Bookmarks: The iPod

Did you know a British guy invented the iPod? No, no, not Jonathan Ive; Kane Kramer came up with idea - even patenting it, and building in DRM, back in 1979. Despite selling some preproduction units, he was ahead of his time; his patent lapsed and he even wound up being called as a witness when Apple was fighting its own patent battles. Wired has the full story and pics. And remember: this was from the year the Walkman was introduced:

Kramer came up with the idea for a pocket-sized, portable solid state music player with a friend, James Campbell. Kramer was 23, Campbell 21. The IXI System had a display screen and buttons for four-way navigation. In a report presented to investors in 1979, the IXI was described as being the size of a cigarette packet. Is this sounding familiar yet?

Back in 1979, a memory chip would store a paltry three and a half minutes of music. Kramer fully expected this to improve, and confidently foresaw a market for reliable, high quality digital music players which would be popular with both consumers and the record labels. It could actually be argued that he was still ahead of Apple after the firat iPod went on sale — that had a hard drive and Kramer had moved onto flash memory years earlier.

[With thanks to @curiousiguana]

Spotify claim to be "concerned" by their own tracking service

Turns out Spotify (along with Hulu and others) have been using an especially nasty piece of tracking software to keep tabs on their customers. Wired reported:

Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have discovered that some of the net’s most popular sites are using a tracking service that can’t be evaded — even when users block cookies, turn off storage in Flash, or use browsers’ “incognito” functions.

The service, called KISSmetrics, is used by sites to track the number of visitors, what the visitors do on the site, and where they come to the site from — and the company says it does a more comprehensive job than its competitors such as Google Analytics.

Yes, more comprehensive because it stuck an undeletable file on your computer, rendering your ability to opt out of tracking invalid.

Spotify issued this in response to the original story:

Spotify, another KISSmetrics customer named in the report, said that it was concerned by the story:

“We take the privacy of our users incredibly seriously and are concerned by this report,” a spokeswoman said by e-mail. “As a result, we have taken immediate action in suspending our use of KISSmetrics whilst the situation is investigated."

The question, surely, is why Spotify didn't investigate how KISSMetrics worked before baking it into its product and distributing it across all its customers. The Spotify response is a bit like a baker muttering "we're surprised to discover adding Acme Arsenic to our cakes and cookies is killing people, we'll stop doing that for the time being to look into it."

Beatles online: For now

The entire Beatles back catalogue has appeared online in a proper download shop. Bluebeat are knocking the lot out for 25 cents a go.

Bluebeat. You surely have heard of them?

Wired is surprised, too:

The idea that the various stakeholders involved with the Beatles would license an unheard-of music store to sell the band’s music at such a steep discount seems highly unlikely. After being tipped off by MusicAlly (subscription required), we’re looking into this. So far, neither BlueBeat, BlueBeat’s “partner” BaseBeat or Media Rights Technologies, which actually owns both BlueBeat and BaseBeat, has responded. The company is located in Santa Cruz, California.

A spokeswoman for the Beatles’ label, Apple Corp, Ltd., told Wired.com she doesn’t think BlueBeat has any sort of permission to be doing this. EMI, which with Apple Corp distributes the band’s music, has yet to respond but we don’t imagine they’ll be too pleased about this either.

They're still there at the moment.

Could it be that there's soon to be a legitimate appearance of Beatles stuff across digital stores, and BlueBeat are already prepping a "oh, sorry, we stuck it all live far too soon" press release as the pay-off? Or has BlueBeat taken a stupidly audacious step to promote itself, figuring it can pay off Apple, say sorry, and enjoy the traffic surge?

Gordon in the morning: Curran affairs

According to the current edition of Wired UK, James Murdoch has said with a straight face that he believes that the Sun's showbusiness coverage will drive people to subscribe to the paper's website in the same way that the business information published by the Wall Street Journal persuades people to fork out for wsj.com.

No, seriously.

Some sort of tailspinning around Alex Curran's people making New! "clarify" a comment she made about Liverpool is apparently on a par with the latest stock prices.

James believes that Gordon copying a couple of tweets from Lily Allen and Liam Gallagher and adding some stuff about them drinking on an aeroplane is pretty much the same as having an expert in the petrochemical industries provide an overview of the day's trading in energy futures on the Far East exchanges.

Murdoch Junior is betting his digital farm on people being willing to pay for something about Jude Law possibly having another kid with a "mystery woman".

It's a lot of faith to put in Gordon and his team.

Imeem squeezed

More trouble at the interface of rights holders and online services: Imeem is struggling to cope with paying royalties at the prices demanded by the people who Abba don't want us to call the intellectual property industry.

There had been rumours that Imeem was about thirty million dollars awry of its obligations, but Imeem deny that figure. It also denies that it's on the point of shutting up shop altogether:

"[TechCrunch's] $30M number is not only wrong, it's preposterous," said Graves. "We don't now owe, nor have we ever owed, that amount of money to the labels. And the shutdown rumor is equally false – we are not shutting down."
[...]
Graves said imeem is indeed hoping to renegotiate its label deals.

"I can confirm that we're negotiating with the major labels to restructure our deals," he wrote via e-mail. "This is a good thing. The economy and world have changed, and just as we've renegotiated our bandwidth bills, ad-serving deals, etc. to take into account the new economic realities, it makes sense to do the same with our content deals."

Wired suggests it could be paying as much as a cent per song streaming for some tracks - which, with Imeem serving a billion streams a month, is clearly insane.

Using our adhoc 'how much would it cost to play a song to an audience the size of Chris Moyles', I make that roughly a thousand times more expensive per listener than Radio One's royalty rate.

Doubtless, though, PRS and other rights agencies will be desperately trying to come up with a justification for overcharging a company when it does have the 'well, the parent company makes a lot' argument to deploy.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read and listen to on the internet

Wired's Listening Post celebrates the Che Cafe scene:

Local music communities like these prefigured today's social networks, according to Rothenberg. "My thesis is that rock 'n' roll scenes were the social networks, before the internet, for teenagers," he told us in an East Village bar in Manhattan. "What we hit upon doing this Che Underground site is putting that back together in a digital medium. People have really responded to it -- everybody who was anybody in that little circle has jumped on there."

And enjoy the music being curated by the Che Underground blog.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

The Wired Listening Post interviews Tim Burgess about giving the album away, and working with Alan McGee:

I really don't want to go back to a label! And obviously, working with Alan, he's kind of the law unto himself anyway. When we got together it was a team made in heaven, really, me and Alan. We both needed each other at the time, and both forged the plan, really. And I think managements where it's at -- decent managers rather than a record label.

Oh... and try before you buy

Wired's Listening Post has compiled a video version of the new Radiohead album, based on live recordings and published tracklists.

Won't someone please think of the labels?

An interesting, doomy Wired piece suggesting that we're in the year The Music Dies. Except, of course, what it means by "the music" is "the music industry", and what it means by "the music industry" is "the current major record labels." While not certain this is a good thing, it does at least suggest that it might be.

Why should we regard EMI and Island as being neccessary and desirable; why should we worry about them not being able to adjust to the new demands of their market? The big labels have never pretended to be social services, they've never worried about dropping acts who suddenly went out of favour with the public; they've recently not been showing much interest in developing audiences and careers for new artists.

Why should we suddenly start to worry about profit-driven organisations with a record for treating their customers like schmucks and their artists as shit? By their own admission, ninety per cent of their products never make a cent in profit, so even when they're at their best, they're not even good at being record sellers. Music existed before the RIAA and now there are many ways that artists can thrive without being on a major label. Bankruptcy in the music industry? Why should I be worried?

You may think we're overblown

Sure, we might make the experts sound like paranoid nutcases, but... the Ipod as nuclear suitcase? - we can't keep up with the sense of hysterical idiocy offered by real life.