MyStrands.TV on Your Wii

For those of you that just got a Nintendo Wii for the holidays (or like me you claim to have gotten for your kids but somehow you seem to be the one that is always playing it), I highly recommend that you download the Opera Browser (aka "Internet Channel") for 500 Wii points and then fire up mystrands.tv on it. It works great and now easily brings personalized music into your living room.



Ho, ho, ho!

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Song of the Day: Manchester Orchestra - Where Have You Been?

I am a fan of Simplify Media, and their iTunes plug-in just got better by now also supporting Winamp. Now I can stream songs off my friends' machines regardless of which media player they use.

Today, I was trawling a friend's collection and saw an artist I had never heard before...Manchester Orchestra. So I just clicked and listened. It turns out that it was a great discovery, so I thought I'd share.

Manchester Orchestra - Where Have You Been? (mp3)

A nice side-effect of this use case is that the MyStrands client tracks these so if I'm streaming off an friends machine and I missed what I had played, I can just go and check out my play history.

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A Tale of Two Cats, A Diamond and Commercial Success

There is a diamond commercial that is playing right now that has the web abuzz. The commercial is simple... a man quietly puts a diamond necklace on his wife while she is sleeping. The entire tone and emotional power of the commercial is provided by Cat Power doing a cover of "How Can I Tell You" by another Cat... Cat Stevens.

I don't go out of my way to buy Cat Power albums, but every time I hear any of her songs I like it. So, I went to search for it and you can find post after post of people asking "who does that song, I love it!". Well, the song is not available in anything more than the 30 second snippet from the commercial.

Cat Power - How Can I Tell You (mp3)

The word is that there is a Cat Power album of covers coming out next year. This commercial may very well turn Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power) into a mainstream star. Some people may call this a sellout, but I think when done right commercial soundtracks can be a very powerful tool. Nick Drake and Volkswagen. Feist and Apple. Israel Kamakawiwo'ole and eToys.

What to get a Cat Power fix to hold you over until the album comes out?
See the video at Cat Power Channel on MyStrandsTV

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Speechless

What on earth is going on here?! Coldplay playing live on a morning show as a musical backdrop to octogenarian Dancing with the Stars?!



See the video at The Frames Channel on MyStrandsTV

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The Moby Equation - How to Calculate Musical Sellouts

I was reading the Washington Post this morning and came across this article and calculation. I thought it was amusing, albeit a bit harsh to Moby. Take a look...

Sellout Songs | washingtonpost.com: "The Moby Quotient, generated by the formula below, determines the degree to which artists besmirch their reputations when they lend their music to hawk products or companies. (The name salutes the techno artist Moby, who took the practice to new extremes with his 1999 album 'Play.' The Moby Quotient is designated by the Greek letter mu.) Each factor is ranked on a scale of 1 to 10; the number assignments can be subjective, but the formula is useful in gauging the relative outrage fans should feel with each instance of this continuing cultural blight. The higher the result, the greater the degree of selling out. Read more about the Moby Equation."

Check out some of the recent reader submissions too.

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Radiohead's "In Rainbows" - What's it Worth To Ya?

UPDATE: There is a far bigger poll going on over at http://www.whatpricedidyouchoose.com/. Between that and some other polls I've seen (at Read/Write Web), it looks like the average is around $7 (after converted from pounds). That feels about right to me.... if the name your own price was in dollars (instead of pounds) I bet you'd see spikes at the $5 multiples (particularly $5 and $10 with the average falling somewhere in between).

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In Over Their Radioheads - Technically Speaking

I love what Radiohead is doing with their name-your-own-price, flip-off-the-record-industry, new DRMless digital album. It (sort of) went live this morning at www.inrainbows.com. I firmly endorse their DIY stance on the sales, distribution and marketing of this album - and when it's all said and done I think it is going to make them a fortune. Even if you only pay a couple of bucks for it, virtually *all* of that couple bucks goes in their pocket. That's roughly equivalent to all they would see on the sale of a $15 CD released and distributed by a major label. So, worst case they basically get what they would have gotten... best case they get about 10x what they would have gotten in their old deal. Granted, these numbers are very rough (someone from the label side of the business can better model this for sure), but you get the picture.

The problem? It appears their DIY stance is crippling them technically speaking. I've been on the site for the last 20 minutes trying to buy the album. You can practically see smoke coming off of the site as it tries to handle the load. I don't know who built/is running the "store" part of the site but I can only imagine a couple of guys running around with their hair on fire with scotch tape and bubble gum trying to piece humpty dumpty back together again.

* Pages are taking minutes to load
* Ugh... prices are only in british pounds. Time to do some conversion... of to another site.
* I just had to enter my price 3 times before it would "stick" (for what it's worth I'm paying 2 Pounds plus the 45 pence service fee, or roughly $5)
* Ugh, now I have to register... more pages to load
* OK, got it... it's a zip file
* Extracted and imported into iTunes
* Listening!
* 160kpbs MP3? Really, that's it?! Amazon is giving us 256kbps. Incomplete metadata (track 1 of ___), no album art.

It is sounding pretty good. But all in all I would have preferred to a storefront in Amazon.

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AIM Tunes

A few months ago I told you guy about the Buddy Tunes plugin for AIM. This basically made people's iTunes libraries appear like they are on your local network - thereby enabling users to stream music from any of their friends' machines. Since then, Simplify Media has essentially launched a productized version of this (albeit not integrated into AIM). The other approach that was being worked on at AOL before I left is now public in the AIM 6.5 release. It is called "AIM Tunes" and it is a similar concept but ditches the deep iTunes integration for a more player-agnostic approach.

Basically, everyone on your Buddy List (that has the plug-in installed) appears on your AIM Tunes dashboard (in your browser). From there, you you to browse their libraries and either stream them directly from your buddy's machines via an embedded flash player - or if you want - to "pop them out" and have your default media player handle them.



You can also create a playlist of songs from all across your network - although it is currently only a single/temporary playlist.

All-in-all, it is pretty slick. It still could benefit from deeper integration into the AIM client (see who is listening to my stuff and better facilitate communication about what's being shared), Mac support, an aggregated "buddy library" view (lets me search seamlessly across my entire network), multiple playlist support, publishing, etc. But, if you use AIM I recommend giving it a whirl. I may end up just running on a separate AIM instance on my home machine (under a separate screen name) and use it to stream to myself. Then again, there are a ton of other options there... Winamp Remote (also an AOL offering), Streampad (although Dan now works for AOL too), and many others.

I'd be interested to know what you guys think of it.

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Song of the Day: "Drugs" by The Cons

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Ben Harper w/ Eddie Vedder - Ashes

If you can get through the politicking at the beginning, the song and performance is really great.


See the video at musick_in_the_head Channel on MyStrandsTV

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