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Search Results for: SoundCloud

Hey Google, That’s Not Me

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As a roundabout way to admit that I don’t ‘Google’ myself too often, it was brought to my attention today that something odd happens when one does a search for ‘Q-Burns’. The info panel that comes up on the right side of the Google search page looks like this:

OK, that’s not my photo. That’s a picture of my friend Brett Johnson, who I have worked with many times but that’s no reason for him to inadvertently take over my identity.

I put a call out to Twitter for theories on this mishap. Pete Dafeet helpfully pointed out that the photo is sourced from a YouTube still on my Reverb Nation page. No offense, Reverb Nation, but I haven’t touched my page there in over five years, and it seems odd that this is where Google’s robots would choose to grab my ‘artist photo.’

On Pete’s advice, I deleted the video from Reverb Nation (which you can watch here if you’d like … it’s for my remix of Brett Johnson’s “Missing You”) which in turn deleted the offending photo from my Reverb Nation page. It will be interesting to see how long it will take Google to change my default image in its search results and, even more interesting, what its robots might replace it with.

So, if you’re like me and don’t ‘Google’ yourself that often, and are a musician or are in a band, you might want to do so to see what image is attached to your results.


Update: It looks like deleting that video from Reverb Nation did the trick.

Full Stack Music: 1 Trillion Streams, 200 Million Tickets

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TechCrunch:

Going back to 1999, the record company would use radio as a way to get fans to discover a new act, then monetize that investment, primarily via selling “on-demand” access in the form of CDs and, finally, drive additional discovery by subsidizing touring (known as “tour support;” a label would underwrite some of the cost of touring to help build an audience to whom to sell CDs). Touring represented a small percentage of artist income.



[Fast forward to 2015:] Over the next few years we will see [the] connection between streaming [i.e. “on-demand” access] and ticket sales become completely explicit. Streaming services will increasingly make it seamless for fans using their services to see when the artist has a local show; Songkick’s existing API partnerships with Deezer, SoundCloud, Spotify and YouTube are hints at what this could look like. It’s not impossible to imagine a time when you could possibly buy tickets directly from your favorite artist right inside your streaming service.



When that happens, artists will finally be able to see a connected picture of how their music is distributed and monetized. An act who gets 100 million streams will see that 10 million of those were monetized via paying subscribers, 90 million by ads and another 5 million fans via ticket purchases. The outcome will be a more seamless experience that results in casual music fans attending more concerts.



The key point across all of this is that the central, most valuable asset of streaming music services will be the listener data they generate. As we shift from offline radio to online streaming, artists will know how those 1 trillion tracks of music were streamed — which fan listened to them, where they were based, which concert tickets they purchased in the past — and be able to tailor personalized and richer experiences to their fans.


The TechCrunch article quoted above was published three days ago. Seems a bit prescient, as the same site revealed this breaking story earlier today:

[Pandora] just announced it will purchase Ticketfly, a Ticketmaster-type site, for $450m in cash and stock. Pandora says in a press release that Ticketfly’s service will allow Pandora listeners to better find live music events.



“This is a game-changer for Pandora – and much more importantly – a game-changer for music,” said Brian McAndrews, chief executive officer at Pandora, in a released statement today.



It’s likely that Pandora will use this extensive data set to attempt to sell tickets through Ticketfly to events it knows listeners will enjoy.

8D Projects: JP Soul – You Want Her (Roam Recordings)

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Our intimate relationship with San Francisco and its labels continues with this latest release for veteran bay area deep house imprint Roam Recordings. Proprietor and DJ resident JP Soul takes the reigns for this single, revealing the enticingly slinky “You Want Her” and its deeply hypnotic remix by Glasgow’s The Revenge. As a bonus, JP collaborates with Hector Works impresario Anthony Mansfield on the melodic mid-tempo wonder that is “Everything Is Real”. Serious stuff … and it’s one of our latest 8DPromo projects.

The Hit Charade: On Algorithms and Creativity

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MIT Technology Review:

Just as computers cannot yet create powerful and imaginative art or prose, they cannot truly appreciate music. And arranging a poignant or compelling music playlist takes a type of insight they don’t have—the ability to find similarities in musical elements and to get the emotional resonance and cultural context of songs. For all the progress being made in artificial intelligence, machines are still hopelessly unimaginative and predictable. This is why Apple has hired hundreds of people to serve as DJs and playlist makers, in addition to the algorithmic recommendations it still offers.



More recently, algorithms have begun producing playlists that can feel a lot more nuanced and tailor-made. The world’s biggest streaming service, Spotify, which has more than 75 million users, is pushing the state of the art, using vast amounts of data to make personalized recommendations.



Spotify’s deep-learning system still has to be trained using millions of example songs, and it would be perplexed by a bold new style of music. What’s more, such algorithms cannot arrange songs in a creative way. Nor can they distinguish between a truly original piece and yet another me-too imitation of a popular sound. (Spotify’s Chris) Johnson acknowledges this limitation, and he says human expertise will remain a key part of Spotify’s algorithms for the foreseeable future.


Though some consider human curation to be elitist, I feel music fans and listeners welcome and crave it. Who doesn’t enjoy a trusted source giving suggestions of cool new music to discover? It’s been the secret of success for certain radio shows, record store clerks, magazine music reviewers, and music blogs. The whole mixtape phenomenon is built on it. My SoundCloud stream is built on it. Basically, if you’re into discovery, you’re into the trusted recommendation … or, in modern industry-speak, “curation”.

Despite my love of human recommendations, I am genuinely curious about Spotify’s algorithmic ‘Discovery’ playlist and want to dig more into it. (There are some technical issues I have with Spotify’s OS X app that keep me from using it more which I won’t go into here.) The team at Spotify seem very confident in what the technology is able to do, and anything that encourages listeners to check out new music is all right by me. But I can’t help but wonder if a human / tastemaker guided algorithm – a mixture of computer recommendation and ‘music fan’ supervision – might be the way to go. From this article, it sounds like this is where we are headed.

An area that I find frustratingly overlooked is the realm of the Pandora-like ‘sounds like’ radio stations. These don’t work for me, not on any of the services, and this ‘radio’ would be my most accessed feature if they did. Pandora drove me crazy because (as an example) I’d program a Joy Division station, and then would hear “Love Will Tear Us Apart” every single time I chose it, but didn’t necessarily want to give it a ‘thumbs down’ and banish the song from its repertoire. I might want to hear it now and then … but not every single time. Of course, I’m not picking solely on Pandora here as none of the services get this radio feature right. If I create a ‘station’ based off Brian Eno’s “Lizard Point” – a beatless, droning composition opening his album Ambient 4: On Land – I’m sure all the services will give me large doses of ’70s art rock instead of the ambient music I’m looking for.

Apple Radio – the one pre-dating Apple Music – tried to address this to a degree with a slider allowing the user to choose if he/she wanted to hear more of the ‘hits’ or, with the slider all the way to the right, to choose an adventurous discovery-oriented path. It wasn’t perfect, but the concept was solid and I would have loved for Apple to fine tune it rather than ditching it altogether in Apple Music at present. Regardless, we’re a long way from computers getting it right (and potentially achieving music snob A.I.) but it’s a fascinating study to see the aims and attempts to move us closer. And, once again, all this effort going into helping listeners find new independent artists is a terrific thing.

8D Projects: Syntax Erik – I Can Feel You EP (Beatservice Records)

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Beatservice Records is long-running label out of Norway solely focusing on that country’s rich pool of talented producers and their distinctive Scandinavian takes on electronic music. The Oslo-based Syntax Erik has unveiled the imprint’s latest release, the four track I Can Feel You EP. There’s some melodic and expansive techno-tinged sounds within, peppered with just enough quirk and experimental flourish to keep things really interesting. Fellow Norwegians De Fantastiske To are also on hand for a groovy-ass remix. This release is one of our latest projects at 8DPromo … check it out:

8D Projects: O.O.R.S. – Les Deux Villes EP (Lucky Sun Recordings)

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We’ve taken on Lucky Sun Recordings, a relatively young label helmed by Londoner Tom Lown that promises a diverse set of forward-thinking electronic music. The releases do lean on the deeper, traditional house music side of things, and this single by the curiously named O.O.R.S. is a fine example. His two tracks here exhibit a keenness for the space between the sounds and a hypnotic use of rhythm and melody. The remix by Leeds-based producer Howard Sessions electrifies things just a bit, but remains as classy and refreshingly restrained as the rest of the single. Our 8DPromo campaign is currently in progress.

Mixcloud’s Place In Digital Music’s Brave New World

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Cuepoint interviewed Mixcloud co-founder Nico Perez:

The thing that would set a podcast apart [from Mixcloud] is that you would actually download it to your phone. To do that legally is incredibly difficult, as you have to obtain clearances for all of the songs and clearances to download. That is something that we’ve steered away from, conducting the streaming model. Because of that, we got the licenses needed for streaming and we pay royalties to the artists listened to in the stream.



We’re slightly different in that we are a radio service and you can’t come to Mixcloud and select a song that you want to listen to and hit play, unlike the Spotifys and Soundclouds of the world. That said, a subscription service that would make sense could be of interest to us, it’s just question of working out the economics and make sure that they work for everybody. Something not too expensive, not the ten dollars you would pay per month for Spotify, because at the end of the day you’re not going to have access to 30 million songs on demand. It’s a different sort of service.


Mixcloud is party to its own legal maneuvering in providing DJ mix content, as observant US-based users may have noticed. In this country, track lists are not available until the mix has been played in full (though skipping ahead sometimes makes them visible), and mixes containing the same artist more than four times are blocked. There’s also the inability to scrub backward in a mix, and of course the ‘no download’ thing (though, of course, that applies globally). These are all restrictions in place due to royalty and licensing laws here – as regulated by SoundExchange – in an attempt to keep Mixcloud free of major label meddling and out of SoundCloud’s present hot water. I feel the Mixcloud-as-radio-station strategy is a good one, and reportedly the service aims to strengthen the radio association by adding live ‘broadcasts’. Some may balk at these restrictions, but users need to realize that total freedom of content access comes at a cost to the services (especially with regards to DJ mixes) and isn’t sustainable. Mixcloud has its flaws, but they are thinking ahead and implementing these restrictions in ways that aren’t sudden and antagonistic to its users. They’ve also worked out a way to pay out some royalty to rightsholders, keeping them at bay (for now). SoundCloud should take note.

8D Projects: Ursula 1000 – Faded Denim Wash (Insect Queen Music)

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We’re now working with Ursula 1000, helping with his self-founded label Insect Queen Music. “Faded Denim Wash” is the first single off Ursula’s upcoming album Voyeur, and it’s fantastic … groovy disco and funk elements abound, with a touch of balearic spaciousness to make for a sophisticated sound. A diverse set of remixes come from a talented set of relative newcomers, including Abelard, Golf Channel’s Payfone, Robot 84, and (our personal favorite) Seahawks. We’ve launched an 8DPromo campaign today.

The Wild West Days Of The Web Are Over

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The Verge:

(Josh Greenberg) had violated the tenets of intellectual property law, of course, but there was precedent for that. Nullsoft’s Justin Frankel had coded Winamp without licensing the underlying mp3 technology; YouTube’s Steve Chen and Chad Hurley had looked the other way as users had uploaded thousands of infringing videos; Napster’s Shawn Fanning had acted as if the entire concept of copyright was obsolete. Greenberg resembled them. He was a scion of middle-class America; he’d attended a state school; he was young, and male, and comfortable with the internet’s culture of appropriation. The template was to move fast and to break things, and to let the lawyers figure out the repercussions once you’d earned your millions.



If Grooveshark had debuted in 2003, or maybe even 2005, he might have gotten away with it. Like a claim-jumper in the 19th century, Grooveshark could perhaps have emerged from the era of digital lawlessness with enough leverage to force the music companies to the negotiating table, and borrowed enough expertise from the venture capitalists to become a functional business. With a little luck, the company might have outmaneuvered Spotify, and Greenberg would have been a business icon.


I had a link to this month-old article hidden in one of my recent posts, but I think it deserves its own place as it’s well worth a read. The author shapes his piece as more of a commentary on changes in the Internet / entrepreneur industry – he believes the days of the budding teenage tech billionaire have passsed – but, of course, it’s all intertwined with developments in the music industry. The required move over the past decade from ‘digital lawlessness’ to legitimacy enlightens a bit about SoundCloud’s recent troubles, as well as how smart Spotify has been from the outset. The article also reminds me how it’s a deep shame that we won’t get to see what Josh Greenberg will come up with next as there was some seriously brilliant idea-making behind Grooveshark.

8D Projects: Chris Forman – Presents ‘Reaching Out To The World’, Part 1 (Them On The Hill)

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New Zealand’s Them On The Hill label has charted a path towards a top notch catalog of modern house music tracks in a classic style, often created by criminally unheralded veteran producers. This upcoming release, and our latest project at 8DPromo, continues this string by enlisting New Jersey’s Chris Forman, who has previously worked with renowned imprints like Nite Grooves, Vega Records, and King Street. The single features two terrific tracks, and there are definitely some nods to house music’s celebrated past, especially in the familiar vocal sample in the second.