Jeff Price, writing for TuneCore, has a different take on Apple’s iCloud. He thinks it will both transform the industry and shift consumer listening from downloaded files to streams. That would mean I’d have to substantially revise my knee-jerk take following Apple’s announcement – and his line of thinking would raise questions about whether dividing up a $25-a-year fee will leave much of a revenue stream for artists.

Updated: Apple responded to NPR’s request for clarification. iCloud is not a streaming service. That invalidates a lot of the arguments on the TuneCore blog. My analysis earlier was based on the assumption that Apple was making iCloud music and iTunes match download-only.)

iCloud: A Music Industry Game-Changing Product

You can read Apple’s description of the product on their site. Correction: while TuneCore claims iCloud’s music functionality is streaming, Apple has only confirmed file sync capability – you play music from local storage. Indeed, Apple touts the ability to download and to listen to music matched on iTunes Match as 256k AAC files.
http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/

There are several observations in his piece worth highlighting:

• Apple’s library sync, once you pay the fee, is automatic, says Price. (This much is correct.)
• It’s a legal coup for Apple. Price notes that the same concept on MP3.com, back in 2000, earned RIAA lawsuits that shuttered the service in 2008. (This is also likely accurate, though we don’t know yet the terms of Apple’s negotiations. Removing streaming would simplify licensing greatly, but since iTunes Match can associate content that isn’t purchased with a file download, it’s safe to assume some sort of revenue sharing for that media. If that’s the case, it’s a huge step forward.)
• Re-downloading uploaded files is possible only with Apple — and yes, that includes files you pirated. Price believes that this “provides the feeling of owning what you are streaming.” But that could be bad news for artists who depend on the “ownership” feeling coming from buying from stores like Bandcamp. Confirmed: Price is at least partially mistaken. Amazon allows re-downloading files, though it’s worth noting those are files you’ve purchased from the Amazon MP3 store — Apple’s functionality is indeed different. What’s entirely incorrect, based on the service in its present state, is the assumption that you stream files. While that’s true of Google and Amazon stores – and while those services might assist the kind of streaming preferences Price describes – Apple isn’t streaming, or at least isn’t doing so yet.
• Price suggests that licensing fees could be a “pot of gold at the end of the digital music rainbow,” by creating revenue streams for plays of music, regardless of source. (That’s an interesting theory, but without specifics of how revenue sharing takes place, it’s unclear how big that pot is.)

Why would this transform the landscape? Two things: one being increased lock-in to Apple’s products, Price argues. While there’s no new DRM, the automatic download as AAC renders files incompatible with some non-Apple players. (I disagree here – AAC compatibility could simply become more widespread, and even now, it’s not limited to Apple.) I think sheer iCloud compatibility could increase Apple dependency, however – and to the iTunes store, too, which is essential to TuneCore’s business as a gatekeeper for unsigned artists.

The other half of the argument is more interesting an interesting description of a hypothetical service that is not iCloud in the state described by Apple:

Just as the original Napster trained people to download music and listen to it on their computers, Apple, due to its vast hardware proliferation (iPhones in particular) is in a position to shift consumer behavior yet again–this time from downloading music to listening to it via streams. And with this consumer shift, the music industry will reset itself once again until the next revolution…

The bottom line here is whether consumers buy in and adjust their listening habits. If they do, Price could be right – we could see a shift from downloads to streams, an income shift from purchases to royalties, and even greater dominance of Apple over how people consume music. Notably, because of the lack of licensing deals, Apple might be without competition. My big fear: those shifts could ultimately mean that only artists with lots of plays get revenues, which again would tilt the scales to big artists. The charts would simply be on your iTunes players, not on the radio. We’ll have to wait and see; stay tuned as I hear from more people close to the iCloud deals and product.

Updated – one last thought for the day. If you’re wondering how you can split up a $25-a-year fee and provide streaming, a simple answer may be, you can’t. It’s possible TuneCore is simply dead wrong, because it doesn’t seem that the math for licensing fees would add up. Apple, for their part, never mentions streaming.

But I am at least partly comforted in my fears about streaming becoming the norm at this absurdly-low price by the evidence that this isn’t a streaming service to begin with. Ahem.

Again, confirmed: Price is making an argument that appears to be divorced from the present facts, though it certainly remains possible a future version of the service will stream. (Given the service isn’t due out until the fall, it’s even possible the final version will ship with that functionality.) In his defense, the question of whether Apple’s service provided streaming seemed to confuse everyone. While it was the single most-anticipated portion of the WWDC keynote, Apple left demos and description to the end of a marathon set of demos of Mac OS and iOS features, and then showed a service that wasn’t complete. That has surprised some onlookers (see our comments), given that many people expect Apple to keep functionality under wraps until it’s fully baked. (Contrast: Google, who regularly release experimental and “beta” products.) Since Apple never specifically debunked rumors their service streamed, some people conflated rumors (and features of rival services) with what Apple showed. While TuneCore hasn’t posted an update to their blog, we’re blessed with the ability to post updates online. For now, the iCloud doesn’t stream. Price’s arguments remain a perspective worth considering because a future iteration might stream, and rival services make it a cornerstone feature.

We’ll be watching Apple’s developer conference closely to try to understand the implications of a likely announcement of an Apple cloud music service for artists. While Google and Amazon are already testing those waters, Apple’s dominance of the software player (iTunes) and mobile players (iPod, iPhone) give it arguably greater weight.

We should know more after the official announcement, but early reports suggest independent labels (to say nothing of unsigned artists) may have reason for concern. I think it’ll make more sense to analyze this once some of the secrecy is lifted, but one group has already made a statement even before that announcement, indicating the level of scrutiny today’s keynote is likely to gather. The “fifth major,” the largest representative of independent labels, is already concerned about even the possibility of a cloud that would favor major labels:

In response to media speculation that independent labels are being offered a discriminatory licensing deal for the new iCloud service, Charles Caldas, CEO independents’ rights agency Merlin says:
“As the most experienced player in the digital music space, Apple should have the deepest understanding of the significant value that independents bring to their business. In light of this I would be very surprised and extremely disappointed if Apple were not going to ensure that independent rights holders are properly and fairly remunerated on the iCloud service.”
Merlin is unable to comment on any aspect of the negotiations, which given Apple’s position running the world’s longest-standing digital music service, with existing deals with the vast majority of the world’s right holders, are a matter between Apple and its licensees.

Merlin is a big player in this landscape, not just someone looking for attention on an Apple launch day. As they describe themselves: “Merlin, the virtual fifth major, represents the world’s most important set of independent music rights. Merlin seeks to ensure its members have effective access to new and emerging revenue streams and that their rights are appropriately valued and protected.”
http://merlinnetwork.org/

I believe interested artists and music lovers may want to pay attention to a number of issues with cloud services from Apple and others:

• Major/minor cadence. Will majors get better deals than minors, in licensing, exposure, compatibility, or other areas? The cloud could level the playing field in some of the ways digital music has generally, but we have yet to see if it’s a step forward, backwards, or sideways.
• Licensing. How will a cloud service track plays? Who will it play for those plays?
• Fidelity. With mobile networks under heavy bandwidth concerns, what will the quality of streams be? How easy will it be to sync a higher-quality file to a device, and what will the quality and format of that device be?
• Ease of sync. Will there be new layers of DRM associated with the synced file?
• Distribution. Will cloud services work with files you’ve purchased direct from artists (on services like Topspin and Bandcamp)? From independent stores (Beatport, Bleep, and the like)? From CDs (or vinyl) you’ve ripped? Or will they tend to favor the store from which you purchased those files (iTunes, Amazon)? (Google, for instance, syncs your entire iTunes library regardless.)
• Interoperability. To put this bluntly, “does this mean I have to buy stuff from Apple just to make it work in the cloud”? See also proprietary chipsets in playback devices: Apple’s AirPlay for local wireless even requires a chip to authenticate the validity of the stream, which could be seen as a kind of wireless DRM.
• The open Web. Looking at interoperability on a Web front, will we see open APIs for working with these services? I was contacted by a number of people who were disappointed when Google didn’t talk about adding an API to their cloud service – particularly since they unveiled it, as Apple is likely to do today, at a developer conference.

So there’s my checklist; if you have ideas of your own, feel free to add them in comments. Why be concerned about these issues? Ironically, many existing Web services have begun to address these questions, though sometimes with questionable legality.

Updated – I compared these questions against what we got. Apple deserves credit for making the design of the service efficient; the situation just remains complicated by multiple vendors and platforms, and a lack of Web interoperability in all of these services (compared to the level of innovation from Web-based startups).

How’d Apple’s Cloud Do? Four Questions Answered.

The sum total of the flexibility, fairness, and openness of these services could also have a significant impact on independent artists and labels, and the ability to support a diverse range of music. That’s not to say that, absent these factors, the effect will immediately be negative – only that they’re areas of interest.

TuneCore is promising snap reaction immediately after the keynote, which might provide a clue into how unsigned artists would get on the service; I hope to follow up with Merlin, as well.

More reading in advance of Apple’s keynote:
Apple’s iCloud Will Scan, But How Much Will It Match? [Digital Audio Insider]
Storms Ahead for “Cloud” Music? [Future of Music Coalition, speaking largely about concerns and disappointments with Amazon and Google]
Digital Music News has been dutifully covering Apple behind-the-scenes as they reportedly sign a number of major labels – and raising red flags that the service may favor those labels. Unfortunately, that site is down as I write this.

DMN is back up. Read, for instance:
Uh-Oh: iCloud Has All the Markings of Another Indie Shaft…

Merlin is part of the negotiations and are unhappy about how they’re being treated. But note that the issues I raise above go beyond just the licensing questions, to the issue of how music is distributed and consumed in generally. And that may prove to be bad news for “artists who aren’t Lady Gaga,” too.

If your music and sound collections seem like outwardly-expanding universes, two new tools promise to bring order by representing media as virtual planets and stars. One works on albums and tracks on the iPad; the other uses computer-aided analysis of loops and samples (not just music) on Windows. One will make your eyeballs pop; one might help you manage gigs of samples for a game design project.

Built in the open-source framework Cinder by an all-star team of media artist-designers (Ben Cerveny, Tom Carden, Jesper Sparre Andersen and Robert Hodgin), Planetary should satisfy space nuts and eye candy lovers. The metaphor is pretty direct: artists are stars, albums are planets around the artists, tracks are moons around the planets, and you can filter “constellations” by letter. That means the actual structure is heavily hierarchical, actually, in the tradition of iTunes (and, before it, its predecessor SoundJam). I’m not sure what happens with, say, compilations. But let’s face it: the real draw is that it’s incredibly beautiful to look at. I’d be just as entertained looking at a visualization of my system folder if it looked this pretty.

For now, Planetary is some fascinating eye candy with at least basic playback capabilities, iPad-only. That brings some good news – Airplay wireless works, and since it makes use of standard media code, even features like Last.fm scrobbles function. It also brings some bad — while Apple added support for libraries to third-party apps, Home Sharing isn’t included, so you’re limited to what’s on your iPad. Playlists aren’t supported, either. But hook this up to a projector or large screen TV with some of your favorite music, and I don’t think you’ll be complaining. And as a free tool, it’s incredible.

Planetary is available now; free for the iPad. As seen on creativeapplications.
http://planetary.bloom.io/
iTunes link

Less pretty, but with greater facilities on the utility side, is the Windows-only Soundtorch. (Thanks to Kristian Gohlke for the tip!) Visually, it offers a similar metaphor: media assets live on a continuous plane. Functionally, though, it’s more algorithmic than hierarchic, using something called the Computer Aided Sound Exploration engine (C.A.S.E.). The set of algorithms, which the creators say were based on evaluation of human listening, performs a sophisticated set of extractions of some 600 features from each sound file.

Rather than limit itself to albums and tracks, C.A.S.E. is tuned for audio files and loops. It’s fast enough that it can plow quickly through gigs of material. So, if you’re on Windows and have amassed an enormous collection of loops, samples, field recordings, sound effects, and the like, Soundtorch will use C.A.S.E. to first map all those relationship, then visualize them. You can use the mouse to produce new collections of assets, map relationships visually, export those relationship to XML, copy sounds to the clipboard, export to WAV, or open them in Windows Explorer. That is, all that eye candy is a genuine interface, not a barrier between you and what you might do (as so often happens with these sorts of experimental interfaces).

In fact, you might argue that, despite outward appearances, Soundtorch is entirely different from Planetary, but they share one common conceptual assumption. Related media “orbit” or attract to common materials. The difference is that Soundtorch is relational. In Soundtorch, if you “magnetize” a file, it – and any similar files – become attracted to attractors called “magnets.”

As is appropriate searching for media, the “torchlight” metaphor shines a light through files. Everything under the light plays back simultaneously, so you don’t have to audition sounds one at a time. (That sounds slightly terrifying to me, but I have to spend more time with it in an actual library.)

The creators describe the magic thusly:

Have you ever listened to a sound and felt that there was a similar one somewhere on your hard disk? And the sound you can’t find would just work so much better right now? Well, Soundtorch also remembers all sounds that you ever listened to. Just select any sound on Soundtorch, and let the system suggest the most similar ones from your whole collection.

In other words, SoundTorch is as much about what you can’t see as what you can – the intelligence to determine similarity behind the scenes. Check out the tech talk in the video above for more information on how “aurally and visually-enhanced audio search” could also apply this technology. More research at:
http://www.accessive-tools.com/

Soundtorch 2.0 entered a free public beta last week. It was developed in Microsoft’s C#-based XNA framework.

Grab the download:
http://soundtorch.com

Finally, if you want to hear the “Optimist” track by Zoe Keating without that voiceover and just enjoy Planetary’s gorgeous visuals, here you go:

From innovation in the visual interface to the intelligence underneath that changes how the computer interprets relationships between files, finally, there’s hope. Music and sound might not forever be trapped in views borrowed from spreadsheets, tables modeled on the needs of accountants 30 years ago.

If it’s an iconic piece of hardware or software, there’s at least a decent chance you could be seeing it in virtual iPad form soon.

Tascam’s Portastudio, released today, is a particularly striking example. The famed, budget cassette multitrack recorder, the box on which countless demos and quick songwriter creations was forged, appears on Apple’s tablet. There’s even a fake cassette tape, which I have to say is a little bit unnerving.

This is all nostalgia, right? Well, no, actually: those big, simplified plastic controls and memorable layout work because they’re so easy to use. The problem with a lot of software design of the past couple of decades is that it’s somewhat inhumane. Given endless space and often-increasing, ever-cheaper system resources, music software has been, charitably, less-than-friendly. Resembling a 70s jumbo jet cockpit, UI controls multiply and shrink to the point that they challenge all but an 18-year-old pair of eyes. Add in clunky default OS widgets, collapsible tabs and dockable windows that add still more complexity, and you wind up with a trainwreck. What these hardware emulations prove is that you could learn something from hardware – even when the need for blank space, big knobs and faders and buttons, limited controls, and standard hardware inputs and readouts is gone.

So, back to the original product, what does $10 get your iPad? If you know how a Portastudio works, you probably already know most of the answer, but here’s a quick rundown:

• Cassette tape-style transport. (Linear transport, I might add. Seriously. You have to rewind and fast forward to get around.)
• Routing to four inputs.
• Mixdown to stereo (via a dialog box, so that’s the point where you break the illusion).
• Simple EQ.
• File sharing, via iTunes or Soundcloud. (This last item is what makes this a useful tool and not just a novelty.)
• Support for “a few” class-compliant audio interfaces, though your mileage may vary.

The development work was done by a well-loved developer, Chris Randall / Audio Damage. (Chris I think does learn hardware’s design lessons in his UIs.) See his blog post:
Hey, Look What I Made…

The bad news: no bounce, which seems a major oversight. Ironically, Tascam also has to admit that they don’t have any class-compliant audio interfaces. (Doh!) In case you’re wondering, they also say flat out in the FAQ, don’t expect versions for other operating systems soon — too bad, as this would seem fairly ideal in a reduced form on iPhone and iPod touch.

But the radical simplicity of this app could be its appeal. I may actually fire this up to use as a recording sketchpad, especially with hardware synths, Game Boys, and so on.

http://tascam.com/product/portastudio/

And forget the app itself: this ought to be a perfect time to look back and remember what made the original PortaStudio great – and wonder why so often those same design principles are lost.

Remember the music industry? We used to talk about radio play and record deals. Now, we’re talking developers, APIs, and analytics. Of course, the test, now as then, is whether there’s actually substance for music listeners and artists. On Friday, we looked at Apple’s Ping and how, via TuneCore, artists who aren’t Lady Gaga can get their own pages. We also saw some vigorous discussion of TuneCore, which helps you get your music into “big bucket” sites like Amazon and iTunes, and SoundCloud, who together offer integrated sharing and distribution.

The Echo Nest is an unusual animal in this landscape, an “intelligent platform” for other tools built on machine listening. Via algorithms that analyze music and try to absorb human knowledge about music, Echo Nest powers apps that do everything from matching beats to workouts to tracking data for artists and labels. They even apply natural language algorithms to try to absorb text about music, meaning a robot may be … listening to … everything I say. Okay, moving on… (This leads to some interesting sci fi scenarios… No! Robot! Obey your master! You will NOT harm Katy Perry!) Check out how it works.

The latest news from Echo Nest: they’re partnering with online store 7Digital to connect all that data with some actual music sales opportunities. The result: a DIY online music store platform. Developers can create their own applications and music sales websites, drawing on all of the intelligent data on music from Echo Nest – from machine-analyzed news feeds to musical attributes of individual tracks – with the 7Digital store. 7Digital is now up to 10 million songs, with art, previews, and sales. And whereas a lot of deals (like Ping) are closed, in this case the “product” is actually a toolkit that relies on developers to do interesting things. Whether or not this particular idea gets traction, that’s an interesting shift in models.

If you’re skeptical about those machine algorithms, you’ll be gratified to know even Echo Nest’s own Brian Whitman conceded around the Ping launch that he has “a strong aversion to music recommenders and music similarity services.” And Whitman knows his stuff – he’s an MIT Media Lab PhD and co-founder of the company. But there’s no saying this has to be limited to recommendations – as those jogging apps that analyze tempo illustrate.

I spoke to Echo Nest to find out more about the new offering, and to see what they think about other trends, like Apple’s much-hyped – then much-criticized – Ping.

Jim Lucchese of Echo Nest and developer Paul Lamere respond.

CDM: How do the two APIs fit together? That is, given that The Echo Nest and 7digital each have their own open APIs to begin with, what’s unique here about the joint offering?

Paul: We’ve incorporated 7Digital Artist and song IDs into our Rosetta stone system. [Ed. As the name implies, that's a mechanism for translating all the different ID numbers used by music databases for tracking songs, since there's no universal numbering system for music.]

This means that developers can use 7Digital Artist and Song IDs with our APIs, and can instruct our APIs to return 7Digital IDs.

In addition, all Echo Nest results can be limited to the 7Digital ID space. This is useful for tasks such as search and artist similarity. For instance, we can limit the results of an artist similarity query to include just artists that are in the 7Digital catalog.

We have also applied the Echo Nest analyzer to each of the 10 million or so 7Digital tracks. This means that we have a very detailed understanding of what every song in the 7Digital catalog sounds like. We know the tempo, mode, key, time signature. We have a detailed understanding of the loudness profile of the song and of the rhythm structure of the song, we know where all the bars, beats and tatums are. We have a detailed understanding of the harmonic and timbral content of each of the songs. With the Echo Nest / 7Digital partnership, developers can get access to this detailed analysis for any of the 7Digital tracks and use this analysis for all sorts of apps.

The Analysis data allows developers to create interesting playlists using the new Echo Nest Playlist API based on the 7Digital catalog. For instance, a developer could create a playlist of songs by artists similar to Lady Gaga with a tempo between 120 and 135 BPMs. You can read more about the playlisting API on my blog [Music Machinery]:

Is that a million songs in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?
Echo Nest Playlist API Methods

Is this something that might become relevant to other stores, too — provided, of course, they were as open as 7digital is with their data?

Jim: We expect so, though we’ve found that 7Digital is definitely the most forward-thinking around open API access and developer offerings.

You mentioned that monetization for developers could be a big draw. How does that work — is it simply a 7digital affiliate program, essentially?

Jim: Yes. It’s like an uber affiliate network of developers. Sell tracks through your app and get a cut of each sale.

What sorts of applications do you imagine this might encourage?

Paul: I see a wide range of possibilities here:

• Music discovery apps – given the deep data that Echo Nest has about music coupled with the content that 7Digital can provide will make it much easier for developers to create new music discovery and exploration apps – think of a next generation of Ishkur’s guide to electronic music
  [4], or musicovery [mood-based radio search]
• Music listening apps – Applications that help people listen to music – for instance I can imagine a pandora-style app that gives the user more control over the listening experience – ‘more music like this but with more energy’ or ‘give me music by hair metal bands from the 70s that are from the UK’
• Music Interaction apps – since developers have access to a detailed analysis of each track, it would be possible for developers to create interesting music visualizers that respond to the music
• Apps that we can’t even think of – never underestimate the creativity of a developer – someone will create something that we can’t think of around music that we can’t even imagine now, but will become a big part of our music experience.

Artists are becoming increasingly excited about engaging these platforms themselves, particularly as many of them get more savvy about development and use independent distribution to get their work out there. Is there a place for music makers to do something with this kind of technology?

Paul: That’s a big question – some areas where platforms like 7Digital/Echo Nest platform will be relevant to artists are:

• Interactive media – the recent Arcade Fire interactive video ‘The Wilderness Downtown‘ is an excellent example of the type of interactive app that artists will be able to create on top of platforms like 7Digital/Echo Nest/
• Analytics about fans – artists are spending more time figuring out how to market their music. APIs around data about who is listening to, going to shows, or writing about an artist will be very useful for artists

What about the end user (that is, the listener) – what will this allow a music lover to do that they couldn’t before?

Paul: As the music app space developers, we will see better applications for music discovery and exploration. A music lover will be able to find more interesting music that they will like.

Music listening apps can be greatly improved with access to all of the contextual information about the artist and the song, along with recommendations for other artists And you can see context-dependent playlisting – a user could create a ‘jogging’ playlist that has songs at just 135 BPM, or a high school reunion playlist of pop songs from 1985.

One of the things that struck me about Apple’s Ping announcement was that – while we’re waiting on information about any potential API – the general sense was of something pretty walled-off, specific to just their store, in the client software, and not connected to the Web and across platforms. Do you see a contrast in philosophy here?

Also, the initial reaction of the press surprised me; the first response was that Apple’s installed user base would just wipe everyone else out. I disagree, but how do you see open offerings like this fitting into (or providing alternatives to, or both) that Apple ecosystem?

Paul: There’s no question that Apple’s installed base makes their foray into social music a significant event. Millions of people who would never think of visiting a social music site like Last.fm will now become part of a social music network. That will be good. Music is very social, and one of the best ways to discovery new music is through one’s friends. However, social music systems can have some problems: Feedback loops, decreasing diversity in listening, susceptibility to hacking, schilling and spamming, and the cold start problem (where new artists have no way to break into the listening rotation) are all issues that plague social recommender systems.

Systems that can draw on multiple sources of data – social data, plus other data like curated reviews, blog posts and the content of the music itself can provide a way to avoid the problems inherent in social-only systems. I think that music discovery applications that are built on broad sets of data (like we are building here at the Echo Nest) will ultimately do a better job in helping people finding new music.

The most interesting possibility I see with the opening up of all the different music-oriented APIs is the emergence of a thriving music application developer community – (like we are starting to see coming out of the Music Hack Days). This developer community is ultra creative and they love music. They love to listen to it, and they love to create it. I am convinced that these developers are going to have as much of an impact on the future of music as the iPod did. These developers will be creating the applications that will help all of us to create, to discover, to interact with and to listen to music.

Whether or not the ability to use TuneCore as a way to get an iTunes Ping page piqued your interest, if you’re generally interested in selling your music online, here’s some more interesting news. SoundCloud has teamed up with TuneCore to allow you to sell singles and albums in a variety of online stores, including Nokia phones, Amazon MP3, Zune, Emusic, and of course iTunes.

TuneCore’s approach is pretty simple: accounts are free, and you play a flat fee ($9.99 per single, $49.99 per album) to distribute music online in all the stores. You keep all of the royalties; once TuneCore gets their flat fee, they’re out of the picture fee-wise.

Another interesting angle to me of all of this is what it may mean for Creative Commons-licensed music. There’s nothing stopping you from self-releasing an entire album under a permissive CC license, sharing it with communities of samplers and remixers on Creative Commons, but also generating revenue by selling it online.

The SoundCloud angle here isn’t complicated; it’s just some nice integration of the two accounts to save you some time. Given the rabid following SoundCloud has started to generate, though, that’s significant. “Fatigue” is really the largest problem facing social music, as a huge array of competitors try to get the attention of artists – most of them, quite frankly, fairly useless. TuneCore is very much in the non-useless category from where I sit, and getting them and SoundCloud in front of artists could be really valuable (indeed, maybe far more valuable than iTunes Ping).

Here’s the full explanation from the SoundCloud blog:
SoundCloud + TuneCore: Getting your music sold just got easier

If you’re curious who’s using TuneCore, this compilation could give you some idea. In a promotion, Yamaha (yes, the music gear and instrument makers) have worked with Amazon MP3 and TuneCore to put out a free album of TuneCore artists:
26 Free Songs. 26 TuneCore Artists.

Updated – I should note, I do hope this is the first step. The killer feature here would be “buy” links right on SoundCloud, but that doesn’t appear to be implemented yet. Edit: David from SoundCloud observes in comments that you can manually insert buy links, which gives you the freedom to choose whatever store you like. Whether automating that makes sense is another question, but you definitely have options.

And as noted by Steve of sighup in comments, part of the reason you don’t hear more about TuneCore from folks in this community is because, while it covers big-bucket distributors well, it doesn’t cover the kind of niches a lot of readers here want covered. And, indeed, focused retailers – whether direct sales or places like Beatport, Other, 7Digital, and Bleep – often generate more sales within a lot of genres, based on conversations I’ve had with artists. I’ll talk to TuneCore about what their plans may be there. On the other hand, what it illustrates is that there isn’t any one solution that works for everyone – cool as TuneCore is, part of what makes those smaller stores work is the relationships they build directly with labels and artists. And they may not be open to working with a TuneCore. The landscape is complex, but if you’re willing to invest some time, that can allow you to best fit something to your audience. More discussion in comments…

Anyway, enough shilling for TuneCore – let’s hear what you think. Are you currently using TuneCore, or an alternative outlet? What’s your experience been? Or are you leaving this to your label?

What’s a social network for music discovery if there aren’t any artists? As covered previously, Apple’s Ping on launch was a pretty big flop. With no custom artist pages, artists felt left out of the party – and would-be users found themselves scratching their heads as iTunes mindlessly recommended U2 and Lady Gaga to everyone.

At the very least, as expected, we should start to see artists appear on Ping – and now there’s a way for you to be one of those artists, if you desire.

Ping’s reliance on the iTunes client and exclusively music purchased from the iTunes store remains worrisome, but if you’re an artist whose music is on iTunes and want to get in front of some extra eyeballs, we’ve got good news. TuneCore is a service designed to help artists distribute their music by managing the complexities of the various digital storefronts out there. That makes them a natural choice for helping get artists onto Ping – even if your music is in other places, too (like eMusic, Amazon, and Amie Street).

TuneCore was apparently on the phone with Apple the day Ping launched. And they now have Artist Ping accounts live. Here’s the full story, with some additional thoughts from TuneCore for CDM.

TuneCore posted an update at the beginning of this week announcing that they had set up Ping artist pages for their TuneCore artists:
Artist Ping Accounts [TuneCore blog]

Excerpt:

First an artist, or their representative, is verified as the authorized person to control the Artist Ping account (i.e. no, you cannot pretend to be Iggy Pop). This is done via TuneCore coordinating with TuneCore Artists and then relaying information to Apple.

Once this info is received by Apple, Apple emails out a unique url link specific to the artist, this link is then clicked on, when its clicked on the iTunes software opens in your browser and says “Ping Aritst Account” – it will ask you to log in with your iTunes user name/password or you can create a new iTunes account just for your Ping Artist account.

Whatever account you use to log in will be part of your Ping Artist Account. One of the things the Ping Artist and People account will do is display what you bought via that account on your Ping page.

So, if you are Motorhead and you buy the Strawberry shortcake “Rockaberry Roll” album (and yes, that is the name of a real album, I just looked it up) – this will appear on your Ping Artist Page.

Once in your Ping account you will be able to upload assets, etc. There may be a slight delay before they appear as Apple will check to assure the movies/images are not pornographic.

So, the bad news here to me is that there’s not really a whole lot of interaction on the page – for now, at least, a lot of this is just you buying music from iTunes. But if you’re willing to put in the time, and you have a lot of fans or listeners on iTunes, at least you now have a pretty easy avenue to get there. (Many readers’ response to Ping was, in part, social network fatigue, so I think it’s really in Apple’s court to provide more compelling reasons for artists to bother. Then again, you know your iTunes sales, and that may be the deciding factor.)

For their part, TuneCore defends the added work for the verification process:

There are literally millions of bands on iTunes. Apple has to come up with a way to authenticate that the entity that lays claim to the Radiohead etc Ping Artist page is actually authorized to do so.

To control this, there has to be a manual process (at least at inception) where Apple literally reaches out to an artist via the entity that provided iTunes the music so they can assure the control for that Artist’s Ping page is actually the person/entity that has the right to do so.

This would be consistent with the high quality experience that Apple provides. It’s an Apple process that many others do not do.

That makes some sense – see also the verified accounts on Twitter. On the other hand, to me the real challenge on Ping isn’t only opening up artist accounts, but providing a reason for artists to go there, and that remains to be seen.

Jeff Prince from TuneCore provided some additional information on how this works, including some best-guess attempts outside TuneCore.

CDM: Can you tell me – obviously there are advantages to going through TuneCore, but how would an artist work directly with Apple if they don’t work with TuneCore?

Jeff: Whatever entity the artist used to get their music into iTunes would be the default go to – there are exceptions (i.e. a huge multi-national act signed to a major may have its own pre-existing relationship with Apple where the management company has previously been verified).

As for TuneCore’s part, can any TuneCore artist go through your process — assuming their music is on iTunes?

Yes.

Any indication yet whether this will start to correct the current follower suggestions from Apple (i.e., the fact that everyone is supposed to be a Lady Gaga fan)?

My guess is that the algorithm’s need information/data to get more accurate. As more people sign up and use Ping, there is more data which allows the suggestions to get more accurate/interesting. But to me the real value is in the curated suggestions by People/Artists, not so much the automated recommendations.

Thanks, Chris. Well, so, folks, if you do hop on there and like what you see, feel free to share your experiences and Ping artist pages. And if you’re still unimpressed, well, of course, we’ll continue to look at other options for social music online, of which Ping is just one.

Before diving into the litany of gripes from artists regarding Apple’s Ping social service, it’s worth saying: some critics say they expected better. Many artists want a smarter, more social iTunes. That’s the only reason anyone is spending time talking about the service’s perceived flaws.

Cellist and laptop musician Zoë Keating, an independent artist with collaborations from Imogen Heap to DJ Shadow, reminded me of that via Twitter. Even amidst her own criticisms, she was quick to add:

“But it’s Apple, so good or bad we all want to be invited to the party!”

That sums up not only the most disappointing aspects of Ping, but also why anyone would care in the first place. This isn’t the age of the hit parade, of Ed Sullivan, or even MTV. It’s the era of the Web, and people expect music media to be genuinely participatory. Because of the popularity of iTunes, the introduction of Ping seemed to artists like an opportunity.

Apple has responded to criticism, addressing some user concerns: Forbes’ Philip Elmer-DeWitt, asking “Can Ping be Saved?” last week, updated his article to reflect that issues with spam and forward and back navigation were fixed over the weekend.

The problem is that the fundamental complaints – and those of artists – run deeper. They may or may not be fixable.

Every artist I talked to said the same thing: the problem with Ping is that you’re not invited to the party. Missing from the guest list: independent (or, indeed, almost any) artists, alternative music stores, iTunes listening data, musical genres, and, above all, the World Wide Web.

Artists can’t make their own pages; Apple invites artists. In May, I criticized analysts for describing the iTunes App Store as being curated, a term I felt didn’t fit. This, on the other hand, really is curation: Apple invites a small number of artists at their discretion, which is why Ping makes some curious recommendations. As Keating puts it, “I’ve never bought Lady Gaga or anything remotely similar, but she is the #1 recommendation and I have to see her everytime I log on. That goes for Katy Perry too…I’ve created a world where I can pretend she doesn’t exist, but Apple really wants me to listen to her.”

Here, there’s a perfect contrast between Apple design and Apple curation. Apple design is beloved in the musical community, for the reliability and attention to detail of their hardware, operating system, and software. But Apple as curator, as tastemaker, is another matter. Apple’s (or Jobs’) obsession with artists like John Mayer had been a punchline, not a source of inspiration. For that matter, why should your computer vendor be responsible for musical taste? Would you ask Microsoft what clothes to wear today?

Apple ignores other music sources. When iTunes is criticized for promoting “lock-in” to Apple’s music store, listeners often respond that they rely on other sources for music. Apple may command big statistics when it comes to online sales, but that’s an aggregate of all music styles. For independent artists, everything from free distribution to specialized online stores – and physical CDs, which still rake in billions of dollars in sales annually – can matter more than iTunes.

Here, Apple runs into the tension between iTunes the player and iTunes the store. Ping as an add-on to iTunes the store makes some sense. As a modest feature that tells you what other iTunes shoppers are buying, it’d be unremarkable but also reasonably uncontroversial, at least before Apple hyped it as a new social network.

But iTunes the player demands higher expectations. iTunes is, for many, the virtual jukebox that the tool was when it began its life, before the debut of the integrated music store or even the iPod. I’ve even talked to frequent iTunes users, people who buy a lot of music, who have only purchased tracks from Apple a couple of times. For nearly anyone, iTunes – and by extension, Ping – must catalog all their musical activities, not just stuff they bought from Apple.

Ping is dumber about iTunes data than non-Apple services. Leaving other music stores out of the picture is perhaps unsurprising. But leaving out iTunes itself is more of a puzzler. The beauty of services like Last.fm is their ability to collect data about yourself that you can use. Sharing that data should obviously be a choice, but as Last.fm has demonstrated, the information can be useful to yourself, to fellow listeners, and to artists. It can make sure you see a favorite artist live or discover musicians based on human interactions, without violating privacy. But Ping is an inferior tool for iTunes data, compared to a third-party service like Last.fm. Wiley Wiggins, an Austin-based visual artist, has an extended complaint about Ping.

The killer insight: Ping is “store-centric,” not “user-centric,” says Wiggins. Flaws in genre handling and awkward mechanisms for tracking music and friends “make Ping seem like it is currently designed for users who 1) do not listen to much music, and 2) do not have many friends.”

Ping Feedback Form [Wiley Wiggins Blog]

Apple’s curatorial tendencies don’t make for a social network. Keating argues some of the tension here is philosophical: “Good social networking is chaotic and grassroots,” she says. “Apple is all about top-down control. Not sure this blend of the two works.”

And then there are … the genres. Aside from limiting you, comically, to choosing three genres you like, Apple seems to have lifted its genre categories from a BMG Music Club sign-up form.

It’s all too broken to be social. User interface trainwrecks, hidden “like” buttons, a “lonely” scene devoid of users or artist pages, and a laborious process to add friends made worse by Apple’s row with Facebook mean that getting anything social going is a waste of time. Mario Anima, who has led community efforts for Current and Community Speak Up! sums up the problems in an excellent post. Even with some navigational tweaks, there just isn’t much in the design that works. Even with Apple’s user base, I that could spell doom for the service. If users don’t spend time, the whole thing becomes pretty useless to artists, who are already fatigued by the amount of heavy lifting they have to do to get noticed online as it is. (See more on that below.)

Apple ignores the Web. Wired Magazine infamously ran an inflammatory cover this summer claiming The Web is Dead. That article could have been written about Ping. Ping isn’t visible on a browser; click on a link to a Ping profile, and it looks for an iTunes 10 client. Ping isn’t searchable. Ping is completely disconnected, at least for now, from the rest of the world – no integration with other services, and no public API. (One developer source told me an API is coming, with extensions to be approved by Apple, but I can’t yet confirm that, and that’d still fall short of making this a Web app.)

Ping is more than a walled garden: it’s a room with no windows or doors. It’s a tomb.

If Ping were the future, the Web might be dead – but early indications are that the reality is just the opposite. (Among many retorts to Wired’s “Web is Dead” thesis, The New York Observer is spot-on, and Boing Boing negates the graph they use to open the story, which turns out to say the opposite of what they claim.)

In fact, if anything, the negative reaction to Ping proves that the Web is more important now than ever before. People expect open participation, they expect browser-based interfaces (at least as an option), and they expect open interoperability and data portability in some form.

Browsers and links matter. Even Twitter and Facebook are popular partly as ways of linking back to other sites – I know this personally, because they’re two of this site’s biggest referrers. The Web make these services publicly searchable, connected, and accessible anywhere. They are the Web, and they also make the rest of the Web even more popular. Apple’s iPad and iPhone may focus more on “apps” than the “browser,” for now, but that singular example hasn’t yet been proven elsewhere. Meanwhile, competing browser-based music services have done just fine without an iTunes client.

Oh, yeah – and don’t forget that the lack of an open API also means hackers are shut out. This past weekend, Music Hackday – which I’ll cover separately – again gathered hordes of geeks to create new musical tools. That included things you’ll never see on Ping, like MixCloud on iPad.

Best of all: Brian Whitman of The Echo Nest had a pithy answer to how recommendation services should work. He created The Future of Music, which tells you which music you shouldn’t listen to. And that brings us to the last point:

In the end, maybe recommendation services aren’t everything. Whitman has a strong argument as he describes his tool:

I have a strong aversion to music recommenders and music similarity services. I especially deal with a lot of cognitive dissonance as the company I co-founded makes a lot of $$$$$ (that is 5 dollar signs) selling ordered lists of artists to multinational music streaming conglomerates.
Nonetheless, we recently completed our first live recommender system (to be announced near the Boston Music Hack day in October) and to perhaps get myself more comfortable with a future in which children will no longer ask their cooler older dope-smoking brothers what to listen to in lieu of some HTML table in a UL, I decided to really sign up wholesale to this movement. If we rely on these computer programs to learn about music, well we might as well rely on them to fix the sins of our past and delete the crap we are obviously not meant to listen to anymore.

“Future of Music (2010)” is a Mac OS X app that scans your iTunes library and computes the music you are not supposed to listen to anymore based on your preferences. It then helpfully deletes it from iTunes and your hard drive. Skips the recycle bin.

I don’t think Future of Music will have one million users any time soon. But it does raise the most important point: the actual music has to come first.

Whether or not the general public is fatigued of social networks promising to revolutionize music, you can bet musicians are. Oliver Chesler is the blogger behind “wire to the ear” and, as The Horrorist,” an electronic musician who has topped German charts. He sums it up best:

As a musician the word to describe how I feel about the new Apple Ping social network is: exhausted. Musicians have become the tech industries guinea pigs. Why not? We try anything and work cheap right? After creating and curating profiles on MySpace, Last.fm, Imeem, Facebook and then Facebook Fan Pages and on and on now it’s time for Ping.

For his part, Chesler says he’ll make his own Ping page and promote it, even as “the Lady Gaga’s get all the love.”

Remember why we were all excited about the Internet for music in the first place? It’s a chaotic, level playing field. That can be scary, but given the miraculous, mind-boggling diversity of musical output and taste on planet Earth, it’s perfectly natural. And any business model around music must be built around that reality.

Don’t believe me? Ping may have one million members, but the fastest-growing musical sensation right now is a guy who came to his sister’s aid in an attempted rape and was AutoTuned into… actually, that’s a long story, told neatly by the New York Times. (I couldn’t wrap my head around it at first, either.)

Take a look at his fans. The guy is, literally, a rockstar. How did he get big? He spread on the Web – not on apps, not in any “curated,” walled garden vertically integrated experience. Not in any way, frankly, that makes any logical sense at all. (AttemptedYou know … on the Web.

My guess is, you’ll know Ping (or a competing service) has been fixed when you find Antoine Dodson’s profile. Antoine, if you have music recommendations, we’d love to hear them.

Magic Bonus Addendum!

Broken Social Scene references that fit iTunes Ping! (thanks to the story above)

“Broken Social Scene”
“You Forgot It In People” (or, at least, you forgot people in it)
“Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” (Katy Perry? Lady Gaga? Even Coldplay?)

Following mobile music making means keeping up with technical details that are complex and changing. And because the Internet is open, when you post a story on iOS DJ apps, odds are it may be read by some of the Apple audio engineers, third-party developers, and a casual DJ with little understanding of what’s behind the scenes. But I’ll say this: the behind the scenes stuff matters, and it’s a great gift that we’re all able to compare notes.

Last week, I noted that, via the developers of a scratch app called Flare, there was evidence that Apple had broadened developers’ ability to work with music from the iTunes library in iOS 4. That led to an explosion of comments, including many from developers. The issue is still one we’re exploring, but I’d like to clear up some questions.

Also, I want to invite developers interested in comparing notes and sharing code to join a new group on Noisepages, the community site we’re finishing developing this summer:
Next-gen Mobile Music + Visual Dev Hack Group

The group has forum-style discussion features, the ability to connect with other users, and a group blog which could be useful for posting code snippets and the like. That means if you want to share something you’ve discovered with other developers or ask a question, you can. We’re not trying to replace other resources, but to make it easier to find them – so you can point to a stackoverflow thread, or your Git repository, or your commercial developer blog. Part of the reason to invite you is that this July and August is when we’re establishing other features for launch, so if there’s something you wish the site did, just suggest it. You only need to sign up for a Noisepages account, which is free and now open to anyone. I kept this platform agnostic partly because I hope we can all learn more about different operating systems, and because there’s plenty of overlap.

But first, let’s clear up some of those questions users and developers might have about Friday’s story.

Why all this fuss over having access to the iTunes library? Aren’t there DJ apps already?

For a lot of DJ end users, the ability to manage music with iTunes but DJ with a mobile app is important. In the past, developers have had to keep a separate set of files for use in the DJ app, synchronized separately, which for many end users isn’t good enough.

Wasn’t this added before? This isn’t news.

Actually, this is news. iOS 3 added very primitive access to the library — that is, you could see what was in the library on the device and play and stop, but nothing else. DJ apps will naturally want to be able to do things like change pitch or scratch – or even play the volume – which weren’t available in iOS 3. That means access to the buffer data for the audio in order to process it directly. (Those are the numbers filling your head Prince was recently complaining about.)

So, what’s the story? You can access audio buffers in iOS 4?

Here’s where things got a bit confusing. Because there’s a new set of APIs, music developers on iOS are still working out what’s possible and how to implement it. As a developer, you really don’t know a platform feature until you’ve successfully used it in your own code. Even with a documented feature, you may discover subtle issues – and new features often aren’t fully documented, if at all.

Async Games, makers of Flare, did manage to pull audio files from a device library and scratch them. So far, so good. But to get there, they required an intermediate step; what developers really want is direct, full-blown access to the Library. (And yes, I got a few messages in my inbox from developers who thought I was overstating what Apple had provided.)

To see the discussion of what’s there, what isn’t there, and how to use it, complete with code samples, see comments on Friday’s post.

Async Games and some of our regular iOS developers readers have been helpful to me in untangling this. But while Flare was the first to officially scratch an iTunes track, here’s some good news – it does sound out like the makers of DJ Mixer have figured out how to build a whole DJ app. There’s still that intermediate step, however. DJ Mixer developer Aviv Eyal tells me:

It works by copying the audio file into the App’s sandbox. MP3, M4A, AIF and WAV are supported.
Once there, the App has full access to the audio data and it calculates the BPM, beats, bars, extracts cover image and other meta-data that helps in mixing.
After this one-time import, the music is mixable and can be played without additional importing.

http://djmixer.fm/

And as I said on Friday, even for non-DJ apps, this could be significant. You could make a sample-based performance app, for instance, that allowed your user to manage samples via iTunes on the desktop instead of a separate conduit. So, for instance, an artist might take all of her albums, load it as an iTunes playlist, and then remix her back catalog in a mobile app.

It could also mean creative visualizer applications for the iTunes library. Stay tuned; hopefully we can document how to actually do this. (Join the group above.)

(Yes, some readers say they prefer a separate file store for their DJ tracks; if that’s you, you don’t have to worry about any of this! As a developer, though, you have to cater to the users who want to use iTunes.)

Here’s a new video of the upcoming 2.1 version of DJ Mixer with the iTunes Library functionality; it’s currently awaiting approval from Apple as I write this.

What about Android? You said the situation was different on Android. This is all about different philosophies of openness, Apple’s lockdown, blah, blah…

Well, yes and no. I brought up Android on Friday to provide some context – and not because I wished to make a black-and-white comparison about which was “better,” but on the contrary, as a way of highlighting the unique challenges all mobile developers face.

Here’s the deal. First, Android does allow developers freer access to files loaded on the device. That is a partly philosophical difference; since before the iPhone, Apple has maintained a fair degree of control over media files synced to their iPod. For instance, when you mount an Android device on your desktop, you can freely drag and drop files into the music database. That’s actually been a cause for complaint among some reviewers, but I will say, even a lot of less-sophisticated / less-techie Android owners I talk to like it.

In this case, though, these issues are less relevant to the task at hand. The issue with a DJ app is that you want to get buffer access not just to any file, but very possibly a compressed file. Part of the reason neither Android nor iOS has made this very obvious may even be that both platforms are using hardware acceleration for some decoding tasks, and they’d need to get the data back from the decoder.

Anyway, this isn’t a platform discussion, and it isn’t philosophy – it’s good, old-fashioned, nuts-and-bolts, hands-dirty development.

For the record, when I said it was possible to directly access files on Android, I wasn’t incorrect, but I was simplifying matters in regards to decoded files. There isn’t a software-side decoder that comes out-of-box with the platform. It is possible to decode MP3s, however; you just need to add your own library and dig into the NDK. The MAD MP3 library would be a way to do that, and it’s free. I’m going to actually look into this, because I need for a project. But yes, assuming we do work out how to use them, it looks like the iOS platform will be a path of less resistance thanks to these recent changes. (In-box decoding could be an issue on new platforms, too, like Chrome and MeeGo.)

The bottom line? If you’re building a DJ app right now on mobile platforms, be prepared to roll up your sleeves, because some things you take for granted on desktops simply aren’t there. On the other hand, there’s such interest in the problem, you won’t be alone – and I suspect we’ll be getting code examples going in relatively short order.

So, definitely do join up the Noisepages group if you’d like to learn from fellow coders; otherwise, as always, stay tuned here. And if you’re an end user, of course, we’ll explain what’s available to you as these apps ship. Having a window into development simply means you’ll know what’s coming a little earlier.

Out today in the US is the new release from The Chemical Brothers, ‘Further.’ From what I’ve heard so far, expect a full-bodied, raucous record of sounds, neither particularly retro nor modern. I’m withholding judgment on how successful the direction is until I spend some quality time with it. I find it interesting that the press materials suggest the result should sound a bit like a live set – and I likewise look forward to seeing the act live when they come to New York in early September.

What’s also interesting about this release is that it’s an audiovisual album. Each track comes accompanied by a film, as previewed above. It’s not a new idea, but it’s one that main gain more traction now than ever before, thanks to mobile players capable of playing both kinds of content. I’m a little disappointed that a lot of the language of the visuals is familiar, from textured dancing silhouettes to flocks of birds. But given the range, it seems likely at least one or two gems might emerge, and I love the fact that they’re giving audiovisual records a go. The visual work is by director Adam Smith, aka Flat Nose George, whose credits include visuals for this season’s Doctor Who, Chemical Brothers’ own “Galvanize,” and Lady Sovereign.

iTunes buyers in North America get a “pass” of content that includes the audiovisual download and some extra tracks. But physical media buyers aren’t left out: the deluxe edition appears to have the most content, including a ‘making of’ video. Full details:

http://www.thechemicalbrothers.com/further/