Seattle-based online music service Rhapsody has announced today that it’s in the process of purchasing the once dominant music file sharing company Napster. Under the terms of the deal, Rhapsody will take over Napster’s subscriber base and other assets, and Best Buy, who purchased Napster for a reported $121 million in 2008, will get a minority stake in Rhapsody. The specific financial details haven’t been disclosed yet. According to the press release, all parties expect final details of the purchase to be worked out around November.

What’s clear here is that Best Buy is waking up and no longer feels that Napster represents the future of music like it once did. It’s surprising that they were suckered into spending that kind of cash on a fledgling peer to peer music service amidst the recession of 2008. Then again, big box retailers are rarely quick to recognize what consumers already know.

Personally, it seems that Rhapsody is taking a gamble as well in their efforts to outmaneuver some of the new players in online music streaming such as Rdio, Spotify, and MOG. Rhapsody was ahead of it’s time years ago in trying to convince the industry that music streaming was the future. As Greg Sandoval at CNET points out, here in 2011, every major online player you can think of is banking their future on streaming and cloud services. Rhapsody clearly has a history of knowing what it’s doing. Right now, they want, or realistically, need more subscribers to remain competitive. I’m just not convinced Napster users (all 700,000 of them — if that) constitute a considerable power move for Rhapsody.

This might have been front page news several years ago, yet today, the Yahoo News/ABC News merger announced this morning is generating far more buzz. I like Rhapsody’s strategy of not sitting still. Maybe I’m the only one that isn’t convinced Napster is even significant.

Every year, thousands of bands, bloggers, filmmakers, social media gurus and entrepreneurs come to the South By Southwest Music, Film and Interactive festival in Austin, Texas. When I joined the MCDM program in 2008 and heard about SXSW, I started to work on plans to be actively involved. Sooner than expected I had the opportunity to participate on one of the music panels—and got to spend a week soaking in the latest in digital media, while enjoying entertainment and Southern hospitality. Attending SXSW was well worth the lessons, networking contacts and, sometimes, the free food.

Pitching a panel

Last November, at the Showbox in downtown Seattle, I met with the SXSW music committee, which was accepting submissions from bands, record labels, and anyone else who wanted to pitch an idea. For the past two years, I have been filming a documentary on legendary blues singer Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter and using the MCDM program as a testing ground for the documentary’s online marketing and digital distribution strategies. I successfully pitched an MCDM-inspired panel based on the evolution of Lead Belly’s music from analog recordings to digital formats. Staying true to the digital storytelling code of honor, my presentation, “Lead Belly to Ludacris: From Analog to Digital,” included a video mash up I produced especially for the panel. The video mixed a rare performance of Lead Belly with hip-hop artist Ludacris covering a popular folk song. (You can read a review of my panel in the Austin Chronicle.)

Best of SXSW

In addition to presenting, I learned about a few innovative technologies and saw some great films at SXSW. Here are some of the highlights:

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The digital revolution has brought about the age of the DIY musician, or as Sonicbids.com founder Panos Panay calls it, the “artistic middle class.” With technology, artists are able to produce and distribute their work easily while maintaining creative control. But big record labels, despite their floundering, still appear to be the way for an artist to go from anonymity to platinum-selling success. So how is this middle-class musician Panay speaks of making money and supporting his or her craft? Read more…

On Sept. 9, the Beatles finally entered the world of digital music. This was an inevitable move, but what’s truly interesting is how they chose to do it. Well-known Beatles fan Steve Jobs has yet to secure the world-famous music catalog in a digital format for iTunes. So who did? MTV/Viacom and their video game studio Harmonix, which created “Rock Band: The Beatles” for video game consoles.

Money is said to be one of the sticking points in the negotiations to bring the Beatles’ catalog to iTunes. I have no doubt that money influenced the Beatles’ decision to do a video game, but I’d also bet that they wanted to do something different and cutting-edge. Read more…

What you are about to see here is a week-old, mind-blowing example of data mining and passion. A talented young man by the name of Ophir Kutiel, a.k.a Kutiman, poured through the countably many videos on YouTube of people playing music, practicing instruments, jamming, or showing off their mad skills and love of music and created beautifully lyrical mash-ups that musically surpass most of these performances by a few miles.  

John Peters, in his book, Speaking into Air, claims that “in the age of electronic media, [communication] has become the art of reaching across the intervening spirits to touch another’s body (p.225),” and I could not agree with him more.  

As the talented Erin McKeown sings: “there is hope in poetry, comfort in fiction.” There is, indeed, pleasure in the physicality involved in creating something heartfelt, even as simple as a webcam video of you attempting to sing, and then sharing that with others. That pleasure is only surpassed at the moment it generates a physical response in another, the moment were the bodies in the medium are moved to action. The soaring popularity of Kutiman’s videos clearly attest to that. Kutiman was moved to create an amazing project in six movements joining lots of people in their private act of music creation and connecting their efforts.  

We all want to feel a sense of connectedness and belonging. Even when we are singing loud in the shower, we are hoping someone is listening. What Kutiman created here is an extraordinary moment of someone from the apartment next door joining in your shower-singing in a duet across the walls the separates you. 

While there is comfort in ambient presence, the real potential for social media is when the electronic connectedness finds a way to generate a visceral response. 

The crowd was not wise on its own, it needed a human filter to cut through the noise, see a potential, and realize it.  I encourage you to check out the full project with links to the source videos at Thru-You.com.

crossposted at armyoffools.net

Today we talk about foley. Your film creation cannot live on music alone, unless you are making a silent movie, or you make sure you record every footstep sound carefully, you will need some sounds effects to enhance the action on the screen.  Most professional editing suites come packaged with all sorts bits and bites that you can use. If you do not have those, there is hope on the internet for non-commercial use: basically for free for students and filmmakers for online distribution and film festivals, with possibility of licensing for commercial when (more realistically, if) needed.

The resource I want to share with you today is The Freesound Project. Freesound makes available an ever-growing database of sound effect licensed under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license. This means you can use and abuse the samples for non-commercial purposes including remixing, file sharing and webcasting.

You may search the site using freeform text, tags, descriptions, usernames, or geotags.  There is also a “sounds-like” type of browsing available on the site. An account is required, but sign-up is free.

This was going to be the exception to creative commons music and a post about licensing from small recording houses. But in the past two days while talking to musician and studio manager Robby Baier at SoulTube, Robby just went ahead and posted a Non-Commercial, Attribution, Limited Use notice to the site. I verified this with the studio, and indeed, licenses to students are free (yay)-festival licenses included. When the money comes (keep believing), they would want to talk to you some more about commercial distribution and offer to even help you pick the right song for a scene. Either way, always give credit where its due.

SoulTube is home to a small, but a unqiue and beautifully-produced collection of artists. They have licensed music to commercials, TV, and films before so they are not new to the game. Check out their site, go to the “Songs For Film” section and choose the advanced search feature. You can explore from their list of artists, pick a mood, or search for specific words in the lyrics database (kudos!).

If this does not sound too good already, most of the tracks are also available in instrumental versions and you can hear the music and download it from the site directly.  Again, the only drawback is that it is a small collection, but the experience of dealing with people passionate about their music is vastly superior to any of the stock music houses or large labels.

You have labored over your film concept (the one you just came up with an hour before you had to pitch it), you have poured every emotion in your soul into the storyboards (mostly fear), and now you scurry about in the last two weeks of Winter quarter, squeezing whatever creative juices (and hard-earned cash) left in you to put out a story you can call your own into this cyberworld.

Visually, things seem to be falling into place (historically known as the crapper), and now it is time to find that perfect minor chord to send your audience weeping after they view your piece.

The musicscapes are vast and this post (in three parts) will only attempt to provide some guidance for those creating audio-visual projects to navigating the creative commons music territories (or swamps).

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