Apple’s iMatch feature is their answer to Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive in terms of the management of music libraries. Firstly, iCloud means that any music you have bought from the iTunes Store in the past or future will automatically be available for your other devices: whether that’s a PC running Windows Vista (but not XP), a Macbook, an iPad or an iPhone.

Apple managed to secure what Google and Amazon could not: agreements with the major music labels. Most interestingly, for $24.99 a year (only available in the U.S for now), iMatch will scan your existing iTunes library for music you haven’t purchased from iTunes. It matches those songs with their equivalents in the iTunes Store and automatically adds the 256kbps iTunes version to your iCloud library. If no match is found, you can upload the song to the cloud yourself. The number of unmatched songs you can upload is limited to 25,000.

Reaction to iMatch was mixed. Many commentators seemed disappointed that the iCloud didn’t instantly revolutionise our entertainment habits. Apple are not offering a music streaming service to rival the likes of Spotify, rather they are offering fancy synchronisation of your existing music collection. While it’s true that with major label support and a catalogue of 18 million songs, iTunes would be the ultimate streaming service, that is not within the interests of Apple. Their modus operandi is to sell more of their iOS devices.

Others said that iMatch legitimises piracy. Is that a bad thing? These illegally-downloaded songs already exist on a person’s hard-drive so maybe this amnesty of sorts will create a new dependency on iTunes and change downloading habits.

As for the music makers and copyright holders, there should be no complaints. What iMatch’s license fee enables Apple to do, is to pay the rights owners of a song which was never paid for in the first place. Let me say that again – Apple is giving you free money for previously-acquired illegal downloads. And that also applies to MP3 rips from a CD legally bought in a shop. You’re getting paid TWICE. Sounds like a win win to me.

I’m sure a few of you are wondering what kind of hippy dippy nonsense I’m on about. Cloud music? It all sounds suspiciously like an ill-advised experimental ambient concept album, but fear not, this is THE FUTURE (probably). The cloud concept in computing is one that is becoming much more ubiquitous (ironically after the last big computing system concept was called “ubiquitous computing”).

Cloud computing allows you to harness the power and resources of multiple computers rather than rely on one computer or server to host your website, email or files. So, as we all become increasingly more connected, the theory is that everything we own on our hard drives could exist on the virtual cloud, so we could access it anywhere we needed it and our data will persist across our digital life.

Amazon have actually been on the forefront of “the cloud” since they launched Amazon Web Services in 2006 which included online backup systems and the Cloud Drive is a logical extension of that. The service offers 5GB of starter space (20GB if you purchase an album) to which, Amazon account holders can upload their documents, photos and music collection.

That library or “digital locker” can then be accessed everywhere via an Android mobile, laptop or desktop and voila, your music will be with you everywhere via the sleek looking Cloud Player app. The only catch is that it’s a U.S. only operation at the moment.

Amazon are not the first company to launch a cloud entertainment service. MSpot & Mp3Tunes have been offering similar solutions for a couple of years now but Amazon are certainly the biggest. Apple will inevitably launch a cloud service at some point in the future while Google is said to be currently testing a similar music service amongst employees in the company.

You might be wondering how Amazon managed to get the blessing of the music industry to allow their users to upload their files? They didn’t. In a bold move, Cloud Player is currently unlicensed by the industry. Amazon has said that uploading an MP3 file to the cloud is the same as putting it on an external hard drive but after Sony Music expressed disappointment with Amazon that they didn’t even ask, it seems likely that behind the scenes, there is some negotiation going on. Record labels, artists, publishers, Google and Apple will surely be interested in any outcome.

However, Cloud Player points to a greater trend in digital music – that of solving the customer problem first and worrying about the music industry afterwards. As Amazon’s Director of Music told Billboard “We’re trying to solve a customer pain point that affects how much people buy digital music. We’re trying to make purchased music more valuable. And we think that’s good for everybody.”

The mysterious DJ duo DJA and DSJ are back with a followup to their first ’80s action-movie mixtape with more pumped up and steroid-assisted tunes from Rocky, Scarface, Top Gun and Cocaine Cowboys.

Full details »

Blood Bros: Heaven2Hell by maddecent

Beth Ditto & Simian Mobile Disco EP

The Gossip singer and the London dance duo hooked up before on the brilliant disco-dance track Cruel Intentions in 2009. Their partnership was obviously a fruitful one so they got back in the studio and have just released a 4-track EP of similar tunes.

Irish Bloggers’ Sound of 2011 compilation

Two Irish music bloggers – Swear I’m Not Paul and 2UIBestow got together and posted a Soundcloud compilation of Irish artists they think will be worth more investigation in 2011. It includes Milan Jay, B-Movie Lightning, Deaf Joe, The Riot Tapes, A Northern Light and more.

Listen at Swear I’m Not Paul »

Dirty Beaches

While most of Taiwan-born Canada-based Alex Zhang Hungtai’s music is reminiscent of electro-punks Suicide, Lord Knows Best showcases a different side to his music. It’s a smokey lo-fi serenade with Hungtai in bar-room, loose tie mode.

Listen at The Hype Machine »

Eircom’s MusicHub offers free unlimited music streaming (at 128kbps AAC+ audio junkies) to all of their broadband customers and that service is €6.99 per month for non-Eircom customers. If you want to add downloads to that subscription, then for 15 and 40 downloads for Eircom customers costs €5.99 and €12.99 a month respectively while the same for non-Eircom customers is €11.99 and €22.99 a month.

The company also has plans for app versions of the MusicHub for iPhone, Android and Windows phones. At 32 cent per download, the download offering is a lot less than iTunes pricing and the music is not restricted to certain devices. Eircom says it has over 4 million tracks in its MusicHub library.

We7 meanwhile are a company that have been operating in the UK since late 2008. Now claiming to have 3 million monthly users and 6.5 million tracks to stream, it has established itself as one of the frontrunners in music streaming services in the UK.

We7 does not offer downloads but crucially is free to stream (at a superior 192kbps over the MusicHub) for anyone for the small annoyance of listening to occasional ads. If you want to remove the ads, it costs €4.99 a month. You can listen to charts, albums, songs, playlists or radio which autoplays a selection of music based on your artist choices. We7 already offers mobile app versions for iPhone and Android. The impressive app features offline-caching, library searching and the ability to listen to saved playlists so you can take your music with you everywhere is only available on premium which costs €9.99 a month. When We7.ie launches next week, the company promises lots of Irish music content which it has been very pro-active in sourcing in recent months.

Whether you choose Eircom’s MusicHub or my personal favourite We7, the arrival of these two new music services is very good news indeed for Irish music fans.

Since that time, starting a record label is cool again, judging by the number of music bloggers who are now doing so. In many ways, a blogger starting a small independent label is a simple extension of their modus operandi with the blog – to promote music they are interested in.

Popular alternative Texas-based music blog Gorilla Vs Bear started Forest Family Records along with fellow blogger Weekly Tape Deck three months ago. Far from acting as an MP3-selling hub, the label releases limited vinyl releases from bands they love. So far artists like Cults, Gauntlet Hair and Dent May have been lined up with the first two releases selling out quickly.

Popjustice – the UK pop music blog with discernable taste has struck a deal with Virgin/EMI to launch their own imprint called Popjustice Hi-Fi which will release the Robyn-esque pop of Rosanna in August. There were accusations that Perez robbed his music recommendations directly from Popjustice so it’ll be interesting to see how this UK major label partnership fares.

It’s mostly small DIY blogs though who have gotten in on the physical music-releasing game like BigStereo, My Old Kentucky Blog, White Guys With Beards, Chocolate Bobka (both cassette releases) and Catbird Seat.

Blogs are niche and they know their audiences very well. At the top of the pile, Perez feels the pressure to break acts internationally while the smaller blogs have no such worries. Most of them are selling around 500 copies of each record only. Technology has now empowered them to sell, not just share. It makes competitive sense as well. Many labels sign bands after reading about them on blogs so this just cuts out the middle man, at least at the start of an artist’s career.

Meanwhile, a host of independent music blogs were recently snapped up themselves by the larger and more popular boy in the class, Pitchfork. The Chicago-based influential music site launched Altered Zones, a sister site consisting of 14 blogs who will be highlighting creative and adventurous small-scale new artists on Pitchfork’s dime. It’s an interesting development as rather than try to ratchet up into the mainstream, Pitchfork has gone the other way, appealing to the even more niche group of people who like pychedelic, drone, new-age and lo-fi music. It seems niches really are the new mainstream.

The licence in question, the IMRO/MCPSI Limited Online Exploitation Licence (LOEL) covers the use of music online by small scale/non-commercial companies and individuals whose gross revenue is less than €7,000.

Now of course, in black and white terms, music blogs are covered by this blanket licence and all the music bloggers in question have no problem paying royalties if that is what is required. Currently, Nialler9 is the only site which actively takes advertising while the rest are distinctly non-commercial. The bigger issue here is by taxing amateur and hobby bloggers who don’t have any money available at their disposal to pay these licences (from €150 – €750 per year depending on the situation), IMRO will be effectively putting up a significant financial barrier to music blogs in this country resulting in the decimation of a now-vital part of the Irish music landscape.

Even more importantly, music blogs are the first rung on the ladder for many unsigned and independent bands before radio and print. These bands are willingly sending their music to bloggers giving them permission to post their songs online. IMRO are saying that bands registered with them do not have the right to give their own recorded works for use on a blog or any other site. If music blogs disappear, these artists will suffer as the promotion they receive from blogs will no longer be available to them.

In another case, Richter Collective – a small Irish-based independent label who include The Redneck Manifesto, Adebisi Shank and Bats on their roster were told they would have to pay IMRO to post their bands tracks on the label website. What next? Will a band be asked to pay to post their own songs on their own sites?

According to IMRO, “a website should be licensed in each territory it is made available in”. So does that mean, as this licence only covers Ireland that music blogs and sites should obtain and pay for a licence in every country in the world? If this is true, running a music blog is going to cost thousands of euro per year. The whole thing highlights how utterly ill-fitting these territorial licences are when applied to the world wide web.

By the time you read this, the other music bloggers and I will have met with IMRO to voice our concerns but it is the bands who can make a difference, the people who IMRO represent. A lot of artists have come out in support of the music blogs with The Cast of Cheers – a band who first gained significant traction online, pulling out of an IMRO showcase gig last Saturday along with MIA Sparrow in protest. Hopefully, by an opt-out clause or otherwise, an agreement can be reached to continue to allow artists to benefit from the existence of music blogs.

Update from the meeting yesterday.

1. Soundcloud – It started as a highly intuitive way for bands and labels to share music with others. Thanks to its lightning fast speed and visual waveform interface, Soundcloud has become the place to catch the latest new tracks, particularly in dance and electronic circles. Try out http://player.thejackplug.com as it shows you the most popular tracks on Soundcloud.com.

2. Tuneglue – An expandable interactive spider diagram that helps you find related artists to who you search for. It’s extremely accurate and is essentially a cool visualisation of the musical landscape and its interconnectedness.

3. Grooveshark – It seems to be operating in a legal grey area but its popularity is not in question. Type in a few artists and build a streaming playlist made up of user-uploaded songs. The library is deep with plenty of remixes and full albums.

4. 14tracks.com – If underground movements and cutting-edge genres are your bag, 14tracks is perfect for you. Handpicked compilations based on themes like Scandanavian disco, cosmic soul, junglist hardcore, UK funky and loads more for about €7.50 each.

5. The Hype Machine – The daddy of the MP3 blogs. Put simply: “Every day, thousands of people around the world write about music they love, and it all ends up here.”

6. WeAreHunted.com – We Are Hunted claims to chart the most popular songs from all parts of the internet world. It’s heavily skewed towards what’s popular on the music blogs.

7. Breakingtunes.com – An Irish initiative to pitch the country’s bands at industry globally but it also functions as a great resource for new Irish music with streaming songs, profiles and bio info.

8. Elbo.ws – A lesser known but equally great music blog aggregator. Less reliant on remixes than The Hype Machine, it features top artists, tracks and videos in the sidebar to give you an instant pulse of what people are writing about.

9. TVAdmusic – Ads can make or break a song these days (see Florence’s Cosmic Love), so if you ever find yourself wondering who that song in the advert is by, this site will probably tell you.

10. Mixcloud – Pitching themselves as the “Youtube of radio”, Mixcloud offers on-demand DJ sets, radio shows and podcasts. It’s been adopted in dance music first but has a larger potential beyond those confines.

Great tunes are a must but it’s never that simple. So it’s good to see an example of an Irish band seize the initiative and attempt to attract listeners and interest in what they are doing. MacroGrizzly are a rock band from Laois who are doing just that in innovative ways.

Since the beginning, the core band members of Cormac Strain (formerly of 79 Cortinaz) and Steve Ryan have used an open source social networking platform called Elgg to upload ideas and work on music remotely when it suited them. Dubbed “The Shed” after their own real-world practice space in a field in Laois, the platform has led to the creation of a (forgive me) shedload of songs.

With DIY spirit firmly intact, the band have hatched plans to release their first of 12 monthly singles on January 15th 2010. Unlike Ash, whose ongoing A-Z singles project happens fortnightly and racks up 26 single songs, MacroGrizzly’s version includes remixes, alternative versions and interpretations.

The band are also doing live web gigs from The Shed. The first took place in November, with another happening this Saturday from 10pm with streaming video via HD cameras or an audio stream. There’s even support from Carlow band The Louis Walsh Assassination Project.

Purchasing just one of the band’s singles gives you access to the virtual version of The Shed for a year where you can download all 12 singles and their accompanying songs, watch archived web gigs, give feedback on what the band are working on, friend others, read blogs, chat and all the other standard social network functions.

MacroGrizzly are currently in talks with The Damned’ drummer Rat Scabies in getting him on board for one of the virtual gigs and thus far, he has agreed to join them on their cover of The Damned’s ‘Love Song’.

“Our ultimate goal is a long shot, but we really would like to help develop a working music network,” Cormac says. “We’d like to get to know these bands and encourage them to do much the same as what we do. We’ve worked out our own format, we have our own Shoutcast radio server and we’re quite willing to share the resources and knowledge with bands who want to make music and let people hear it.”

Check out the live gig and The Shed at the MacroGrizzly site – http://macrogrizzly.com

Clients from Hell
“I don’t want to pay for the red words on my website, can you use less red so that I can get a discount?” Plenty more face palms abound on this web design horror stories site.

http://clientsfromhell.tumblr.com

STFU Marrieds
This site calls out married couples who practice the Facebook equivalent of P.D.A in their status updates. Whether it’s annoying exaltations of love or domestic tiffs over the dinner for all to see, we don’t want to know.
http://stfumarrieds.tumblr.com

Chuck D, Flava Flav and co. are hoping to raise $250,000, the site’s most ambitious funding project yet at sellaband.com/publicenemy. PE have always been at the forefront of championing net music technology. They were one of the first groups to release MP3s from their own website and have advocated artist-owned releases for a decade or so.

“Believers” are able to buy single $25 shares and each share entitles them to: a numbered copy of the album, an early download version and 33% of the net revenue for the first five years divided amongst them.

“SellaBand’s financial engine model goes about restructuring the music business in reverse,” said Chuck D. “It starts with fans first, then the artists create from there. The music business is built on searching for fans and this is a brand new way for acts to create a new album with fans first, already on board.”

In the week since the project began, Public Enemy have raised $30,700, 12% of the total target. The money will go towards the complete recording costs and a strategic marketing plan for the release in 2010.

According to industry newsletter Record of the Day, Sellaband has 34 artists who have reached their $50,000 target since the site started in 2006. Thanks to their enduring popularity with hip-hop fans, Public Enemy are confident they will reach their target.

These ideas don’t always work out though. Spare a thought for Texan rockers White Denim who recently tried a similar fan-assisted scheme. They set up a subscription service promising fans regular exclusive releases but had to cancel the idea when the money raised didn’t cover the manufacturing of vinyls they initially promised.

Another act taking the completely independent route are Canadian band Metric who recently released their album Fantasies. Metric’s manager told the LA Times that by selling direct to fans from their website and download stores like iTunes, Metric have already made more money on the new album than their last (and relatively popular Live it Out) record achieved in four years.

Taking the “direct to fan” approach further is Josh Freese, who gained plenty of exposure thanks to his unique scheme. The alt-rock drummer made enough noise with former bands A Perfect Circle, Nine Inch Nails, Devo and The Vandals, that when it came to releasing his second solo album Since 1972, he decided to come up with a novel and attention-grabbing way of releasing it.

In the form of value-added purchase tiers, Freese’s website offered fans the opportunity to purchase the album along with a personal five minute “Thank You” phone call from Josh for $50. From there, the price went up considerably. $250 includes lunch with Josh at PF Changs (limited to 25 – now sold out), for $500 you can join Josh in a trip to a Sensory Deprivation Tank with dinner afterwards. For $5000 Josh offers to write a song about you and put it up on iTunes, co-direct a video for the song, take you for some margaritas and a private tour of Disneyland. Another package, limited to one for the tune of $20,000 which includes amongst other things – a tour of Josh’s old haunts, a minature golf trip with Josh along with friends Maynard of Tool and Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo, two songs written about you, a foot massage and a chance to take three things from Josh’s closet is now sold out. Freese stopped just short of letting you sleep with him!

Of course, these three acts are already established in some form so the real challenge lies in making the direct to fan model work for lesser-known bands. With low overheads and a big of ingenuity (not to mention decent tunes), it’s not an inconceivable future.