Bach Technology

A proposed file format called MusicDNA will allow content owners to ship up to 32GB of information, such as album cover art, song lyrics, and even up-to-the minute blog posts and concert listings, alongside a music file. If enough content owners and distributors sign on, it could become an alternative to the MP3, giving users a more album-like digital playback experience, and allowing artists and content owners to charge more money per download.

The proposed format was announced by Bach Technology on Sunday at MIDEM 2010, a music-industry conference under way in Cannes, France. Unlike current alternatives to the MP3, such as Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), MusicDNA is not a new audio technology, and requires no new audio codecs. Rather, as Bach CEO Stefan Kohlmeyer explains in this video interview with PaidContent, MusicDNA is an add-on to existing audio formats.

MusicDNA analyzes the audio itself for characteristics in 13 categories such as mood and tempo. This information is encoded as XML and ships with the file. Content owners can also provide data, such as album art and lyrics, to be included with the file. This data can even be updated when the user is online–for example, concert listings could be added as they’re announced, complete with links to ticket-buying sites. Bach hopes to make money by licensing the technology to software and hardware manufacturers.

Because MusicDNA isn’t a new audio technology, MusicDNA files should play on existing hardware and software–they’ll play the underlying audio file and ignore all the added data. This is how MusicDNA could escape the fate of marginalized formats like Windows Media Audio or Sony’s ATRAC.

It’s an ambitious and interesting idea, but the digital music industry right now is dominated by one player: Apple. A lot of what MusicDNA proposes to accomplish could be handled at the application level–if Apple wants to analyze the audio content in files and add more categories to describe them, it could build this technology into iTunes. Moreover, Apple’s already got its own format, iTunes LP, for shipping additional information with music files. So I don’t see a lot of incentive for Apple to spend money to license and support this new third-party format. And without Apple, I don’t see how MusicDNA can survive.

Google Inc. and major music companies launched a free Internet music download service for China on Monday in a bid to help turn a field dominated by pirates into a profitable, legitimate business.

The advertising-supported service will offer 1.1 million tracks, including the full catalogs of Chinese and Western music for Warner Music Group Corp., EMI Group Ltd., Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music and 14 independent labels, the companies said. It will be limited to use by computers whose Internet protocol, or IP, addresses show they are in mainland China.

“This is the first really serious attempt to start monetizing online music in China,” said Lachie Rutherford, president of Warner Music Asia and regional head of the global recording industry group, the International Federation of Phonographic Industries.

Chinese pirate Web sites offer downloads of unauthorized copies of music despite repeated lawsuits and government crackdowns. Legitimate producers have no estimate of lost potential sales, but some Chinese performers have announced they were no longer recording because piracy made it unprofitable.

The venture gives Google a new way to compete in a market where its research shows 84 percent of people say finding music is their main reason to use search engines, said Kai-Fu Lee, Google’s president for Greater China.

“With today’s offering, we complete the puzzle and offer a complete set of services that are fully integrated,” he said.

China has the world’s biggest online population, with some 300 million Internet users, according to the government. Online commerce is still modest in China and most Web surfers are looking for music, games and other entertainment.

Lee said the company was optimistic that use would grow rapidly but he declined to give any revenue forecasts.

EMI launched a separate venture with China’s dominant search engine, Baidu Inc., in January 2007 to compete with pirates by allowing free streaming pop music from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. It sells downloads for a small fee.

Google’s service is to be run by Top100.cn, a 3 1/2-year-old Chinese Web site partly owned by Google. The site will sell advertising on its download page and split revenues with music companies, said its CEO, Gary Chen.

Providers will abide by Chinese censorship and withhold songs that are banned by the communist government, Rutherford said.

“When you’re in the music business in China you know you have to follow the regulations,” he said. “We wouldn’t give files to people in China (in situations) where a song has been banned.”

Google, headquartered in Mountain View, California, has struggled to expand in China, where it says it has about 30 percent of the search market. Baidu’s market share is just over 60 percent, according to research firm Analysys International.

Google’s Lee declined to comment on Beijing’s blocking of its YouTube video-sharing service last week. China occasionally bars its Internet users from seeing YouTube to prevent access to videos considered critical of communist rule or unflattering to the government.

Source: Yahoo! & AP

Microsoft also said it recently expanded its Exchange ActiveSync Licensing Program, which includes partners and competitors Apple, Nokia, Palm, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, among others.

Google Sync, currently in beta, uses push technology that lets iPhone and Windows Mobile devices get Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar events to phones.

When Sync is set up on phones, it automatically starts synchronizing a user’s address book and calendar in the background and over-the-air and allows changes or additions to transfers over devices in minutes. For example, when a colleague changes the time of the TPS report cover sheets meeting, it will let alert Sync users immediately.

As a security feature, data is automatically backed up to Google accounts, so information is stored even if a user loses their phone.

In addition, for devices that support the open SyncML protocol, Google Sync allows two-way contacts synchronization. For BlackBerry users, a version of Google Sync is already available.

“This agreement is a great example of Microsoft’ s openness to generally license our patents under fair and reasonable terms so long as licensees respect Microsoft intellectual property,” said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel and vice president, Intellectual Property and Licensing, in a statement.

Source: ChannelWeb

The brief filed Thursday in the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals argues that allowing webcasting of the Feb. 24 hearing is in the public interest, and is in keeping with camera access already granted in the courts.

The Recording Industry Association of America is appealing a Boston judge’s decision to allow the webcast, which it says goes against federal court guidelines on cameras and threatens its ability to get a fair trial.

“It is hard to imagine a hearing more deserving of public scrutiny through the same technological medium that is at the heart of this litigation,” the news organizations said in their brief to the appeals court.

The copyright infringement lawsuit is part an effort by the RIAA to stop online music sharing. Since 2003, it has filed civil lawsuits against about 35,000 people who allegedly swapped songs online.

Charles Nesson, a Harvard Law School professor representing Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum, is challenging the constitutionality of the lawsuits.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner approved Nesson’s request to allow a courtroom video service to transmit the hearing to Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which would stream it unedited on its Web site with free access. Gertner has said the RIAA also can subscribe to the video feed and stream it on a Web site of its choosing under the same conditions.

New organizations argued in their brief there was “nothing inherently harmful” in camera access to oral arguments, and countered the RIAA’s claim that online streaming could be manipulated, saying the potential to edit video is no different from the potential to edit transcripts or a reporter’s own notes. The news groups said the webcast would allow for more accurate reporting.

The news groups filing the brief also included Courtroom Television Network, Dow Jones & Co., Gannett Co. Inc., The Hearst Corp., Incisive Media, National Public Radio, NBC Universal Inc., Radio-Television News Directors Association, The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, The E.W. Scripps Co., Tribune Co., and Washington Post Digital.

Source: Yahoo! & AP

Palm’s Pre won CNET’s Best of CES award for 2009, and is getting tons of love from around the tech world. Not a bad accomplishment for a smartphone with a completely new OS, from a company written off as dead not long ago.

I wrote something like this about RIM’s BlackBerry Storm and got some heat for it, but still…where’s the music?

I don’t mean that the Pre won’t play music–of course it will. Palm even announced a deal with Amazon to let users buy music downloads without any intervention (cooperation? interference?) from the carrier, Sprint.But let’s recap why the iPhone became the first smart phone to capture the consumer imagination. Sure, its design had a lot of pleasant “just works” surprises, from the bright touchscreen to the way the keypad auto-corrects for big fingers. But a large reason is because Apple branded it as an extension of the iPod, which has become synonymous with mobile music. When music fans were looking to consolidate from two devices (MP3 player, phone) to a single one, the “i” brand reassured them that they wouldn’t get a second-class music experience.

Equally important: iTunes, the software that every iPod user was already familiar with. It’s not perfect. I know people who hate it, particularly on the PC. But compare it with the proposed Pre experience, as covered by PC Magazine:

9.) How do you get music and video onto the Pre?

You can drag and drop it over from your PC using USB mass storage, or buy songs on the device using a built in Amazon MP3 Store client.

My immediate reaction upon reading those three little words, “drag and drop”? Yecch. No sync? No library? No rating system? No playlists, preset or automatic? No way to view and change information about songs?

Here’s the thing: without iTunes, there’s no iPhone. And without the iPhone, there’s no consumer smartphone audience. I don’t doubt that Palm (and RIM, for that matter) understand mobile communications and information management, and there’s certainly a lot of room for improvement in business phones. But if I’m going to replace my MP3 player with a phone, these phones won’t cut it.

That’s why Microsoft’s recent justification for the Zune–it helped them learn how to build music-management software and an online store–didn’t ring as false to me as it did to some other folks. The device might be a failure. But whenever Microsoft rolls out its next-generation mobile phone platform, at least it has a reasonable story for managing and buying music.

Source: CNET News – Posted by Matt Rosoff

George Kliavkoff, chief digital officer at NBC Universal, didn’t specifically mention Apple by name in his request, but it was clear he had the iPod maker in mind when it came to combating people’s consumption of pirated content.

"If you look at studies about MP3 players, especially leading MP3 players and what portion of that content is pirated, and think about how that content gets onto that device, it has to go through a gatekeeping piece of software, which would be a convenient place to put some antipiracy measures," Kliavkoff said in an onstage interview at the Ad:Tech conference here. "One of the big issues for NBC is piracy. We are financially harmed every day by piracy. It results in us not being able to invest as much money in the next generation of film and TV products."

Apple’s iTunes service has become the largest music retailer in the United States, but relations between Apple and NBC Universal are strained. In 2007, NBC Universal pulled its TV content from iTunes when the two companies disagreed about pricing. Kliavkoff made it clear that he’d like the conduit back, though.

"We’d love to be on iTunes. It has a great customer experience. We’d love to figure out a way to distribute our content on iTunes," he said, but wouldn’t comment on any negotiations. "We have film distribution with iTunes so yes, we do talk to Apple," he said.

Price appears still to be a sticking point. NBC Universal sets a wholesale price for content it offers to distributors, and then distributors are free to set the retail price.

"They can mark up the price and make a profit or use it as a loss leader to get people in the door," Kliavkoff said. "It’s really difficult for us to work with any distribution partner who says ‘Here’s the wholesale price and the retail price,’ especially when the price doesn’t reflect the full value of the product."

"The music industry guys would have something to say about how the pricing has affected their product over the last few years," he added.

The Apple-NBC Universal spat has been a game of brinksmanship over which company needs the other more. Analysts at Forrester Research think Apple needs the content more than NBC needs the distribution.

NBC Universal, through a 50-50 partnership with NBC and News Corp., has its own mechanism to view entertainment TV shows on the Web: Hulu. However, the site doesn’t offer downloads and doesn’t support mobile devices, at least today.

Hulu is in part an attempt to combat piracy on Google’s YouTube, Kliavkoff said.

"It used to be that at the end of Saturday Night Live, YouTube would have clips up faster. You can fight that all you want, but until you provide a place to go at 1:05 a.m. Eastern time that has the digital short, you won’t get anywhere." Now, with Hulu, viewers can get the same content through legitimate channels.

YouTube, he added, is a "fantastic promotional vehicle for some of our product," such as trailers. And it’s the "market leader for amateur content." But sites like Hulu will change its position for professionally produced video, he predicted.

"I think that balance will shift a little bit. I think at the end of the day people, more often than now, will want to see professionally produced content," Kliavkoff said.

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