Rewriting Magnatune

I'm starting the process of rewriting Magnatune from scratch.

I have a few aims with the rewrite:

1) redoing the music playing experience, to both be more up-to-date and also to reflect the all-you-can eat way in which the music catalog is experienced. The original magnatune web site, which has been tweaked over the years, is 9 years old, and its design was focussed on selling album downloads.

2) coming up with a new look for Magnatune, and a clearer way of explaining what we do that's special.

For my other web sites, such as MoodMixes, iLicenseMusic and BookMooch, I've been commissioning illustrations from Andrice Arp. I love her drawing style, as it's both cute and slightly insane at the same time, and is extremely distinctive.

I looked at the competition's home pages, specifically: Rdio, Rara, MOG, Rhapsody. What surprised me about these music sites is just how _bland_ their home pages are. Here are their home pages:

There's no passion, no humanity, no edginess...no excitement at all. All have the same concept of "unlimited music, no ads" and look like they were designed by a committee of MBAs.

In all fairness, the MOG home page is a bit better, with the blue Amoeba mascot and some press endorsements.

The real standout for me among "the competition" is Spotify's home page, with its cartoon illustration and super-clear youtube video which explains their concept of social music:

Without further ado, below is our current "working mockup" of what a redesigned Magnatune home page might look like (click any image to see it larger).

A few things to note:

1) the illustration and color scheme is a bit "out there". Too much so? The drawing is actually based on a photograph of me from when I founded Magnatune.

2) the messaging is much shorter, explaining what Magnatune does in terms of a "complete music collection"

3) a new slogan has replaced "We are not evil". Google came out with their "don't be evil" some time after Magnatune launched. But: let's face it, Google is a bit more well known than we are, and our "no evil" slogan nowadays sounds like it was borrowed from Google, even if it wasn't.

4) all the information that is on the current home page is still on the new home page, but much of it has been moved to the "grey section" below the illustration.

And here is a working mockup of our audio player, which would replace the artist/album/download pages on Magnatune.

This audio player actually exists and works today, on our MoodMixes site which launched in May. This web-based player is much like iTunes, and has features people expect nowadays, such as ratings, playlists and sharing.

One of the ideas I'm tinkering with, as part of the Magnatune rewrite, is a "backward compatible mode" so that people who much prefer the way Magnatune organizes and plays its music now, will be able to keep it that way.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the mockups above. Remember... these are just conceptual mockups at this point: no HTML or programming has yet to occur, so your feedback can effect what we end up doing!

- John

A Happy Filmmaker

Filmmaker Chris Gavin blogged yesterday that he had used music from Magnatune under our Creative Commons terms, and now Youtube has asked him to join their "partnership" status, where he makes money sharing ad revenue with them. He came back to us at Magnatune to ask about getting the right kind of commercial license for the music, and writes about his experience:

One consequence of the YouTube approach, is that I've decided to secure the appropriate licence on the sound track of the film to enable the agreement to go ahead. Fortunately back in 2008, I was (and still remain) fairly scrupulous about music usage rights on my films, and I had sought music from www.magnatune.com Under the terms and conditions they had then, I was able to buy the album and use it for internet distribution of a non profit-making film. Now that the YT partnership has been offered, I got back in touch with Magnatune last night and got a very speedy and reasonable deal to 'upgrade' to a more suitable licence to reflect this change in circumstances. I can say that not only is Magnatune a great source for new and varied music, but that they also very much have their act together in terms of enabling film-makers to effectively and affordably gain the licences they need to use the music in productions. Now, I only wish there was a way of retrospectively improving the video quality of the old YouTube film. Three years ago, there was no HD option on YouTube only something called 'HQ mode' which seems to have been scrapped since then.

Thanks Chris! I'm happy you're happy! (grin)

A nice example of the free-use-brings-commercial-licensing business model...

-john

At the Restaurant Show

This past spring, Magnatune launched a new side-business called MoodMixes, which provides restaurant music and in-store music.

Because our musicians sign with us directly, we're able to offer restaurants and shops a much lower price than if they play any old music they want, because they then have to pay the high ASCAP/BMI fees (which they don't have to pay if they use us).

Also, in case you haven't noticed, lots of shops and restaurants aren't very good at picking appropriate music for their environment, while we've been sifting and categorizing the best of indie music for nine years now (which is why some of you become paid Magnatune members).

Last week, we exhibited at the national restaurant show:

here is a picture of me standing in front of our booth:

We were the only music company present, other than the collecting society's booth. What's surprising is how apathetic small restaurant owners are about their music. They don't seem to care that much either about having good music, or dropping their bill from several thousand dollars per year to several hundred.

My perception is that restaurant owners have their small circle of trusted suppliers, for everything from bottled water to furniture, and that's how they feel comfortable buying things.

So... one of my major initiatives for MoodMixes is recruiting resellers, as to that end we're paying a 30% commission to people who sign others up to our music service. We did manage to interest about a dozen major restaurant and bar consultants, and that's probably the best outcome of the show.

Mobile Magnatune Improvements

I received a hand-me-down iPad a few months ago, and have been using it to play Magnatune throughout my house.

I've been using both the Mobile Magnatune site (because it supports Magnatune Podcasts) as well as our iPad/iPhone app.

My iPad can send music (via the "airplay" feature) to the airport express wifi boxes I have around the house, allowing me to direct music from Magnatune to whatever room I happen to be in.

Here is what this feature looks like from the Mobile Magnatune site:

and from the iPad/iPhone app:

Android and other webphone users: I recommend you use the Mobile Magnatune site, which I've also been improving.

Three improvements to the Magnatune Mobile Site were launched today:

a) the artist name is linked back to a page listing their other albums
b) a "recommendations" link provides 20 other albums we think you'll like that are similar the one you're listening to
c) the artwork is now high resolution and fills the screen.

These improvements work equally well on all web browser capable phones:

We'll be continuing to regularly improve the mobile site, as it's much easier to improve an HTML web site than an iPad app, and also because the mobile site improvements help people with all kinds of phones, not just Apple devices.

If you have a feature you'd like to see on the Mobile Magnatune site, say so!

-john

Article in the Independent UK

The Independent newspaper in the UK ran an article about me today.

You can read it on the link above, or read the PDF or from this text below:

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John Buckman: The battle to keep the internet free for all
The Business Interview: His entrepreneurial skills are put to good use in the battle to defend his vision of the web

By Stephen Foley
Thursday, 11 August 2011

John Buckman hands his fold-up bicycle to the maître d', scans the menu, gently rebuffs the sommelier's suggestion of English sparkling wine ("You can't even cook with it") and settles in for a philosophical chat.

The British-born, US and French-educated head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a man without borders, who splits his time between London and Silicon Valley, running two businesses, indulging his passions for the arts, and campaigning for freedom on the internet.

When The Independent caught up with him in the UK, he was alive with tales of a recent "soirée" at his London home, a regular event he holds in the style of a French salon. He had invited a shakuhachi player to entertain the guests, if entertain is the precise word, since the didgeridoo-style Japanese flute is more of a personal meditative tool than a performance instrument. "It's the one performance where it is perfectly acceptable to fall asleep," he says.

One of Mr Buckman's businesses is Magnatune, a distributor of world and classical music and defunct styles of Eighties electronica, by artists who have found no place in the modern factories of iTunes and cost-cutting record-label giants. Unlike traditional labels, Magnatune lets the artists keep the rights to their work. "I make about three months' rent for 4,000 musicians, and that's my contribution right now," he explains.

Mr Buckman's other venture is BookMooch, whose 250,000 members swap second-hand books amongst themselves. "It was inspired by a Bruce Sterling science-fiction story, where everyone had a watch on them that kept track of what they were doing and suggested favours they could do for others at no cost to themselves, through an invisible co-operative net."

This pair of ventures, like his soirées, speak to Mr Buckman's belief that the world is at its best when people collaborate, share and create, and where the internet is the most powerful force for achieving these goals. It is a vision of the web that is under constant threat from corporations that aggressively enforce "all rights reserved" copyright, and from governments and courts who spend too much time snooping on what people do online.

Which is why he joined the EFF, and the board of the Open Rights Group, a similar UK-based campaign group. "I am not actually a very political person," he says, "but I find there is a British person in me, saying: 'That's not on.'"

The EFF was founded 21 years ago in an early wave of public and corporate concern about computer hackers, to defend computer programmers and entrepreneurs caught up in the US authorities' campaign against cyber-crime. Some of its first funding came from the co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak. It still advises hackers these days – not the "black hat" types out to steal people's credit-card details, but the kids and hobbyists who risk falling foul of intellectual property laws when they tinker with other people's source codes or hardware – and it goes into battle to shape copyright and free-speech laws through the US court system.

It took on the Texan telecoms giant AT&T; which was revealed to have secretly aided the security services by allowing them access to phone records and to wiretap customers in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, a case that was stopped only when Congress retrospectively legitimised the assistance. In the UK, the EFF is campaigning against new laws to block websites suspected of aiding music and film piracy, and last week it welcomed the Government's climbdown from provisions of the Digital Economy Act that would have forced internet service providers to do so.

"Instead of trying to get laws passed or repealed, we try to get case law we like," Mr Buckman says. "Judges are much more reasonable people than politicians. They listen to arguments and they are supposed to make a decision based on what everyone heard, not on a back-room deal. But when you consider we are 50 people working on the entire body of US law against every company that wants to push things too far, that is not many people."

For many companies, particularly music and media businesses, the EFF's lines are hard to swallow. But the bottom line, according to its chairman, is this: the internet is new, the laws governing it are new, and it is important to carve out as much protection for free speech and freedom of activity as possible. Laws that might seem to be aimed only at child pornographers or music pirates might one day be used to infringe basic human rights and to censor the web in egregious ways.

"One of the most interesting things that WikiLeaks has taught is that your best defence against the government is putting your words out on dead trees. If you are purely digital, you don't have seem to have anywhere near as strong a legal defence. A huge amount of our effort goes into building up case law to show that journalism online should have all the same legal protections. And by journalism we mean a very broad definition of journalism that includes bloggers and citizen journalists. Essentially anyone who writes on the internet engages in journalism, and we think should be protected."

The EFF under Mr Buckman is carving out an influential niche in the world of advocacy, on – as its name suggests – the frontier of technical and business innovation. There are running battles to come between those who envision a sometimes anarchic, always collaborative, internet where people freely share, adapt and build new ventures, and those who want to impose order and restore the primacy of intellectual property over those who would steal it. The polymath has chosen his side, and Mr Buckman is clear about why.

"London is a screaming example of the success that openness leads to," he says, before cycling off into the Central London traffic. "In the European Union now, every talented person who leaves school spends a couple of years in London. It's the new British empire. Where before we had bureaucrats all over the world, now we have Anglophiles."

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Buckman in brief

Campaigner Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2010; director of the Open Rights Group.

Entrepreneur Currently chief executive of BookMooch, a book-swap service, and Magnatune, an artist-friendly record label. Previously founded Lyris, a direct-marketing firm. "At one point George Bush used my software to send out all his emails in his re-election campaign. To do penance I gave a free copy to the Howard Dean campaign."

World traveller Born in London and raised in France and the US, his family moved around with his father's job as an executive for Singer sewing machines. Studied philosophy at Bates College in Maine and the Sorbonne.

Musician Renaissance lute and viola da gamba player, and a composer of jazz and classical jingles for radio.

Rhythmbox on Linux Update

A tech support question came in today asking about the status of Rhythmbox, an excellent audio player on Linux.

This gave me the nudge to install the latest Ubuntu 11.04, and give Rhythmbox a spin. It's very easily installed, from within the UBuntu Software Center.

I found that the current version of Rhythmbox has *EXCELLENT* support for Magnatune, both in free and membership modes.

The entire Magnatune catalog is kept up to date in Rhythmbox, you can stream everything as well as easily download from within Rhythmbox. Basically, the entire experience is as good as if you downloaded the entire Magnatune catalog, all perfectly organized on your desktop.

Rhythmbox also supports a number of audio format defaults, since Magnatune also provides all its music in these formats:

Make sure you have a fairly recent version of Rhythmbox. This tutorial was made on Ubuntu 11.04 and Rhythmbox version:

To enable streaming and downloading ad-free music from Rhythmbox, follow these steps:

1) go to "edit/plugins"
2) choose "magnatune store" and click "configure"
3) choose "I have a download account"
4) enter in your Magnatune membership name and password

Here are what the screens look like for these steps:

If you're running Linux, give it a try.

If you're running Windows, you can run Ubuntu inside of Windows quite easily (and then install Rhythmbox) with this installer: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/windows-installer

On Mac OSX, Ubuntu now installs in 3 minutes inside of Parallels, and Rhythmbox works perfectly. Just download the "32 bit" version of Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download

Amarok

I'd also like to mention that Amarok, another audio player on Linux, also supports Magnatune (and memberships) very nicely:

You set Amarok with your membership by going to the preferences page and choosing "Magnatune Store":

put your membership info in:

this is what Amarok looks like while browsing/playing Magnatune:

Tone Gnome Recordings

Over the past 5 years, I've been the recording engineer on about 20 classical, world and folk albums, all of them for free so that I could "learn my trade". 2 years ago, I stopped taking free jobs, and started charging (modestly) for my recording services.

If you're interested in having a recording done and you play un-amplified music (that's what I specialize in), take a look at the Tone Gnome web site, listen to the recordings I've done, and let me know what you think:

http://ToneGnome.com/

At Cannes Film Festival

I'm going to the Cannes Film Festival tomorrow, for the first time with an approved "professional accreditation", which is nice because it's a pass to the entire festival. The Cannes Festival plays the elitist game to the hilt: you can't even get into a hotel to have a drink unless you have "professional accreditation". A few years I was in Cannes during the festival without accreditation, and there wasn't much you could do but visit the "hospitality rooms" of various indie film makers who also weren't accredited.

Magnatune was approved this year, as we've licensed music to 4 films in the past 2 months, and this was enough for their selection panel to put us on the "permanently approved" list. Woohoo!

If you're reading this and also planning on being at Cannes, drop me an email so we can meet.

We're releasing our albums for this week a few days early, so we can party^H^H^H^H^H network effectively over the week.

-john

New company: MoodMixes

Today we're launching a new company: MoodMixes.

MoodMixes provides background music for business.

Restaurants, offices, clothing stores, hotels, bars, spas, trade shows, theaters, supermarkets, parking lots, art galleries, coffee shops: these are the kinds of businesses who might play our music.

Magnatune has always been in this business, and indeed we've licensed to mall chains in countries such as Italy and Sweden, to chain stores across the UK and America, and to countless small stores. What's changed is that we're now focussing heavily on this use of our music.

MoodMixes has a number of interesting aspects:

1) very low prices: starting at just $30 per month, as well as a free 30 day trial period.

2) all rights are included: there's no need to pay any collecting society to play music in your space. We provide an incredibly strong legal guarantee which indemnifies our customers. Even better, if you ever were to have any problems, we'd immediately take over and handle the dispute for you.

3) Free music for your web site. Any blog, shop or restaurant web site can use our music. This isn't limited to companies: anyone who wants music on their web site can use this.

4) a brand new music player which helps you browse the collection, but also rank it (with 1 to 5 stars) and make your own playlists

I'm planning on migrating this player into Magnatune over the summer.

5) an automated "show making" technology which creates multi-hour single shows with seamless cross fades. In addition, each song is volume matched using a technology which analyzes how loud a song is perceived by human beings rather than its mathematical loudness.

6) ten pre-made playlists across ten genres which you can use immediately, or make your own playlists.

and we'll be making more professionally-vetted playlists over time, across many different genres and moods.

7) Both streaming and downloadable files, at any audio quality from 128k MP3s to WAV files.

8) Full album downloads: something no other "music-for-business" company provides

9) Fair-trade-music : our musicians are paid 50% of revenue, just as they are with Magnatune, and this is determined by which songs our clients choose to play.

Drop by and visit MoodMixes!

And, if you like what MoodMixes is about and want to help, I've made some graphical ads you can put on your blog or web site.

Library uses Magnatune for All-you-can-eat music

The Library system of Ann Arbor, Michigan is now making all of Magnatune's catalog available to all its 107,000 library members.

Essentially, what the Library has done is negotiated with Magnatune for a download membership for all their library members.

In an article in the Ann Arbor Chronicle, the journalist wrote:

One of the most promising new digital offerings is available through Magnatune, a digital music publisher. AADL recently negotiated a deal with the firm for about 12,000 songs – or the equivalent of about 1,200 albums, Choate said. The service offers unlimited, simultaneous downloads with no waiting. The Magnatune page on AADL’s website describes it this way, in what appears to be an oblique reference to Overdrive: "You shouldn’t have to jump through 17 flaming hoops in order to access digital content, so we’ve tried to make the process as simple as possible." Since launching about three weeks ago, over 11,000 tracks have been downloaded, Choate said. Parker noted that these are independent artists – you won’t find music by the current hot performers – but there’s a wide variety of genres, from world music and blues to hip hop, classical and alt rock. She said the music is appealing in a community like Ann Arbor, where alternative music is valued. The AADL doesn’t pay per download – rather, the library paid a $10,000 flat fee in a licensing agreement that runs through June 30, 2012. So the more times the service is used, the lower the cost is per use. It’s a very cost-effective service for the library to provide, Choate said.

Especially impressive is the fact that the Library's IT department has made a gorgeous browsing/streaming/downloading interface, with social networking features and musical categories from our information data feeds. They even noticed the Creative Commons licensing that applies to our paid downloads and applied that same license on their library music site and allows the library members to reuse our music as they see fit.

Here are some screen pictures of the fine work they've done:

The article goes on to say:

AADL has the infrastructure in place to provide these digital services, Choate said. They’re pursuing deals like the one with Magnatune, with fixed costs, unlimited downloads and annual licenses. The library is interested in getting the most use out of its collections, she said, while containing costs – they don’t want to pay per download. Responding to a board member’s query, Parker said there’s never enough exposure for what the library offers, but that when they launch something like the deal with Magnatune, there’s no shortage of information about it. Social media networks are playing a huge role in spreading the word about AADL’s deal with Magnatune, and earlier in the day, Parker said, they got a call from Library Journal, which is interested in doing an article about the agreement. People who are only interested in mainstream music – like the kind licensed by Sony – might not be interested in what’s available via Magnatune, Parker said. But it’s not worth it for the library to strike a deal with Sony – it would cost them almost as much as retail.

Needless to say, I'm thrilled about both the license ($10,000/year is good money for us), the fantastic job the library did in presenting our music, and look forward to working with more libraries in the future.

-john