Daytime Running Lights
The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
Grabb.it has revved up another notch.
Version 1.0 began in 2005 as a hobby project to learn Rails. Early 2007, we started from scratch on Grabb.it 2.0, released last May. Meet rev 3.
We’re shifting the focus to mp3 blogs – they’ve be around a while, but the new UI puts them out front. So if you love music and blogging, we’ll be doing a little of both around there, and you’re welcome to join us.
Here’s some old-time music I grabbed from the Berea Music Archive ages ago:
The big labels want music to be free to move about the internet (as long as they get a cut of it.) Who listens to major-label music anymore? Except as a joke. Wired’s Listening Post has a story on Jim Griffin’s plans for an ISP music tax.
Should the music industry apply top-notch accounting to the mp3 files that move over the last-mile, they might be surprised at the growing percentage of them which do not belong to any label, but are instead truly independent.
I’m a little doubtful that there will be a way for me, as an independent producer, to tag an mp3 file as my work, and the receive a share of the music-tax.
If anyone can do this fairly, Jim Griffin can. The technical and cultural hurdles to providing compensation for the garage-bands and bedroom mashup artists who will be making an ever growing slice of this pie are hard to overestimate. Who gets paid when I listen to The Grey Album?
If I only listen to stuff like the The Grey Album, where does my money go?
These questions may not be burning for Sony execs, but the right answer here could make all the difference in the cultural flowering the internet promises. Failing to answer them would mean just another litigation inspired tax (like the blank-cassette) that does little to encourage artistic effort.
Announcement ya’ll I just dropped the Grabb.it API Documentation and examples on a brand new Google group. I’m inviting you to come mix up our data, and providing some Javascript kit as well.
Click here for the Grabb.it Playlist API Documentation.
There are code examples and more REST theory on the way.
Embeded below is a simple Flash Player playing New Music from Grandpa Chris, a Grabb.it XSPF playlist:
(consider me surprised if that comes through your reader)
I spent the last week hacking up a rad bookmarklet that turns any page that links to mp3s into a continuous playlist. Here’s the screenshot, decorated with Skitch (thanks for the invite Robby!)
Click here to get it in your browser. Tested in Firefox, Safari, and IE 7. It even reads ID3 tags!
This is a comment I left on Lucas Gonze’s blog, in reply to persistent URLs for songs which is part of a big thread that’s been going on there for a few weeks. The subject is a web-architecture version of the “music on the web” question.
The hardest part about selling permalinks to less-technical musicians is that the value proposition is very abstract. Myspace’s angle: “get a bunch of people on your profile and maybe they’ll come to your shows.” Compare that to the open web: “put your music out there where anything can happen to it, and over time your rewards will be greater.”The open web seems scarier (the loss of control) and its upside so much more vague. Even for geeks, the value of URI-following can be hard to understand. Once you get it, you see that things aren’t “really” online until they are permalinked. The question is: How can we show artists the value of being really online?
The biggest single argument for the open web is the flourishing of conversation across the blogosphere. Music blogging is still in its infancy, but as MP3 blogs become the routine way for new music to break, I expect a change in the way artists and labels value being online.
We’ve heard a lot about how music bloggers are wading through crappy file-hosts and legal grey-water. Perhaps the best thing to do is build tools and examples that lead to communities of practice among MP3 bloggers, where permalinks and open standards can prove their value. If we want the creators of culture to respect the open web, the best strategy is to encourage music bloggers to understand and embrace those same principles.
Apologies for mentioning the iPhone thing. I’m getting sick of all the discussion too. Just one counter-point I need to make.
Certain negative comments I’ve seen on posts like the NY Times Bits blog disturb me deeply. The gist of the bad comments are “quit crying, baby, you took the risk and voided you’re warranty”. On them I call bullshit.
But the question is: where do people get the idea that one shouldn’t hack your own computer? My conjecture is that if you consider the iPhone as a fancy phone then it’s way cooler than anything LG is selling. But seeing it as a computer that happens to make calls and fit in your pocket, I’m offended and dismayed by Apple’s stance.
There is a reason Free Software advocates mean “free as in freedom” and to anyone who has been exposed to those ideas, any device which is essentially a computer, but which is actively hostile to its users, is deeply troubling. Computing (communications) and freedom go hand-in-hand, as we’ve seen time and again.
The enemies of freedom are scared by the widespread adoption of general purpose computing (it threatens their business model) and are trying as hard as they can to lock the doors. Should the new iPhone prove unhackable, it will show tyrants (and freedom fighters) that freedom and computing do not necessarily go hand in hand.
If Apple keeps this up much longer, they’ll go on my list of companies to put out of business. Freedom to compute as you wish is rapidly becoming as fundamental as freedom of speech, thought, and assembly. An enemy of freedom is an enemy of mine.
I always liked the darkness of Paul Simon’s 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover but was never that into that “bus/Gus” chorus.
Now Baltimore Bass Connection or maybe Chipset – it’s hard to tell these days, with everyone being so underground and all – has come out with a remix that got me motivated enough to track it down, scrape in from myspace, and give it a proper url for your listening pleasure.
I’d give you a link to related music on Grabb.it but I need to add some features first. Maybe just check out my mp3 blog for everything since my first Spank Rock post.
Hey we dropped another 2del.icio.us track
It’s up in two spots on the internets right now. CC BY SA is also it’s license.
Yes, this post is primarily for Grabb.it testing.
Turns out I got the chops! I won tickets to see Yacht on the Crystal Dophin.
Based on my Photoshopping experience, I now know not to put too many clones on a boat, especially if the sky is Jona.
Astute readers may have noticed the increasing coverage of Grabb.it related topics in my various feeds. We’ve been putting the spit ‘n polish on for release. Hodel 3000, etc.
Basically all the things we have to do to iterate quickly and surely once we deploy. If you want to follow Grabb.it more closely, we’ve started a tumblr:
just dropped these two tonight:
vishnu the plumber, a prayer for the future of water.
goodnight jesus – spoken word, a story from tonight’s party. uploaded using the other format of m f d z .
I painted the upstairs room blue and green and brought the speakers up from the basement. Now we’re cooking with FIRE!
Serious radness has begun to reenvelop my life. Last Friday, I started my work on the new At Dusk record. They are taking a new approach: this time it’s all about prolific writing and recording and (hopefully) about surprising themselves with an album that is recorded before they know it.
Yesterday, Alan came over and played some “strictly demos” on the piano. The concept for his new record could very well require 20 to 30 trained musicians to all work together at once, for a number of weeks. I call that ambitious, partly because it would be my job to see to it that the recordings sound good. Ambitious, but in a good kind of way.
I’m running my blog again, just like before, but with more power! So if you were accustomed to looking at the old Daytime Running Lights, now you’ll get accustomed to looking at the new.
If you’ve got the time and inclination, head over to the index page and check out the variety of feeds available. Some of you might rather subscribe to Livin’ or maybe even Music. There is a new party in town called Vinyl where I’m blogging my parents’ huge record collection, one Jerry Jeff Walker or freaky chilled-out flute player at a time.
