10 Provocations on music business / copyright / futurists

Andrew Dubber (New Music Strategies) has created a list of ten Provocations on the music business / copyright issues / futurists which are really worth thinking about.

Here we go:

01. Music is not a business

02. Copyright is redundant

03. Futurists are liars

04. The Record Industry is dead

05. Music has no value

06. Piracy is morally right

Read the rest ...

Think about these points, read the comments and try to find your own critical opinion on these issues!

tunesBag - problems with power outage at night

This night we had a problem in our housing center, a power outage took down two servers. Since half an hour, everything is up again and all systems are running fine.

tunesBag Release 0109 - it's all about sharing & playlists (and bugfixes ;-))

2009 will be an exciting and crucial year for the online media hub tunesBag - we'll leave the closed beta, enter the market and keep on improving the service. Currently we're offering our service to the participants of the closed beta and the feedback is just gorgeus - people love to have access to their tunes anywhere and anytime; especially in the office (This can be seen clearly because of traffic spikes during business days). A few days ago, we've release our new iPhone application to several testers and it' cool to see mobile streaming actually work.

The first highlight in this year is the new 01/09 release - we're already covering some of the exciting new features in this blog; in this post you can find a compiled best-of:

Listen to any public playlist
Looking for a playlist with the artist Jamiroquai or with some rock music? Just search for it, zap through the tracks with our pre-listen feature and link it to your library if you like it. Searching for new cool playlists has never been easier!


Search for artists, tracks, playlists or users in a new way
It's now easier than ever to find a playlist or user on tunesBag - just enter the desired term in the new search box and we'll crawl the whole service for data.

Share playlists, tracks or artists with other users and by mail, Facebook or myspace
Recommend cool tracks or playlists to friends with a single click, no matter if they're tunesBag members or not. We support e-mail, Facebook, myspace, twitter and some more services.


Overhauled user interface with new player bar
Take a look at it yourself - our aim was it to create a simple but cool interface for daily usage.


We hope you like the new version - please let us know any feedback at feedback.tunesBag.com!

Listen to any public playlist on tunesBag

This is a major step forward - if you're part of the closed beta community of tunesBag.com, you're now able to listen to any public playlist on the system!

Together with our new search and the new privacy features we've introduced a cool new feature offering you to explore interesting playlists and even link them to your account. Just enter any search term (artist, track, playlist name/description/tags) in the search box on top and we'll show you corresponding playlists - see the example blow:

Prelisten to any playlist
If you're interested in a playlist, just click on the name and we'll provide you with a short snippet of each track - this way you can see which tracks this playlist offers. You can skip a track at any time and stop the prelistening mode. In order to make the listening experience as smooth as possible, we've even added a fading-in / fading-out filter so that prelistening really makes fun!

I like a playlist - how can I play it?
Simply click on "Play this playlist now" - this way you can play it. It's also possible to create a short bookmark for this playlist - just click on "Bookmark" in order to create a bookmark for this playlist in the left navigation.
Here you can see what a bookmark looks like - you can remove a linked playlist at any time by using the delete icon.


We hope you enjoy this new feature - please let us know any feedback @ feedback.tunesBag.com!

Ups, I've forgotten to mention one important enhancement - drag & drop support for reordering playlist items has been added and improved - check it out by yourself. Just create a new playlist, add some items and click on "Edit item / reorder".

Search for artists, users, playlists, tracks in a much easier way

I have to admit - the old search function offered on tunesBag sucked and it wasn't clear at all that you've to change the selection to artists / album / user etc in order to search for a certain data type.

Now it's much easier - with a single search you can explore artists, users, playlists and of course search through your own library!

Just enter a term in the search box on the top - the name of an artist, playlist, user, track, tag or description - you're free to enter what you want and tunesBag will search through it's artist database, user list, public playlists and your own library. No more hassles with several search operations or such stuff.

Let's have a look at the output ...
You can see the list of artists (btw, if you enter White Stripes, we'll automatically find "The White Stripes" for you etc) - just click on an item to see more information about this artist. You can find a list of matching usernames - click on their name, check out their music preferences and maybe offer them friendship status on tunesBag.


As you can see the last five search terms will be stored - this way you can re-run the search with a single click at a later time.
We think that this new search is a major step forward in exploring new music and finding cool playlists - so check out this feature soon!

New privacy options - set general and item-based preferences

Privacy is very important and although most people use playlists in order to express their preferences or music knowlege we've all playlists we would like to hide form the public or even from friends. Just image the president of an Aimee Mann fanclub listening to heavy metal all the time ;-) Or who admits having a perfectly adjusted 80's playlist with Rick Astley and friends? ;-)

To overcome these issues, we've introduced a bunch of new privacy preferences with our latest 01/09 release - in the Preferences dialog (you can find the link in the upper right corner) you're now able to define the general privacy settings for your account in more detail. This way, you can allow all users or just your friends to play your playlists.

Of course, the access to your library still will only be possible for your friends.



Privacy settings for an individual playlist
You can mark any playlist as private - this way even your friends will not be able to play your playlist or search for it. Just uncheck the "Public" property when creating a new playlist (or edit it).

Share tunes/playlists/artists with friends (on tunesBag, Facebook, twitter, myspace etc)

People love to share recommendations with friends - especially when it comes to music. Image you're listening to a new cool tune and you would like to recommend it to a friend. Or a certain playlist is just gorgeus and all your friends on Facebook should know about it - in this case the new sharing feature comes in handy!

Where can I find this new feature?
You can find the new sharing button next to several data types including tracks, playlists or artists. See two examples below - the "Now playing" sidebar and the track listing:

How does it work?
When you click on on of the buttons, a dialog in the upper right corner will appear. Here you can select friends, enter email addresses (they will be saved for later re-use) and post your items to several services including Facebook, twitter or myspace. Additionally, you can find a direct link to use in Skype etc.
How does it look like in Facebook etc?
Here we've an example how a posted items looks like in Facebook - you can see the cover art, a short description of the track, your comment and the link for your friends.
What is shared exactly?
To stay legal, your original track will not be shared with the public, instead of that people will be guided to a general site with information about the track and further information about the artist / playlist. If available from public sources, people can play the track. See an example here: Feist - 1234.

Within tunesBag it stays the same as before - you can listen to the recommendations of your friends by opening the playlist "Recommendations".

Overhauled user interface: Cleaner, more simple and easier to navigate

Our 01/09 release includes an overhauled user interface. We've optimized the structure and added several new elements.

The first one is the new header - here you can find now a search field (one input box for all data types, more to come soon). No more nasty selection, simply enter the search term and hit enter! Our new search feature will automatically search for users, artists, playlists and tracks. In the upper right corner you can find the most important administration links, a popup menu with further features plus the Sign Out link.
Please take a look at the brand new footer as well - the buttons for next, previous and play/pause are now much bigger and the slider will automatically adopt to the available width.

Upload client now preserves iTunes ratings and provides further benefits

A new version of our uploader for Windows is part of the brand new 0109 release.

What's new in this version?

Rating information from iTunes are preserved
The tunesBag uploader preserves your iTunes ratings now. This way the Top Rated playlist etc will automatically be available on tunesBag.com!


Add manually uploaded files automatically to a playlist
Simply drag & drop files on the uploader and select the playlist to which you would like to add the tracks. Of course you can enter the name of a new playlist as well.


To update to this latest release, simply download the latest version and install it. You can find the software after the login when you click on "Upload".

Older flash versions might crash your browser

I just tried to play around with tunesBag on a fresh windows setup and the browser kept crashing from time to time (using tunesBag and other websites). After some testing I found out that the default version of flash delivered with Windows XP is rather old and I had to update it (although the user interface is pure html/css, we need flash for media delivery).

In case of stability problems, you should do the same; just visit www.adobe.com and check out if you've installed the latest version of flash!

Netbooks / tunesBag - my learnings

I'm a proud owner of a so called Netbook - in my case it's an Acer Aspire One. This device is really handy when it comes to checking mail, surfing around, watching videos or listening to music.

With the limited power/storage/screen resolution you can really see which sites have been optimized for the usage with these devices and which not. Facebook, for example, has got some real troubles - the page flow / layout is sometimes completley out of control.

At tunesBag.com, we're not planning a special version for these devices, but we'll take care of some things in order to make using tunesBag on Netbooks even more fun. In the end, all our users will benefit from these enhancements, so watch out for the upcoming releases!

Techstuff: My learnings about the Netbook and how to optimize services for them are:

• Clean up the site structure, remove complex table structures etc
• Reduce number of images
• Use JSON instead of Ajax when possible (no visible updates)
• Clean up your CSS
• Optimize caching

Image Source: Flickr / mgminthu