Monday, April 27, 2009

All in One

Music Online is a product of the Alexander Street Press and it is the largest resource available today for the learning of classical, jazz and world music.

It combines a variety of music forms in one interface. It includes music videos and audios, scores, reference content, biographies, opera videos and images. It is the broadest collection of music material in a digital form.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Video Music Lessons

GarageBand, a new music editing software released by Apple, allows people to enjoy music lessons online for as little as $4.99 a lesson.

Some artists, such as Norah Jones and John Fogerty, are already teaching people online how to play their popular songs on the guitar. 

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Pandora Radio and The Music Genome Project

Pandora Radio is a free online radio.  Pandora users can write a key word or an artist name and get results that are related to their search. 

Pandora Radio uses the Music Genome Project, a huge collection of songs and music elements which are analysed in order to help connect search words with the appropriate musical results.

Monday, April 20, 2009

YouTube Orchestra Concert

YouTube orchestra performed for the first time last week. After online auditions, 100 musicians were selected from 70 different countries. They all met for a few days of rehearsals and played a concert together in Carnegie Hall on Wednesday last week. 

This is for sure a big change in the music world and in the way by which an orchestra is assembled. Perhaps this will change the dreadful orchestral audition process. After all it is faster and cheaper both for the candidates and for the orchestras to hear musicians from all over the world on line than to have them all come to NY to play their 7 minutes auditions.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Pay What You Wish

The rock band Radiohead is realising its new album "In Rainbows" as a digital downloadable file which will only be available through the band's website. 

The interesting thing is that the band, which recently ended its long term contract with the record company EMI/Capitol, is allowing fans to pay what they wish for their album. 

Surprisingly the pay what you wish deal is worth while for the band. Radiohead sold many more records than they did for their last three albums. 

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Free Music?

The legal system provided copyright law in order to protect artists' creative output. This applies to artists, scientists, teachers or anybody that created something. 

The problem is that many people disregard copyright law,  and this disregard is made worse by the fact that the law is not always enforced. Even though some people have been sued for downloading copyrighted music from the Internet, millions of people continue to do so.

What does that tell us about the law? Is it any good if it is not fully enforced? And why do people choose to obey certain laws and ignore this one? Their behaviour suggests that people demand music to be free.
 
On the other hand the many people who use iTunes do pay for their music online. Maybe it's because iTunes presentation is and functionality is attractive to them.


Saturday, April 11, 2009

Vevo

The popular online video site, YouTube, and the biggest music company, Universal Music Group, join forces. The two decided to create a joint online site for music videos called Vevo.

Universal will contribute high level content to YouTube ab d YouTube will contribute its large audience to the equation. Combining these two elements can make for a very attractive platform for advertisers, which will increase the two companies' revenues.