Owl Music Search is a cool tool that was spotlighted at a Creative Commons Salon last night. The potentially endangered Pandora and Last.fm recommend which music you'll like by matching text descriptions of albums, artists and songs. But Owl analyzes the actual waveforms of music files and matches them to similar tunes, many of which have Creative Commons licenses.
When I uploaded Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," Owl dug up 44 tracks by Loretta Lynn, Outkast, the Rolling Stones, Marilyn Manson and others, highlighting snippets of their songs that resembled parts of "Hallelujah." Owl has the capability to let you select segments of a song and search for that clip elsewhere. In theory, this would let you find, say, which rappers have sampled "Chocolate City" among a gajillion other Parliament jams.
Owl looks promising but is still hatching from its version .3 shell. Its tagline "finding music through music" describes the novelty but also the limitation to its random search feature. While Owl let me narrow down music by year and genre, I found no text search field on its site. Instead, you can search words and phrases within Owl either via Creative Commons or a Firefox plugin. Mac users can also install a plugin to scour Owl via iTunes.
Owl taps into songs from ccMixter (more here), Jamendo, and Magnatune and other sites. Partnerships with IRIS Distribution and CDBaby are in progress.
Owl Music search matches songs with similar waveforms.
As though timed to coincide with the much-anticipated release of indie rock powerhouse The Arcade Fire's album release this week (it's a must-listen, by the way), Monday night's monthly NY Tech Meetup at Cooper Union featured a trio of Gotham-based start-ups devoted to spreading the buzz about independent music. One's a marketplace; one's an ongoing competition; and one's a way to discover what the people who are discovering new music are discovering (in other words, an aggregator).
The first of the three is Amie Street, which we have previously written up on Webware. Amie Street's novelty is all in the business model: bands and labels who sell their music on this site know that initially, the songs will be distributed for free. After enough downloads, the price of the song gradually begins to rise until it reaches a cap of 98 cents--so, if you're paying full price for a song, you know it's popular. And if you recommend a free track that eventually makes it all the way to 98 cents, you get some small bits of cash from the company. Additionally, as with the larger indie retailer eMusic, there is no DRM. Or, as they like to say, "naked MP3s."
So, basically, you can consider it a social music store. And "social" anything continues to be big these days.
Next up is Music Nation which is less a piece of webware than a new-media marketing opportunity. The guys behind Music Nation conceived it as "YouTube meets American Idol," and that's pretty much what it is. For a $25 entry fee, unsigned artists can put their music videos into Music Nation's central contest. Users then vote on them--though there's also a panel of judges, presumably to prevent the almost-inevitable victory of an artist who's terrible but hilarious (see also: William Hung). Weekly winners are announced--in rock, pop, and "urban" categories--and ultimately, the overall winner will score a record contract thanks to a partnership with Epic Records.
It's unclear as to what Music Nation will do when it's exhausted its contest. Fortunately, the site has already built an infrastructure for unsigned bands to network with fans, publicize tour dates, and the like, so it already has begun to build up a site beyond the competition. But on the flip side, MySpace and PureVolume already have a strong hold on the unsigned-band-publicity market sector.
The third start-up at the NY Tech Meetup was probably the most-hyped, which is appropriate since it's called The Hype Machine. This fledgling start-up, which Meetup founder and Tech Meetup host Scott Heiferman seemed quite pumped about, is essentially a music blog content aggregator. The Hype Machine paws through a list of music-themed blogs and lets you know all kinds of cool stuff: which blogs are the most popular, which are updated most frequently, and which artists are mentioned. The token "awesome" feature is the streaming audio of MP3s that are currently being featured on music blogs. I subscribed to it as an iTunes podcast--hello, new office soundtrack! The only unfortunate part is that many of the music blogs feature MP3s that are a tad...experimental. You'll just have to deal with that.
An audience member at the Tech Meetup raised the question of what happens when music blogs write about bands that they don't like. I could relate to that--one of my favorite music blogs, Stereogum, recently posted the abhorrent new Avril Lavigne video, which I won't link you to because no one deserves to have to sit through it. But the thinking behind Hype Machine is that if a lousy band is so terrible that every music blog is writing about it, it's probably "so bad it's good." And I guess that makes sense.
And thankfully, I didn't come across any Avril Lavigne.
-- Find toxic wastelands via Google Earth. The EPA released a master list of landfills and other offenders to the public today in hopes of getting some recognition on mapping services such as Google Earth and Windows Live Local. Here's hoping for a Toxic button next to the beloved satellite view on Google maps. (CNET News)
-- Global digital-music sales nearly doubled in 2006. It was a good year for digital downloads, but they're still coming in at only 10 percent of the total music market. (CNET News)
-- MTV to buy RateMyProfessors.com. With more than 900,000 professors already rated, RateMyProfessors is now on its way to being owned by MTV as part of their MTVu service. (CNET News)
- prev
- 1
- next
