Tag: youtube

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The evolving blog: things that resemble blogging

This loosely follows on from the previous post about Twitter being a variant of blogging. Incidentally, normal service on this blog may be resumed at some point or possibly never. Anyway.

Sometimes I think almost EVERY form of publishing in social media can be considered a form of blogging. Is everything here blogging?

On Flickr, for example, you upload images which have dates and tags. YouTube and other video sharing sites let you upload video, again with dates and tags. There are subscription options in these too – you add people on Flickr and you subscribe to channels in YouTube. There are variants on other video sites. These “content services” also have feeds of course. They don’t look exactly like blogs but I’m saying the default view you get is incidental to this concept of them being about blogging. Of course, the default display of a blog is incidental. You could take feeds or content from any blog or set of blogs and display them in aggregate in a multitude of ways. The point is, all are about time-based publishing which is essentially all a blog is.

Facebook is like a huge group blog. The newest thing is at the top. Posting a status or whatever is obviously like doing a blog post, but almost everything else you do is subscription. Clicking Like for something is subscription. Writing a comment on a post is a form of subscription. Becoming a fan of a page is subscription. Responding to an event is subscription. And of course, adding a friend is a subscription. It can only be two-way, symmetrical. I tell people Facebook is weirder than blogging and Twitter because of the privacy stuff. There’s a grey area between private and public, but let’s forget about those aspects for now. Facebook is a huge group blog. The things that are slightly annoying on Facebook are the non-bloggy things, mainly the private inboxes. There’s your inbox for requests and your inbox for direct messages. Another thing, if you don’t respond to an event you are automatically subscribed to receive direct messages about that event. That’s annoying because automatic subscription to anything is not bloggy.

Stretching this even further – and this is highly provisional now – maybe a wiki page can be considered a form of blog. The time-based element is most apparent if you look at the history page. This page shows all the edits that have taken place. It looks like a blog, except that instead of different posts it’s the same post being refined over time by multiple authors. And of course there’s a feed of this history too.

Or, the other way around, maybe a blog can be considered a history for its AUTHOR. The author is a biological wiki changing over time! Changes are occurring in the author’s mind and each post is a snapshot in time. So each blog post is a wiki edit. Or at least an indication of one. (If you comment on my blog, I will read it and you will edit me slightly. And the potental future of the blog will change. Have fun.)

Starting an open content service like Twitter, YouTube or Facebook looks like so much fun. I would do it differently to those guys, natch. If I were starting such a service I would look at blogging in detail for which features I could borrow. This often happens subconciously as people have absorbed the customs and features of blogging. Maybe I could start by adapting an old UNIX command.

I’m abstracting features of software here. When I studied Computer Science, I went to a lecture about “computing in the real world” delivered by a software consultant. He said that he’d been asked to work with a prison for their database of inmates. Should they pay to develop an expensive new database system for the prison, from scratch? In a stroke of inspiration, he suggested they just adapt an existing hotel booking system. A prison is a hotel, except if you’re staying you can’t decide when you’re going to leave. On an abstract level, that’s the only functional difference. Inmates are guests.

That observation has always stuck with me and I’ve always tried to look at problems in a similar way.

Of course, not everything is blogging. Now go and eat your tea.

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A Look at Spotify – With My Music Industry Hat On

Spotify on a Snowy Day in Wales

Have you tried Spotify yet?

Tucked away in today’s post on Spotify’s own blog is a file listing newly included recordings by some of my favourite labels and artists.

Labels represented on the list today include: Rough Trade, Poker Flat, XL, Rhino/Elektra, ECM, Universal, Pressure Sounds and more…

Artists on the list from today include: Stereolab, Antony & The Johnsons, Evan Parker, Basement Jaxx, Ray Charles, Si Begg, Elvis Presley, Henry Mancini, Ozzy Osbourne and loads more…

While I write this, I’m listening to a very timely collaborative playlist of snow-related songs. Thanks to @radioedit for that tip-off. I just added “Winter Sadness” by Kool and the Gang for anyone else who’s listening to it.

OK, so what’s Spotify? Rather than rehash what stacks of articles and blog posts are saying, I can recommend Chris Salmon’s introduction to the music streaming service from the Guardian and Rhodri Marsden’s early peek last year from the Independent.

My angle on Spotify? I used to run a label fulltime. It was my business to find revenue streams for recordings and artists. Spotify should be tremendously exciting for anyone in that position now. I still have good ties with the music industry. (I help people with blogging, social media and how to promote on the web without being annoying or spammy.)

The music business is very often criticised – sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly – for being slow to take advantage of new distribution methods. Of course, when people say “music business” here they really mean the “record business”, which is a subset of it. Now, let it not be said that any of these labels has been backward in signing up for Spotify. It feels like we’re reaching a zone of mutual agreement where everyone’s happy – not only the people running the service and the fans, but the artists and labels as well. Merlin (which represents digital rights for many, many independent labels, often slightly overlooked by online music services) were happy to sign their deal with Spotify in September 2008.

If you are a band, record label or otherwise involved in the record business or music business in any way, make sure you try it. It’s all legal, licensed and legitimate. If you’re in the USA or one of the territories not currently covered by Spotify, you have the right to feel left out.

You should be able to create a free account here. (It doesn’t appear that you need an invitation at the moment. As far as I can see, that was clever marketing – creating an impression of scarcity and bestowing users with a limited number to pass on to their friends.)

Barring any mishaps, this is a future of music distribution. Notice I said “a future” – it may not be the sole future, but if you’re a label you need to consider it and put as much time and energy into researching it as you would into being stocked on iTunes and other services. You’ll reach people who wouldn’t normally listen to your music. You’ll get money from Spotify as a direct result, as well as drawing attention to your other music activities, like your gigs and merchandise. Ask your digital distributor or aggregator about it.

People are comparing it with other music streaming services like Pandora and Last.FM. While Pandora was groundbreaking in popularising the track play rather than the track purchase, it had licensing problems leading it to withdraw from the UK. So that’s clearly no good. Last.FM has been well adopted by music aficionados and the tech savvy, but in my opinion needs to work to grow its user base beyond the “heads” and keep all the labels happy, not just the major labels. Its distinctives are music discovery and tagging. (In fact you can scrobble your Spotify listening to Last.FM.)

Even YouTube is a fairly good celestial jukebox for many. Whether YouTube are actually paying rights owners or not is another question. My strawpoll of independent labels says ‘no’. YouTube are busy enough trying to get revenue for themselves.

That’s three examples of music streaming. On a technical level, to casual observers I’ve spoken with, Spotify doesn’t appear to be doing anything dramatically new. But I disagree. The streaming is flawless and uninterrupted. It’s as good as iTunes for sound quality. Importantly for me, the bass is rich and heavy. Hardcore audiophiles may grumble about the bitrate, but they always do – and they still have their cherished music formats.

The main technical reason why Spotify will explode is its SIMPLICITY. People thought iTunes or eMusic was instant gratification, but now you don’t even need a credit card. You just start streaming. The barriers to enjoyment are just non-existent. It’s actually easier to play your favourite album than to grab the CD from your shelf and load it into a drive! It feels somewhat indulgent. That simplicity is why it will win. That’s why it can compete with unlicensed peer-to-peer filesharing services. Take music on tap and make it even easier.

Later, you can delve into collaborative playlists and the like when you feel the need. You can deep link to a chosen lyric or favourite guitar solo, which will change music criticism and other writing for the better. In a music education or academic research context, your citation can include a hyperlink to the moment in the recording to which you’re referring. In turn this availability will continue to open up influences on people creating music. (Although this process did begin with the first version of Napster.)

For now people will continue to acquire music files by other means, often unlicensed and illegal. The Spotify catalogue is huge with many surprising inclusions from the majors, like U2, Madonna, Prince and Coldplay all represented. But there are gaps because of various rights issues relating to other artists. After a recent cull, The Beatles are only represented in cover versions. The same goes for Metallica and others. The precise catalogue listings vary depending on which country you are in, again due to contractual rights.

For their iPods and other portable players, fans will acquire music files because you also need internet access to stream music on Spotify.

But if Spotify can succeed in expanding the catalogue and porting the application to smaller devices, in tandem with public expansion of free wifi access, it will render the arguments about filesharer penalties totally irrelevant. Why would fans expose themselves to the malware risks and badly named or encoded files? Even the time-rich, money poor kids will agree with that.

The advertising seems very infrequent which is good for the user experience. I would say it’s roughly every 20 to 30 minutes. It feels odd to hear the advert transition into a track, which is an association I have with commercial radio – yet I’m listening to genres I like that are almost never played on commercial radio e.g. proper ambient, Welsh language music and dub.

A recurring advert which amuses me is the Energy Saving Trust because it’s a campaign part-funded by the UK government. This is surely the best use of public money for fun and culture since the Soviet Union’s nationalised record label Melodiya.

That said, there is a very small pool of ads so they’re not very targetted at the moment. I’m getting UK ads (which is relevant to me) but they include an ad for Lady GaGa’s new album – when I haven’t been listening to anything resembling that kind of music. That can be improved when more advertisers are on board. Besides, I can imagine music fans in their hordes falling in love with Spotify and opting to escape the advertising completely by signing up to the paid service. It’s a very reasonable 99p for one day or £9.99 for a month.

Last Friday I was invited to talk on a discussion panel in Cardiff hosted by Welsh Music Foundation. (Incidentally, thanks to them and to the other panel members, Dai Lloyd, Simon Rugg (Indie Mobile) and Mark Mitchell (King Harvest)). We had a very insightful discussion with a diverse audience of smaller and newer labels and bands. Not too many of them had heard of Spotify, which leads me to think it hasn’t quite tipped yet. But that will change.

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Beyond YouTube

Mucking about with music video streams isn’t the only misuse of YouTube I’ve been enjoying lately.

Here’s a game called A Car’s Life which is based entirely in YouTube. Click the annotations to save the car, but be quick!

As to how it works, each level has a different video with an annotation linking to the next level. If you let any video play to the end, you’ll see the bad outcome.

It’s a very simple game but from the relative proportions of view counts from level to level, we get an indication of many people have been successful. As you’d expect not everyone proceeds and it’s lower for each successive level. But obviously we don’t know how many good players are just abandoning the game – either because they’re analysing its technical aspects, or because they’ve decided to close it and get back to work.

If you want to upload and share video, there are some good competitors to YouTube – Blip.tv, Vimeo and Viddler all spring to mind. Each seems to focus on a unique set of subtle distinctives and strengths.

But YouTube remains the leader for sheer width of content, particularly music videos. If you want to find a well known video, it’s likely to be on there.

As such it’s long been the de facto site for video and its layout has become very familiar. It’s hard to imagine this advert working on any other video site. (Keep watching…)

http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii

Perhaps a good example of a phoney site put to a good use rather than phishing? You may find that the view count is not very reliable.

Clearly the singular popularity of YouTube has led to their unique advertising deal with Nintendo here.

As other video sites grow though, some will chip away at YouTube’s lead. I wonder if there’s any scope for a dedicated video search engine which indexes them all and is impartial. After all, Google own YouTube. Can we trust the standard search box to index all the other video sites fairly and prominently? Searching for videos there is already quite hit-and-miss. Its format remains largely unchanged since its pre-YouTube days, when online video was relatively undeveloped. For video, all we’ve had from Google since then has been Google Video – but that only indexes itself and YouTube.

All I want is the old footage of Les Dawson playing The Entertainer deliberately wrong on his piano. It’s nowhere to be found.