A rather bleak home page greets me when I go to www.mtvmusic.com to watch the miracle that is the MTV Music website, where we now can watch music videos, all for free, right there in the web browser. The home page has a rather pretty lead image, well, a number of images in fact, but below that, there’s just an unbalanced column of video thumbnails with the title “Vintage Videos”. But who cares?! I want my Run DMC!

You can even embed the videos! A very nice initiative by MTV Netwworks. But the website doesn’t seem all that… developed. Well, it is “Beta”. The FAQ page says “Coming soon… ” with the page title “Copyright”, and as you can see in the column to the left, the information about the video, comments and rating is rather confusing. There’s no call to action below the Rate This Video title for one. And the comment for this video is inaccessible. If you look under MTV Music API, there’s a note stating “For now, registration is only required for commenting in our forums.“, but that’s the forums. I figured maybe you have to be logged in to view the comment, but there’s no way to register! Nor to sign in!

I’m not all that impressed by the quality of the videos, but I’m not the one to complain. The audio sounds pretty good, I guess that’s more important. Maybe the video quality will improve in time like when YouTube rolled out “High Quality” videos, but I wouldn’t count on that being any time soon.

So after a few minutes of digging around, watching some dandy videos, I thought “What about censorship?”. So I tried searching for the word “F*ck” (spelled out properly of course, don’t ask me why this particular search term, I just wanted to search for something dirty), and I got this semi censored result:

Pretty funny ey? I also watched the notorious video “Lapdance” by N.E.R.D. and it was the clean version. This doesn’t necessarily mean they censor videos though. I can’t think of a song that includes a dirty word that might tell me if they do censor videos at the moment, but I’m sure you can find one if you start digging through the archives.

Yo, VIP! Let’s kick it! Alright, Stop!

Word to ya mother

The startup Spotify has really achieved something here. I’m using the Spotify application on my MacBook Pro, and it’s running so smoothly. It’s a very light application streaming music to your computer. It looks very much like iTunes in many ways, only the interface is dark grey. I am using the free account with the invite I got, which is the advertising-funded version of Spotify. So far I’ve heard one third-party ad, and some Spotify ads saying I should get Premium account if I love music as much as they do. Which I might very well do. The ads seem to run with an interval of 20 minutes, and the Spotify ad was only about 10 secs, while the third-party ad was more like 25-30 seconds long. Not bad at all. Oh, as I’m typing this, I just heard two shorter third-party ads in a row.

There is no way to browse music, not by artist, nor by album, songs or genres. It’s all search based Google style, even with spelling suggestions if you get no hits on your search. However, you can get creative with your searches, like they state in their FAQ: “you can search for genres by writing genre: followed by the genre you want to find, like genre:Trip-hop.“. That particular search results in 0 hits though.

I have read some reports from people saying that they are experiencing connection problems with the application, which is to be expected I suppose. It is after all only a few days old. I have however not had any problems at all in the two days I’ve been using it. When connection issues occur, cached music still works. The application caches as much music as you let it cache (up to 100gb) under settings to minimize network strain, which is calculated to run below 256 kbit/s, which means 3G/Turb-3G connections should handle the traffic easily.

The sound quality is nice. Not fantastic, but very good at the very least. They say in their forums, as people asked about this and some had some complaints about the audio sounding “flat”, “We are currently using Ogg Vorbis q5, i.e. up to approx. 160kb/s.“, which seems fair to me.

A bonus feature if you use Growl is a nifty message like this when the song changes, if you change it yourself etc. Beautiful indeed.

It responds to the Play/Pause, Previous and Next buttons on my Apple Wireless Keyboard, which was a surprise, and I think that’s a great feature! However, it does not respond to the Apple Remote Control, which is a real shame, that would have made the experience (for me) far greater, as I have my Mac Mini and iPod at a distance in the office, controlling them remotely. Obviously, it’s a feature outside the norms of delivering a great software application to the general public, but if we’re really lucky, and participate in the forums, we might see it happen.

Some more information about Spotify, which is a Stockholm, Sweden-based company, you can check out this article on TechCrunch and here’s an official video:

Spotify – the story from Spotify on Vimeo.

Nu tar Universal steget och utmanar de illegala sajterna med gratis nedladdning på nätet. En första version av tjänsten lanseras i december.

Vivendi Universal, världens största musikkoncern, kommer via internetsajten Spiralfrog erbjuda gratis nedladdning av musikfiler på internet i Nordamerika. En så kallad betaversion av tjänsten lanseras i december. Universal Music Group (UMG), som ingår i Vivendi-koncernen, är ledande i branschen och hade i fjol en marknadsandel på 25,6 procent.

U2, Eminem och Elton John ingår
Bland bolagets artister finns världskändisar som U2, Eminem och Elton John. “Unga konsumenter kommer att få ett övertygande och lättanvänt alternativ till piratsajterna”, säger Spiralfrogs vd Robin Kent i ett pressmeddelande. Det var på tisdagen oklart om det även blir en europeisk version av tjänsten i framtiden enligt Amy Levin, taleskvinna för Spiralfrog. Enligt Kent kommer sajten att bli ekonomiskt hållbar om annonsörerna är relevanta för den unga publiken. Målgruppen för satsningen, musikkonsumenter mellan 13 och 34 år, beskrivs samtidigt som “en dröm för annonsörer” av vd:n.

Nedladdning växer kraftigt
Marknaden för nedladdning av musik på internet omsatte i fjol 1,1 miljarder dollar och växer kraftigt. Den domineras för närvarande av Apples Itunes, som säljer musikfiler för nio kronor styck på den svenska marknaden. Enligt tidningen Financial Times har Itunes omkring 80 procent av den legala marknaden för nedladdningar av musik från nätet. I fjol såldes 60 miljoner mp3-spelare, som används för att lyssna på de nedladdade filerna och antalet nedladdade musikfiler uppgick totalt till 420 miljoner, enligt branschorganet IFPI:s senaste rapport. Men musikindustrin brottas sedan länge med piratsajterna, som enligt IFPI står för 98 procent av nedladdningarna på nätet. Hur artisterna, vars alster kommer att finnas på Spiralfrog, ska få betalt är ännu oklart. Spiralfrog förhandlar samtidigt med andra musikkoncerner om samma typ av avtal som det som nu träffats med Vivendi Universal.

Source: expressen.se