Magnatune at the LATV Fest

Guest Blogger: Shannon Coulter, Magnatune Director of A&R

On Thursday afternoon I led a music licensing workshop at NATPE's inaugural LATV Fest, an intensive multi-day conference designed to help independent producers navigate the business and further their careers. This outstanding event was held at the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip in L.A., and NATPE did a really great job with the programming. All the panels and workshops were extremely savvy and up-to-date. NATPE is definitely embracing the new distribution reality much more readily than many of their entertainment industry peers. Even their event logo (see below) reflects this. 

I designed this particular workshop in direct response to the music licensing panels I often encounter at other industry events, all of which have seemed intent on turning music licensing from a somewhat intimidating process into a completely daunting and confusing one. At one of these, a panelist actually likened music licensing to "brain surgery"--a comment that I'm sure did little to empower audience members that day, many of whom were student filmmakers. She also recommended that these students "just hire an entertainment lawyer" to deal with the music licensing.

So for the LATV fest, I wanted to create a much more "workshoppy" kind of session, with the goal of demystifying the music licensing process by breaking it down into steps. Subjects covered included the two sets of rights you need to acquire to use a piece of music in film/video, how to locate rights holders, how to approach them, and how to negotiate down a price quote. I also covered strategies for finding great music on a limited budget and showed a classic clip from The Big Lebowski that demonstrates how big the payoff can be when you start thinking about music during the pre-production phase, versus post. By the end of the workshop (which was completely full), music licensing had hopefully been reduced from a brain surgery-like prospect to that of an outpatient procedure. Of course, at Magnatune, music licensing is so painless, that it's more comparable to a spa treatment of some kind. ;)

In any case, I had a great time presenting the information, and got really positive feedback from people who attended, so I think it was helpful for them. Thanks very much to the good folks at NATPE, especially Programming Director Christina Vergara Andrews and Membership Honcho Abel Salas!

Amarok & Magnatune, Nikolaj joins the team

I've super-excited to announce that Nikolaj (from Copenhagen, Denmark) will be working for Magnatune, with his initial focus being version two of Amarok, esp the ports to Windows and Mac, and Magnatune integration, especially some of the new service-offering ideas we're bouncing around Magnatune. He'll also be helping out with other general Magnatune programming work, though that will mostly wait until Amarok 2 is released.

To the right is a preview photo of the current Amarok 2

Read Nikolaj's blog at:
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/authors/21-Nikolaj-Hald-Nielsen

BayCHI presentation

I'm giving a presentation at BayCHI
http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20070710/

a PDF of the presentation is available here:
http://magnatune.com/p/baychi.pdf

The Evolving Design of OPEN Social Sharing Networks: Bookmooch, Magnatune, and the Future of Shared Passions

John Buckman, Creative Commons, Bookmooch, and Magnatune

Bookmooch.com, founded in 2006, was designed as a place where people could share their enthusiasm for books and ensure that books end up in the hands of appreciative readers. John Buckman's presentation will cover the global dimensions of the mooch network, and the continuous improvements being made to the site. The Bookmooch toolbar was an early UI tool to integrate Amazon data, while guiding people toward sharing through the Bookmooch community. John will discuss UI challenges and opportunities, and the challenges of listening to the global community of moochers for enhancements in the site's function. Connections with Magnatune and Creative Commons will also be discussed.

Amarok / ccMixter /Magnatune contest

Nikolaj Hald Nielsen, who wrote the Amarok/Magnatune integration, asked me whether Magnatune artists would be interested in making a 30 second "first time use" song for Amarok (FYI, Amarok is a gorgeous music/media player for Linux)

I suggested a ccMixter contest, using Magnatune samples.

Victor (who runs ccMixter) agreed, and the contest is now up.

The Amarok blog about the contest is here.

The winning song will included with Amarok 2, and released under a Creative Commons by-sa v3.0 license.

new server for Magnatune

Today (july 4th) I switched Magnatune to a new super-duper server.

We've been running on the same 1.2ghz linux box w/512mb of RAM, since Magnatune started 4 years ago.

The old server worked more-or-less fine, but we did finally run out of disk space (3 drives of 250gb each) and now the new server has 3x the disk space, and is about 60x faster, thanks to having 3gb of RAM in it, and the fastest 750gb SATA drives I could find. I also switched from Red Hat Linux to Ubuntu 7.

Creating a 1h podcast used to take 1.5h on the old machine, now it's about 70 seconds.

Now I have the machine power to roll out some of the new product ideas I've been thinking about.

Also, I've been the only tech guy at Magnatune, doing both sysadmin and all the programming. That's going to change, as I'm hiring some help. More on that when it actually happens.

A few small things still need to be ironed out with the server, such as podcast, song of the day, but part of getting this done was so we could have regular (weekly) podcasts, rather than the once-in-a-while we had before, because creating the podcasts stressed the machine out too much.

- John