The first episode of the second season of PBS Arts web-original series Off Book is Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium (mini-documentary, ~7 min). "OFF BOOK explores cutting edge arts and the artists that make it. Breaking the mold of the definition of art, OFF BOOK explores the avant-garde, the experimental and the underground artforms that are supported by online communities." [more inside]
posted by flex on Mar 8, 2012 - 10 comments

Don't delay. Operators are standing by. For the next 30 hours or so you can still get in on the movement to free music. Musopen is a nonprofit organization raising money to record out-of-copyright classical music. They plan to post the results online for free. As of now, they plan to record the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky and for every additional $1000 donated they will record another set of compositions such as Mozart’s violin sonatas. They've done it before. Ain't it a gas?
posted by DaddyNewt on Sep 13, 2010 - 33 comments

1. Create a record label named "Unknown."
2. Form a band named "Various Artists."
3. (step 3 not required)
4. PROFIT!
No, really: Please take your royalty check Royalties are piling up from digital music streams, and a nonprofit has to track down artists who don't know. Then it has to convince them it's not a scam.
posted by planetkyoto on Mar 12, 2010 - 20 comments

A decade of digital music Vaguely styled as a timeline, this end-of-the-decade blog post (from UK digital music news source Music Ally) could prove valuable to anyone studying the music business or the intersection between entertainment and technology. The piece links to ten years of stories on digital music - from Napster through to Spotify - allowing us to look back on the issues without the 20/20 vision of hindsight. Gems include the Bluematter scheme from Universal Records in 2000, which comprised 60 non-transferrable, non-burnable tracks for $1.99 each.
posted by skylar on Jan 2, 2010 - 4 comments

Four years ago metafilter was introduced to Pandora. This weekend, the New York Times introduced the world to the minds behind the music genome project. [more inside]
posted by jefficator on Oct 19, 2009 - 76 comments

The Gorillaz documentary Bananaz has premiered online and can be viewed in full on Babelgum. [more inside]
posted by slimepuppy on Apr 21, 2009 - 17 comments

Medici.tv is an online "television" dedicated to performing arts and music documentaries. Its current catalogue includes many classical concerts, documentaries by Johan van der Keuken and on the Kinshasa musical underground (previously), portraits (lots of Glenn Gould, Shostakovich by Sokurov, Maya Plisetskaya...), and plenty more. Launched April 30th, it's streaming its full contents in lovely quality for free until May 15th. [more inside]
posted by progosk on May 8, 2008 - 8 comments

EMI announces they will begin offering their catalog through online stores sans DRM. Apple's iTunes Store to be among the first, offering a 2-tier price structure featuring 2 different quality versions. Sorry if this is a repeat. I swear I searched first.
posted by Thorzdad on Apr 2, 2007 - 107 comments

MSNBC soft pedalled the story while others have offered their regurgitated take on the press release. But I can't find anyone asking the tough questions about the new deal between Microsoft and Vivendi/Universal wherein MS will pay Universal a flat price for every Zune player sold.
With big names like David Geffen saying, "Each of these devices is used to store unpaid-for material. This way, on top of the material people do pay for, the record companies are getting paid on the devices storing the copied music." are we really getting to the point where everything we think we know about property and theft is going to be re-defined in terms of someone's perceived loss?
posted by I, Credulous on Nov 10, 2006 - 65 comments

Imagine a massively multiplayer music studio, connected worldwide over the Internet. Log in, and everyone sees a set of synths, effects, sequencers, or other custom patches. Everyone’s looking at essentially the same screen, and can add beats, trip out effects, slide the bpm up and down, and reprogram synths — all at once. That’s the basic idea of netpd.
posted by bigmusic on Oct 25, 2006 - 19 comments

Weenie Juke Radio: "...and that was Sleepy John Estes singing Drop Down (I Don't Feel Welcome Here) and Bo Carter, North Canton Quartet are coming up."

Automated yet they take requests. For your favorite Yazoo, Document, Biograph or Arhoolie country blues and string band recording artists, here's your Juke.
posted by y2karl on Jan 2, 2005 - 9 comments

Interactive Church Music Player The LDS Church has created a cool new tool for exploring its hymnbooks: a Flash application that not only shows the sheet music, but allows transposition, tempo changes, part selection, and all kinds of other nifty things.
posted by oissubke on May 16, 2004 - 13 comments

Live Phish (for flame's sake, this is not a post about the band itself) is a new service created by Phish through which people can download SHN or MP3's of their upcoming new years eve shows and burn them themselves, for a fee of course. The recordings are due to be available two days after the shows are over. It will be interesting to see if the service is successful and profitable. Assuming it is, will there be an effect on the music industry and the RIAA? Might they realize they can make money on music downloaded on the internet? Only time will tell.
posted by kurtosis on Dec 20, 2002 - 15 comments