Rock in Rio, a series of music festivals held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (and later in Portugal, Spain and other countries) will be live-streamed this year on YouTube in 24 different languages, Google made it known in a blog post. Headliners include Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Katy Perry, Elton John and Stevie Wonder. The rock fest is running from September 23 through October 2 so don’t forget to tune in to a live stream over at the Rock in Rio YouTube channel.
Using their Content ID feature, YouTube can match song covers to a publisher to enable them to make money from a video they didn’t publish. Today to help Content ID along, YouTube announced they landed agreements with National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) and its subsidiary Harry Fox Agency (HFA). Today’s agreement will give YouTube another 46,000 more songs to match ads to. YouTube currently also has agreements with many more publishers.
Going forward, the 46,000 music publishers already affiliated with HFA will be able to license the musical compositions they represent for use by the YouTube community. When these publishers allow YouTube to run ads alongside user generated videos that incorporate their compositions, the publishers, and the songwriters they represent, can make money.
Some users don’t agree with Google/YouTube’s decision to place ads on content that they made — such as a cover of a song. The user isn’t actually using the artist’s song, per-say, but using their own voice..and they don’t get to make a cent from it. Expand Expanding Close
We here at 9to5Google love Chrome Experiments, nifty little web apps that showcase what can be achieved with HTML5 and the Chrome browser. Be it a simple project like the Google I/O countdown timer or mind-boggling stuff such as this interactive music video, Google Experiments is a go-to place for a glimpse of where web technologies are headed. All Is Not Lost, the latest Chrome experiment and an HTML5 music collaboration between the band OK Go, the dance troupe and choreographers Pilobolus and Google, is one such example.
It lets you embed your message in a music video and have the band dance it out, Keiko Hirayama, senior marketing manager with the Google Tokyo team explains in a post over at the Chrome blog. Upon visiting the experiment’s landing page, you’re only required to type in your message. The web app will then load the video and make the band dance it out with a little bit of HTML5’s canvas magic…
Popular music startup from Sweden called Spotify today kicked off its long-expected US operation. “We’re massively excited to be here”, the company wrote in a blog post. Spotify has been a huge hit in the UK and several other European territories such as Finland, France, Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden, with a total number of subscribers in Europe topping 10 million people. The company is planning a major push to get the word out, lining up exclusive launch partners such as Coca-Cola and Sprite, Chevrolet, Motorola, Reebok and Sonos. “These brands will be launching innovative campaigns in partnership with Spotify in the coming weeks and months”, Spotify says.
Spotify lets you stream songs free of charge, with adverts, to your computer or pay a single-digit monthly fee for unlimited, ad-free streams in high fidelity (384Kbps). A Premium account is required to stream music via the Spotify app on smartphones. Music streams on demand via wireless hotspots or 3G cellular networks so you don’t have to have gigabytes of free storage to keep the files on your device.
The company celebrated launch in the United States with the release of the free Spotify for iOS app. While Spotify for Android is not yet live in the US Android Market, we expect it anytime soon so stay tuned. Why you’ll love Spotify? Because for just ten bucks a month you can play songs from their catalog of more than fifteen million tracks to your phone or computer. That’s a sizable collection even by iTunes’ standards.
And for half the price you get a Spotify Unlimited account which removes ads, but lacks other features and encodes audio in standard quality. Premium accounts can mark entire songs, playlists or albums for offline listening when there is no network coverage.
Sony is joining the streaming music craze with today’s release of Music Unlimited, a brand new Android app that lets you stream from Sony’s catalog of 7+ million songs, with monthly fees starting at just four bucks for the Basic streaming plan (a pricier Premium plan is also available). From release notes:
With the Basic plan, you can access personalized channels that adapt to your music tastes and your mood and enjoy the songs in your personal library that have been previously synched from your PC. The Premium plan offers all the features of the Basic Plan, plus full access to our entire catalogue and premium streaming channels.
The Music Unlimited service is also available via the PlayStation3, Internet-connected Sony television sets and Blu-ray players. What’s best, they let you sign up for the Premium plan with a free of charge 30-day trial period. So ho ahead, grab the free download from Android Market now. Bear in mind that the app is currently available only in the United States, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Also – good luck with that PlayStation Network streaming!
With all three players having introduced their respective music lockers in the skies, we can now pit their respective offerings against each other. The above chart is from paidContent which opined that “Apple doesn’t always get it right the first time” before observing that in iTunes “syncing should be faster and easier” while “song quality may get a boost”.
Apple yesterday took the wraps off iTunes Match, a new feature that scans all your music (regardless of sources) to make matching songs instantly available using iCloud. “With 18 million songs we’re most likely to have what you got”, Jobs said at yesterday’s unveiling. He noted that Apple will automatically upgrade all matching songs to 256Kbps AAC. On the downside, you cannot stream songs with iCloud – yeah, you read that right. What that means is you have to download each iCloud song that is not saved on your iOS device before you can listen to it. What else should you know?
As we await for the Google I/O 2011 keynote to begin, the search giant’s long-rumored iTunes competitor dubbed Google Music has just went live. It’s an invite-only affair at the moment but we have no doubt it’ll roll out to some or all US users following the upcoming announcement. It’s unlikely that the service at this stage will be immediately available to everyone in the world due to complex licensing terms.
It’s a digital locker in the cloud that lets you access your music via the web and on Android devices (they don’t mention anything about iOS gadgets).
Music Beta is a new service from Google that gives you instant access to your personal music collection without the hassle of wires or syncing. Add your music collection and listen on the web or any compatible Android device.
