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April 2004 News
../ New Mobile Music Recognition Service From AT&TThanks to AT&T's new mobile music recognition service you will never have to say "What's the name of that song?" again. AT&T announced the availability of their new service, the first of its kind in the United States, after a successful trial period.AT&T cell phone users simply dial a special 3 digit code and when prompted hold their phone up to a speaker for 15 seconds. AT&T then sends a text message to their phone with the artist and song name. The new "#ID" music service is provided by Musicphone in cooperation with Shazam Entertainment, which operates a propriety recognition database of more than one million recorded songs. AT&T Wireless customers can demo the music recognition service at no charge when they first dial "#ID." Afterwards, the service costs $.99 cents, plus standard airtime charges, each time they use it.
The Future: Finally an exciting and useful music service for your cell phone. Of course, AT&T's wireless service dropped the call
before the 15 seconds required to recognize the song, and we didn't get any type of text message, but, hey, who's quibbling?
Phil and Paul Hartnoll recently announced on their web site that their forthcoming "Blue Album" - to be released on June 21st in Europe - would be their last. In addition, their last live performance in the United Kingdom will be closing the second stage June 27th at the Glastonbury Festival. Being very politically correct for a change, Paul stated, "I think we feel that Orbital has run it's course...We're both pursuing different avenues with our music. And we've been sitting, as brothers, in the same room for 15 years...so I think it's time for a change." Orbital were true electronic music pioneers. Their live performances set the high water mark for what an electronic band could accomplish on stage, and their instantly recognizable music influenced many aspiring artists. The brothers Hartnoll took their live show very seriously, and shunned pushing play on a DAT recorder and faking it. Their innovative use of the Alesis MMT8 hardware sequencers, still in their live rig to this day, demonstrated that a live electronic music show could be tactile and vivacious. Instead of just tweaking the EQ on a mixer, Orbital jumped around with their trademark Alien Flashlight Glasses from one piece of gear to another creating an energy that's only been matched by a handful of acts. There have long been rumors about their impending breakup, but just when you thought it was going to come to a screeching halt, they'd release another album and announce a tour. The "Blue Album" is their seventh full length release which is a shock to both brothers who started their career with the landmark "Chime" release in 1990. The album harkens back to some of their earlier work, but with the collaborations that they've been known for recently. The album evolved slowly over the course of 2003 with the band liberated from strict record company release schedules and music guidelines for the first time since their career began. "If anything, it's closer in character to our first album than our later ones, if only because we made it in our own time and for ourselves," Paul reveals. "It's nice to know that we're finishing, it's not many bands that do that. They tend to just fade away. And it's nice to have our last gig at Glastonbury. It's going be a party set, a best of Orbital. I think if we're going do a last gig we should do distilled set of all the best stuff we've done. And that's what we’re going to do, play all the stuff that's stuck around for all this time," Paul surmises. The Future: So it better to retire to Ibiza then to end up in a dishwashing detergent commercial? After one punchout too many, the Hartnoll brothers have decided to hang up their flashlight glasses and spend the rest of their days not dragging their studio out to play live shows. We'll miss them, but Futuremusic has a sneaking suspicion that we'll be hearing a lot more from Paul in the future.
Programming the original D-50 was a tad cumbersome. However, the new card utilized the V-Synth's touch screen to make finding and tweaking the patches a breeze. The V-Synth also utilizes its TimeTrip pad to recreate the D-50's original Partial Balance joystick controller so you can modulate the V in the same way as the original. In addition, the V-Synth can accept a MIDI bulk dump of D-50 Patch data enabling the user to import the thousands of alternative sounds that have been created since the original debuted over 15 years ago. The Future: That's great boys...now get busy on a Jupiter card. And make it snappy!
The service, which bowed one year ago, sold 13 million songs to the Macintosh computers it initially supported, and then accelerated in the back straight away when the service was opened to Windows users with another 40 million. However, even as iTunes is way out in front of the pack of other music download services in terms of sales, it appears that late competition may catch them at the finish. Walmart recently opened their online music service and has made an impact in the industry by undercutting all the other services. Utilizing the "Competitor Castration" strategy out of their Official How To Wipe Out Our Competitors When We Launch A New Store Handbook, they have entered the market by selling individual songs for 88 cents. The backend of Walmart's service is being handled by Liquid Digital Media, a division of Anderson Merchandisers who purchased the assets of Liquid Audio for $3.2 million in January 2003. Anderson is currently Walmart's physical music distributor, as well as their magazine distributor. Just like iTunes, Walmart's music store features jukebox software for searching, buying music, organizing songs, managing playlists and burning CD's. The downloadable software is only available for Windows users. The Future: Watch out Steve, Walmart doesn't innovate, it annihilates. They will lose money for as long as it takes until no competitor is left standing. The good thing for you is that you don't care if you lose money too...just as long as you can sell every iPod that rolls off the assembly line.
The great thing about the TT-M1 is that the DJ does not need to learn a whole new bag of tricks. The DJ can utilize all the turntable functions that he honed his/her skills on: pitch control, start/stop, power on/off, back spins, wind ups/downs, etc., to control a CD. This setup doesn't require any additional hardware, special records, or a computer. Simply attach the MM-T1 to the side of the turntable's platter, connect to a CDX series Tascam CD player and start scratchin'.
Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group of companies, bellows, "Passionate music fans have made it clear that they want their music when they want it, where they want it, and how they want it. Well, we've heard them. We're going to redefine the way that our customers relate to their music...we're going to take digital music into the stratosphere." Virgin will work directly with MusicNet to integrate and promote a digital download store and subscription music club into the Virgin Digital service. This global service, incorporating over 700,000 music tracks, will allow consumers to either purchase individual songs, or to pay a small monthly fee to gain complete access to the entire catalog of available music without any surcharges. Each option will be available on the Internet, in kiosks, on mobile phones and on consumer electronics devices. The Future: This is a major score for the hurting MusicNet, but how much did they have to give up on the backend to form this partnership?
"I am honored that the Attorney General has appointed me to lead this initiative," said David Israelite. "The Task Force will determine how best to meet the evolving challenges that law enforcement faces in the intellectual property arena. I look forward to working with the Department's experts as we move ahead. Well-organized criminal enterprises have recently begun to increase the scale, scope, and sophistication of international piracy and counterfeiting. Given the simplicity of disseminating millions of copies of stolen software, music, video, as well as other products and programs around the globe with a single computer click, and given the inconsistent enforcement of existing laws worldwide, it is imperative that intellectual property rights be reaffirmed and vigorously protected." The lobbying efforts of the music, film and software industry have paid off with the creation of this new agency. It appears that the Recording Industry of America (RIAA) will be working closely with the IPTF in their ongoing campaign to thwart piracy efforts that have grown from small one room apartment operations to well-organized criminal enterprises. The Future: Will the IPTF truly make an impact or is this just a waste of precious tax dollars?
In the IFPI's announcement, they declared that "further waves of lawsuits against major offenders" will be launched in 2004. Following the lessons learned by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the IFPI has targeted users who are distributing enormous archives of compressed music files, also known as MP3's. One of the infringers reportedly was distributing over 50,000 songs. Jay Berman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the IFPI concurs with the RIAA's litigation strategy and notes that it has had a major impact on restoring the music industry's fiscal well being. Unfortunately, many countries in Europe have been slow to launch legal alternatives to the illegal P2P services because of their muddled licensing laws and greedy copyright agencies. Basically the IFPI is saying to the international community, we know that you don't really have a legal alternative, but if you share music online, we'll sue you. To make matters worse, each country has its own method to combat the infringers. In Canada and Denmark, civil charges were filed, while in Italy and Germany, criminal actions were instituted. The lawsuit breakdown by country: 29 people in Canada, 30 in Italy, 68 in Germany and 120 in Denmark. The Future: Even though the IFPI's lawyers have a major uphill battle navigating the various individual countries copyright laws, they will press on with this mostly public relations offensive. However, without a stable list of legal alternatives, the international community will continue to share music illegally. Denmark will also continue to be a thorn in the IFPI's foot where file sharing has been so weaved into the fabric of Internet users that sales of CD's have declined 50% over the last four years.
The Future: From the start, the management team behind the new Napster thought that the Napster name alone would be enough to drive sales of the new service. As we predicted long ago, consumers could care less about the brand. What they were looking for was selection, personal use rights and the ability to take their music with them. Whether the new executives coming into the fold will "get it" is the real question. To make the service compelling, Napster needs much more than a logo.
Guitar Rig really pushes the envelop for the modern guitarist who is not afraid to take a laptop out with him to a gig. The reward is processing power and sound design possibilities from more than 20 effects, three tube amplifier emulations and an extensive cabinets and mics module with ten speaker types, five microphones and the possibility to stack eight combinations simultaneously. Native is really touting Guitar Rig's sound quality. It will have to be incredible to set this new paradigm apart from competitors such as Line6. For its part, Native has developed a new sound engine named "Dynamic Tube Response" and utilized impulse response modeling to capture the essence of the microphones and cabinets.
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