Matt Goyer: EmergentMusic

Here's some filler content: Free CDs!

I think we're going to stop giving away free CDs for a while because no one wants them. Maybe we'll start giving away free 0100101s. I hear it's trendy to do that.

It's that *free cd* time of the week again over at Emergent Music. So let me tell you about the free CDs we have even though none of you seem interested in *free* CDs:

honky mofo - honky mofo (Rock)
Sarah Fimm - Cocooned (Progressive Rock)

Now I'm glad to see that you guys, like myself, hate CDs, but come on, these are *free* CDs that we're giving away and I really hate it when Natalie wins because it just smacks of favoritism:

Linda M - This is Linda M [Pop]
macgregor - Beat Camp Tactics [Hip-hop]

Bidding ends tomorrow.

We also sent out second newsletter today. We're trying to send them out every Wednesday as a way of reminding you guys to bid on CDs.. If you want the newsletter then go sign up. If you think you're a better writer than us we'll gladly publish your ramblings/articles/letters as long as they're somehow related to music. Email me if you're interested.

Auctions end in two hours and so far no one has bid on one of them and I'd hate to have to put it up for auction again because what would tell that artist??

Kyler England - How Many Angels (current bid: 75pts)
Edie Carey - Call Me Home (current bid: 500pts!)
Jimmy Atto - Time Is Right (current bid: 0)

Emergent Music Auctions this week:

Spend a few minutes rating and writing new music recommendations in order to pick up some free CDs.

Edie Carey posted something on our website!

While you're waiting for me to detail our NYC adventures (which will have to wait till after work, then hockey, then dinner (because while Transpose sometimes pays me to blog I think they'd question paying me to blog about my vacation)) (or you can read John's abridged version) go bid on this weeks batch of CDs because if you don't I'll know that you don't love me. And really folks, these are like *free* CDs. What more could you want?

I almost forgot. Auctions for 5 albums end in two hours. Go bid now!

Lots of CDs up for auction! (Ends next Thursday).

Bid with EM Points which you can earn by spending only a few minutes rating and recommending new music.

CDs up for auction this week:

The Chris Ho Band - Picasso Blue

All it takes is few minutes of either rating or writing to earn enough points to earn free CDs.

Auction for Cameron Dezen's album Mary's Daughter ends today.

New album up for auction: Cameron Dezen's CD Mary's Daughter.

Emergent Music is pleased to welcome Christa who will be working with us to recruit artists and fans to the site. Christa's a student at Baker University and was looking for a job doing PR work involving non-mainstream music and we're more than happy to put her to work :).

Remember: EM auction ends today.

One of the CDs Rannie won a week or two ago came with a bonus CD with nine audio tracks and 73 MP3s. So you just never know!

Does someone want to suggest two albums for next week?

New albums up for auction! Thanks to Maeve who is visiting for the weekend and picked them.

The last two albums went for 200 and 100 points. Now consider that you get about 250 points for writing a recommendation an above average recommendation which means you only have to do about 15 minutes of work to get a free cd.

EM Auctions end in an hour!

If you ever rated or wrote a recommendation then you probably have some points and you can use those points to pick up either of those great albums.

Update: Congrats to chris_mahan and photojunkie for winning those two CDs. I'll hopefully have two more CDs up tomorrow (requests welcome).

Just a reminder that the EM Auctions (2 CDs are up for grabs) end tomorrow at 4pm EST.

As much as I want my girlfriend to win the two CDs currently up for auction I don't want to be accused of favoritism. So GO BID.

On EM, member profile pages now feature a 'views' column so you can see how many times people have viewed a revision of a recommendation (note: a view is only counted if the viewer is logged in so it doesn't log unlogged-in views).

In a day or two the number of views for a revision will be a link and will click through to more detailed info.

Here is my member profile.

Two new albums up for auction at Emergent Music:

Sarah Dougher: The Bluff
Jessica Weiser: After Silence

Auction ends: May 30 (a Thursday) @ 4pm.

You can bid on these albums with EM points which you can earn by rating and recommending new music.

EM Top Scorers List gone!

Instead we've replaced it with a 'Top Scorers Today' because while I'm sure Rannie enjoyed his perch at the top it was time to make the list more dynamic and more accessible.

So go rate and recommend some new music (I don't yet know if I recommend Melissa Ferricks new CD though..) and watch your name appear.

Some of you (Paul, Dave,..) have noticed that Gary & Bob re-worked the math. They assure me that you haven't lost any points and that under the new math you will in fact receive more. Please direct any comments about this to the EM discussion board.

Custom RSS Feeds From Emergent Music

If you find our current Radio Userland driven feed not flexible enough for your hardcore RSS needs then please check out our new dynamic RSS feeds (we're using RSS 0.92).

We know have the following feeds:

And you can limit how many items you want in each in addition to filtering by genre.

Send your complaints my way if you have any.

Hopefully this helps Benny who was trying to read our RSS feeds with his iPod.

I'm working on custom RSS feeds for Emergent Music.. Here's one for me. Now when I click on it in IE nothing happens. What am I doing wrong? Why doesn't it display a nice XML document? It seems to work in Opera and Netscape..

Emergent Music.com as seen on TV Guide

There was a week there before exams when there was a big EM lovefest going on. Lots of people were posting new recommendations and chit-chatting in the comments. Things have since slowed and I'm wondering what we can do to get the excitement back?

Another batch of CDs should be going out to some of you EM fans. By request here is a list of closed auctions to see who won what.

There is now only one open auction so if you have suggestions for more CDs that we could put up then drop me a line.

You can now see the the last 10 changes made on EM.

RSS feeds for all this kind of stuff will be coming soon.

While I finish the feature below.. Radio users will want to check out our EM weblog which if you subscribe to will deliver music enclosures via Radio to your desktop.

Gary outlines his plan for creating a new alternative music industry in Three Steps To Freedom.

Is Gary a visionary or just another dot commer with a dream? Be sure to let him know because he wants your comments.

Update: Mark Cuban agrees 'with the thoughts' but believes we need signed artists which IMHO defeats the purpose.

Enclosures test.

Note that's not a 'real recommendation' but it is a great song.

I *have* to get payloads done and then introduce Adam to EM. (How Adam preps for a radio show).

You can now sign up for an email subscription of our Emergent Music weblog (thanks to Bloglet (thanks Curt!)).

Gary really has been taking a beating at K5 and responded with this long explanation that starts:

I have noticed that in the discussions here, there seems to be a fundamental assumption on the part of some intelligent people that we are being... how do I say it... stupid in our approach. That we haven't even considered certain obvious issues and problems and strategies. That the first thing an intelligent reader of these threads might think of is obviously a better strategy than ours.
I think that such assumptions are made because intelligent people can get jaded by the amount of crap out there. There ARE many crappy web sites out there, created by people who think that good marketing, rather than good technology, is the way to create a successful company.

But if you wade through his 1,951 word response you will see that Gary has been around a long time and understands what he's doing.

This K5 situation reminds of Fairtunes' first Slashdotting in which we were attacked for a number of reasons some them including:

We'd never actually send the money to the artists
How would *we* find the artists
Tipping will never work
Our business model wasn't viable.
Our costs were too high

You get the point.

You can now see what recommendations need rating (thanks to Paul for suggesting this).

Gary's K5 submission was accepted as a story: The Technology Behind the Emergent Music Web Site but of course the comments are of much more interest than the story is.

Also 3 auctions are ending tomorrow so if you have some EM points and want to pick up and album or two go bid on them now.

We're tossing around suggestions for new text ads for EM.

Bob suggested:

Emergent Music
Come give Gary a hard time.

Ah well. It killed me! :)

Gary submitted The Technology Behind EM to Kuro5hin (you might have to be logged in to read it) (and a user there recommended he post the article (i.e. we're not spamming K5!)).

Emergent Music is a Web site for the purpose of identifying the best undiscovered music. A key problem it faces is motivating people to do the work involved in finding that music, such as inputting ACCURATE ratings, reliable recommendations of music, etc.

Update: I've never been a big K5'er so its interesting to see its engine in action. I'd also note that we get an excellent click through rate for K5 which is why we keep buying ads there. And hey if you have recommendations on where we should be buying ads then let me know.

The Emergent Music weblog (w/ rss feed! Subscribe today (if you're a Radio/RSS feed junkie)).

Basically when a recommendation becomes very good it gets published to this weblog. And I personally endorse all those recommendations you see there today (they rock!).

When my exams are over (they're Monday & Tuesday) I'll go get dirty in the RSS sandbox. Till then you'll have to amuse yourselves with the above.

Bob has replaced our elcheapo firewall with something much more heavy duty (and costly!). In other words: There should be no more of those brief annoying outages that always came at the worst possible times.

In celebration of this milestone I give you a list of artists on the site.

Emergent Music Discussion Board now open! Take that Yahoo.

Tell me if you find any bugs..

This is the nice thing about being a small company.. You get things done quickly. We made the decision just before noon to drop the Yahoo thing and later this afternoon we have an alternative solution in place.

Seeing as how Yahoo Groups sucks so much (it took 7 hours for my post to get posted yesterday) I'm rolling our own discussion board. Should be up by the end of the day.

Anyone have any suggestions on how we resolve the Album vs Songs vs Artist problem?

I'm specifically talking about how some song recommendations are morphing into album recommendations and vice versa. I think we all agree that we can't remove song recommendations from the system (as much as Natalie would like to do so) and we can't remove album recommendations from the system either (like Bob has proposed). We need both in there. We just need to find a way to get them to work together.

So if you have a suggestion we're listening.

Are you an Emergent Music Fan?

By popular demand: You can now navigate our fan list.

While the project manager is on vacation the engineers will add unasked for features:

It's a subtle difference but you can comment on both 'the music' and a 'specific recommendation'. So please keep music comments in the music discussion area and blah blah blah.

You can find those links on our stats page.

Also, I used to be able to keep up with all the new music recommendations but alas, no longer.

Maeve, check out my roommates profile, he's your soulmate! :)

Jenny has more comments on Emergent Music:

The problem with these types of sites is that the information stays on their site - it doesn't travel with me. I visit fewer and fewer sites these days as I channel my news, information, and commentary through the news aggregator in Radio. If I could have a separate page to automatically pull in new music recommendations, movie reviews that match my tastes, etc., I'd be consuming far more products than I do now.

Rest assured that we at Emergent Music will be playing with RSS feeds in the near future. After all 66% of the team are Radio webloggers!

Imagine: Feeds by genre, feeds by quality, feeds by person doing the recommending,...

And Rannie's EM pitch is better than mine. Also thanks to him we have a ton of new recommendations today.

Emergent Music went down again today so it's obviously not Resin or Tomcat. While it was down I put Apache up and we couldn't even connect to Apache.. So there must be a problem with our kernel settings. The weird thing was that while the site was down there was someone connected to port 80 in SYN_RCVD state (info on SYN_RCVD attacks).

The bids are slowly trickling in so my question is this.

What CDs would you like to have the opportunity to review and perhaps recommend if you liked them? If you guys could suggest some that you would bid on if we had them then I'll go out and try and get them.

Update: I'm beginning to go through and add some albums to the auction (we're up to 5) so please contact me ASAP if you have an album in mind.

Hey Look. Someone recommended Ember Swift.

It's time to promote the hell out of Emergent Music and get more people writing, rating, and improving the new music recommendations.

Any suggestions on places to buy text ads? (We have ads running on Metafilter, Kuro5hin, Blogger and Daypop).
Any suggestions on copy for text ads?
Anyone know any artists who'd like to send us review copy of CDs that we can auction off?
What discussion boards should I be spamming? (Of course I won't *really* spam them :) )

We made the links to the free songs much more accessible: Check out the main list (notice the new 'listen' column).

And so far Resin is doing an excellent job.

If no one else bids on the two CDs up for auction then Natalie is going to win them and I don't want to hear you guys whining about favoritisim when she does.

We switched from Tomcat to Resin in an attempt to fix these whacked out connectivity problems we've been having with our site. So hopefully things are better now.

Attention: Mark, Paul, Maeve, Ken, Nat, Aj, Dave, Ming, Rafi, Benny, Lily, Jenn, Chris,...

You guys are all on our Top Scorers List which means you have points. Which means you can spend them! We have two CDs up for auction that you can bid on *today*.

If you too want points to cash in for CDs then get over here and start rating/writing!

There's a bunch of new recommendations so check em out. Rate em. Improve em. Create some new ones.

Tip. Adjust the age control on the main music page if you want to see newer stuff.

Emergent Music: Uncover the undiscovered in new music is now officially launched.

In my own words I'd describe EM as:

A site with collaborative new music recommendations that the community in turn rates and then our fancy math (based on Bayesian statistics) figures out not only the best recommendations but also the best people at creating and improving them (who we then reward).

It's part MetaFilter, part Slashdot, part CNET, part Amazon and part Wiki. It's a place you can go everyday to find out about new music; new music that is being suggested by the community not new music which is being recommended by a radio station funded with payola.

Gary has written an open letter to the EM Community that you might be interested in (but it's rather looooong).

I think I failed to mention: Rate/write recommendations, get FREE CDs. Yes I know the CD is dead. I'm the one who told you so. But hey, earn some points and start bidding on what's available.

This is a perfect example of our unique collaborative process.

Gary liked my Rachel Smith recommendation and expanded on it by refining the genre and adding more details after giving her free music a listen. You're of course welcome to expand on what we wrote making this recommendation even better.

Also, Ming recently wrote a recommendation for Shed Seven but I'm not much of a Brit Rock fan. So no comments here but if you're a brit rock fan give it a listen and if you can improve his recommendation or if it's perfect then rate it so!

Shift: Cool things get 15 seconds these days, not 15 minutes (via Ev). For a more in-depth look at cool check out PBS' Merchants of Cool. It's unfortunate that you can't stream the MoC video.. I have a copy of it in Winnipeg if you're interested :).

The other day I was on Shift and couldn't believe how cheap a subscription was and before I knew it I had signed up for a subscription. Price for the impulse buy is the moral of that story. FYI: I'd definitely impulse buy more CDs at $10CDN then at $18.

Update: The Shift story talks about a Rachel Smith so I clicked through to her IUMA site and downloaded some music (4 songs) and wrote a recommendation. Check her out.

Update on Sunday: Playing hockey tonight with a very bad hangover was a very bad idea.

Lots more digital music articles this weekend.

The NY Times magazine leads the pack with a long list of articles though the digital music critics tend to agree that the Where Music Will Be Coming From article is missing the mark. I'd of course debunk it for you but there is work to be done. But I would like to point out this paragraph which makes a strong case for Emergent Music:

The quality least plentiful in a world of rampant free copies is attention. Each year more than 30,000 new music titles are released (or rereleased) into a very cluttered head space of new movies, new TV shows, new books, new games, new Web sites. No matter what your musical appetite, there are not enough hours in a lifetime to listen to but a tiny fraction of the global supply. People will pay simply to have someone edit the music and recommend and present selected material to them in an easy and fun manner. That is why producers, labels and the related ecology of reviewers, catalogers and guides will continue to make a living: they counter our natural lack of attention for the 10 million albums we can expect to see in another 50 years. In the end, an awful lot of music will be sold in the territory of the free because it will be easier to buy music you really like than to find it for free.

The MSNBC article, In the dorms, where are the stereos? quotes the stat:

23 percent of the U.S. population aged 12 and over have downloaded a music or MP3 file off of the Internet.

Which if you believe copying music is illegal means that 23% of the US population should be fined/jailed. CNET also recently ran a story about music on campuses entitled Schools declare file-swapping truce.

And Yahoo has a piece on the new indie friendly Morpheous which I remain very skeptical about.

And now, back to work.

Update: And this PDF of what's on Beck's iPod is pretty cool. I'd love to see the playlists for all my favorite artists.

We need more people to rate the recommendations at Emergent Music to test our almost functional math (disclaimer: I was not involved with the math (so therefore it probably works)). While doing so please keep in mind our suggested rating criteria.

The LA Times: 'O Brother' CD Puts Lost Highway Records on Map talks about how radio programmers completely dropped the ball on the 'O Brother' soundtrack because programmers are 'are risk-averse, and they're more worried about people tuning out than they are interested in drawing people in'.

"There's a disconnect when a phenomenon like 'O Brother' isn't even talked about on the radio station," Lenski said. "Here, programmers are saying, 'We know better than you.' That's a mistake. They all missed this, and they'll probably miss the next big thing."
Moreover, an analysis of Internet file-swapping services suggests that contrary to some programmers' contentions, the music of "O Brother" gained a following among fans of more contemporary country. Data from Los Angeles research firm BigChampagne shows that among fans who downloaded songs from the soundtrack, the acts most frequently downloaded are mainstream country stars, including Alan Jackson, George Strait and Toby Keith--the same artists who top the playlists of many country stations.

If you can't trust the radio programmers, and you can't trust the labels, then who can you trust? [cough]EmergentMusic[/cough]. It's all about finding better 'music filters' because the traditional filters are failing not only us the consumers but the artists as well (having to sell 500,000 to 700,000 to break even is ridiculous!). Hopefully we've found a way to find those filters.

Moses Avalon's royalty calculator (via MeFi).

Dave would also pay for music if the music industry let him. That makes two of us. And so Mary asks what about EMusic?

What about EMusic? When it first burst onto the scene we rejected it for four reasons:

Selection
Cost (it used to be pay per download and I think it was $1.50 a song).
Encoding rate (was 128kbps)
Questionable artist compensation (we enquired what the artists got of our $1.50 and they had no clue what we were talking about)

To be fair and to inform you guys I just spent some time on the site. First impressions:

Improved fee structure. All you can eat is good.
Canadian Friendly. Many of the new services are available only to Americans. EMusic has no such restrictions.
200,000 songs available. Sounds like a lot eh? Try plugging in your top 5 favorite artists and see how many songs they have available for download. I counted 2.
MP3s! All songs are in MP3 format which of course rocks, but they're..
Low quality. While many don't mind if their songs are encoded at 128kbps the consumer who is willing to use their credit card online probably does care about quality. I'd prefer to see at least 160kbps.
They compensate artists!. From their faq: 'EMusic splits all of the profits from membership fees 50/50 with the label or artist.' (Of course we don't know how much the label splits with the artist...)

But hey, if EMusic has what you're looking for your search for music online is over. Of course the astutue reader like Mary will notice that EMusic is now owned by Vivendi who also owns Universal (see David's chart). Of course wouldn't it be nice if Universal content were made available in MP3 format on EMusic? I'd pay for that instead of using Pressplay, an online music subscription for which Universal provides content.

Are there any EMusic subscribers amongst us? Anyone have an experience they want to share?

I was a little hesitant about posting that music & porn industry post but it looks like I'm not so far off. From The Guardian: Why sex still leads the net (via Dazereader).

Ashe is something of a pioneer: a porn star who has crossed the wire. Although known in internet circles for some time as that rare breed - a profitable e-entrepreneur - other dot.com executives were initially reluctant to welcome the porn model into the fold. But as other companies struggle to emulate her success, Ashe has found herself in demand as a technological consultant and keynote conference speaker.

Of course not everything is as rosy as can be in the porn business according to an article last month in Wired entitled The Naked Truth.

In 7 hours the IBM, RIM, and EmergentMusic co-ops are going skiing (if it's possible to go skiing one hour outside of Toronto!). Should be interesting.

David's now written two recommendations for EmergentMusic. One for the I Am Sam Soundtrack and another for Phantom Planet's TheGuest. And I didn't even have to twist his arm to write them! With the recently added discussion features you can discuss both his recommendations and the music behind them and of course if you think you can do a better job you're welcome to take a shot at it.

A whole bunch of changes just went live at EmergentMusic (translation: I've introduced more bugs). Feel free to go break things and then talk about it. Some of the features include:

They're not reviews, they're recommendations
Get points for writing and rating reviews
Soon you'll be able to cash in points for CDs
Comment on recommendations
Comment on the music
Simplified the text (but you can be the judge)
A weird weblog feature that will be turned on soon

If you wrote a review a while back and want to get paid for it email us (contact *at* emergentmusic.com) your address so we can mail it.

Where do you find your new music?

Art of the Mix: Natalie posted Maeve's Don't Diet Riot here. AoftheM is similar to the slicker Uplister but Uplister's slickness came at an expense and they're now Fucked.
Mix Matcher: They suggest a theme you suggest the music. This coming week the theme is 'Places in Canada'. I suggested Bobcaygeon by the Hip. (MixMatch is also hotlinking album covers from Amazon.. Is that illegal?)
Please add to this list in the comments

Garageband.com is offline:

To conserve cash as we endeavor to close another distribution agreement, we have pulled the garageband.com website off line. This means that you will not be able to access any of the site's music or information.

This is notable because www.emergentmusic.com is quite similar to GarageBand. What really boggles me is that they don't even have enough cash to put up a simple 'maybe we'll be back soon' page?

David Weekly put together a great chart showing which record label owns which properties. It's very cool if you're into that media conglomerate incest thing.

So the EmergentMusic contest just didn't work. Our goal was 200 reviews and we got 43. So the obvious conclusion is that the contest was a poor motivator (now why is that?). Feeling bad that I had conned a bunch of you into writing a reviews on the premise of the contest we felt we had to do something for those of you who wrote reviews. The compromise we've reached is that if you created a review we're going to send you $10USD and if you edited one then you'll get $1USD. So those of you who thought you were going to win probably hate me while those of you who stood no chance of winning now have some extra pocket money :).

If I can resist blogging long enough to get some work done we're going to be 'releasing' a new cut of the website on Monday or Tuesday which will incorporate some new ideas which quite simply will enable people who review and rate to earn points which can be redeemed for CDs (and in the future other 'stuff'). Concrete rewards for concrete work.

Update: Points for written reviews will work retroactively and Gary remarks the early predictive raters get the most points so they should rate NOW!

If you have any thoughts on how to motivate people to review feel free to blab away. Or if you think our idea sucks then I want to hear that too.

If you write a review in the next 4 hours for EmergentMusic I promise you that you will not be disappointed.

Update 1: Thanks guys. You did an awesome job. I urge you all to watch for Maeve's reviews. She's never let us down.

Update 2: I know I should be doing some math myself but over on an a-lister's site I saw a link to a genre we obviously forgot to include at EM and that is Math Rock. First the ManHood and now this. Today folks I've read and seen it all. Oh and we lost our hockey game 6-0.

Test!