Grant Cerny

I got this one from Paul Lamere’s MusicMachinery blog…. it’s so cool.  Not really super useful yet in my experience, but TOTALLY COOL even so.

You install LastHistory.  You put in your Last.fm username.  It parses through your listening history.  Then you get a graphical representation of your listening over time, that looks something like this.

But you won’t get it, quite, til you play with it yourself.  To save you time in doing so, I recorded a ScreenJelly screencast so you can see the interaction.  Unfortunately ScreenJelly seems not to embrace remote embedding so you’lll have to make the jump to their domain to see it…. here it is.  http://screenjel.ly/watch/OAi7kRm2o4o

For those digital music geeks and also just the other generally really cool folks who like to organize and simplify their online music life, look no further because Dan Kantor has created another fabulous solution: Extension.FM.

Extension.FM is a Google Chrome extension (yes this means you have to install Google Chrome, but you will be glad you did, I think). It keeps track of all of the online music you encounter as you surf across various music blogs like Spinner, Pitchfork, Tuneage, and Fluxblog.  Like an elephant, but much faster than an elephant, Extension.fm remembers every single web reference, all the song metadata, including album art etcetera that you find as you surf.  In fact as of today, it also can import the top 50 songs from your Tumblr dashboard. The result? A web-based personalized music discovery experience that aggregates your favorite sources and helps you simplify your web-based listening into one place.   It also scrobbles to Last.fm (sweet!).

What’s next?  I dunno – probably whatever is coolest that the best users of Extension.fm (like me) ask for most.   I think it’s local playlisting support.  But I could be wrong.  It could be a social filter, or two.  Hell, it’s great already, so everything else will be gravy!

Today Dan Kantor and I attended the Music Hackday Boston, at the Microsoft NERD (New England Research & Development Center) in Boston. What a day. I was only able to attend for the one day, while Dan is here the whole weekend.

I caught up on everything that’s going on with Playdar, the open music-resolver technology started by Richard Jones, founder/former CTO of Last.fm, and pretty widely embraced by the whole music hacking / music product innovation community, whereby running a lightweight server on a local host can take any given bunch of requested music tracks, and find local or networked matching media files, to “resolve” or find sources for, the music in question. Given that we were all on the same local net and running the playdar localhosts, it was fascinating to see how hacking devs (and me, a has-been dev, now product evangelist) created new ways to express music discovery within and amongst our local media collective, as well as the many extensions offered by the EchoNest APIs, and other sources. I am loathe to have to head home in the morning, since the demos of everyone’s hacks are being reviewed Sunday. But Dan will catch me up on his hack and all the rest.

The very long day resulted in a great deal of critical thought and creative energy for me. I came up with a number of ideas regarding Music Influencer extensions, which I think can result in an ecosystem of incentive for platform providers (such as EchoNest), integrating developers, catalog-holding providers (such as Last.fm), music publishers, labels and artists themselves. The thrashing of the music industry will be solved, one way or the other, in the upcoming few years, as labels and artists regain equlibrium in the new value chain, and it’s likely that the resolvers like Playdar and the platforms like EchoNest are positioned to offer the mediating layer which properties on all levels of the chain can utilize to restore playfulness, fun, extensible openness and scale to Music in the new, networked, real-time web world.

We ended up at Jimmy D’s in Davis Square, at the “EchoNestival”, a party thrown by the EchoNest sponsors, where we three acts played, and got progressively more intense and awesome – Faces on Film, The Bodega Girls, and EL – P. I have at least three new albums to buy after tonight’s lineup, that’s for certain.

Many thanks to Microsoft, the EchoNest and other givers in making today’s hackday (and tomorrow’s which I will miss) a great success.

It was also great to meet Paul Lamere, Tristan Harris and Brian Whitman from the EchoNest, as well as to catch up with Jason Herskowitz, and to meet Lucas Gonze and get philosophical about how real-time, space-erased data availability can modify and multiply the progress of cultural and psychological evolution.

I look forward to reviewing the results of Sunday’s hack presentation demos.

Earlier this week Mark Zuckerberg posted his status (FB status presumably stating “Spotify is so good” and the whole digital music space thumped with billion-dollar bass 808s.

While we all look forward to what Facebook will be doing with Spotify as Spotify works on its US domestic licensing (which prevents the US public at large from accessing the increasingly-coveted product, as the EU-based public has for some time enjoyed,  ad-supported or premium ad-free), the music internets went into high BPMs after Mark issued his vote of approval.

So there is a madding crowd for Spotify suddenness, and US access is in high demand.   Luckily, I have had Spotify beta for several months now, and liked it a lot when I first tried it, but later got distracted and went back to my mainstreams:  iTunes, iPod, SHOUTcast, and Streampad music blog discovery mostly on Tumbleblogs.   But Spotify is indeed good… first of all, it’s good software.  The UX is very fine.  The graphic design is like a strong, heavy, and ultimately winning weapon.   Most importantly everything links and is draggable.

What’s missing?  I guess I am not quite satisfied with the Now Playing experience during discovery, and the fact that Radio basically means “lean back listening” these days not “Radio”, but I will always find something missing in anything, while still being positively impressed.

The largest “miss” which is probably next on their product backlog is social services.  Beyond Last.FM scrobbling, there is no social integration.  For example right now I am listening to David Guetta, album One Love, track David Guetta – On The Dancefloor (Featuring Will I Am & Apl De Ap) .  I want to be dancing in a club, not in my kitchen geeking out with headphones while my family enters dreamland.  I’m in a zone.  I want to share with my peeps and maybe find out who else is in the zone, with Guetta or maybe the same genre or maybe even on the same downbeat in the same BPM.  Why not?  Why couldn’t I find friends who are on the same beat?  There is no reason why not with the technology we have.  Once that’s done we could mash up the tunes against the synchronized beats.  But… I digress.

Spotify currently has no social integration.  I’m not talking its own SocialNet like Last.FM approaches, but just the social services such as FriendFeed or Ping.fm or other innumerable offerings out there.  I’m sure that’s coming soon… unless a Facebook deal shutters out the openness.  I hope that won’t happen.

I hope that Spotify will emerge as a surviving player amongst the corpse-ridden battlegrounds of digital music knights:   Napster (not dead, just different) Total Music (dead), Rhapsody (not at all dead, just bleeding), and all the playlisters including Muxtape (dead), Seeqpod (pretty darn dead!), and about six others I could remember if I rifled around in my email.  I guess 8Tracks is still gaining momentum and that’s great – good for David Porter and his crew, making me think the only playlisting model that’s sustainable is for the brand to pay royalties at lowest rate possible and make the play-time such a great experience that it can be adjacently monetized, probably by the context adjacency of other user value.

This post started off as a tweet.  I guess I had way more than 140 characters in me.  Thankfully I do have a blog for these rare occasions.  Now heading back to ‘da club!

Today was my first foray into team athletics for about 15 years.  I had already bought a new mitt and broke it in, having failed in finding my high-school baseball mitt from my parents house.   I went out at lunch today and bought some cleats from Paragon in Union Square, on the warning that I’d injure myself without them, and was all set and wearing my AOL Softball jersey (number 00) and joined the motley bunch of colleagues who were ready to head to Central Park to play against the current opponent, “Highbridge”.   As we gathered in the office lobby and desparately tried to determine if we would have enough players, and enough mitts, we discovered one of the players wasn’t coming because she was covering the story of Michael Jackson’s heart attack.  It seemed unbelievable.  Late, we rushed off to the subway.

When we were walking up to the field, a catcher on another game stood up and yelled loud “Michael Jackson has left the building!”  A buzz went around, people saying that Michael had died.  Again it seemed unbelievable, and random jokes went around that it was a hoax to relieve the troubled star from his upcoming European tour.  By the time we were settled in at the bench, the sad truth was confirmed… indeed Michael had passed away.   The game was about to start.  We warmed up for five minutes, and the umpire called game on.  We grouped up to cheer and chose to cheer for Michael.

I had already discovered that I was doing a really cold start for anything athletic, having not worked out in the area of sprinting, or throwing, or any sort of quick-twitch action, in…. well a really long time.   The warmup had already got my hamstrings ready to seize.   Our coach Jake smartly moved me from right field to first base, where I was much more comfortable not having to run so much, but ready to catch and throw.  The game began and we started off smart, one of our guys Tony stealing home in the first inning and holding back the opponents with a zero.  Things changed quickly after that.  The other team, clearly, were not as motley and either had great experience or had actually practiced a bit.   I found that I enjoyed myself a lot, even while we worked our way to a spectacular loss of 15 to 1.  While doing my best to focus, be ready for the quick catch, and doing all I could to coax my 36 year old office-bod into base-running sprints, I marvelled at playing a game in Central Park for the first time, in a verdure of green with actual spectators watching, surrounded by tall buildings beyond the trees, and rediscovering the baseball I had last played in high school 20 years ago.

After the game we checked our devices and got caught up on the story.  Everything was confirmed, indeed Michael had passed, creating a double tragedy to a day starting off with the passing of Farrah Fawcett who had bravely battled cancer for so long.  Apparently while we played the game, a lot of controversy had ensued between the people who had openly voiced opinions about hoax-theory as we had jokingly done on our way to the field, and the people who indignantly replied with later, better information about the sad truth.

I joined the team for a couple celebratory — even though we lost abysmally — beers, which we raised to the departed, then I headed home to my suburban life and family, including doing baby-duty til now.   All in all, I have to say that the diversion from the ordinary in the way of softball was really wonderful, and made a bit surreal by the surrounding tension of a world responding to several losses of  significant magnitude, certainly worse than losing 15 to 1.

Copied from Thomas Chau (@tomchau) w.r.t. AOL Radio (@aolradio)’s all-twitter request station.

“Beginning at 12 PM ET and lasting until midnight, tweet your song request on Twitter as follows:

Artist Name, Song Title #aolradiorequest (example: Madonna, Like a Prayer #aolradiorequest)

If we have it, we’ll play it the next day at aolradio.com.

Full details are at: http://www.aolradioblog.com/2009/06/09/aol-radio-all-tweet-song-request-radio-station/ “

Hit Play.

That’s DonkDJ version of NWA’s Straight Outta Compton.

Wanna feel like you’re taking speed, but don’t want to take speed?  Upload your fave mp3 to DonkDJ.com and let the magic happen while you get your track suit on and get ready to DANCE.

http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-goom-radio-raises-16m-first-round/

Goom is (or says it will be) “HD sound” programmed internet radio with DJ programming and user-created stations.

I met Zac Bjelgrlic, the CTO for Goom last summer at an OpenID conference.  At the time he worked for BBC and I was trying to network my way into the BBC to find out more about their work on Musicbrainz when he told me he was leaving for Goom.  I followed up with him a couple times, at one point disclosing that we operate AOL Radio and Shoutcast.  We haven’t connected since.

You can sign up for their US beta invite at the bottom of goomradio.com, but why wait for personalization in the US.  Go to goomradio.com/fr or http://www.goomradio.com/goomWeb/home.do to try the product live as it is being marketed in France since it is not effectively georestricted.

The interface and player station-customization is neat.  Not sure how they’ll make the business work.  My sense is that they take a loss on the royalty-bearing DJ programming to motivate people to heavy up on user-gen uploads and playlists and don’t pay royalties on those, and net positive with advertising.

As visitors to my blog can see, I use Streampad to add tunes to my blog.

I’m proud to be THE FIRST to reblog the following from Dan Kantor at http://blog.dankantor.com/post/91673730/streampad-wordpress-plugin-now-available

“Streampad Wordpress plugin now available
We are proud to announce the general availability of our Streampad plugin for Wordpress! You can grab it here – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/streampad/

The plugin will search for all mp3 links in previous posts, as well as any new posts moving forward. You can also manually add mp3’s.

We’d love to hear feedback on this and how we could improve it.”

OK here’s an update.  Gregory Tomlinson, who did the Wordpress plugin development from Dan’s Streampad, asserts that he blogged it first when he checked in his code today.  Here he is on http://gregorytomlinson.com/encoded .

So, in the below posts I had used the Streampad player for Wordpress, and uploaded my own audio. Then I figured I’d just use my existing Tumblr songs here, and so the bottom bar you see below is pulling my songs uploaded to Tumblr. I removed links to the songs in the posts below, but may put them back onto the Tumblr list (not sure if the Oakenfold session isn’t too large however).