Universal Music Group has decided to team up with Google’s money-hemorrhaging video site YouTube for a joint venture called Vevo, which will apparently “highlight” clips from the major-label behemoth and make money for everyone (maybe even artists? Haha, just kidding!) via ad revenue. What does this mean for you, the end user? Well, clips that use UMG-owned music—which right now are only available for YouTube viewing if you venture over to the site—will be embeddable on third-party sites, thanks to “a special VEVO branded embedded player,” which reads to me like code for “you’ll be clicking through lots of ads before you see that new Lil Wayne clip.” MORE »
POSTS FROM "web 2.maybe?" CATEGORY
the biz
Vevo La Vida: Universal Music Group Hoping That It Can Create A Hulu Of Its Own
the new model
Digital Music: Basically, No One Has Any Idea
For all the excitement surrounding new ideas about digital music, there’s rarely any follow-up on those concepts. Sure, we’ll get some breathless posts about some great new system for sharing songs or listening to streams, but if it fails, or does only OK, that doesn’t get quite the same amount of coverage. (Unless, of course, it gets sued, at which point it’s a cause célèbre.) So it’s nice to see CNet try to give a once-over to some recent new-media music startups and assess their fortunes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really do much digging. The playlist site Imeem and the ad-supported streaming site SpiralFrog—two companies that have been thought of as not long for this world for a while—get pegged as failures. At the same time, the case for the “success,” the amorphous digital-music site LaLa, isn’t really convincing. MORE »
web 2.maybe?
Someone In The Digital Music Business Making Sense Shocker!
I’m not ready to forgive Last.fm for what its application did to my computer (although I should probably update my Commodore 128, so that might not be their fault), but the social-music site’s COO, Spencer Hyman, talked to Forbes about the company’s place in the post-MySpace Music economy–and he might have established himself as one of the few sane voices in digital music in the process. MORE »
web 2.maybe?
Amazon To Allmusic: “A-Wiki-What?”
On Monday, Amazon launched the beta version of Sound Unwound, its new IMDB-for-music wiki interface, allowing you the viewer to change stuff. We can’t believe it either. MORE »
web 2.maybe?
Those of you who aren’t deleting artists from your Last.fm profiles to look “cool” may want to check out Soundamus, which slices and dices the listening habits you’ve leaked to the site in order to let you know which artists you like have new releases on the horizon. MORE »
web 2.maybe?
Time For You To Uncover The Mystery Of Chessboxin’
WuChess opened today, and in addition to a (welcome, to me) return to Wu-branded merchandise it offers a new business model from the RZA, who’s charging $48 a year for chess instruction, online play, tournaments, and social networking. MORE »
web 2.maybe?
Soundflavor Whittles Your Taste In Music Down To A Small Tag Cloud
Most people have at one time or another–or, you know, every single day–stared into the great information sinkhole that is a database-driven Web site and wasted a great deal of time. As Internet technology becomes more advanced this process only becomes more efficient, yet paradoxically more time-consuming. It’s in this spirit that I checked out Soundflavor, an unholy mixture of Pandora, Allmusic, and YouTube with a large database of artist profiles and links to videos featuring an artist’s songs (plus a link to buy songs legally, in the unlikely event that you choose that route). After selecting a song, a little window listing 25 similar songs compiled by Soundflavor–again, complete with YouTubage–pops up. It’s as flawed as it is brilliantly convenient. Let’s waste some time, shall we? MORE »
web 2.no
New Online Mixtape Site Hopes That It Doesn’t Get Recorded Over By Rights Issues
Yesterday saw the launch of Muxtape, a playlist-sharing service where users are allowed to craft and share 12-song “mix tapes” by uploading songs they like to a server, from whence they stream. Word spread quickly throughout the microblogging service Tumblr, and Travis McCoy from the Gym Class Heroes has even made one. Basically, Muxtape takes the idea of the International Mixtape Project into the Web 2.0 era, complete with slick, commentary-free interface, and ultra-self-referential group of base users. Which is why I’m wondering how long it’ll be before the whole thing gets shut down by the majors, who are notorious sticklers about things like “getting paid for the streaming of songs they own the rights to.” MORE »
