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Inside R.E.M.'s online music strategy

Mathew Ingram, 05/09/08 at 10:39 AM EDT

There's a great series of guest posts over at Hypebot by Ethan Kaplan, the vice-president of technology at Warner Brothers Records, who provides a detailed breakdown of the online strategy behind the release of R.E.M.'s latest album, Accelerate. The band was apparently underwhelmed with the response to its previous albums, and decided that a gangbuster online push was one way to help reverse that tide, and Ethan was the natural architect for such a strategy, given his technology background -- but also his intimate relationship with the band, which began over a decade ago when he created a fansite at the age of 16.

The strategy eventually included six different websites and sub-sites set up before and after the release of the album. And that's in addition to the use of existing sites such as Murmur, the band's community website and forum (which evolved out of Ethan's original fan site), where bootleg audio of the songs started appearing months before the official release, taken from live rehearsals and promotional events. There was also REMDublin.com, which was set up as a central place for fans who attended the band's Dublin 5-night series of shows to congregate and share their experiences. As Ethan notes: "Michael Stipe encouraged people to photograph and videotape the shows from the stage."

The band set up a similar site later on called REMHQ Tour, which aggregated all fan-created content -- Twitter comments, Flickr photos, blog posts, YouTube videos and so on. I checked it out several times, and it was an incredible, almost real-time view of what fans were thinking and doing, and there was some excellent material there that would likely never have been seen by as many people if it was scattered all over dozens of Web services. Ethan says in the second part of his series that the site got over 3000 items submitted.

At the end, Ethan says: "The beauty of all of this of course is that none of this would have been possible ten years ago. While people cry for the old days of the music business, I find it exciting that we can experiment so willingly and easily (and cost effectively) with technology. The very technology people say would be the death of the industry is the very technology which provided REM and WBR the ability to stretch our boundaries [and] help a band reinvent themselves." Let's hope that some other artists and record executives get that message.

Metallica is cool with online leak

Mathew Ingram, 03/09/08 at 11:56 AM EDT

My, how times have changed. It wasn't all that long ago that the heavy-metal band Metallica was known for its strident opposition to online music services such as Napster, since the group claimed that they were nothing more than a front for piracy. Now, the band is not only streaming its own unreleased songs through its website -- Mission Metallica -- and offering fans the ability to download high-quality tracks before the CD is actually released, but the boys don't even seem to mind that the entire album has leaked online already, apparently as a result of a French record store selling copies before the September 12 official release.

In an interview with a radio station in San Francisco on Tuesday, drummer Lars Ulrich -- who was the front-man for the group during its fight with Napster -- seemed to be taking the whole event in stride. "Listen, we're 10 days from release," he said. "I mean, from here, we're golden. If this thing leaks all over the world today or tomorrow, happy days. Happy days. Trust me -- 10 days out and it hasn't quote unquote fallen off the truck yet? Everybody's happy. It's 2008 and it's part of how it is these days, so it's fine. We're happy."

Lars is right about one thing: leaks have become part of the record business in the digital age, whether bands and record labels like it or not. Artists such as Britney Spears and Gnarls Barkley have reportedly moved up the dates of their album releases due to early leaks, and some artists (such as rapper The Game) have even leaked their own albums online, under the assumption that someone else is going to do it anyway. At least that way they get to control the quality of the music: In the case of the recently leaked tracks from Chinese Democracy -- the long-awaited album from Guns and Roses -- both the band and its label were reportedly upset because the songs weren't finished yet.

A glimpse of the old Metallica seemed to rear its head earlier this year, when the band held "listening parties" for some music bloggers to introduce them to the new album, and then apparently got upset when those blogs wrote about their impressions of the disc. But after the incident got some attention in the blogosphere, the band released a statement saying that it was unaware of the legal letters that had gone out to the bloggers (which it said came from someone at its management company) and that it didn't mind having the reviews online at all. Now, it's even embracing unofficial leaks of entire albums. What's the world coming to?

Like a CD, but for your phone

Mathew Ingram, 02/09/08 at 12:52 PM EDT

As Apple's iTunes music store has grown larger and larger -- to the point where, with more than five billion songs downloaded, it unquestionably dominates the world of digital music -- some nostalgic music fans continue to feel a twinge of nostalgia for the old days of compact discs, or even LP albums. Why? Not because of the music per se, but because of everything that came along with it: cover art, a lyric sheet, perhaps a cryptic note or two from the musician themselves for true fans to pore over and decipher.

Songs that are downloaded don't come with anything except a tiny image of the album cover, which some software users can see when they listen to a song on their Mac or PC. And while Google can produce the lyrics for virtually any song with a couple of clicks, it's just not the same. That's why even online music offers such as the ones from Trent Reznor of the Nine Inch Nails or David Byrne and Brian Eno include special packages that offer lyric sheets, album art and so on. Now, Apple is set to offer something that it says will bring the full album experience to the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The downloadable touch-screen application will come with the new album from the band Snow Patrol, and will reportedly offer many of the things that traditional album buyers have grown accustomed to: artwork, lyrics, behind-the-scenes photographs and more. According to a representative from the band's music label, users will be able to leaf through a digital booklet with all of that content, plus links to videos and other band-related material. The album, A Hundred Million Suns, is expected in October. Pricing for the iPhone app is unknown.

John Cleese gets social with his fans

Mathew Ingram, 20/08/08 at 2:10 PM EDT

Just a couple of years ago, legendary British comedian John Cleese said he was retiring from writing and performing, telling interviewers that he didn't think he could ever eclipse some of his earlier television hits such as Monty Python or the Fawlty Towers series. But stepping back from doing prime-time comedy doesn't mean that Cleese has retreated from his fans -- far from it, in fact. They can now get closer to him than ever, since he has jumped on the Web 2.0 bandwagon and is involved in a surprisingly large number of different “social media” networks and services.

The 68-year-old comedian doesn't just have one website. He has three of them: one called Cleeseblog.com, including an active public forum where fans can post comments, another that hosts his archived podcasts -- which he has been doing for over a year -- and a third site that hosts his archived video blogs (which cost $1 to download) called Headcast.

Cleese also has a mini-social network of his own hosted by the startup Ning, called The Cheese Shop. But that's not all. The Monty Python star is also on Twitter, a kind of group chat/instant messaging service, where he has 2,300 people following his comments. Among other things, Cleese has posted messages on Twitter about looking for a new place to live, now that he has divorced his third wife and sold his California ranch for a rumoured $16-million.

For those who don't want to follow Cleese in all of these different forums, the comedian has also helpfully set up an account on FriendFeed, a kind of social aggregator that allows users to see what their friends are doing or posting on a number of different social-networking services, including their blogs, Facebook, Twitter and the photo site Flickr.

NewsCred wants to fix the news

Mathew Ingram, 19/08/08 at 12:49 PM EDT

Surveys often find that media consumers have a fairly low opinion of the credibility of the media, whether it's newspapers or television -- and the blogosphere isn't much better, with many readers seeing blogs as biased and in many cases not very credible.

NewsCred, a startup with offices in Geneva and Stockholm that just launched this morning, wants to try and help change that by allowing readers of news sites and blogs to say whether they think a particular report, story or blog post is credible or not. Those rankings are then aggregated by the site based on a proprietary algorithm, and readers are able to see an overall ranking for the news site or blog, as well as for individual authors or reporters.

Shafqat Islam, one of the co-founders of the site, says that NewsCred is trying to help restore some of the credibility that the media has lost over the years, because "access to credible and accurate news is a cornerstone of democracy." Islam says that by using the site, readers can create what amounts to their own online newspaper filled with reports from sources they and others see as credible and authoritative.

The NewsCred founder says that the site plans to add the ability to create individual user profiles, so that readers can see who else has been ranking different sites and what their likes and dislikes are, as well as adding more detail to the voting system. At the moment, users simply click a "credit" or "discredit" button, but Islam says that the site will be adding checkboxes so that users can say whether a story or source is factually inaccurate, biased, etc. when they discredit it.

Another site that has similar goals to NewsCred is NewsTrust.net, a non-profit service run by former journalist Fabrice Florin and an advisory board that includes Craigslist founder Craig Newmark (who has also provided financing for the site). NewsTrust is also a beneficiary of a multi-year grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

Bono leaks new U2 songs

Mathew Ingram, 18/08/08 at 11:40 AM EDT

It's hard enough for bands to keep their new songs from turning up on the Internet before their official release, thanks to slippery-fingered sound engineers and other underlings. Now they apparently have to worry about accidentally leaking new tracks themselves.

According to several published accounts in the UK press, U2 frontman Bono (also known as Paul Hewson) was relaxing at his villa in the south of France recently, and decided to play a few of the new songs from the band's upcoming album, which is said to be called No Line on the Horizon. He played them so loud, however, that a passer-by reportedly heard them, recorded several songs on his cellphone, and then uploaded them to YouTube.

The songs have since disappeared, and according to one report the sound quality was fairly low, filled with the cries of seagulls and other background noise. But the irony of the band's own lead singer accidentally broadcasting unreleased songs onto the Internet is pretty rich, especially since the band's manager, Paul McGuinness, has been so vocal about the dangers of piracy and the need for an "ISP tax" to compensate artists.

At least one business in Britain has been sued for something similar: The British Performing Rights Society launched a claim against the Kwik-Fit auto-repair chain, alleging that the company routinely played music in their garages that was so loud that customers could hear it. The group argued that doing so created a "public performance" and that the chain was liable for royalty payments as a result. The PRS has even launched a claim against the police in Lancashire for doing the same thing.

Bono, of course, owns the rights to U2's music, so it's unlikely that he will face any legal repercussions as a result of his "performance."

Download some hot 78rpm singles

Mathew Ingram, 15/08/08 at 3:48 PM EDT

At first, it seemed almost too good to be true: a website where one obsessed audio fan had encoded and uploaded thousands of rare and collectable 78rpm recordings, and was providing them for free to anyone who wanted them. And after an initial report from Wired magazine about Cliff Bolling, the website suddenly disappeared and was unreachable. Had he decided to take it down? Had the record industry sent legal takedown notices because some of the recordings were still under copyright? Was it some kind of prank?

As it turns out, the attention that Bolling's site got after the Wired piece was picked up by the popular blog Boing Boing and other online media outlets sent so much traffic to the website that his service provider -- a division of Web giant Yahoo -- pulled the plug, even though Bolling had an account that allegedly provided unlimited bandwidth.

According to a Wired update, the site was getting more than 6,000 hits an hour, after getting a fraction of that prior to the magazine story. Given that huge increase in traffic, Yahoo was apparently concerned that it would affect other account holders on the same servers. So it took the site down until it could get in touch with Bolling and confirm that it was legitimate traffic, and set up a plan to deal with it.

The site is now back online, with more than 3,700 freely available 78 tracks such as Cliff Steward's "Aba Daba Honeymoon" -- the first record Bolling says he ever owned, recorded in 1951. And the music buff says that he still has several thousand other 78s ready to capture and upload, which he expects will take him the better part of the next decade.

Update: (08/18/08)

The site appears to be down again -- as several people have mentioned, trying to access it brings up a Yahoo error message. No word on why it has been removed this time.

Chinese blogger detained on Twitter

Mathew Ingram, 14/08/08 at 11:08 AM EDT

Twitter -- the global chat service beloved by geeks and 'social media' fans -- often gets a somewhat deserved rap for being shallow, filled mostly with people's thoughts about the weather or what they had for breakfast. But every now and then something important happens, like an earthquake or a forest fire, and the service shows its true potential.

The most recent example was the Twitter stream from a Chinese "citizen journalist" or blogger named Zhou "Zhuola" Shuguang, who got a visit from some government officials after he showed up in Beijing to blog about the Olympics. They said they were there to talk with him about a breach of the government's "one child only" rule (which is more than a little odd, considering Zhou is childless), but it became obvious that what they really wanted was for him to leave Beijing.

Global Voices, the excellent global blogging project founded by Rebecca MacKinnon and the Harvard Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, caught wind of the detainment and started posting translations of Zhou's Twitter messages, updating the post with each new message as it came in.

Not only did several  officials put Zhou in a car and drive him back to his hometown, but others also apparently went to visit his parents, saying they wanted to take them out for tea (one of the officials who detained Zhou was an executive with the Changsha Mining Group, the company that Zhou's father worked for). In his last update the blogger said that he was unharmed, and that he was planning to return to Beijing accompanied by a journalist, in defiance of the authorities.

A fascinating story -- or at least the core of a fascinating story -- and all told entirely via Twitter. The "first draft of history" indeed.

Google Streetview: The new candid snapshot

Mathew Ingram, 13/08/08 at 11:26 AM EDT

Candid photography has been a popular pastime ever since cameras were first invented, with some photographers specializing in the impromptu capture of private moments, such as the unknown soldier and nurse kissing after the end of the Second World War. Google, however, has turned that phenomenon into an industry with its "Streetview" service, in which a growing fleet of camera-equipped cars take continuous 360-degree photos of streets throughout the U.S. and now other countries such as Britain and Australia (Google Streetview cars have been seen in Canada, but no photos have appeared yet on the Google Canada site). Even though the company has agreed to blur faces, license plates and other details -- and will remove photos when requested -- the service continues to generate controversy.

In Australia, for example, where Streetview only recently became available, a man who passed out on the curb in front of his house after a night of drinking was caught on the company's car-mounted camera, and explained to a local newspaper that he wasn't terribly happy about the incident, which he said occurred after a night of grieving over a friend who had passed away. The photo has since been removed, but copies of it are readily available elsewhere. In the same article, a woman complained that a photo of her parents' house shows her father and mother standing outside, even though her father has since passed away, and that she finds this troubling.

Some Streetview critics have taken their claims to the courts: Aaron and Christine Boring (yes, that's their real name) are suing Google because photos of their home appeared on the service, even though nothing unusual is happening in the shots. The couple claim that because they live on a private road, Google invaded their privacy by taking the photos. In an attempt to make the same point, a privacy-activism group supporting the case posted photos of Google co-founder Larry Page's home in California, including shots of cars in his driveway and what appears to be a security guard standing in a carport and drinking a can of pop. Google, meanwhile, has argued that there is no such thing as absolute privacy in the modern world (the Boring photo has already been removed).

Less personally invasive, but still fascinating, is the recent photo of a house on fire as the Google Streetview car drove past 1 Eagle Point Drive in Arkansas. Fire trucks can clearly be seen on the street next to the house, so obviously the Google driver didn't feel compelled to stop and do anything at the time. And earlier this year, there was a controversy over shots that appeared to show a drug deal going down on a street corner in Chicago; some complained that these reports stigmatized the black men in the photo, while others noted that the corner was a well-known hangout for drug dealers (who probably need to get better spotters if they can't manage to recognize a Volkswagen Beetle with a giant camera mounted on its roof).

Previous Streetview celebrities include the woman who flashed the Streetview car, the Google employees who lined up to wave -- and to send out a marriage proposal -- and the people in these shots.

Another Web comedy born on strike

Mathew Ingram, 12/08/08 at 1:07 PM EDT

Like the mini "baby booms" that suddenly explode nine months after a major power failure, the Hollywood writers' strike continues to produce unexpected benefits in the form of Web-based comedy.

One of the bigger booms came last month, when Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, came out with a three-part comedy-musical called Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog, starring Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion. The episodes were available for online streaming (although only for a day) and for download through iTunes, and also appeared on NBC's Hulu video portal, and were reportedly watched and downloaded millions of times.

Over the past couple of weeks, another Web comedy series has emerged, written by Saturday Night Live comedian Bill Hader and SNL writer Simon Rich and starring Hader and Superbad star Joe Lo Truglio as science-fiction movie fans who are standing in line for a Star Wars-style blockbuster (the series was directed by SNL star Seth Myers, who also appears, along with SNL's Jason Sudeikis). The seven-part series, called The Line, was created by Hader and Rich while they were walking the line during the writers' strike last fall, the same event that gave birth to Dr. Horrible.

The SNL connection doesn't stop with the writers, stars and director of The Line either: the Web series was produced by Broadway Video Entertainment, the production company run by Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, which also produces SNL, the comedy 30 Rock and Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Episodes of The Line, which was financed by Sony, first appeared on the Sony-owned video site Crackle and are now available on YouTube, Hulu and the video site Heavy.com (although the final episode is so far available only on Crackle and on AOL's video site).

Although the first few episodes of The Line were only viewed a few thousand times on Crackle and on YouTube, by the fifth episode the series seemed to have caught on with Web surfers: Episode 5 got more than 160,000 views on YouTube.

 

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