profile artists who may disagree with that position or get your music featured, because no one wants to take the risk of being sued.

We don’t exactly know, but it’s surely something to think about. And, that’s why Kaskade’s view on the music industry is so telling. We’ll leave you with an excerpt from the same blog post referenced earlier in this post.

There’s always been this cagey group of old men who are scared to death of people taking their money. Back in the day, they were upset that the technology existed to record onto cassette tapes directly from the radio. “What! (Harumph!) Why will people buy music if they can just pull it out of the air?!” Yet, people still bought music. Because it was more accessible. Because more people were exposed. Because Mikey played it for Joey on the corner and then Joey had to have it. It’s music, and we buy what we love. We can’t love music we haven’t heard.

Innovation helps the music industry. The industry only needs to make the effort to keep up and adapt. Make no mistake: exposing as many people as possible to music – all music – is a good thing. Everyone wins. The artist, the audience, even the old guys who just want some more cash.

The laws that are governing online music share sites were written at a time when our online and real-life landscapes were totally different. Our marching orders are coming from a place that’s completely out of touch and irrelevant. They have these legal legs to stand on that empower them to make life kind of a pain-in-the-ass for people like me. And for many of you. Countless artists have launched their careers though mash ups, bootlegs, remixes and music sharing. These laws and page take-downs are cutting us down at the knees.

And yo, musicians definitely need knees.

We referenced these stories in this post:

Two great remixes by the renowned, MK!

Mark Kinchen, known around the world simply as MK, has been producing dance music since the early ’90s. MK is responsible for three incredible house music classics, including “For You” under the pseudonym 4th Measure Men, “Love Changes as MK featuring Alana,” and the legendary record by Nightcrawlers called, “Push The Feeling On.”

I first learned about MK when I heard this record, “Somebody New” (which I still have on vinyl!) on KMS Records in 1989. KMS was Kevin Saunderson’s label out of Detroit. One could argue that while we attribute tech-house to German producers like Terry Lee Brown Jr, MK was really one of the early pioneers of tech house – the blending of techno and house. And, it’s clearly apparent on this record as well as the “For You” release.

According to his Wikipedia entry, his discography stops short in the late ’90s and doesn’t pick back up again until 2009. But in an interview with PublicSF, MK mentions doing two or three remixes a month after the Nightcrawlers record. A quick check over on Discogs and you can see that MK has credits on 435 remixes at the time of this writing. That’s pretty incredible, as I personally had no idea he had done that much work. I guess someone has to get started correcting the Wikipedia entry! It’s a huge body of work and maybe it’s time to go back and revisit many of these mixes. Well, that’s when I have some time, because that’s a lot of stuff to wade through.

Since we’re not going backwards but forwards, here are two recent MK mixes that I really loved. The first is a remix of Duke Dumont’s hit, “I Got You,” which is also available on Beatport as a download.

http://soundcloud.com/mixmag-1/premiere-duke-dumont-i-gotyou

This one, Wankelmut feat. Emma Louis, “My Head Is a Jungle,” was one of the top tracks on Beatport’s Deep House and Tech House charts. MK took a crack at this one and the results are here on Netmix. We love this mix and we hope you do too!

Making your audio player persistent with jQuery and AJAX

What is the single most important feature of any music website? C’mon, don’t let us stump you that easily. Still thinking? Okay, let us help. It’s the audio player, of course! If you’ve got a hot music site, then you’ve got to have a functioning audio player, so your audience can play back music featured on your website or in your mobile web application (notice I said mobile web application, not mobile application). When serving up those audio tracks, nothing is more frustrating than having a song interrupted while navigating between pages of a website. That means you can’t just deploy any audio player, you’ve got to deploy something with persistence across all site pages, allowing a consistent listening experience while surfing with no obvious break in the action. Wait, did we say that a user can navigate between pages while the audio player remains persistent and it doesn’t disrupt the audio stream? Yes! That’s what we said. After many years of ugly pop-up players or Flash-enabled players in Flash .swf wrappers that kill your site’s SEO, it is finally possible. Lots of sites are now deploying them. Some are even creating themes for WordPress with enhanced audio player experiences, so you get all that for free or a very low cost compared to custom development. The Stylico-DJ-Template features a persistent HTML5 player in the left sidebar. Before we get into the how and why of persistent audio players, here are a few more examples of sites employing these players successfully.

8tracks.com

The best site for hand-crafted Internet radio, where user-generated playlists are all the rage, 8tracks.com recently converted to a persist audio player experience. This advancement will allow listeners to enjoy uninterrupted audio while navigating the site and following their favorite “DJs.” It will surely increase engagement with 8tracks and subsequently, listening hours. check out the player in the screen shot below. It’s at the bottom of the page. (In the interest of full disclosure, the author of this post is an adviser to 8tracks.com and holds shares in the company.)

8tracks.com Audio Player Example Screen Shot

Beatport.com

One of the earliest and best implementations of a persistent audio player, Beatport first innovated with a full, all-Flash experience. Advances in HTML5/CSS3 and jQuery saw Beatport convert their entire experience into an SEO friendly website. This was smart for two reasons. First, it improved search engine optimization of the Beatport site. Flash is notoriously difficult for search engines to crawl, so converting the experience into HTML would helps Google, Bing and other search engines efficiently crawl the site. Second, it was to enable their audio player to work on Apple iPhones. When Apple decided not to support Adobe’s Flash Player plugin, Beatport customers could not play music from the existing Flash site on an iPhone or iPad. This forced Beatport to quickly innovate and come up with a solution for the mobile web, which you can from the screenshot posted see below.

Beatport Home Page Screenshot as of 1/1/13

Play any track on the Beatport home page and the track is added to a playlist found by the drop down arrow to the right of the bright green “add to cart” button in the header. You can jump back and forth and pause/play your track selections and there is a visual representation of the track with a cursor in the timeline that helps you know where you are. Then try and navigate between pages and you’ll see that the player consistently remains fixed and the audio continues to play.

This is similar to the iTunes experience, which has always had a playback feature in the head of the software as shown below. The user has the ability to play a track and navigate throughout the store or their library, as shown below without interruption.

Screenshot of iTunes as of 1/13/13

Finding a way for users to listen to music uninterrupted while surfing the site is one of Beatport’s competitive advantages over its rivals, many of whom continue to deploy pop-over players, which are problematic for a number of reasons. As you can see in the screenshot of the DJDownload website below, the pop-over player gets in the way. It pops up and over the left side of the page, making it very difficult for the user to navigate the site. Since the pop-up player is in its own browser window, just clicking on the main page will bring the main page forward and layer the player behind it making it that much more difficult to use. Today, an audio player should always be persistent on your site. The technology is available, you just have to find the right developer to make it happen for your site. There are a few WordPress themes that feature HTML5 audio players and we hope to see more.

Screenshot of DJDownload.com and its accompanying audio player

Pandora

Another successful deployment of the persistent audio player is on the Pandora website. Pandora is one of the most popular streaming radio services on the Internet. The implementation is also HTML5/CSS3 with jQuery and AJAX, two methods to trigger playback and load new page information in the browser, without stopping audio playback. Whether you change your preferred radio station or click into your user profile, the audio player stays constant.

Pandora Audio Player Screenshot

Reverb Nation

The grandaddy of artist networks and indie music discovery, Reverb Nation recently converted their site and player experience as well. The difference here is the player is on the bottom of the page instead of the top. It’s a different take and we’re wondering what A/B user testing uncovered when they were planning this feature. Does it matter whether the player is fixed to the bottom or the top? Is there an increase of decrease in usage based on location on the page? We’d love to get some feedback on this. Please leave us a comment with your thoughts on the placement of a persistent player experience. Top or bottom – which is better for the user experience?

Reverb Nation Audio Player

MySpace

The new MySpace has launched and its got a new player experience as well. As you can see, all the titles we’ve listened to are in a left/right scrollable slider. The player sits at the bottom of the page – similar to Reverb Nation. All pages load with AJAX, keeping the player persistent.

new.MySpace page with audio player experience as of 1/13/13Here is a view of the new.myspace.com media library. Click on any track it will play in the player at the bottom of the page. Playlists can be created and shared with other new.myspace.com members. Of course, there is no Facebook or Twitter integration, which is understandable given the competitive landscape between these social networks, but that is going to make it much harder for MySpace to gain social traction. You cannot cross-post from MySpace to Facebook or Twitter and vice versa. MySpace is going to have to decide if they want to go down that road. But, we’re getting off track! Back to the player discussion.

Screenshot of the new.myspace.com music library

A Brief Jog Through Our Experience With Audio Players over the past 17+ years

While persistent audio players have long been available in a downloadable client for the desktop (iTunes) or baked into an Adobe Flash experience, it’s only in the last few years you’re seeing them included on web sites as a persistent web app. And, like all audio players that came before it, it’s not all that easy to implement. I mean, it’s not necessarily plug-n-play type thing. You’ve got some work to do to implement them correctly. We”ll get to that, but let’s first start with a little history. When we first started out in this business, the most widely accepted method for streaming audio was to purchase a streaming server from Real Networks or lease space on a server from a hosting company who invested in the technology. Using Real’s server technology, you could broadcast at 14.4kbps, which is a fraction of today’s 10mbps download speeds. Early audio players were rudimentary. They were only meant as a utility to stream audio and not much else. The first image below is the Real Player 2.0, which was released in 1996. Netmix actually used this player to stream our first DJ mixes when we launched in January of 1996. Image of Real Player 2.0 (1996) Here is a view of the latest version of Real Player 16, which has a persistent player experience. The software also acts as a media library along with other advanced features. As you can see, Real Player has advanced considerably over 17+ years.

Real Player 16 Image

Before bandwidth got cheap, Real Networks would power audio on the web for the better part of a decade before being rendered obsolete by HTTP, UDP (User Datagram Protocol) and RTSP (RealTime Streaming Protocol).  At the time, Microsoft would compete with Real Networks, rolling out a competitor to Real Audio and calling it, Windows Media. Here’s the original Windows Media Player. Windows Media Classic VB6 image The latest version is Windows Media 11.

Image of Windows Media Player 11

Not to be left behind, Apple joined the party with its QuickTime streaming technology. All were required to employ a dedicated streaming server to deliver packets of data to their respective desktop clients that had to be downloaded and installed on the end user’s machine. Proprietary and expensive (although all companies offered a version of free for a limited number of consecutive connections), these products became the darlings of corporations who needed a way to stream webcasts for corporate announcements, online trainings and webinars while also keeping their content secure. The the big three controlled streaming audio throughout the 90’s until the MP3 format disrupted the status quo. In the meantime, Adobe would work audio player functionality into it’s Flash SDK (software development kit), which provided a way to create immersive, interactive audio player experiences.  The vector-based tools in Flash gave designers and developers creative license to employ unique and highly stylized players that could be persistent across an entire site. Even though Real Networks developed a proprietary markup language, SMIL, to embed web pages and other multimedia into the Real Player, Flash really took off as the best way to implement audio in a web experience. With Flash, anyone could surf a Flash-enabled website pages while listening to a continuous audio stream that would not stop abruptly when navigating between pages. The dewplayer is a good example of how designers and developers used Flash to create sophisticated and lightweight audio players. The player has various options, from Mini to one called Playlist, which displays a list of files to play. The player at the bottom of the list below shows an emulated black vinyl record, which actually emerges from behind the white box each time a new song is played. Screen shot of Dew Audio Player options To get an idea of how complex Real Audio technology was for developers to deploy, take a look at this Real Networks Production Guide published in 2002, we found on a still functioning service site. And, here is a tutorial on how to create a Flash Audio Player using Flash MX. Noted previously in this article was that Beatport once employed a Flash solution. The entire site was loaded in the browser via a .swf file, which encompasses all the code and graphics needed to display the site and make it interactive. While Flash is still in use today, HTML5 and jQuery can give you similar functionality on a standard web page all without having to load a proprietary file to run a complete web site. One can image how expensive it is to constantly update multiple .swf files that may run a very large web site. Despite the cost, some still prefer to build all-Flash experiences, but they sacrifice search engine optimization best practices in the process. A disgruntled user posted his dismay over Beatport’s migration from Flash to HTML5. Why do away with Flash? Google is the dominant search engine. Its crawlers – the bots that scour all websites to index them for content and relevancy – could’t penetrate the Flash .swf wrapper to index text within the Flash experience. Sure, there are workarounds to point a browser to scan files that would import text into Flash, but doing so was highly problematic when you could really just build a full HTML5 experience and not have to struggle with search engine optimization for Flash. Ultimately, it’s also cheaper to build an HTML5 experience than hire $175-an-hour Flash developers. Some would say that Flash technology has outlived its usefulness for complete end-to-end web sites. It’s now better served to use Flash in very specific use cases. For example, advertising banners or desktop solutions built in Flex that need to be complete, closed solutions and not open web apps that can be more easily modified. We’re at the point where the power of Google’s search and its crawler requirements have reduced the necessity of immersive Flash experiences. With Flash’s hold on the media industry reduced, which technology will now provide a similar audio player experience? Now, there is javaScript, which has evolved to offer a solution. Using HTTP, UDP or RTSP, anyone can employ a javaScript player by embedding it on their website and streaming audio from a web server the listener. It’s now possible, because telecom and cable companies have improved the speed and efficiency of bandwidth to deliver rich media to the user’s desktop or mobile device at a faster rate and more reliably than ever before. In addition, a technology called Really Simple Syndication, which is known in web circles as RSS, allow a listener to subscribe to podcasts that deliver downloads of episodic content to a laptop, desktop or mobile phone. All of the aforementioned advances make downloading, transporting and sharing audio across devices easier. There was a time when Yahoo was focused on creating open source products. During that period, one of their development groups created an immersive javaScript audio player, the Yahoo! Web Player, which could also be installed as a plugin for WordPress. In the screenshot below, you can see that once installed, the player is loaded by a click action on the page. The version in the image below is the full video experience.

Screenshot of Yahoo! Web Player

While the trial site did have a link to the audio only view, we discovered that by clicking on the link for the audio only experience, both Chrome and Safari for Mac returned the audio file in their HTML5 browser based audio players, as shown below.

Safari Audio Player screenshotIn the context of this post, it’s important to address this issue, because many of those who are new to development and working with audio on the web may not know that audio links must start using the new HTML5 download attribute, which is appended inside the link tag like this:

<a href="http://www.google.com/.../logo2w.png" download="MyGoogleLogo">download me</a>

Open Source content management systems including WordPress are inadvertently driving persistent audio player experiences. Free to download and install, these content management systems are extremely popular with DJs, bands and labels. Anyone with a hosting account can quickly set up a blog and within minutes publish a podcast or embed player widgets from services like Reverb Nation, Soundcloud or 8tracks into their sites pages. When it comes to a persistent experience, we’re just starting to see WordPress themes that utilize jQuery and AJAX to deliver the persistent player music fans are increasingly exposed to from the sites we mentioned earlier in this post. If you’re a DJ, artist, band or label, there will be a point in time your users will expect to be able to navigate your site or mobile pages, while listening to audio uninterrupted. We’re anticipating your next question, which is probably, “show me some examples of WordPress themes that have persistent audio players?” Ha! We thought you’d never ask. We mentioned Stylico-DJ-Template, which is available for $18 at Themeforest, a theme and plugin marketplace. The theme uses history,js, which:

…gracefully supports the HTML5 History/State APIs (pushState, replaceState, onPopState) in all browsers. Including continued support for data, titles, replaceState. Supports jQuery, MooTools and Prototype. For HTML5 browsers this means that you can modify the URL directly, without needing to use hashes anymore. For HTML4 browsers it will revert back to using the old onhashchange functionality.

Stylico WordPress Template Screen shot at Themeforest

 Another example of a WordPress theme using history.js to create a consistent player experience is the predominantly dubstep and mash-up site, sosimpull.com. Notice the player is fixed at the top left. You can navigate between each tab in the playlist and the audio will continue to play.

Screen Shot of SoSimpull.com

How do you build persistent audio players?

After a little bit of research, I came up with a list of links that I’m going to pass to you, which should help you get started in building out your persistent audio player experience.

If you need a little help trying to get AJAX into your theme, here are a few links that may help you out.

Lastly, SEO is very important to this endeavor. If you’re going to AJAX your site’s pages, you’re going to want to do some “deep linking” to content.

For developers, this slide deck might be useful. The author is Ronald Huereca, who presented these slides at WordPress Philadelphia in 2010.

Sennheiser Goes Social with Inspired By DJs Site and Day and Nite DJ Portrait Series

Sennheiser, a leading manufacturer of headphones and microphones for the pro can consumer audio market, recently launched the Inspired by DJs: Day and Nite Portrait Series to promote its new Amperior headphones. Based on the popular HD 25 DJ headphone, Sennheiser says the the Amperior, with its brushed aluminum finish, is geared for both the street and the DJ booth. Netmix takes a look at Sennheiser's new One Day & One Night contest and marketing campaign with Bob Sinclair, QBert, Richie Hawtin and other influential DJs.

Read more

Storified: Pete Tong’s New Show On iHeartRadio’s Evolution Channel

Here’s news from around the web on Clear Channel’s and Pete Tong’s new collaboration on iHeartRadio.com’s Evolution channel. Tong brings his #AllGonePeteTong radio show to the USA along with a tour and new release on the venerable UK label, Defected Records.

http://storify.com/netmix/the-wrap-up-top-posts-about-pete-tong-s-new-iheart

SoundCloud and Audible Magic infringement policy frustrating DJs

For a long time, everyone loved SoundCloud, including many of the world’s most influential DJs. The love affair DJs had with SoundCloud is on the rocks now that SoundCloud has implemented the integration of Audible Magic’s SmartID and CopySense® technology into the service, which will help the company protect copyright owners from infringement. DJs? Well, they’re starting to feel the pinch and its leaving a sour taste in their mouths, while also forcing them to divorce themselves from SoundCloud and post their DJ mixes elsewhere.

http://twitter.com/Mathias301/status/270593471281233920

The Mix Tape

Ever since the advent of the DJ, there’s been the recorded “mix tape,” which – depending on who’s definition you get – is also called a “dj mix,” “dj set,” or  “mix show.” The latter is generally used to describe a live or pre-recorded mix broadcast in a pre-defined time slot on terrestrial, satellite and Internet radio. DJs have passed around their mix tapes using many differing recorded formats, including vinyl, reel to reel, cassette, 8-track, mini-disc (MD), digital audio tape (DAT) and compact disc (CD). Many DJs today strictly distribute their mixes as MP3 or FLAC digital audio files. Purists will even go far as to share uncompressed .WAV or .AIFF digital audio files.

SoundCloud, like its video-oriented cousin, YouTube, allows the owner of a sound recording to upload audio content to its website, where it can then be streamed using a highly customized audio player experience that allows for user-generated comments along the audio timeline – in essence, making the audio track “social.” By simply adding the a SoundCloud URL to a Facebook status update, a SoundCloud audio player “widget” can be published into a Facebook status update, or special code provided by SoundCloud will allow the audio player widget to be embedded in a blog post or webpage. Listeners can comment at points on the audio timeline, favorite tracks to their SoundCloud profiles and Tweet or re-share them into their own Facebook profiles.

Below is an example of a SoundCloud embeddable widget for the Kaskade vs. Albin Myer‘s track, “Don’t Stop Hells Bells.”

In the early pre-MP3 days of the Internet, many DJs used Real Networks RealAudio®, Microsoft’s WindowsMedia® or Apple’s QuickTime® technology to stream their mix shows, but in each case, the cost of maintaining the streaming technology was prohibitively expensive.  The implosion of Internet services in the Dotcom 1.0 era (roughly 2000 to 2004) made it difficult for independent webcasters to generate ad revenue that would support broadcasting niche formats like underground techno DJs mixes. A DJ needed a contract with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that operated a streaming server from one of the aforementioned major tech companies.

Not only was accessing a streaming server costly, but ISPs also charge for bandwidth. The more traffic, the higher the cost. In addition to bandwidth fees, new licensing rules were put in place by the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which forced many DJ sites to pay public performance royalties to songwriters through ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, as well as to artists through SoundExchange (for non-interactive streaming only). Things were getting way too expensive for the average DJ to be able to afford webcasting and many DJs operating streaming mix show sites, including this site, had to shut their doors or find alternatives while the industry sorted itself out and new technologies arrived to lower costs.

Fortunately, along came webcasting providers like Live365, who bundled the cost of streaming with performance royalty licensing. Live365 negotiated direct deals with the PROs on behalf of their account holders, so that would take the onus off of the DJ to report daily spins of music over webcasts.

But, Live365 was just that – live! Not every DJ can program a 24-hour a day radio station. That’s when many Internet radio DJs turned to open source webcasting tools like ShoutCast and IceCast, which provided free webcasting software that could be installed and run on an ISP’s server or even your own computer acting as a server (Macs can easily do this), while using your cable provider as an ISP. Of course, today, many cable providers are throttling bandwidth, making hosting your own webcasting server a problem.

MP3s Change the Game

The mass adoption of the MP3 format was a game changer. Not only could a DJ stream their mixes without having to use streaming server technology, but they could also provide mixes in podcast format. On a parallel track, as more people migrated to MP3, blogging technology like Movable Type and WordPress gave DJs the ability to post their mixes to their blogs utilizing enclosures and open source, javascript audio players. DJs could then feature mixes that listeners could subscribe to and receive notifications from their blogs when new mixes were posted. While podcasting is still a fantastic way to broadcast DJ mixes, there was still the sticky issue of paying rights holders. There may be podcasting aggregators who, like Live365, offer PRO services.

That’s just about when SoundCloud came along. We can’t say for absolute certain that the founders of SoundCloud created the service for DJ mixes or as a service for artists and labels to post single tracks, but once DJs learned they could post their mixes to the SoundCloud system, many started gravitating to the service for a few reasons.

First, uploading to SoundCloud and having your mix playback immediately in a unique player experience, which could then be embedded into blogs and social networks took the onus off of the DJ to have to support their own website and podcasts. Second, SoundCloud’s social timeline, where users comment along the audio timeline, was an innovation that is simply not available to DJs using open source audio players for their podcasts. Lastly, DJs could upload and control their mix in block formats and then shares those mixes exactly as intended – in the mix-tape format. No longer did DJs have to maintain live feeds or submit to other Internet radio stations and wait to hear their mix. They could provide their mixes direct to fan in a matter of seconds, disrupting the entire underground DJ mix market, which had thrived for years in “mom and pop” record shops, which would sell those illegal mixes from behind the counter.

DJs, Infringement and PROs

Thousands of DJs use SoundCloud for their mixes today, but they’re now finding out that the party is over. Before SoundCloud raised over $50M in a round of recent venture capital funding, they were predominantly a European-based service operating in the grey area of performance rights, where the rules may be different than in the USA around paying public performance royalties to the PROs. Honestly, we don’t know what the difference in the rules are, but it always seems like these services start in Europe and once they become large enough where major labels and the RIAA take notice, they quickly have to ensure their in compliance with the DMCA. Since SoundCloud is considered interactive and not non-interactive, the company is not eligible for a compulsory license, so if the site were found to house copyrighted content, it could be sued by the copyright owner. For user-generated content sites like SoundCloud, ensuring their in compliance with the DMCA is now a cost of doing business in the United States.

SoundCloud could exist and still accept DJs mixes if they hadn’t had much grander plans. But something as cool as SoundCloud could operate under the radar only for so long. Once the VCs funded them, it’s safe to say that a pre-condition of that funding was that SoundCloud would have to ensure that the company adhered to the letter of the law as defined by the DMCA and subsequent legislation around paying the PROs performance royalties. They would also have to provide some type of technology to identify infringing content, should copyright owners want to leverage the powers of the DMCA to notify SoundCloud that someone had infringed on their copyright by posting their content to the service without permission. These are the same rules that YouTube or any other UGC (user-generated content) service must adhere to, which is where Audible Magic comes into play.

Hector Romero Facebook Wall Post about SoundCloud and Audible MagicNetmix has learned through conversations with many DJs that SoundCloud’s new Audible Magic technology implementation has been flagging and removing their DJ mixes for infringing content. In fact, there was a massive discussion on DJ, Hector Romero of Def Mix Productions wall, where Romero had posted this happened to him and he wasn’t sure why.

 

We don’t have screen shots of this process, but in our conversations on Hec’s Facebook wall, through Twitter posts and other discussions, Netmix learned the following:

  • DJ creates mix and uploads it to SoundCloud
  • SoundCloud’s Audible Magic technology integration identifies the mix as “infringing” and automatically issues a take down notice to the DJ.
  • The DJs mix is removed from the site.
  • The DJ can appeal the take down.
  • If the appeal is successful, the mix wil be restored. If not, the mix will not be restored.

Sounds simple, right? Audible Magic reads the tracks in the DJ mix, recognizing some infringing content and then automatically issues a takedown.

Well, here’s what we found out from a few DJs this has happened to. SoundCloud has to provide a mechanism for the account owner (the DJ) to appeal the take down. We have learned from one DJ that he has appealed a couple of times, even though he doesn’t own the copyright to the songs in the mix. SoundCloud has reinstated the mix, solely based on receiving the appeal. That begets the question: is it really that easy to fool SoundCloud and get them to restore your DJ mix, simply by challenging the takedown notification?

We also found that a few DJs started to see a pattern in Audible Magic’s scanning on their mixes. When the DJs first uploaded their mix and SoundCloud issued a takedown, they tried to fool Audible Magic by removing the first track in their mix. This is possible by either editing out the mix using a free sound editing tool like Audacity, or if you’re a digital DJ and use a digital audio workstation like Ableton Live, you could just remove the first track, re-export your mix and then re-upload it to SoundCloud.

What these DJs found is that by removing the first track, they could easily re-upload their mix and Audible Magic would’t flag the re-upload mix as infringing. How is this possible? We’re thinking it could be Audible Magic’s technology only scans the first few seconds or minutes of the upload to see if the content is infringing and that it doesn’t take snapshots along the mix timeline. While the first few seconds to minutes may have been infringing, once the mix is re-uploaded, we think that Audible Magic doesn’t scan the mix again. It already scanned the first go’round, so why scan a second time? Scanning multiple times take processing power of the servers that run the scan software. It can only scan so many tracks at one time. Since thousands of songs are being uploaded every day, the technology has to run the scans in a cue and each song or a set of songs wait their turn, depending on how many servers are employed by Audible Magic to perform the scans.

Of course, many DJs are not going to waste their time or energy trying to fool Audible Magic, so they can post their mixes to SoundCloud. What’s a DJ to do? Fortunately, a few competing service have come along. The most popular being MixCloud, which is free to post and is supported not be audio ads, but by users who will pay to ensure that their mix is featured on the site’s home page for a period of page impressions. There’s also a service out of Austria, Play.fm, that we love. They’ve been at it a while and their site and service is top notch.

BTW, Netmix has a MixCloud here: http://www.mixcloud.com/netmix. We hope you’ll follow us and share our mixes with your friends!