Patenting the use of all episodic media on the Web might sound absurd, but the US Patent and Trademark Office has granted just such a patent, to a company called VoloMedia. It’s a significant issue, one that could threaten the freedom of all media distribution online. Wherever you are in the world, you can help.

Intellectual property law was created in order to protect genuine inventions and innovation from exploitation. But predatory patents, based on bogus claims and attempting to stake out broad rights, threaten to do just the opposite.

Here’s a new idea: fight back.

Lawyers are the heroes this time. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s patent-busting project aims to take down unfair patents that threaten common-sense uses of technology. A number of these have applied to music and audio. The EFF has already won a big victory against what had been the worst offender – media giant Clear Channel actually successfully patented recording live shows. (No, really — recording a live gig, then burning them on the spot. The EFF was able to bust that patent.) The advocacy group also scored significant victories against patents on sending and receiving online streams and encoding media. (If someone thought they could patent your ears and charge you royalties for hearing, they probably would.)

Lawyers alone haven’t won these battles. The EFF’s clever twist is to crowd-source its case, by getting people like you to help the group document “prior art” – in plain English, to prove that something existed before the patent. (Without basic chronology, I could claim to have discovered electricity.)

In short, you can help save the freedom of online content.

VoloMedia’s Bogus Patent – And Why It’s Dangerous

VoloMedia has been granted a patent for “providing episodic media.” The patent is broad enough to endanger any independent podcast or episodic media producer. Over the summer, Volomedia’s own Murgesh Navar sidestepped concerns about patent abuse to brag on the company blog about just how broad that claim was – that even non-RSS-based episodic media belong to them:

With specific reference to our newly issued 7,568,213 patent, it was filed in November 2003, almost a year before the start of podcasting.  This helps underscore the point, that for nearly six years, VoloMedia has been focused on helping publishers monetize portable media…. and has continued these efforts with the addition of a wide array of smartphone-based applications.  The patent that issued yesterday helps to tie together and reinforce the value of the various technologies and services that VoloMedia has developed to help accomplish this objective.  VoloMedia’s intent is to continue to work collaboratively with key participants in the industry, leveraging its unique range of products to further grow and accelerate the market.  Today, podcasting is 100% RSS-based.  However, the patent is not RSS-dependent.  Rather, it covers all episodic media downloads.  It just so happens that, today, the majority of episodic media downloads are RSS-based podcasts, which is why we titled our announcement the way we did.

Aside from the “before the start of podcasting” lie – and I believe “lie” is the only accurate word – it’s the implied threat that should send a chill down the spine of anyone using the Internet. Make no mistake about it: VoloMedia wants anyone doing podcasting, via any mechanism, to work with them. From that same blog entry:

The impact of a strong growing IP portfolio is such that we would expect new entrants into the podcasting arena to have a collaborative relationship with VoloMedia, just as do many of the current players.

From the patent itself, as approved, the technology VoloMedia claims to own is described as:

A method for providing episodic media, the method comprising: providing a user with access to a channel dedicated to episodic media, wherein the episodic media provided over the channel is pre-defined into one or more episodes by a remote publisher of the episodic media; receiving a subscription request to the channel dedicated to the episodic media from the user; automatically downloading updated episodic media associated with the channel dedicated to the episodic media to a computing device associated with the user in accordance with the subscription request upon availability of the updated episodic media, the automatic download occurring without further user interaction; and providing the user with: an indication of a maximum available channel depth, the channel depth indicating a size of episodic media yet to be downloaded from the channel and size of episodic media already downloaded from the channel, the channel depth being specified in playtime or storage resources, and the ability to modify the channel depth by deleting selected episodic media content, thereby overriding the previously configured channel depth.

Plain English translation: if what you’re doing with media has episodes, you owe VoloMedia.

If this patent were allowed to stand, and if VoloMedia were able to successfully enforce it, it would have a chilling effect on all Internet distribution. Regardless of the likelihood of their legal success, that underlies the fundamental problem with patent law – it has come completely unglued from reality. That alone ought to motivate people to fully document these issues and try to effect change.

Wondering why you haven’t heard of VoloMedia if they supposedly invented all episodic content online? Right now, they advertise “solutions” for advertising and analytics, an iTunes plug-in, and branded mobile apps for platforms like the iPhone. That’s it. RSS and previous formats date back to the 1990s, with the intention of covering episodic media across formats, just as the VoloMedia patent claims. These were published standards years before VoloMedia’s claim. That’s why demonstrating the details of this history become so important: they could strike down VoloMedia’s bogus patent.

Help Write Episodic Content’s History

VoloMedia’s patent twists the law, and common sense. But the same laws also provide for disproving a patent. If you can prove that an invention existed prior to the date for which a patent is claimed, you can undo the damage.

For that reason, the EFF is asking for your help. Knowing the readers of this site, I imagine there are people out there who know those details, or know people who do.

You’re all old enough to remember the Age Before Fall of 2003, right?

Here’s the call to action:

In order to bust this patent, we are looking for additional "prior art" — or evidence that the podcasting methods described in the patent were already in use before November 19, 2003. In particular, we’re looking for written descriptions of methods that allow a user to download pre-programmed episodic media like audio files or video files from a remote publisher, with the download occurring after the user subscribes to the episodes, and with the user continuing to automatically receive new episodes. You can read the entire prior art request here, and if you have something that could help, please send it to podcasting_priorart@eff.org or fill out the form on our Volomedia page.

For more information:

EFF Tackles Bogus Podcasting Patent – And We Need Your Help

Patent Busting Project: VoloMedia

Prior art serves a second purpose. Part of the reason predatory firms can abuse patent law is because technology’s history is so poorly written. I would like to see these kinds of bogus patents struck down, but I’d also like the real history behind today’s technologies to be told. So even beyond this legal battle, I hope that we begin to make the story of technologies like what is now called “podcasting” accurate, complete, and fair. Future generations of technologists will thank us.

Certainly, the VoloMedia patent, if enforced, would do tremendous harm to media today. The entire strength of the Web is that it doesn’t have to have homogenized distribution channels, that anyone can publish without centralized outlets or “collaborative relationships” with any big partner.

If you’ve never cared about intellectual property policy before, this might change your mind. No one should be allowed to un-invent the Internet.

Yesterday, I talked about two complaints of music developers writing applications for the iPhone. These come from developers who are really iPhone fans, who just want to get their software released and (for many music devs) better categorized on Apple’s store. Pajamahouse Studios, maker of the new Sonorasaurus remix application, follow up with a more detailed explanation of their situation.

These are not rejections; at least rejections are generally accompanied with some sort of suggestion of what would need to be changed. They represent the dreaded iPhone developer “limbo,” in which an application is neither rejected nor approved. For Sonorasaurus, that’s been the state of affairs for over two months. As the developers explain, there seems to be nothing unusual about their app:

• Library access: It doesn’t access the iPhone/iPod music library. (no application is allowed to do that, which incidentally limits a lot of the DJ app possibilities of the device) Clarification: The status of the music API itself is unclear; some developers report just this sort of approval delay when trying to use it. [Source] Also, access to files inside the media library is not directly possible, which can be compared to the status of Android.
• File access: A separate http server is provided, with a parallel library, for users to store their own tracks – again, something found on numerous other approved applications. This doesn’t use the included library.
• Included music / music distribution: Five included songs are for testing only – something found in a number of other, similar applications that have been approved. The application is not an alternative to iTunes for distribution.
• Media decoding: Custom MP3 decoding technology – something not provided on the iPhone – was separately licensed. Clarification: This was not meant to imply that you can’t do MP3 decoding; the developers meant to make the point that they were not violating patents or licensing by using their own decoding, which presumably they did for the purposes of building a DJ app.

Of course, whatever the reason, we’ve seen in past applications suddenly approved after weeks or months, so who knows what will actually happen with this app.

Read the full explanation:

In Limbo Pt. 1 [Sonorasaurus]

While reading that, though, I also have to observe how significant these workarounds are. Without launching into an Android versus iPhone debate – believe me, there are many, many things to criticize about the Android as a platform, especially relative to music –  none of these is an issue on the Android. Forget platform wars or fanboys. Alternatives are good. I’d hope that we do have more than one approach to how to do this. These approaches should have to compete with one another, as they offer different tradeoffs and advantages.

If music is becoming an application, this kind of freedom is important.

Point by point:

• Library access: Android’s standard, supported APIs provide access to the media library and user playlists. Clarification: this includes direct access to the files and the ability to read from the buffer of these files (with some effort), in public, documented, approved APIs, with no chance of having an app rejected for the use of these APIs. My understanding is that this is not exactly the case on the iPhone.
• File access: Users are free to put files on their SD card over USB, and off-load those files – neither possible on iPhone. And yes, these will be integrated with the media library; iTunes-style sync isn’t necessary.
• Included music / music distribution: Including songs is actually a bit of a challenge, but you can freely download content and store it on the SD card. Because Google doesn’t have an equivalent of iTunes, that includes creating your own alternative distribution methods – meaning a label or music store can do make their own outlet.
• Media decoding: Decoding technology is included on the phone, including the ability to decode the open OGG Vorbis format. Clarification: Some folks read this to mean that the iPhone can’t decode MP3s, which was not what I intended; the key point here is that Android has in-box support for free formats and byte-level access to the audio buffers they give you, by default, straight out of the user’s media library. That is not entirely the case on iPhone.

Beneath all of this is the major fundamental difference, which is that you can install applications for Android whether or not they’ve been approved for Android. There’s actually a checkbox in the Market that allows you to opt into installing other apps you’ve downloaded directly from a developer or from another source.

Again, I don’t mean to make a pro-Android argument. In fact, I believe many of these items are also true on Windows Mobile, Symbian, and upcoming Linux platforms; I just happen to be working on Android now, so I’m more familiar with it.

What’s important is that this represents an alternative approach to how to provide music as an application, one in which the user is free to load content on and off the device.

Specifically, this paragraph jumped out at me:

Another problem would be that Apple could see this as a means to circumvent iTunes as a means to sell and distribute music. This we also addressed. These songs can only be used within the App. They can not be removed from the app / device for use elsewhere (iTunes on the desktop, burning to a CD, etc).

Now, we hear from many developers that the iTunes integration is something that attracts them to the platform. Likewise, many content creators will want just these sorts of restrictions.

But what if you want fewer restrictions? Let’s say you’re an artist releasing Creative Commons-licensed tracks, and you want to encourage remixing, sampling, modification, and free use of your tracks. Or what if you’re a label or artist collective, and want to experiment with new ways of using mobile for distribution, beyond what’s possible with iTunes and Apple’s stores? The same qualities that may attract someone else should, I think, concern you. I don’t think that necessarily means you shouldn’t write an iPhone application with your music, but perhaps you should also consider trying an alternative platform.

There seems to be a growing sense that the iPhone Way is The Only Way. Obviously, that’s not the case. This very debate demonstrates just how much room for interpretation the distribution of content can produce.

A powerful DJ application for your iPhone or iPod touch may be a tantalizing prospect. But several would-be candidates aren’t available to you yet. Why? They’re languishing in Apple’s approval process, with no sign of whether they’ll be released or not.

For all the success of Apple’s App Store, some developers and users continue to express frustration at what they believe is a sluggish, unpredictable approval process, restrictive Apple policies, and Apple’s complete control over distribution and categorization. That now leads to two complaints from music developers. A number of music developers want more delineation from Apple’s categories, so that the flood of general music apps don’t drown out powerful, creative tools. Meanwhile, developers of DJ applications claim that Apple is discriminating against DJ apps, which they say has led to delays without explanation.

“Open” development is relative, without question. Game system makers require developers to prove to them why they should be “allowed” to create titles, leading to a tightly-controlled stream of approved titles. But the success of Apple’s relatively open development model has prompted many software creators to hunger for greater freedom. I’ve increasingly heard people enthusiastic about the more flexible distribution model on Google’s Android (and other Linux) platforms, which allow users to install apps they want. I even moderated a mobile music platform panel at the CMJ music conference at which a Verizon representative, no less, talked about wanting to be more open to applications. The benchmark was Apple, for being perceived as overly restrictive.

iPhone/iPod touch developers, however, aren’t simply ranting against Apple. They’re complaining because they’re enthusiastic about the App Store. They want changes from Apple and believe there’s potential to get what they want. That said, I think they also illustrate potential for rivals like Google to outdo Apple – assuming those rivals invest more time and effort into courting these kind of applications.

Is Apple Blocking DJ Apps?

First, some developers believe that Apple is intentionally blocking DJ applications from being approved. Whether intentional or not, a number of potentially ground-breaking applications are unavailable after a significant delay. Kasabian Kasabianmeister writes:

Apple is deliberately not allowing DJ apps to the App Store

Something really strange is going on with the Apple review team. They now seem to approve all kinds of applications, even the ones that have been previously considered "unacceptable", but there is one kind of applications that are simply kept "in review" stage for months without any explanation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVv4PY6st6Y

These are the DJ applications that have been developed with the idea to give the user the ability to mix his own MP3 tracks on the iPhone. Currently, there is no application in the AppStore that has such functionality. Of course, this wasn’t left unnoticed by the developers, but…

At least 3 applications: Touch DJ (www.amidio.com), Sonorasaurus (www.sonorasaurus.com), DJ Player (www.djplayer.fm) are not being approved since the beginning of September, hitting the 2-month "in review" mark. One of the developers even made a video voicing the frustration over the absolutely unacceptable behaviour of Apple:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDUS_2rcAjw

What is really weird and unprofessional, Apple doesn’t give any reasons whatsoever what is the reason of such delays. The developers are just told to "wait" without any explanations.
Meanwhile, the demand for the DJ apps is so high that people even started an online petition entitled "Apple, Allow DJ apps on the iPhone!":
http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/iphonedj

One of the reasons for such attitude could be that Apple is working on its own DJ app, or is waiting for a DJ app from a "senior" player and keeping the possible "competitors" aside. In any case, it is quite possible that we will know the real reason soon.

It’s worth noting that, in the past, Apple’s application process has simply proved to be inconsistent and slow, which can cause people to see intention where there is none. But that doesn’t necessarily excuse Apple’s App Store approval process. The iPhone and iPod touch are popular largely because of Apple’s success at making media playback devices. Apple needs to document what it views as acceptable use of these devices. In the absence of information, developers are jumping to their own conclusions, possibly accurately, possibly not.

Obviously, aside from interest in Apple’s policies, I’m sure many iPhone and iPod touch owners are eager to see these applications, so we’ll certainly be following them to see if any are released.

In other rejection news… The App Store is currently just letting these DJ apps languish in limbo rather than providing a rejection. But another significant set of rejections is game titles built with the Unity game engine. There, the issue appears to be the presence of support in the engine for a private API call from Apple, whether or not the title itself uses the API, and …uh, yeah, that one’s complicated. Updated TUAW tells us via Twitter that Unity developers say they’ve fixed that issue, so… move along, nothing to see here.

Do Music Apps Need Better Categorization?

One potential danger of having a centralized store like iTunes and the App Store is giving control of approval to a single company (Apple), as seen in the DJ apps. The other is that such a storefront will simply not be categorized in a way that allows people to discover apps successfully.

Apple has been roundly praised for creating a store that encourages people to consume apps. Now, some developers want Apple to tweak their categorization to allow some of the most creative applications to stay in the forefront. Over the summer, Jokton Strealy, maker of the excellent songvoo music collection management tool, issued a call to fellow developers to try to get better categorization from Cupertino.

Side note: songvoo is just the sort of app that critics of the App Store might assume would be impossible. It replaces the existing playback functionality of the iPod and iPhone, the sort of replacement app that has sometimes earned rejection from Apple. Evidently, if an application is differentiated enough, it can clear Apple’s approval hurdles. (On the other hand, inconsistent policy and overzealous restrictions are at the center of some of those criticisms.)

But Strealy has no complaints about the App Store itself or the approval process. He just wants a more intelligently-organized store. Here’s his open letter from the summer, which has since earned a lot of support from fellow developers:

Recently, the Music section of the App store has gotten very busy with a new type of app — let’s call them Artist Apps or Fan Apps. Some of these Apps are great resources for fans and artists reaching out to their fans and potential fans, and some don’t live up to their potential.

However, they are joining a category that previously moved a lot slower, as the apps that had been populating this category were apps with a lot of development put into them and therefore sold at a higher tier usually- but were released at a slower pace. A look at the top 100 paid music apps illustrates this nicely.

Customers perusing the music section to catch that next great sound generating tool (for example), could check in on the new releases section perhaps once a week or even once a month and have the opportunity to check out all the great new apps that had been released, without worrying that one was missed.

Now however, these newer Artist apps have flooded this category, and great apps are getting lost in the shuffle. On one day last week, there were 21 pages of Artist or Fan apps, with a few "other" apps strewn in the mix here and there, very hard to pick out of the jumble.

I understand that this may be happening in other categories for other reasons, but I only concentrate on the Music section since I am a music producer and music App writer.

I propose that we all get together to come up with some suggested sub-category names for the music category. I will start the list off and hopefully some of you will chime in and give suggestions for other categories or add more definition to a sub-category that is already here.

Once enough input is received, I will compile it into one bug report for Apple. i will then post the bug# for everyone to include with any correspondence with Apple on this issue.

New sub-categories for the Music section of the App store.

Music Creation:
Synthesizers, drum machines, sound generators, scoring and notation, sequencers, DJ apps, recorders (multi track)

Music Utilities:
Lyrics apps, iPod interfaces, visualizers, iPod controllers, song recognizers, concert finders

Learning:
Metronomes, guitar and voice tuners, music slow downers, guitar tutors, chord apps,

Artist Apps/Fan Apps:
iLike apps, Deadmau5 app, PVD App, Underworld App, NIN, etc.

Radio Tuners:
AOL Radio, Pandora, Last.fm, individual radio stations

Please visit the Apple iPhone developer forums and voice your opinion/support!
https://devforums.apple.com/message/107989#107989

Sincerely,
Jokton Strealy., President
Elements2Dance.com

If nothing else, the explosion of development for iPhone and iPod touch is prompting some lively discussions about just what development should look like. A lot of what you hear is praise for the Apple model, but I expect some of the criticism of it – even down to minor details – could be productive, as well. I’ll certainly be watching the development of both of these issues, and we’ll see if Apple responds or not.

Updated: Jokton notes an additional change to the way apps are listed.

As for my original issue with categories and release dates, there has been a new development. Apple recently stopped listing “updates” in the “release date” listing of each category. Now the only way to get a listing there (which generates sales) is release a new app (1.0). Before that, devs were releasing constant updates to an app to keep it “on the radar” on the app store, even if the update were a simple as correcting a spelling error or perhaps even faking issues to correct. That in itself created a lot of “update spam”. Many developers are up in arms about these new changes because previously this was the only way to get your app seen by the masses. There has been no official word from Apple on the issue, so it is still unclear if this is a permanent change or some kind of error in the system. If this change is indeed permanent, then the argument for more subcategories is even more important now.

Critics frequently attach the phrase “lock-in” to Apple’s iTunes Store – iTunes – iPod/iPhone combination. But, in the post-DRM age, what does that mean, exactly?

First, you have to recall that while for many of us the manual drag-and-drop music management is appealing, it isn’t so for many average consumers. They want sync. That means that music will be stored in iTunes and synced to Apple devices and nothing else. Apple is serious about locking you to their store and their devices, enough so that they frequently update their software with special keys that prevent the use of devices. iTunes is “free,” but Apple determines which mobile devices you can use and which you can’t. And Apple has gone after anyone who dares give you the ability to use your own music software or own devices, including efforts (ironically) to make their iPhone and iPod work with Linux and open source players.

These efforts don’t protect the music or prevent privacy – they protect users of Apple’s software and mobile devices from using anything but Apple’s tools. Yet Apple has used the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to take legal action over anyone who dares to even talk about how to use legally-purchased music and hardware:

OdioWorks v Apple

Perhaps suspecting their case was too thin to defend, Apple eventually backed off that particular claim — after, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “7 months of censorship and a lawsuit.”

Apple Withdraws Threats Against Wiki Site

But the software and hardware locks are unchanged. And Apple has won, in my view, an even more important battle: they have a monopoly over mindshare.

Here’s an example from a recent review by Gizmodo of the Android 2.0 mobile operating system from Google, as implemented on the Verizon-distributed Motorola Droid. They have some fair points about Android’s maturity and strong and weak points. But note what they say about music sync:

The only way to get your music and videos on the phone is to manually drag and drop the files. There is no syncing, no easy way to get your music library onto your phone. How are normal people supposed to figure this out? Verizon reps actually joked about how putting music on the Droid is sure to make for a lovely Saturday afternoon. What. The. Shit.

In fact, this is technically accurate, to my knowledge, only if you’re using iTunes. That incompatibility is engineered specifically by Apple. It’s a “feature”: other vendors could make other devices sync with iTunes, but Apple engineers regular updates to prevent them from doing so. In fact, while Apple was conceding defeat in its efforts to censor the Web over its iTunes lock, it was simultaneously busy blocking the Palm Pre from working with iTunes. This should be especially sad to long-time Mac watchers, who saw a Mac community railing against Microsoft’s effective office software and operating system monopolies in the 90s. Those Mac historians should also recall the early development of iTunes and shareware predecessor SoundJam, both of which worked with a variety of hardware. Now, some members of the same Mac community cheer market share numbers and anti-competitive practices by Apple.

But, engineering aside, it’s really the mindshare battle that’s most impressive. Gizmodo, in saying the Android “doesn’t sync,” really means that it “doesn’t sync with iTunes.” And given iTunes’ massive market share, Gizmodo is not alone – I’ve seen similar complaints from other press outlets and, anecdotally, many, many users.

In fact, Android sync is supported by a variety of applications. In my tests, it works with the open-source players Songbird (Mac, Windows, Linux), Banshee (Mac, Linux), Rhythmbox (Linux), Winamp (Windows), Media Monkey (Windows), and yes, even Microsoft’s own Windows Media Player. Microsoft may restrict the use of its Zune media player, but ironically its music playback software is far more open than Apple’s.

By “sync,” incidentally, I mean automatically – it’s no harder to use these applications with Google Android than Apple’s iTunes and iPhone/iPod. I personally find most of them more flexible and intuitive than iTunes. And I can show someone in a couple of minutes how to manage their device via the file system, too – even “normal people.” (I definitely don’t count as “normal,” so no argument there. But presumably “normal people” can learn to use the Mac Finder, right? Apple certainly argues they can – then locks users out of that tool when they connect an Apple mobile player.)

This is not a pro-Android argument, despite the screenshot. Any music player or phone that supports normal disk mounting will work the same way.

Why should all of this matter to musicians? The reasons monopolies are a concern in the first place has to do with pricing, and media monopolies add to that control of culture and speech. Even if your music isn’t distributed through iTunes, pricing and consumption patterns, and even the kinds of music people listen to and where they discover it are now being deeply impacted by Apple. Apple, in turn, by convincing users that there are no other options and engineering interoperability out of their products protect that control, just as digital music is growing by leaps and bounds. (For statistical evidence of the resulting trends, see today’s other story, linked below.)

I spoke to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann in April about the paper-thin (literally) arguments from Apple, when Apple was trying to prevent websites from talking about the database lock between iTunes and mobile devices:

All Apple has told us about this is in the letter they sent to us in December, as posted on the website as an exhibit to our complaint. Apple simply cites the fact that the iTunesDB page authors said that the obfuscation mechanisms used to create the iTunesDB has “may reside” in the FairPlay DRM code.

…The important thing here is that the iTunesDB pages were simply discussions about what might need to be done to reverse engineer the iTunesDB hashing. There was nothing to indicate that the efforts had succeeded. So even if understanding the iTunesDB hashing mechanism somehow magically unlocked all of FairPlay (which would seem to be far fetched), nothing on the pages suggests that the authors were anywhere near that goal.

Note that at the time, the EFF did not claim Apple lacked the right to make these kind of locks. The EFF told CDM at the time, “They have every right to do – to try to block it. Apple can certainly try to block it. What they can’t do is use inapplicable federal law to use legal threats to get them to stop.” And Apple backed off those claims.

The issue is whether you should invest in a product that limits your freedoms to use it. And the issue for musicians is whether this kind of a behavior from a company with an effective monopoly is limiting the potential power of digital music listeners in the future.

This is not to say that there aren’t reasons to choose to use an Apple device or its iTunes software. As reader “low resolution sunset” says in comments on the previous story:

This is pure conjecture: but I tend to think that slick interface design, trust, and loyalty for the Apple brand identity is what’s winning them the dominant market share of downloads.

Indeed. So, why not rely on that design, trust, and natural loyalty? Why force loyalty through engineering? And even given these qualities, isn’t there a danger when one company becomes so dominant that people don’t so much as consider alternatives? What’s to keep Apple competitive on good design if they have no competitors?

I certainly can’t answer those questions. And in the meantime, I’m looking to other alternatives, alternatives that have made me quite happy.

More on what this can actually mean:

Digital Sales Up, But is Apple Monopoly the Price? NPD, Mint Data, Editorial Analysis

Mint.com, the online financial management tool, has put its numbers together with market researchers NPD Group to analyze music spending. The results: when it comes to consuming recorded music, digital music continues to rise. At the same time, so does Apple’s grip on the music consumption market, a combination that includes proprietary control of a music store, a music player, and the leading mobile device.

The NPD data should look familiar. Digital music is growing, and clearly it’s at the root of the record industry’s loss of revenue as consumers shift from physical to digital media. Also, Apple’s iTunes remains the lion’s share of the market – enough so that they effectively control distribution, pricing, and consumption patterns, the very definition of monopoly by most measures. (That’s even before you get to Apple’s effective monopoly over the computer player and mobile device, though my suspicion is that an all-out attack on the portable device could start to chisel away at all three.)

Even in the NPD data, though, there’s an interesting indicator: note that the “Other” category is roughly the same size as Apple’s main competitors. That suggests that there’s a plurality minority. And oddly enough, it’s right in the middle of this mysterious “Other” category that a lot of unknown music artists make their dollars, selling direct to listeners or going through niche sites. Artists I’ve talked to in the electronic genre have almost universally said they make nothing on Apple, while they do very well on a site like electronic-specific Beatport. And unlike physical media, it’s not a big deal for someone who loves electronic music to drop their favorite tunes manually from the Beatport store into iTunes and an iPhone.

Dig into the Mint.com numbers, and you see just how different stores can be. Per-transaction spending differs by an enormous margin. Brick-and-mortar retailers sell a lot more per transaction. True, this could include accessories like headphones at stores like Sam Goody, but it’s also interesting to note the gap between stores like eMusic, Rhapsody, and CD Baby, and the smaller per-transaction buy at iTunes.

While Apple buyers aren’t spending as much per visit, they’re visiting more often, and Apple’s move to variable has made a big difference. Buyers have gone from purchasing an average of 2-2.5 transactions to well over 3, coinciding with the introduction of variable pricing.

If you’re not a fan of monopolies, there’s just not much to be done to spin this data. As digital consumption has grown by an order of magnitude, nothing has happened – thus far – to change Apple’s dominant share of the market. And as you can see in pricing statistics, within the Apple ecosystem, Apple has been enormously effective in controlling the pricing of the product and spending habits of the consumers.

On the other hand, looking at the inverse situation, a lot of the most interesting activity is happening outside either the former brick-and-mortar or new digital iTunes economies. We don’t have data on a lot of these niche stores (Dancetracks, Beatport, Bleep, and so on), which grow in number and variety. We don’t have data on direct-to-consumer sales by artists. And we don’t have much data on legal free music consumption, music released as Creative Commons or pay-what-you-will. Just criticizing Apple for their popularity could miss out on what’s happening in these alternative channels.

Many of these channels have no obligation to share their statistics, but to any who are interested, I’d love to talk to you. (And I think CD Baby winds up being the most interesting stat here.)

This is also an excellent illustration of what online analytics can do with financial data. It certainly won’t ease anyone who prefers that this data remain private, but fans of analytics might also see potential for collective learning experiences from shared data. Data like this had long been privileged only to banks and credit cards; a service like Mint allows users to share such data with one another.

So, how are you spending on music?

And would you find it useful – or disturbing – to have that kind of data shared anonymously with other consumers?

Commencing in about 12 hours, Visionsonic 2009 showcases Audiovisual artists from around the world. The Thursday show is “for Young Audiences”, but I’ll definitely be watching The Odyssey of Rick the Cube.

L’Odyssée de Rick le cube (extraits du spectacle) from Jesse Lucas on Vimeo.

The festival program has 20 artists performing over Friday and Saturday, which you can view on the Visionsonic TV page, or load the WMV stream in your media player of choice (VLC works beautifully).

There are plenty of reasons to go to live performances, to be in the same physical location as the artists, and to experience them without any technology or production getting in the way. Of course, if the performance is happening on the other side of the planet, then streaming may be the only feasible way to get there. CDM has dabbled in internationally-streamed performance before with NetLag, which attempted to put together a “festival” featuring artists performing from various locations. This was great fun, but beset with various problems, as technical and especially bandwidth limitations are keeping us from the “everything streaming live in HD” world the mainstream media seems to think we inhabit. These limitations are falling away quickly though, so it just remains for us to figure out the most compelling ways to capture live performance for streaming.

For watching the stream? Well I’ve got a big stereo, a projector, a copy of VLC, and a weekend’s entertainment all planned out for me.

A young, aspiring musician walks into a consumer electronics store. (Let’s call it Big Buy, and imagine people wearing… red polo shirts.) They wander into the game aisle and muse at the latest music games in the video game section – $60-100 in price. But there’s an endcap with something else: a box of Pro Tools that’ll run on their computer, plus a ready-to-use audio interface, for $99-129. Instead of Guitar Hero, they leave with Pro Tools – a name they already knew.

See full details of the new lineup, with photos.

This idea is nothing new – for many years, it’s been possible to do great stuff with $100 on a computer. But the most powerful brand in music production (Pro Tools) has remained notably absent. Instead, that hypothetical consumer would find a smattering of consumer-only choices with names they likely wouldn’t recognize. Meanwhile, the name “Pro Tools,” and the software interface that made it popular, have been limited to more complex offerings sold through specialists.

Today changes all of that. Gone is the idea that “Pro Tools” is only for the high end. Gone is the iLok hardware dongle. (You still need either the Micro or Fast Track interface plugged in, but the target market for this product may not care.)

There are three offerings:

A vocal studio, bundled with a USB mic (similar to M-Audio’s Luna).

A “recording” studio, bundled with a simple USB bus-powered audio interface (the previously-available Fast Track.

The “KeyStudio”, bundled with a 49-key USB keyboard. The software comes with 60+ virtual instruments, says Avid, so you’ve got quite a lot to play.

The software included in each has some limitations – it has 32 tracks (16 audio, 8 instrument, and 8 MIDI), and more basic routing options (3 inserts per track, 2 audio inputs, and 2 outputs). The absence of multitrack recording is probably the biggest restriction. But you nonetheless get a range of virtual instrument sounds and effects, plus a full complement of editing and mixing features.

On the same day that people are rediscovering The Beatles through a video game, and video games are causing people to rediscover music making, you can buy a studio for about the same price.

Now, if you’re reading this site, that’s probably not news. But it could be news to quite a lot of people who haven’t discovered computer music making. And it represents a tectonic shift in how the titan of music making software treats its flagship.

What’s hard to overstate is how profoundly Avid has changed overnight some of the rules they themselves wrote. There’s no diplomatic way to put this: for years, Avid/Digidesign has been a dinosaur, with all the negatives and positives that can come from that. They have all the heft of a dinosaur, the footprint – and all of the kind of ongoing assumptions about how to do business. The whole modus operandi of Pro Tools seems to have been protecting the crown jewels. The idea of something called Pro Tools sold to a genuine mass market at this price, without any differentiation between “consumer” and “pro” or “mass-market” and “musician” is largely new. And that could point to a sea change for the whole industry further in the future.

In fact, even Avid’s competition has followed the unspoken rule that your flagship product and the crippled version you sell to the mass market have to be kept isolated. Apple is careful to distinguish Garage Band from Logic, iMovie from Final Cut. Ableton’s entry-level versions of Live have key features removed – even the LE version that costs about twice what Pro Tools Essentials, with hardware, does. Cakewalk doesn’t call its entry-level software SONAR. MOTU doesn’t have an entry-level Digital Performer. Steinberg has Nuendo, Cubase… and, remember, most people who have never heard of any of these things have heard of Pro Tools. The result is the industry takes a bunch of names that aren’t well-known to the general public, and then …adds more.

The kind of gymnastics manufacturers do to keep the low-end from being the “real” product sometimes border on absurdist.

For instance, take M-Audio’s Fast Track, the interface now included with Pro Tools Essentials Studio. It’s a simple box with a USB jack and some audio inputs. But a first-time consumer probably wants to plug it into a computer – including a Windows PC that lacks a pre-installed GarageBand – and have something happen.

The Fast Track is marketed as coming from “M-AUDIO,” a company most people outside our bubble have never heard. It’s “compatible” with Pro Tools “M-Powered” (not an actual word). Oh, except that’s a separate purchase – and it comes with a special plastic USB dongle that you have to plug into your computer called the iLok. The average consumer hasn’t ever seen hardware copy protection.

On the Fast Track product page, the fine print about how the other software bundles work is longer than the description of the actual product.

*M-Audio Session software is available in Fast Track USB packages sold at consumer electronics retailers, and currently works only with Fast Track USB and M-Audio Micro hardware. If you purchased a Fast Track USB package from your local pro audio dealer, you received a professional software bundle including Ableton Live Lite. If you wish to purchase Session for use with your Fast Track USB, it is available directly from M-Audio for only $25 (valued at $69.95). Purchase Session now.”

What’s Session? That’s another software product, unrelated to Pro Tools.

Hell, I’m confused, and I do this for a living.

Now, instead of that complexity, you can get one box that includes both the Fast Track and Pro Tools Essentials, without any of the fine print. (As pictured.) If those stores had decent commissions, I’d just park myself in one around the holiday season.

Don’t get me wrong: Pro Tools Essentials has tough competition. GarageBand has been down this path before, minus the hardware and the “Pro Tools” name, but with the very serious “Apple” name attached. The aforementioned Rock Band franchise will now have its game songs produced in Reaper, a $60 piece of software that does for some of its advanced users what Pro Tools might. The hardware tie-ins here, ironically, may be less valuable to people than the software – Pro Tools, more than a keyboard or mic, is likely to sell the packages.

The bottom line, though, is that a box that says “Pro Tools” at $99 is important to the whole industry. And if Avid is redefining what a “Pro” tool is, something bigger than even Avid really is shifting. The technological shift is hardly new, but the ability to recognize that in the market has been a long time coming.

I’m curious to see what will happen next.

Ten minutes. Four or five kids (or adults). Make a song. Go.

That’s the idea behind the Youth Music Box, developed by Silent Studios and Chris O’Shea. (Our friend Chris you may recall from various interactive projects and the blog pixelsumo; he sends this project our way.) The software is build in openFrameworks, the C++-based creative coding environment for artists.

With keys, drums, and yes, even a scratching DJ-style interface, the music box brings together kids for quick music making, inspired by the phenomenon of musical games. The experience is guided by genre, with some effort to make sure whatever they do sounds good, but it’s extraordinary how effective it is at conveying the experience of the successful jam. It’s a bit of a confidence builder, in other words, for a group musical experience, perhaps more so than those ear-splitting, cheap plastic recorder consorts I recall from my youth.

And oh yeah, those kids look super cute once they get rocking out. (See video below.)

Youth Music Box Experience from Silent Studios | Resonate on Vimeo.

All of this raises some fascinating questions, and not always with the answers you might expect. In a normal musical ensemble, you begin sounding like crap, amp up difficulty, and eventually sound something like this – at least as far as coherence goes, assuming you’re not aiming for experimental free jazz. But with the addition of technology, whether musical games or the presets on our favorite synths or the quantization and beat-synced loops of our sequencers, it goes something in reverse. You start out sounding like this, pull apart the mechanisms that make you sound a certain way, and eventually find your way to your own personal approach. (And at some point, you get some of the readers on this site, writing code to produce their own sounds and musical structures line by line.) In fact, one could imagine scaling difficulty of even this particular setup, gradually adding greater musical freedom and taking away the “training wheels” of all the rules-based restrictions that make the results sound a particular way.

Skeptical about the connection of music-based games and actual music making? Think again – even as music education unravels worldwide, games are actually encouraging real music. That revelation was the impetus of the music box project:

Research commissioned by Youth Music found that up to 2.5 million young people in the UK – or 1 million aged between 12 and 18 – have been inspired to progress into ‘real’ music-making because they have played music-based console games.

You got it – they hit those plastic buttons, got inspired, got bored, then decided to go to the real thing. And otherwise, they might have remained passive musical consumers: the game was a gateway drug. Of course, that means that any such interactive experience has to stand up to polished Guitar Hero and Rock Band-style games. But anyone who believes the music games genre has peaked and is on its way out may be dead wrong on many, many levels. On the contrary, this may only be getting started – and the real growth could come in music beyond the realm of games, as people graduate to the unlimited set of possible music experiences.

Chris sends lots more documentation of this project, if you’d like to learn more:

by silent studios and me for uk charity youth music to get kids turned on to music
http://www.vimeo.com/6210259

watch some bbc coverage here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_8160000/newsid_8168800/8168881.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8154449.stm

Ed.: The video at top doesn’t play outside the UK, because we don’t pay BBC license fees. What, all those Doctor Who videos I bought in the 80s and 90s didn’t make up for it?

here is a press release from roland. the box is ‘powered by roland’
http://www.audioprointernational.com/news/1329/Roland-unveils-Music-Box-for-Youth-Music

some launch pics
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsumo/sets/72157621466657993/

making of pics
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsumo/sets/72157621404410234/

this goes into some of the ideas and details about the musical kit
http://musicispower.youthmusic.org.uk/blog/24/youthmusicboxlaunchesatlondonssouthbankcentre/

on the website there is a very simplified flash version you can try out on a mini timeline, just click play online :)

its quite funny to read these comments on it
http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/07/youth-music-box-democratizes-music-creation.html

And yes, you can try this yourself and play online! The official site:

http://musicispower.youthmusic.org.uk/youth_music_box/

The production company:

http://www.silentstudios.co.uk/

And Chris’ own site:

http://www.chrisoshea.org/

Roland is involved, and donated an E-09 Interactive Music Arranger to give kids some toys to explore.

And yes, I did notice a certain kindred spirit in the form of Moldover’s Octamasher. The underlying technology and its results are different, but to me what’s most interesting isn’t the superficial similarity of these projects, but the fact that they array the instruments in a circle. Computer production often simply orients a single person to a screen – not so ideal for collaboration. And even Rock Band and Guitar Hero, like an onstage band, line up artists for a (now nonexitent) audience. Perhaps the circle is about to make a comeback as music restores its social aspect.

Curious to hear other thoughts on these projects as they evolve.

There’s a lot of hype around the latest schemes for changing how artists get their music to fans, but not actually a whole lot of news. (It always seems to boil down to a website with some unpronounceable name.)

Well, this is news: Harmonix is opening up Rock Band to anyone who wants their music in it, and giving you the same sophistication of tools they use themselves. That’s a real game-changer – literally.

And I don’t mean just for the actual game Rock Band. Sure, Harmonix was the house that made music games a phenomenon in the US. They learned well from Japan’s Masaya Matsuura, perfected music games’ mechanics in Amplitude and Frequency, popularized the formula by launching Guitar Hero, then rocked collaboration with Rock Band before convincing the infamously-guarded Beatles to finally embrace digital tech. But the sad reality of game music in general is that it’s been a playing field for the old guard – it’s licensing deals with major labels to promote music you’ve already heard. It’s the top hits on the radio, redigested onto your game console. There’s commercial calculation behind even the tune that’s in the background while you’re paging through a screen in Madden. Harmonix has already changed some of the economics, and disrupted even what could be a hit, as kids discover classic metal for the first time or geeks grab music by Jonathan Coulton and Stephen Colbert. But that’s not quite the disruptive shift in game music so many people have expected.

I think Rock Band Network could be the first real sign of that shift.

Rock Band Network promises to be something really different. How?

• Anyone can get their music in the game. You don’t even need a label. You need a few (cheap) software tools, a computer, and some basic MIDI chops, and for a fraction of the cost of pressing a couple hundred CDs, any artist can get their work into Rock Band 2.
• It’s a real community-driven process. Your A&R people don’t have to shmooze with MTV. You don’t have to enter into some complex developer agreement with Microsoft or Sony. There isn’t even a shady, mysterious review process like the Apple iTunes App Store. Actual Rock Band fans will get to play your music and tell you that the animation needs fixing and the difficulty level needs to be fixed on the drums.
• You use Reaper – an actual music production tool for grown-ups. Harmonix could have given us some weird in-game tool they cobbled together themselves. Instead, they give us a special verison of Reaper, the brilliant, full-blown Digital Audio Workstation that inexplicably costs just US$60 but blows the pants off a lot of better-known tools. So you actually get to assemble your music the way Harmonix has been doing for years, with a real tool. Fortunately, the process has been made much easier and copiously documented, but it’s nice to be treated like adults for a change.
• If it works, Rock Band is just the beginning. It’s impossible to see into the future. RBN is a leap of faith both in the artists and the game fans, in terms of their taste and the amount of effort they’ll invest. But if it works, Rock Band Network could change the way people think about interactive user-created content, well beyond just furniture in the Sims or Little Big Planet.

Anyway, enough of the big picture – let’s talk details. I got to sit down with the Rock Band Network team from Harmonix high above Times Square in MTV’s offices this week to get a full-blown demo – including some seriously fun nerding out with composer/sound designer Caleb Epps, plus Senior Producer Matthew Nordhaus and MTV’s games man, Paul DeGooyer. (In a sign that the big media world still doesn’t quite get what’s going on in this field, no one at the Viacom security desk had even heard of Harmonix.)

The team was extremely generous with technical details of Rock Band Network, and walked me through the process of how artists would get going with RBN. Here’s a first look at that process.

What You Need to Get Started

$60 Reaper + free plug-ins + a computer + Windows to beam over the music + an Xbox 360 to test on.

1. Reaper (Mac, Windows) For the authoring itself, you may be surprised: you don’t need some special tool. You use Cockos’ brilliant, lightweight, Reaper. It’s not even Reaper Rock Band Edition. Reaper for Mac will work, too. Cost: US$60 for the standard license, or US$225 if you’re already a huge rockstar.

http://www.reaper.fm/

2. Reaper plug-ins (Mac, Windows) Reaper plug-ins: this download is the real magic, adding everything from shortcuts for making tempo maps to color-coding tracks to helping you add lyrics, animations, and everything else that makes your song into a Rock Band track… game. Gamesong? Songgame? Cost: Free.

3. MAGMA Packaging Tool (Windows) MAGMA is a simple tool that facilitates getting those files packaged up with artwork and keywords and such, and moving them over to the Xbox 360 for testing yourself and for sharing with the rest of the community. It is Windows-only because it relies on Microsoft’s networking functionality with the console, but Harmonix says they’ve had no problem using it on the Mac via an emulator or Boot Camp. Cost: Free. (or the cost of Windows if you’re on the Mac).

4. Xbox Creators’ Club Membership: Join Microsoft’s game development community, and you get access to a special Rock Band creators area that lets you upload and share your tracks – and other tracks from other users (which is where item #5 comes in). Cost: $99 /year (Note that there are some discounted ways to get at this for shorter terms, and you get all the game developing features of the community, too, in case you want to try to make your own game in XNA.)

5. An Xbox 360 and Rock Band 2: You do want to actually play the results, right? (Unfortunately, because of the reliance on Creators Club, Sony’s PS3 isn’t yet supported, though some sort of PS3 distribution is planned for the future.) Cost: About to come down thanks to sales – and now you get to write off an Xbox 360 on your taxes.

Total cost: as little as $100-160 or so with the various pieces, or a little more if you need to pick up an Xbox 360 and the game and/or equip your Mac to run Windows.

By the way, Ars Technica claimed this month, based on the experience of one developer, that Xbox Live [is] not ready for user-generated content. That claim is simply wrong. Sure, LittleBigPlanet is cool on PS3, but the infrastructure for moderating content is there, on the community created for the XNA game development platform. And the tracks for Trails HD (the game mentioned in that article) or even LittleBigPlanet really pale in comparison to what Harmonix is about to unleash. It’s the first time a game has really been a platform, which was long the vision of Harmonix’s founders.

Now, let’s get into actually making your music.

The Tempo Map

Since Rock Band is assuming …well, a rock band, you’ll need to allign a tempo map with the audio so the software knows where the bars are. Caleb Epps showed me some of the nifty shortcuts that make moving from bar to bar snappy and automagical. Reaper itself has actually incorporated feature enhancements to accommodate the Rock Band workflow – which, in turn, means that the wider Reaper community may find improvements that impact them outside of preparing tracks for the game. I’ll cover this process in more detail once Harmonix unveils the wider beta.

MIDI Mapping and Animation

Here’s where the real work begins. When I visited Harmonix in Cambridge as they were developing the first Rock Band game, I found one guy hunched over a copy of Cubase doing just this: adding MIDI events for the game play at different skill levels. Now, in Reaper, you’re doing a process that’s just as sophisticated – it’s just much more user-friendly and quicker. (Harmonix says they’re gradually adopting the tools for the Rock Band Network internally, and some of their work already uses it.)

Especially nice: you’ll see color coding that matches the different game controllers.

MIDI isn’t just used for the notes in gameplay, though. You also add notes for the vocals, with the “+” key signifying a syllable extending across notes and another character designating notes that can’t be sung. (Bob Dylan, I’m looking at you.)

Most interestingly, you can tightly control animations, down to when the onscreen drummer chokes a hat or the camera cuts to the singer or the lighting in the venue activates, all using MIDI events. Check out the “Text Events” dropdown in the screen grab above.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is. Fortunately, Harmonix says that the finished release will include tools that, say, allow the software to intelligently generate the animations. You can come back and tweak those if you wish, but you won’t necessarily have to manually add every single camera move – even though that’s traditionally how Harmonix does it.

All of this gets saved as standard MIDI files, so theoretically DAWs other than Reaper could perform the task, too – though for now, I can’t imagine wanting to leave Reaper, given the level of integration and documentation. But it’s nice that Harmonix hasn’t invented some crazy closed format, because if this takes off, I could see people creating other tools.

The Simulation

Now, if you had worked at Harmonix up until recently – as I saw when I did that first office tour – you’d then have to figure out how to get this song over to an Xbox console to play test it. Happily, you don’t have to do that any more. A convenient plug-in will pop up a graphical representation of any of the four parts. You can watch them animate through and get a real sense of what it’s like playing the game.

This is implemented as a standard plug-in, but the UI requires Reaper to work properly, so for now, it’s restricted to Reaper.

MAGMA and Play Testing

Good game design is all about play testing. So, when you’re distributing your music as a game, it’s essential that you actually play it as a game.

Yep, that’s right. This is the stage of the process where you have to play your Xbox. (Shame.)

MAGMA is the tool that packages in artwork and beams the track over to your Xbox 360 console. Provided your computer and your console are on the same network, the process of getting a built track to the Xbox is nearly instantaeous.

You can “audition games” locally, thanks to a patch to Rock Band 2 allows anyone with a Creators Club membership to play the games. That means you can easily test your own tracks on your Xbox, but also explore what other people are doing. And the community will ultimately determine which tracks are good enough to be approved.

In other words, if you don’t want to make your own Rock Band tracks, but want to become a virtual Xbox music “scout,” you could sign up for a membership and look for the next big thing by playing their music – interactively – on Rock Band.

That’s got to be better than dealing with all the CDs that usually show up in your mailbox.

The best part of all of this to me is that people can offer feedback. You can get through the first pass of your music, but then see how it’s playing with other people. Need to fix a camera angle? Dial down the difficulty on one level? Now you’ll get real feedback.

Interestingly, this also complements Microsoft’s other purpose for the Creators’ Club, which is to encourage independent game development using their elegantly-designed XNA game tools, some of which ultimately make it to Xbox Live Arcade. I think there’s actually a chance this could breathe some life (and users) into that service. Now, if only Microsoft would build more robust audio tools into the game toolkit so some crazy indie developer can built the next Frequency or Amplitude …but I digress.

Q&A

Anticipating the kind of questions you may be asking yourself…

When does it all happen? The network is now in closed beta. A larger beta is planned for next month, with a full launch expected around October.

So who will use all of this? I think there will be several groups:

1. Indie bands with tech savvy.

2. Indie bands who aren’t tech savvy, who will learn Reaper to get this working – and wind up using Reaper and other computer audio tools to produce their next album. (Harmonix promises extensive documentation to give them a hand. I’m sure CDM can help, too.)

3. Electronic artists who build a cottage business around prepping other people’s tracks.

4. Game developers and game fans who pick this stuff up because they love Rock Band, and wind up getting further into music.

And while 1-3 are certainly interesting to CDM, I hope we get to interract with people in that fourth category.

Isn’t this going to be too hard for some people?

Yup. Yup, it is. On the other hand, Harmonix is going to great lengths to make this easier – and if you are a skilled MIDI sequencer, you’ve just found a business opportunity.

I’ve got a Mac and a PS3.

Don’t sweat it. A lot of the Harmonix folks are Mac users, alongside the happy Windows users. It could be well worth running in an emulator or a second partition, and you can still do all your music production on the Mac. As for the PS3 – well, you can either make friends with an Xbox owner, or watch for the sale I hope is coming. You do need a hard drive, but otherwise this seems a reasonable investment.

Will I get paid?

We’ll talk more about this in a future story, but yes – thanks to the Xbox Creators Club payment infrastructure, you can expect to get paid early and often (payments arrive quarterly), meaning this could be a decent revenue stream at a time when they’re hard to find.

Performance licensing is apparently not applicable to Rock Band (I did ask about that); that’s, again, a topic for a separate article.

What if my instrumentation doesn’t fit Rock Band?

Check out the Rock Band catalog. There’s some flexibility here, as long as the game play works. You just need to make it work for the default setup so that people with a mic, a guitar, a bass, and a drum kit in front of their TV can have a good time.

And as I talked to Harmonix, we talked about the fact that previously unavailable genres could look really fantastic in the game – yes, Norwegian Death Metal, your time has come! (Now, if we just got vocal harmonies as in The Beatles…)

I also expect some really, really odd submissions in the community. (“The World’s Hardest Rock Band Track,” anyone?)

Meanwhile, I’m hoping that Harmonix will re-release their back catalog, Frequency and Amplitude, on Xbox Live Arcade, and then doubly hoping they’ll let people author for them, for all of us fans of electronic music with unusual instrumentations, and the unusual gameplay mechanic of those games. (Their new PSP game, incidentally, quietly returns to that game style.)’

On the other hand, I don’t expect Harmonix to do everything here. If this works, Rock Band could be just the beginning.

Changing the World of Music

Harmonix has long talked about wanting to create a “platform” for music, but I think it’s really Rock Band Network that could get them there. Rock Band alone can’t be the exclusive future of interactive music – that’d be boring. But if Harmonix pulls this off, it could be a real catalyst for transforming all recordings into an interactive experience – not just the established hit parade we’ve already seen. And that’s utterly huge.

I also think it’ll be well worth the time of CDM to watch as this evolves. We talk a lot about alternative controllers, about interaction design, about the merging spheres of games and music, but also about musical integrity and creativity and new outlets for spreading musical material. Rock Band Network could bring all of those ideas into mainstream consciousness in new ways.

And, oh yeah – it’ll be a heck of a lot of fun to play those tracks, and to get people playing your music. Stay tuned.

Sign up for the beta and get more information here:

http://creators.rockband.com/

Rounding up my catch-up-on-iPod/iPhone-stories, here’s one from the developer perspective – one that could face music creation developers on the entire platform.

The Apple iTunes App Store now faces the risk of becoming a victim of its own success. Music applications could be a big part of that, without some adjustments on Apple’s part. The problem is this: incoming music “fan” apps could flood out the music production apps that had enriched the mobile software platform since its debut. I think the need could be really urgent. Consider that part of the appeal of Apple’s mobile platform – yes, even in stark contrast to the Google Android on which I’ve been developing myself – is its spectacular real-time audio tools. Combine that with a disproportionately large number of Mac-using musicians, lots of ingenious apps build on Apple’s Core Audio platform, and we’ve seen a mobile platform with an extraordinary number of tools for music creation.

The problem now is that that unique set of powerful apps could get overwhelmed by essentially unrelated “music” apps. A developer who has asked to remain anonymous is already campaigning for a change. He does a good job of explaining the issue, and what might need to happen to fix it. If you’re a developer, you can add your support and feedback to the idea.

Here’s the full explanation:

Hi Peter,
I am writing you with this email I have been sending other developers on the Apple App Store. Although you probably cannot go visit the apple developer connection website because you dont have a membership, I thought you should be informed about the discussion brewing there. Here it is:

Recently the Music section of the App store has gotten very busy with a new type of app, lets call them Artist Apps or Fan Apps. Some of these Apps are great resources for fans and artists reaching out to their fans and potential fans, and some don’t live up to their potential.

However, they are joining a category that previously moved a lot slower, as the apps that had been populating this category were apps with a lot of development put into them and therefore sold at a higher tier usually- but were released at a slower pace. A look at the top 100 paid music apps illustrates this nicely.

Customers perusing the music section to catch that next great sound generating tool (for example), could check in on the new releases section perhaps once a week or even once a month and have the opportunity to check out all the great new apps that had been released, without worrying that one was missed.

Now however, these newer Artist apps have flooded this category, and great apps are getting lost in the shuffle. On one day last week, there were 21 pages of Artist or Fan apps, with a few “other” apps strewn in the mix here and there, very hard to pick out of the jumble.

I understand that this may be happening in other categories for other reasons, but I only concentrate on the Music section since I am a music producer and music App writer.

I propose that we all get together to come up with some suggested sub-category names for the music category. I will start the list off and hopefully some of you will chime in and give suggestions for other categories or add more definition to a sub-category that is alredy here.

Once enough input is received, I will compile it into one bug report for Apple. i will then post the bug# for everyone to include with any correspondance with Apple on this issue.

New sub-categories for the Music section of the App store.

Music Creation:
Synthesizers, drum machines, sound generators, scoring and notation, sequencers, DJ apps, recorders (multi track)

Music Utilities:
Lyrics apps, iPod interfaces, visualizers, iPod controllers, song recognizers, concert finders,

Learning:
Metronomes, guitar and voice tuners, music slow downers, guitar tutors, chord apps,

Artist Apps/Fan Apps:
iLike apps, Deadmou5 app, PVD App, Underworld App, NIN, etc.

Radio Tuners:

AOL Radio, Pandora, Last.fm, individual radio stations

Please visit the Apple iPhone developer forums and voice your opinion/support!

https://devforums.apple.com/message/107989#107989

Definitely voice your thoughts to Apple, but I’d love to hear what you think here on CDM, too (especially since I know some folks at Apple do read this site).