JetLib News

An anonymous reader writes “Philippe Dauman, Viacom CEO and President, announced today that Harmonix is currently working on the next Rock Band game, Rock Band 3, due for release Holiday 2010. ‘The company is pursuing the game in spite of an industry-weakening decline in the once-booming genre of peripheral-equipped music games. Although the franchise has generated over $1 billion to date, the category in general saw sales contract by as much as half throughout 2009. MTV Games parent Viacom also saw Rock Band declines drag on its balance sheet in its last fiscal quarter, and expressed a need to refocus away from pricey peripherals in favor of software. It also said that due to royalties it would need to be more “selective” about track listings, and that it needs more support from the music industry in that department.’”

Source: Rock Band 3 Officially Announced For Holiday 2010

cyberfringe writes “Classical music is being used increasingly in Great Britain as a tool for social control and a deterrent to bad behavior. One school district subjects badly behaving children to hours of Mozart in special detention. Unsurprisingly, some of these youth now find classical music unbearable. Recorded classical music is blared through speakers at bus stops, outside stores, train stations and elsewhere to drive away loitering youth. Apparently it works. Detentions are down, graffiti is reduced, and naughty youth flee because they find classical music repugnant.”

Source: Using Classical Music As a Form of Social Control

mbone writes “Ever wonder how Jimi Hendrix would cover Lady Gaga? Whether you do or not [I'm guessing not], you may be about to find out. Writing for Wired, Eliot Van Buskirk describes North Carolina’s Zenph Sound Innovations, which takes existing recordings of musicians (deceased, for now) and models their ‘musical personalities’ to create new recordings, apparently to critical acclaim (PDF). The company has raised $10.7 million in funding to pursue their business plan, and hopes to branch out into, among other things, software that would let musicians jam with virtual versions of famous musicians. This work unites music with the very similar trend going on in the movies — Tron 2.0, for example, will clone the young Jeff Bridges. If this goes on, will the major labels and studios actually need musicians and actors? In the future, it could be harder to make money playing guitar with all of the competition from dead or retired artists.”

Source: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Music

Persian rapper Hichkas and a Hot Chip remix of Gorillaz’s “Kids With Guns” round out this week’s music podcast, hosted by Wired magazine’s music and culture editor, Nancy Miller.

Source: Playlist: New Tracks From Javelin, Watson Twins and Splinters

Making music has never been quite this awesome! Using only ThinkGeek products (Bliptronic 5000, Guitar Shirt, Drumkit Shirt, Stylophone, and Otamatone Electronic Instrument) the ultra-geeks over at ThinkGeek have created this ultra-cool cover of The Who’s Baba O’Reilly. This also qualifies as a full blown shameless plug since ThinkGeek shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot.

Source: Timmy O’Riley By L. Hadron and the Colliders

Say what you will about shlock-rock band K.I.S.S., but they understood one thing: There’s lots of money to be made by selling nonmusical merchandise to music fans. You might say it’s better than the music business.

Source: Music Won’t Feed the Band — But Merch Might

Google may have lost to Apple in its bid to acquire Lala, a music service that grabs users’ digital music collections and hosts them in the cloud, allowing them to add to those collections for a mere 10 cents per song. But it would be nuts to count out Google in the race to replace iTunes’ pay-per-download model with a cloud-based music service that is easy and attractive enough to convince non-music-buyers to open their wallets.

Source: Google’s Music Strategy: Past, Present and Future

Guvera’s upcoming music service will offer free streams and downloads using a novel approach: funneling music into branded areas using a complex algorithm that obviates the need for users to sit through ads. The catch: a velvet-rope policy limiting the service to the first 100,000 users.

Source: Free, Ad-Supported Music … With a Twist

AnotherUsername writes “Recently, many [Google-hosted] music blogs were deleted for hosting mp3s of songs by various artists. The problem? The music blogs in question had been given permission to host the songs, and often, the older links to mp3s were often broken intentionally by the bloggers in order to save bandwidth. From the article: ‘You’re reading this right: Five years of Lipold’s labor of love was deleted, in part, because he posted a track with full permission of a label, and the track apparently wasn’t even online by the time the IFPI filed its complaint.’”

Source: Overzealous Enforcement Means Even Legit Music Blogs Deleted

A rash of music blog deletions on Google’s Blogger and Blogspot platforms drew the ire of music fans and bloggers this week, but Google had no choice by law but to delete them. The fault lies mainly with clumsy techniques used by the labels’ representatives to detect infringement and laws that haven’t kept up with reality.

Source: Dumb Labels, Laws (Not Google) To Blame for Music Blog Deletions