DRM-free Mexican music on emusic.com

One of the labels that supplied their music collection to emusic.com is a wide-known mexican record label, musart.  Some of the artists that arrived to emusic from this deal, and artists whose entire collection can now be obtained DRM-free are:

• Pepe Aguilar
• Antonio Aguilar
• Joan Sebastian
• Chalino Sanchez
• Paquita La Del Barrio
• Mi Banda El Mexicano
• Pancho Barraza
• Banda Los Recoditos
• … and more than 100 more.

Hopefully, we won’t see the end in mexican music record labels going DRM-free.  Unfortunately, Fonovisa, another great mexican music label, is not part of emusic.com, yet.  Will it be any time soon?

DJ Magnet attracts Digitial Music Collector

A few weeks ago I wrote about my methods of discovering music. In this post, I described how mixsets are a golden source for discovering music. I just discovered a new blog that I would be adding to my feed reader for this purpose: DJ Magnet. Not only does he provide mixsets, but individual mashups, as well.

“DRM in downloaded music will be gone”, says emusic.com’s CEO David Pakman

This is a great interview with emusic.com’s CEO David Pakman.  Emusic.com is my favorite music download store.  This article gives us a great insight on Mr. Pakman’s opinions regarding DRM.  Some notable quotes from David Pakman:

The average iTunes customer buys one song per month, spends about $10 a year on iTunes. The average eMusic customer buys 20 songs per month and spends $168.

EMI totally understands [music that plays everywhere] now. I think they made a courageous move. Obviously, the indies have done this since the beginning, and the indie market share has grown considerably in the last five or six years, while the majors have declined. They must be doing something right. I think another major will take the same approach this year, and then the other two will do it next year. DRM in downloaded music will be gone. Its days are numbered. There will still be DRM for subscription rental services.

Keep ‘em Coming

Another DRM-free MP3 Music Store: cdbaby.com.

While you are at it, pick up the album in mp3 format by the Vinyl Kings: A Little Trip.  A great band that closely resembles the beatles.  Here are a few quotes about the band:

“This, by all means, is the real thing.  The Beatles have split; long live the Vinyl Kings!” – Beatles Unlimited Magazine.

“Some of these songs could have been hits for the Beatles”  - BBC Radio Merseyside, Liverpool, UK

More DRM-free music stores

• PureTracks: This site really looks promising ($1 a drm-less tune) – can’t wait to give it a try.
• gBox: (coming soon) Universal and Google get together to sell DRM-free music.
• Walmart: jumping into the DRM-less music sales business – great, the consumer ultimately wins. Except if that consumer happens to be using firefox ;( in that case he is out of luck.
• 7digitial: a UK-based site for DRM-less music – haven’t tried this one out, yet.

A Genre is Suffering

Hip Hop is not dead, it just sucks: A great article with analysis of today’s Hip Hop. This Time.com article, gives us some figures to prove that the hip-hop, the once king of all genres, is now in a slipping slope downward.

While music-industry sales have plummeted, no genre has fallen harder than rap. According to the music trade publication Billboard, rap sales have dropped 44% since 2000 and declined from 13% of all music sales to 10%. Artists who were once the tent poles at rap labels are posting disappointing numbers. Jay-Z’s return album, Kingdom Come, for instance, sold a gaudy 680,000 units in its first week, according to Billboard. But by the second week, its sales had declined some 80%. This year rap sales are down 33% so far.

upcoming artists ask for YOUR $upport

There are three sites that allow music fans to support their favorite artists with what matters the most (initial start-up cash).  Each of these three sites offer a slightly different spin in the way they approach this, but the basic idea remains the same.

• strayform.com: artists make a proposal for a new project. If they get enough money from people who beleive in them, they create the product. After the product is completed, it gets delivered to the public for free.
• sellaband.com: users listen to up-and-coming artists’ music. If they like their music, they donate $10. After a band or artist reaches $50,000, they record an album in a studio and send all contributors the final product. Users have the freedom to withdraw their money from a band at any time before the band reaches their goal of $50,0000.
• amiestreet.com: songs start out as Free. As more people show interest in a song, the song keeps increasing in value – a true testament on how popular a song is.

This is a win-win-win system for all involve: Artist get more money by eliminating the middle-man, Consumers get low-priced DRM-less music, and the companies offering these services get their fair share

I haven’t looked around these sites, yet. Therefore, I don’t have any artist I can recommend. I *am* looking forward to listening to these artists and backing up those that are worthy.

via Techcrunch.

one giant leap towards my dream music player

I have been working on a Java Swing music player that is fast and can hold a huge collection of music files. I’ve had a sour taste with all of the music players out there – they behave very slow when all my music collection is loaded. I even have a sourceforge page for this application. I had the initial framework all wired up and was able to go through my folders and play my music files. My application, JMusicFiles, behaved rather fast (if I may say) : ) However, a few days back I bumped into a music player (Jajuk) that was written with the main emphasis of making it fast even for huge collections.

Rather than starting from scratch with JMusicFiles, I decided to put JMusicFiles to rest and start looking into contributing into Jajuk. Jajuk seems rather complete with features such as:

• traverse your collection by physical file structrue or by genre
• create xml reports and charts/graphs of your whole collection
• performs fast with my current collection of about 66GB

I still have many ideas that can still be added to Jajuk:

• suggest songs/artists I might like based on my current collection
• completeness percentage for an artist/genre (how much complete is my Metallica collection, for example. Furthermore, what songs do I need to complete my Metallica collection)
• quickly create a playlist (for example, some uninvited guests arrive at my house, therefore I create a quick playlist: medium to fast english songs with no explicit lyrics and filter out any country and hip hop genre songs)

I need to start going through their open tickets and see if any of my ideas have already been suggested or ideas I haven’t thought of.   I am looking forward to start contributing to Jajuk in the near future.