Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
The Personal Touch #1
Paul Marshall makes beautiful music and sings beautiful songs. I ordered his CD and he hand wrote a little note to go with it letting me know when he'd next be playing London and what he was up to at the moment. Nice!
One half of Paul's album is by Tascam Tapes, who also makes beautiful music and sings beautiful songs, alone and with her band The Minor Fall.
Browsing all these connections again on myspace is a little strange, because I never remember where I find these things. It turns out they all have releases on Seduction Records alongside a band called Whores Whores Whores who my brother has done a bit of PR for recently. And then I find my brother's band recommending Paul Marshall to Marsha from XFM as a response to her podcast where she recommends them, and it's all neatly tied together.
MySpace needs an API
Despite its wilful disregard of many best practice web design patterns I hold dear, and its obvious attraction to big business in order to sell things to "the kids", I'm still a big fan of MySpace for keeping track of new music. I go there mainly because lots of the bands I like are there every day, talking to their fans, keeping up to date gig listings (which they almost all fail to do on their own sites), posting new songs (often months before release), and so on. The good outweighs the bad, even if it's very bad.
For those who haven't tried it, when you find a band you like on MySpace you can "add" them as a friend (much as you add contacts on any social networking site). You then get bulletins and blogs and event notifications from those bands. But here's the thing: MySpace doesn’t notify you if your favourite bands post new tracks. That's the main reason I'm there!
MySpace should generate a podcast/RSS feed for me which points to the most recent downloadable mp3s from bands I have added as friends. Maybe that's a really obscure feature request? But if MySpace had an API, it would be a trivial 10 minute script, and then I could take the most up to date MySpace music with me wherever I went.
Without an API, it's an uphill struggle from the beginning. All the data is there, but it's locked up - I can't export a list of my friends, the track URLs are locked up in a Flash player, the HTML is so bad it almost seems deliberate. There are streaming-only tracks as well as tracks which are legal downloads – for bonus points a podcast script would also grab the streams, but I imagine that would involve hacking around with the Flash player they use and watching what goes over the wire to pick out the URLs. And a big fat News Corp lawsuit...
Update: since this page is getting lots of hits, some readers may be interested in this Myspace Parser which gives a Python interface to Myspace.
Joined Up Thinking
Please can I twin my del.icio.us account with my last.fm account and keep a record of the things I stream with the del.icio.us mp3 widget?
Whilst you're implementing that for me, can you do the same thing for myspace bands, purevolume bands and so on?
Could this be done with a Greasemonkey script or a Firefox extension?
RupertSpace
So now myspace has been bought by News Corp, does that mean Rupert Murdoch will automatically add himself as my friend? I hope so.
Seriously though, this is big news. I can't help thinking that the first comment at Many2Many isn't as much of a troll as it seems. Danah Boyd is usually spot on, but she seems to come across a little right on in that post, or is it just me?
DARTS! is good
My brother's latest band - DARTS! - have just recorded a demo. You can have a listen to the first cut of it over at myspace.com/darts.
Influences, apparently, include Minus The Bear, Devo, The Police, The Futureheads, Dismemberment Plan, Q and Not U and Talking Heads. It's funky, punky, disco-tinged, jazzy, spazzy, indie rock. With Teesside accents. You might like it.
15 Megs of Fame
From the makers of the small but perfectly formed user-driven T-Shirt site Threadless comes 15 Megs of Fame, a music site made to the same high standards. Artists can upload songs (much like the old mp3.com, and current contenders such as PureVolume, IUMA, Vitaminic, MySpace, etc.), and users can stream, download, comment and rate songs. The song rating star slider interface is lickable (one for Widgetopia, I think), and fits in well with the rest of the design, as does the seamless flash-based streaming (much like the flash-integration on Flickr). To top it all off, the music is licensed for sharing under a Creative Commons music license.
So it all looks good, but I can't help thinking that there might not be room in the market for yet another vaguely social amateur music recommendation site. Purevolume started off looking quite promising too, but now suffers massively from rich-get-richer charts, and it looks like artists must pay to get on the front page (where most of the traffic comes from). The quality of encoding has also dropped unbearably low since it got more and more popular, as you can tell if you compare my brother's old band (The New Lev Yashin: purevolume, myspace) or his friends (Burnout In The Capital: purevolume, myspace, Stories and Comets: purevolume, myspace).
In the case of 15 Megs of Fame, it looks like the charts aren't totally ratings-based, so hopefully there'll be enough churn in there to keep good artists bubbling to the top. I wish that the ratings system led somewhere though, like the T-Shirt design ratings on Threadless lead to actual T-Shirts, maybe the song ratings on 15 Megs could generate the track-listing for a monthly compilation CD that I could subscribe to?
Anyway. 15 Megs of Fame: great looking site but needs something else, I think.
On Hifi Separates in Information Space and Gadget Space
Matt Jones makes a nice analogy concerning the expected convergence of web-based services like Bloglines, Flickr or Blogger. Matt asserts that there will always be Home Info Theatre - the web equivalent of hi-fi separates - for those who want the highest quality services. The corollary here, then, is that sites like MySpace are the mini-systems of information space.
I use a similar argument to illustrate why there will probably always be separate gadgets, such as digital cameras and digital music players, despite the potential to integrate everything into one device (generally centred around a mobile phone). Most of the arguments which justify hi-fi separates will carry through to the gadget world - smoother upgrade paths, less chance of crippling failure, greater robustness etc. (the old, "small pieces, loosely joined" mentality). Of course, the downsides will apply too - separate components make for bulkier systems (more to carry), and the price is inevitably higher.
All this talk of convergence reminds me - I really want one of those Swiss Army Knife USB Storage things.
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