Written on December 18, 2008 – 12:01 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Update: I’ve emailed the founders for some more details. I’ll let you know whether get back to me.
When Muxtape closed up, I did regret the reasons - but wasn’t too sad. I used Mixwit, the cool little brother of Muxtape. Users could make mixes, based on songs from Skreemr and Seeqpod, and spice up the old-fashioned tape with a cool cover. Last night, founders Radley and Mike sent the following email to its users:
We regret to announce that Mixwit will cease to exist at the end of the year. [..] We’ve put a year of work into Mixwit so this choice wasn’t taken lightly. I won’t go into the details of our situation but state simply that we boldly marched into in a position best described as “between a rock and a hard place.” We’re very grateful to be have been part of the mixtape revival of ‘08 and are satisfied to be able to to bow out while things are still good.
Radley and Mile also praise Mixwit users with the fantastic artwork they’ve delivered. They’re trying to figure out some way to archive the artwork and playlists, “if for nothing at least historic value”. The Mixwit code might be donated to the OpenTape project.
The website and profiles will be turned off around Dec 27th and all embedded widgets will stop playing before the end of December. The boys will surprise the web scene next year with another company, they promised.
I absolutely loved this service and the way they brought music, artwork, and blogging together. Here’s a tape I made when my co-editor Boris and I rocked a Jukebox in downtown San Francisco. If you’re reading this article after December 27th, you’ll probably see nothing. How tragic.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on December 10, 2008 – 1:23 am Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference
Today, Amsterdam based Twones launches in private beta. Twones is a new Music service that tracks the music you’re playing on your computer (iTunes, WMP, Winamp) AND on 18 web services (Youtube, Last.fm, Myspace, Muxtape etc.). Disclosure: The Twones guys share offices with us and we have a minor stake in the company
Read also what Techcrunch wrote about Twones.
The service collects the songs and destinations you’re playing and shows your songs and the songs your ‘friends’ are playing in a twitter like interface.
Screenshot of music stream:
Screenshot of Heavy Rotation (most popular songs)
Legal
Twones might have the answer to the legal problems of most online music services. Twones directs the traffic to the source where the song is played in first hand, the service itself does not play or embed songs and just collects and displays the data of which songs are played on which site. Twones could be seen as the Delicious of music, it drives traffic to other sites.
Earlier this year Twones received seed funding from a group of European Live Nation informals, the world’s largest concert and music promoter.
Check the 3 minute intro video: (notice the avatar :) )
I just watched this video but had a hard time listening to the technical explanation. I couldn’t focus on anything except the guy’s hair. But this is what I found at their blog:
Based off of Johnny Chung Lee’s whiteboard, we assembled a four-foot rear-projected faux touchscreen. It’s perfect for our Wheel Of Mashup shows, which depend on an overloaded setup of Ableton Live. Because it’s overloaded, it’s very difficult to mouse quickly and accurately enough to mash things up on the fly. The touchscreen solves that.
They basically mashed a beamer, two Wii controllers, small and wearable infra-red lights and a PC with an overload of music clips to select and play music easily onstage. Very cool and artsy.
Written on November 20, 2008 – 7:02 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Dutch music service SellABand has changed its concepts on thirteen points. On the site, any beginning band can upload their music to the website. People who like their tunes and foresee a successful future for them, can become a ‘believer’ by investing 10 dollars. As soon as the band counts 5000 believers - and thus gained 50.000 dollars - SellABand steps up and helps the talented folks to record an album with a studio and expert producer. Believers used to get around €7,50 to €11 for every sold CD (which costs €15). That complicated system has now been changed into a much simpler concept: 50/50 during the first five years. This change and some other small ones have been made in order to prepare the service for something “big”.
The final announcement will be made on December 1st, and of course we’ll blog about it. The changes probably have something to do with the 3,5 million euros funding round in last April, led by Prime Technology Ventures. The investors wanted change, and it seems that they’ve got it now. They seemed to be focused on increasing the efficiency of the revenue model.
Other changes include the disappearance of advertisement and SellABand will charge 10 percent for recording costs. Though the service hasn’t seen a big breakthrough of one its artists yet, the site is probably profitable - as it receives interest over all the donations.
Juicy detail: the site is down while I’m typing this.
We all know the hype of Applications moving online with Gmail, Google Docs and other popular webaps as examples. But a drum machine? That works? In Javascript???
Yep, that is what the people at TheManInBlue have built as a demonstration. All without libraries and without Flash. The developer published as a demo of what is possible with Javascript and hasn’t tested it on all browsers. But he does offer this:
“I do guarantee that if I’m running it on my computer, on a stage, through a loud speaker system with plenty of bass, in front of a couple hundred people, it kinda makes me feel like a rockstar.”
It is supposed to work in IE6, Firefox 3 and Safari 3 as long as you have the Quicktime Plug-in installed. Sounds like it will work on all Macs and some Windows machines to me. Check it out, and pump up the bass!
Written on November 15, 2008 – 2:10 am Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
If you are an user of Pandora, the provider of online personalized radio service, you now have the chance to interact and discuss with other users about your favorite music and bands.
Pandora just launched a music discussion forum for its legions of music fans. The new forum provides Pandora’s robust user base with a platform to interact with each other once they’ve discovered new artists and bands. The forum can be accessed here: www.pandoradiscussionarea.com (they could have chosen a better name, I think)
This forum is opened in cooperation with Energizer (remember that pink bunny?), one of the world’s largest manufacturers of primary batteries, battery-powered devices and flashlights. Energizer and its iconic Energizer Bunny® will be presented as a branded skin framing the forum content and will encourage Pandora users to talk about music by creating a user profile complete with avatar choice, share their Pandora music discoveries, ask questions of other users, give opinions on bands and artists and interact with musicians who want instant feedback on new material.
This forum is a good way for Energizer to brand its name more to users (that is, it’s a marketing tool after all).
The forum will be promoted to users via co-branded ads from Pandora and Energizer on Pandora’s home page with a link to the forum and email announcements to registered users with a link to the forum as well.
We will see how much traction this forum will have among music fans around Pandora service.
Written on November 11, 2008 – 8:32 am Zee, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
Yep, you read it correctly. Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, famous for writing the music to shows such as Evita, Cats, Phantom of the Opera amongst many others, is entering the online publishing arena. His company, Really Useful Group, is revamping their website and turning it into a destination site for online content.
Currently the site reads very much like an online brochure albeit an impressive one, the new site however will allow members to create their own personalised spaces based upon Lloyd-Webber’s musicals. They will also be able to post reviews and blog posts through a new “backstage” area. As well as audio and video content, the site will also feature a marketplace delivered by Viagogo (They have nothing to do with the new site, our mistake!) with recordings and a monthly podcast featuring interviews with Lloyd-Webber and friends.
Douglas Glen, the former head of BBC’s Worldwide digital media technology strategy, is leading the revamp and told paidContent UK they were targeting the “entertainment consumer” particularly from the US and everything was to be focused around Lloyd-Webber’s identity.
Written on October 31, 2008 – 3:52 pm Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France
I first came across Derek Sivers (founder and director of CD Baby) about one year ago. He had done an interview a few years prior on Venture Voice which I thought it was one of the most interesting among that collection (another that stands out in my mind was with Jason Fried) but they are all excellent.
Derek Sivers is now back in the news and was again interviewed on Venture Voice to talk about the recent sale of CD Baby for more than 20 Million USD. By the time of sale CD Baby had grown to 85 staff and a turnover of about 100 Million USD. Derek chimes in on the discussion that ensued on HN “Although of 85 people, 50 of which were in the warehouse $8/hr pick-pack-ship, 28 were customer service answering emails, and only 6 jobs were “other”, such as bizdev, tech, or management.”
“No Stress!”
I asked Derek a few questions for this article which I hoped might reveal some clues to his success. One of those being, “How did you deal with the stress of running and building such a company”, his answer was very surprising: “No stress, either. I always make sure situations are to my liking, and make me happy. If they’re not, I change them. That way, work is just play, not work”.
In a day and age when stress seems to be rampant, not only does Derek build a company from scratch without VC capital nor any large investments, but he does it without breaking sweat! Nearly every entrepreneur I have come across has grappled with the problem of stress, even the mighty Mark Cuban who doesn’t seem to have found his businesses nearly as painful, talks about his worst moments in the TC50 Calacanis interview.
On the opposite of side of the fence, we have the maverick Michael Robertson who has had a long string of successes followed by stress. He formally started MP3.com and lost it to legal assaults in the first bubble and now is again in the midst of yet another legal wrangle with EMI who have been at him and his latest business MP3Tunes like a dog with a bone, currently demanding everything from his home to the toilet paper he uses in the mornings!
So what is Derek’s secret to NO STRESS. Derek says he reads a lot then “wisdom sinks in and just becomes unconscious decisions”. He has written an ebook packed with advice for fellow musicians on how to be successful, which should no doubt be mandatory reading for entrepreneurs, as it contains many useful insights which are not limited to musicians.
So what is the master of ‘no stress’ going to do next? To lower the stress of artists that’s what! He’s next venture is aptly called MuckWork and he is pitching to do the dirty work for musicians so they can concentrate on their art. As Paul Graham says: “Where there’s muck, there’s brass!”
Is the secret to no stress, not to tackle anything that is groundbreaking, rather to muck about doing the donkey work that others cannot stand, in doing so cleaning up?
Written on October 31, 2008 – 1:48 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’m not a morning person. The moment my iPhone’s terrible “alarm” rings, I curse the day. There’s only one reason why I make it to the office, or anywhere besides my bed. Music.
It fuels my life. And those of my friends. We exchange music every day - our drop boxes are working overtime. The Hypemachine, a secret new music service, and some specific friends on Twitter supply us with inspiration for new songs and albums. There’s only one downside.., my iTunes collection is a mess.
In comes TuneUp
Actually, my iTunes collection was a mess. Ever since I’ve discovered TuneUp, I can browse my collection Cover Flow style without being agitated by the lack of covers.
TuneUp is a management tool that let’s you clean dirty tracks (like the ones that have the artists’s name in the song title), find missing cover art, receive upcoming concert alerts, and enjoy music videos.
The PC version is available in French, Spanish, Italian, German, and English, so most of your European folks can use the service in your native language. People from Holland, Scandinavia, and Eastern European countries must remain patient for a while.
Still in beta, we have 50 invites
TuneUp for Mac is still in private beta, meaning it made my Mac crash once and it loads very slowly. But still, my collection looks way better now. So grab yourself one of those Next Web invites to try it our yourself. Send an email to thenextweb@tuneupmedia.com, the first 50 will be invited to the TuneUp Mac Beta.
The normal program is free for 500 songs/50 album art cleans, and $19.95 for unlimited (Gold version).
Written on October 18, 2008 – 1:07 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Hobnox is a Berlin-based start-up that brings creative minds from all over the world together in their online community. With a strong focus on music and video, users can create, share, and collaborate their funky stuff.
What particularly impressed me when I first reviewed Hobnox in May, was the state-of-the-art Audiotool. The developers have created a browser-based Flash version of a mix table, so that Hobnox members can create their own beats and melody lines within the site. For me it was all quite overwhelming, as I’m anything but a digital music maker.
That my influence my ability to properly review the tools as well, since some commenters basically said that online flash based toys are not useful in the ultimate business of making music. I can imagine what they meant to say, so I’m really interested to hear their opinion about Hobnox’s updates. David Noël, head of Hobnox marketing, has sent me the following list:
Live recording and saving functionality
Addition of a ‚Mac-Dock’-like shelf with all the devices
We added new devices (Splitter, Merger, Compressor, Phaser, Slope and Gate)
We’ve improved the performance by getting rid of the Java bypass which means that you’ll need to upgrade to Flash 10 to use the tool
Starting the Audiotool, you can choose out of three default set-ups or start a blank set-up
The latter even is exciting for a uninitiate like me, as I can just press “electro” and listen in awe. Anyhow, if you’re a professional, please let me know what you think about the Hobnox Audiotool.
Written on December 18, 2008 – 12:01 pm
Radley and Mile also praise Mixwit users with the fantastic artwork they’ve delivered. They’re trying to figure out some way to archive the artwork and playlists, “if for nothing at least historic value”. The Mixwit code might be donated to the OpenTape project.
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