Tagged: web2maybe

Universal Music Group has decided to team up with Google's money-hemorrhaging video site YouTube for a joint venture called Vevo, which will apparently "highlight" clips from the major-label behemoth and make money for everyone (maybe even artists? Haha, just kidding!) via ad revenue. What does this mean for you, the end user? Well, clips that use UMG-owned music—which right now are only available for YouTube viewing if you venture over to the site—will be embeddable on third-party sites, thanks to "a special VEVO branded embedded player," which reads to me like code for "you'll be clicking through [...]

For all the excitement surrounding new ideas about digital music, there's rarely any follow-up on those concepts. Sure, we'll get some breathless posts about some great new system for sharing songs or listening to streams, but if it fails, or does only OK, that doesn't get quite the same amount of coverage. (Unless, of course, it gets sued, at which point it's a cause célèbre.) So it's nice to see CNet try to give a once-over to some recent new-media music startups and assess their fortunes . Unfortunately, it doesn't really do much digging. The [...]

I'm not ready to forgive Last.fm for what its application did to my computer (although I should probably update my Commodore 128, so that might not be their fault), but the social-music site's COO, Spencer Hyman, talked to Forbes about the company's place in the post-MySpace Music economy—and he might have established himself as one of the few sane voices in digital music in the process. Hyman disses MySpace for not having the database to back up its much-hyped initiative, scolds the music business for being slow on streams, and discusses [...]

On Monday, Amazon launched the beta version of Sound Unwound, its new IMDB-for-music wiki interface, allowing you the viewer to change stuff . We can't believe it either. Shocking new developments in Internet interfacing aside, this is a pretty nice-looking site: loads quickly, attractively boxy layout, etc. It ought to be interesting to see how its reader/contributors go about changing the entry of, say, the Beatles , but as we well know around here, the Internet is just full of surprises. [ Sound Unwound Beta ]

Those of you who aren't deleting artists from your Last.fm profiles to look "cool" may want to check out Soundamus, which slices and dices the listening habits you've leaked to the site in order to let you know which artists you like have new releases on the horizon. (NB: You may want to let it run while at lunch, since running a query on the site seems to take a while.) Unfortunately, the site seems to have no info on JC Chasez's long-in-turnaround Kate . Booo. [ Soundamus ; HT Nick Douglas ]