Bitvibe

This video is a bit long (18 minutes!) but also pretty interesting.

It’s amazing the way copyrights and licenses of content have evolved over the years and this video shows that it’s important to make sure you’ve got your bases covered, legally, especially now, with the proliferation of digital media.

It also shows the incredible variety in the way something can be used and re-purposed. This drum beat is 40 years old and only 6 seconds long, yet it has been used countless ways in countless settings by thousands of different people! This should serve as a reminder that creative people are always creating and that a lot of what they think may not have value elsewhere, for other people, really does.

Sachin Agarwal, cofound of Posterous and Final Cut Pro expert was correct when he stated:

People think they are entitled to free music. But history has shown that no one can give you media for free. Illegal sites have tried and failed (Napster, allofmp3). And even ad based services are switching to pay (Hulu). Lala’s model was interesting, a nice experiment, but it was bound to fail.

You can read his whole blog post here.

Apple has proven that people are willing to pay for personal use of songs they love.  iTunes made it super convenient to get songs and simple to be legal.

At Bitvibe we’re following Apple’s lead in believing that music and other media isn’t free. We’re busy developing a super cool way to provide a wide variety of legal licensing of all content in our marketplace. Can’t wait to show you!

SXSW Interactive conference showcases the bleeding edge tech ideas that are being pioneered today. Sean Cunningham from the award-winning interactive documentary series Docublogger interviews Ron Wikso and me about Bitvibe.

I’m excited that our friends at Lilac Writer have created an excellent Pro Tools video tutorial using the Hip Hop Anonymous drum loops available in our Bitvibe Marketplace. The video shows how to assemble a drum part to match an instrumental groove using the Elastic Audio feature on the track to make the drum part match the project tempo. Check this out:

LilacWriter is online collaboration software for the professional songwriter. Simple tools focused around lyric projects allow you to organize rewrites. Exclusive rhyming look-up technology finds less cliched near rhymes to help you express your ideas in new and personal ways. Comments, Files and To-dos give you everything you need to collaborate with co-writers or you band – next door or around the world.

Abbey Road Studio 2

I read today about EMI placing the legendary Abbey Road Studios for sale – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8519706.stm – which made me think of several things. First among them of course, is the fact that The Beatles made so many amazing, historical recordings there and in large part, gave the studio its place in history, particularly with their photo on the cover of their Abbey Road album, where they famously cross the street one after another.

Of course, the Beatles were not the only well known band to record there, they we just the biggest and because they also had an album of the same name, they made the name of the studio a household name to many people in the general public who would have otherwise, never known its significance. The article actually points that out, when they mention the fact that Olympic Studios, where Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones had worked, was sold and the sale was barely noticed in the press.

Though I never had the chance to actually work at Abbey Road (maybe someday!) I did have the very good fortune of getting a tour of the facility from someone who worked there, when I was on tour in London with David Lee Roth some years ago. I have some great video and memories of that which I will always cherish and I recommend that anyone who is a fan of the Beatles or just great recording, try and get there to see it if you can.

But the other side of this story is one of a changing world…progress perhaps? Well, maybe progress is not the right word, who knows? It is a changing world though and one of the main reasons, alluded to in the article, for vaunted facilities like this becoming no longer economically viable is that there is less and less need for them based on available, cheap, high quality technology, particularly very fast computers with amazing recording programs like Pro Tools, Nuendo, Sonar, Studio 1, Logic and many others.

So how does this affect you? How does it affect bands, singers, film score composers, recording enthusaists? There are some traditions that may go by the wayside but in many ways, it’s great news and there are a ton of new, never before available opportunities to interact with other artists from around the world, get your work known and even make money in the process, doing what you love to do and exploiting resources that you’re creating all the time but could not exploit previously.

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Bitvibe Product Profile Page

So you want to sell your stuff on Bitvibe right? You’re ready to upload your products and show them to the world but how do you tell people what they are? How they can use them? Here’s a few tips to help you do just that and help you to make your products stand out!

Product Description – Try to think of yourself as a prospective buyer. What does the buyer need to know about your product that would make it useful to him/her? How will the user find your product in the marketplace?

First of all- Tell them what it is! If it’s some audio that would be great for use in a video production, say that. If it’s some kind of drum loop, what kind is it? Stereo? Multitrack? Midi? Some criteria can apply to lots of different kinds of digital media like: What genre is it? How big is the file size? These are generic terms that apply to Audio, Video, Images, Vectors, Wordpress Templates and more.

Perhaps you’ve created something that is meant to be used in a particular program. Say that! “This is a multiple layer comp for Adobe After Effects CS3 and above”. “Pixel Aspect Ratio is 720×480 and it is Standard Definition”.

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You can now do the following cool things on both your Company and any of your Artist Profile pages at Bitvibe.com:

• Upload Audio, Video and Images – a sort multimedia resume that you can use to highlight whatever makes you look good! Maybe you’ve written some film or TV scores…you could upload video clips of those things, with your music. Or maybe you’ve got some cool videos or photos of you working. Songs you’ve played on…whatever you think will enhance your credibility with other users in the Bitvibe Marketplace. If you’ve got multiple artists that are part of your company, you can highlight them on your company profile page and/or highlight various products from all of your artists.
• Add tags for your profile, which will allow visitors to the site to not only find products that are tagged with the terms they’re interested in, but also find artists and companies tagged that way too! For example, maybe I do a search (or click a tag) for cartoon music. I would get a list of all the music that is cartoon music AND I would also get a list of any artists or companies who have tagged themselves with the term ‘cartoon music’. So get tagging!
• Add your Social Network links! You can now add links to your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn profiles. If you have any ideas of other ones we should add, let us know!
• In the near future we’ll have the ability for you to be able to add a profile widget to any blog or website you like, that will show people what’s part of your Bitvibe Profile. Stay tuned!

Don’t forget, your artist profile is like your own personal store, with a unique URL that you can add to your e-mail signature, your website and lots of other places to let people know what you’ve got for sale in the Bitvibe Marketplace! Oh, since I mentioned it…here’s mine! www.bitvibe.com/ronwikso

Watched by Arthur E. on February 11 2010:

Derek Sivers is right. We’re seeing a crowd forming at at Bitvibe. Come join us!

It’s no secret that there’s lots of stock audio, stock video, stock photo sites and such out there on the internet but so far, there’s nothing that aggregates all of that for people who need those things for use in their creative projects. And there’s nowhere online that allows you to not only find “traditional” stock media files but also other “components” that you can use, like project templates, presets and other kinds of valuable digital files. The Bitvibe Marketplace allows content creators to sell ANY kind of digital file and makes it easy for people who need them to find what they need to help them with their projects.

One of the things that we believe can be very useful to a lot of creative people is the ability to find whatever they need for their projects, across all the creative disciplines – not just the one they specialize in – because it’s often the case that you need something that really isn’t your specialty. Maybe you work with audio but you need some graphics to use on a CD cover or a website, or maybe you need a really cool Wordpress template. Maybe you’re a video producer and you need some B-roll footage AND some underscore music. Right now, you’d have to search across multiple websites to find what you need but as we build the marketplace with more and more great content, it will be easy to find whatever you need, aggregated in one place…the Bitvibe Marketplace!

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I ran across this hunk of paper today. This is from an early discussion that Ron and I had on what the profile screen might look like for Bitvibe. Just a piece of paper, a pen and a couple of guys with an idea a few years ago…  Read More