Big news for Rob and his MusicBrainz team (and by team I mean over 300,000 dedicated music fans) today:

MusicBrainz is an online database of music information, maintained by an international
community of dedicated enthusiasts and managed by MetaBrainz, a US-based 501.c.3 non-
profit. By working with MusicBrainz, the BBC plans to underpin its broadcasts with a data-
driven, comprehensive online offering, enabling music discovery through its music websites
and beyond.

Matthew Shorter, Editor, bbc.co.uk/music says: “The BBC is getting closer to its audiences by
letting fans write and tag the information around the music they love. Using the MusicBrainz
database to achieve this confirms the BBC’s commitment to work more closely with external
suppliers and with the wider web community.”

Commitment to music? Check. Benefits music lovers? You betcha. Commerce strangling information/knowledge? Well, of course not.

By George, I think we have a winner.

It’s hard to believe a whole year has passed since I uploaded last year’s Valentine’s Day Playlist to FIQL. We’ve been busily working on some fun stuff for our users behind the scenes, but we’re not quite ready to talk about that yet…

So instead, I offer you this Valentine’s Day Pie Chart (ok, the only thing Valentine’s Day about it is the color red). We’ve been going through some of our stats recently, and here’s a different view which some of you might find interesting. This picture shows how often we are seeing songs in the different file formats.

Unsurprisingly, MP3 is the dominant format, at about 80%. AAC and WMA are running a distant second, but with similar penetration. Note, though, that protected AAC files are not included, because they are controlled by an unlicensed DRM model. Trailing those are the less mainstream FLAC and Ogg formats - if you are an audiophile, you might want to check out FLAC, as it provides an reasonably efficient, open format for lossless audio.

Just to let everyone know, we’re in the progress of making the trek to Vegas for CES. If you are going to be around, stop by and see us in The Sands (booth 70031).

Also, feel free to send me an email and we can sync up: adam [at] music ip [dot] com.

I was listening to some Christmas music on the radio on the way home the other day, and they started playing a song I didn’t much care for. So I switched to another station, and they were playing the exact same song. Sigh. If you’ve listened to any Christmas music at all, you’ve probably noticed that a small number of songs get played over and over. Well, I ran a quick report on the new MusicDNS tables in progress, and came up with the following interesting statistics.

The most popular song according to MusicDNS, meaning the song which shows up in most people’s collections, is Silent Night, with versions by over 300 different artists. The top 20 shapes up like this:

Silent Night
White Christmas
The Christmas Song
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
Winter Wonderland
Jingle Bells
O Holy Night
Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
I'll Be Home For Christmas
Silver Bells
Sleigh Ride !
The First Noel
Joy To The World
Blue Christmas !
Away in a Manger
Carol Of The Bells
Ave Maria
Frosty the Snowman
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree !

Songs marked with ! are songs whose popularity exceeds the simple
number of performances (meaning more or less that there is one specific version which
is very popular, rather than the popularity simply spread across many different
artists).

Surprisingly, if you look at the top 100 Christmas songs (including
all the different versions), this only covers %35 of the total Christmas music available. So, radio stations - where’s the rest of the music?

For completeness, here are the 20 most popular performers
of Christmas songs (again, based on how likely a Christmas song
by that artist is likely to be in a given user’s collection).

Bing Crosby
Mannheim Steamroller
Trans-Siberian Orchestra
Frank Sinatra
Elvis Presley
Nat King Cole
Harry Connick, Jr.
Dean Martin
Kenny G
Mariah Carey
The Carpenters
Céline Dion
Amy Grant
Johnny Mathis
Burl Ives
Vince Guaraldi Trio
The Beach Boys
Ella Fitzgerald
Perry Como
Andy Williams

Seth Godin received some interesting insight from a a reader who was giving Rhapsody a try:

I signed up for the 14 day trial of rhapsody.com … As I’m enjoying Roxanne by Sting I hear Feliz Navidad playing over the track.  I instantly assume that something is wrong with the stream and try to replay the song.  It happens again.  I then go back to the song list page trying to figure out what the heck is doing that.  Then I realize it.  It’s the Cingular Banner at the top of the page!!!   How horrible.  I was enjoying rhapsody.com.  Now I’m done.

Wendell, who’s been using Rhapsody for a while explained the difference between the web and desktop versions of a Rhapsody subscription. Same price, different format, and the web includes ads that the software does not.

But how do you let this one slip through? I understand that advertisers sometimes exert more control over their ads than one would like…but you’d think (or at least hope) that on a site where listening to (and purchasing) music is the goal…Rhapsody would have worked out eliminating this scenario as a possibility with a stipulation along the lines of ‘All entities wishing to promote or advertise their goods and services herein to fore on the website commonly know as Rhapsody…must hush when listeners are listening‘.

Ideal world, maybe…but just this one example alone demonstrates that it’s not only Cingular who is being ineffective with their campaign, but Rhapsody is taking a hit too. It’s one thing to be a website with noisy advertisers…it’s an entirely other thing to be a music website and have noisy advertisers.

iPods r cool, and many of us use Macs. but don’t confuse iTunes with music at large.

Apparently Forrester can’t tell the diff:

Headline: Digital Music Sales “Collapsing?”

Substance: “Forrester reportedly analyzed credit card transactions over a 27-month period, and while it found transactions for iTunes grew steadily for much of the study period, since January 2006 revenue has reportedly fallen by 65 percent, with the size of the average transaction declining by 17 percent.”

No mention of streaming (growing), legit p2p, non-legit p2p, subscription services…pretty myopic perspective.

Maybe consumers have decided that paying for drm’d tracks is a bad expenditure and they’re focused on rip-and-rediscover.

Where’s my cd carousel…i knew this was all a fad….

Or at least, name when it’s not that sound.

For a lazy afternoon, or an early weekend evening, here’s something to check out — how tone deaf are you? Jake Mandell writes:

While working at the music and neuroimaging lab at Beth Israel/Harvard Medical School in Boston, I developed a quick online way to screen for the tonedeafness. It actually turned out to be a pretty good test to check for overall pitch perception ability. The test is purposefully made very hard, so excellent musicians rarely score above 80% correct. Give it a try!

And so I did. 77.8% later…not bad for no musical training…

Check it out, interesting research going on all over the place.

Thanks, Music Thing.

OpenBusiness.cc, with the Arts Council of England, released a report today on how and how much artists in the United Kingdom are taking advantage of the many perks of Creative Commons licenses. The results? A pleasant surprise.

The report suggests that one key reason for artists’ using CC is that they perceive standard copyright as too complex and costly. CC licenses are an effective and practical tool for new media artists, who adapt existing work. Artists are also using CC to exploit network effects and to better market their creative work. CC is still used by an avant-garde of mainly rather young artists; more than 140,000 websites in the UK make use of such licenses.

140,000 may not be huge, but it’s encouraging. Matt’s comments, which I first read on Boing Boing, get right to the point.

“…I think it’s interesting artists seem to be using CC licenses on instinct, even if many haven’t thought through how that can really apply or feed through into their work, other than through network effects related to distribution.”

The individual artists are starting to really ‘get it’…the idea of giving up a little power in order to build a stronger relationship with the listener/viewer/consumer is catching on. I hope this trend continues and we see it cross the pond over to our neck of the woods (freeways?) in the near future.

In case you’re not stuffed from Thanksgiving festivities already…

Here’s a couple of interesting perspectives on the music industry and being an artist today. The first is over at Melatone Music — the article is called The 10 Mistakes I’ve Made Hustling My Music. Here’s a peak:

Too Many Meetings, Not Enough Doings

Do We Really Need To Talk About This Over & Over?

Isn’t This Self Explanatory?

Do I Really Have To Sell You On The Novel Idea That In Order To Be Musicians We Have To Actually Make Music?

Couldn’t We Talk About This AND Work On Music Simultaneously?

Written in an frank, conversational manner, I imagine pretty well every musician who reads his advice sees at least one or two points which hit surprisingly close to home.

The second perspective comes from Hugh MacLeod’s blog, gapingvoid. As part of a call to change the world, 500 words at a time, Shane Carey, a musician from Arizona, submitted a fantastically eloquent “Mini-festo“. Here’s part of it:

Amateur musicians: You no longer need to “make it big.”
The Internet is slowly killing the myth that only rock stars make popular music. The record industry still controls most of the fame and fortune, but a record contract is no longer necessary to reach listeners. If all you want is people to hear your music, get a website or put it on MySpace. Maybe you’ll get fame if 50 million people like it, and maybe you’ll have fortune if they send some money your way. If not, at least you have shared your music. Needing stardom puts the power in someone else’s hands; being a musician is yours, right now.

There’s a point for everyone in the music business (that includes you, the music fan), none of which point fingers, single out victims or lay blame. The situation as it stands is laid out clearly and the responsibilities of all parties are articulated concisely (a 500 word limit will do that) and intelligently.

Check them out…and if you’re interested, write your own mini-manifesto and submit it to Hugh. The guidelines can be found here, and more mini-festos can be found over here.

Here’s an inventive…invention. If you can’t afford an xbox 360 for your tech-minded love one this season, you have other options.

This is Daisy. She’s an mp3 player. You can purchase Daisy on Raphael Abram’s (her creator) website or at Makezine for the reasonable price of $115 (plus shipping).

From Abram’s website:

The Daisy is a multipurpose sound player for embedded applications. It can be used as a standalone personal music player,as the sound for an art project, in a kiosk, as a museum tour guide, in a toy, or anywhere that high quality embedded audio is desired. It uses MMC or SD flash memory cards so storage size is unlimited. It has several interface modes for either human or machine control…This is an open source project, with minimal protections reserved via a Creative Commons license. You are allowed to use any of the information on this page for any purpose, I only require attribution. Please go to the Creative Commons website and look at the GNU General Public License for the general idea. Viva la Revolution!

Affordable, no DRM wars to battle (we love our iPods…we’re fascinated by the Zune…but we’ve all griped at LEAST once about the restrictions or difficulties that must be dealt with), and actually kind of cute in it’s own way…Daisy may never hit the mainstream (I worry she might not fair to well on the off chance that I actually make it out for a run…), but it’s nice to know you have choices.

From:
Creating Passionate Users (link)
Makezine Blog (link)