Emusic

In the past I’ve discussed several ways in which I think eMusic could improve itself for the benefit of both its customers and its suppliers (i.e., the music labels and the artists). Recently I read three interesting posts that touch on this subject. The first (to which this post is dedicated) is from Ian Rogers of Yahoo!, recapping his presentation at the Aspen Live conference in December: Today users are creating tremendous value and for the most part we’re ignoring it. They’re writing blogs about your artists, putting bios on Wikipedia, documenting last night’s concert on Flickr and video sharing sites, showing what songs are most popular by their behavior on Last.fm, building “box sets” on community sites, etc. How has the music industry leveraged this? What tools have you created to enable or encourage it? ...

The migration of Swindleeeee!!!!! to wordpress.com is now complete. The domain swindleeeee.com now redirects to the new blog, as do variant spellings such as swindleeee.com (four ‘e’s) or swindleeeeee.com (six ‘e’s). Your RSS newsreader may show you the last few posts again as it picks up the new feed, but otherwise everything should just work without any need for you to change feed URLs, bookmarks, links in your own posts, etc. If you do encounter any problems please send me email at hecker (at) hecker (dot) org. ...

Currently Swindleeeee!!!!! is hosted on a server I administer, and uses the WordPress blogging software. Over the years I’ve grown tired of maintaining my own blogging configuration, and some time ago I wrote that I was considering moving this blog to the wordpress.com blog hosting service. That time has now come. I have imported all my old blog posts and comments to my new wordpress.com blog, and am about to throw the switch on the actual move. ...

For the most part I resist writing about the actual music on eMusic, because I’m really not a very good musical critic. However from time to time I do feel the urge to recommend something, and this is one of those times. Courtesy of eMusic I’ve been listening to a lot of “contemporary classical” music (or “new music” to insiders), a taste I came by through listening to electronic music (techno, ambient, etc.). The most well-known and influential movement in classical music over the past half century is of course minimalism, and I think everyone interested in either classical music or (especially) modern electronic music should have an acquaintance with the classic works of minimalism. I’m referring here not to Nixon in China-style “minimalism” but rather to hard-core “let’s play that phrase a few dozen times and then introduce a new element or two” minimalism—or as suggested by someone in response to a Kyle Gann rant, the-music-formerly-known-as-minimalism. ...

No, Alex Ross (of “The Rest is Noise” fame, both blog and book) isn’t being mean to eMusic; in fact to my knowledge he’s never mentioned it, at least on his blog. What I mean is that several of the releases on Ross’s list of recommended CDs (CDs? how last century!) can be found on eMusic: ...