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.

This week we drove down to San Antonio from Austin to meet with folks from Rackspace at their corporate castle. We’ve been fans of Rackspace since the beginning of Bitvibe. We have massive storage needs for our marketplace. Rackspace is providing the infrastructure to technically help us make it happen. When you hear people talking about cloud computing, that’s what we’re using.

I’m posting about Rackspace for two reasons. Read More

The huge music festival South by Southwest is rolling into Bitvibe’s backyard in March 12-21, 2010. Here are some of the bands we’ll be checking out!

!!!, The 88, 65daysofstatic, 8Ball & MJG, A Sunny Day in Glasgow, Aa, Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso UFO, Acrylics, Adam Green, Adventure, Afghan Raiders, Alberta Cross, Alina Simone, Alpha Rev, An Horse, Andrew W.K., The Antlers, Anita Tijoux, Anti-Pop Consortium, Anya Marina, Apostle of Hustle, Archie Bronson Outfit, Arms, Art vs Science, The Asteroids Galaxy Tour, Athlete, Attack Attack!, Avi Buffalo, B-Real (of Cypress Hill), Bachelorette, Bajofondo, The Band of Heathens, Band of Horses, Band of Skulls, Balkan Beat Box, Basia Bulat, Bear Hands, Bear In Heaven, The Beauvilles, The Besnard Lakes, Big Sam’s Funky Nation, Billy Bragg, The Bitters, Blackbone Child, Kathleen Blackwell, The Black Atlantic, The Black Box Revelation, Black Feelings, Black Milk, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Blue Scholars, Boats, Born Ruffians, Bowerbirds, Bowling For Soup, The Boxer Rebellion, Brasstronaut, Brazos, Broken Bells, Broken Records, Broken Social Scene, Butch Walker, Butterfly Explosion, Califone, Camper Van Beethoven , DJ Car Stereo (Wars), Casiokids, The Cave Singers, Cheap Trick, Read More

We met the nice folks from Noteflight at NAMM 2010 in Anaheim. Chatted with Joe Berkovitz, President and Elizabeth Gazda, Business Development, again today.

Noteflight is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They’re dedicated to reinventing the way that people create, share and use written music. They provide an online service for written music. Noteflight is a full-featured application to edit, display and play back music notation in a standard web browser, integrated in an online library of musical scores that anyone can publish, link to, or embed. Nice people. Cool service. Check them out!

Here’s an example: Read More

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.

Read More

Watched by Arthur E. on February 11 2010:

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

This was the first year for Bitvibe to be at Winter NAMM all 4-days. We appreciate so many of you taking the time to talk with us. It was fun talking about and showing what we’ve developed. It was exciting to get such a cool response from almost everyone. We ran into one naysayer “company” that wasn’t thrilled that an Austin start-up (us!) is blazing a trail by developing a digital goods marketplace. This company basically said we couldn’t build a marketplace because it goes against their policies for dealers and distributors.  Read More

I’m excited about attending Winter NAMM 2010 in Anaheim. This will be only my 2nd Winter NAMM. I think my biz partner and Co-Founder of Bitvibe, Ron Wikso has attended at least 25.

We’re both excited because we”ll be introducing the Bitvibe at NAMM to a whole new group of people that don’t know about us, yet.

We’ll be showing that Bitvibe allows creative people to buy and sell any kind of digital content, including digital components that other people might be able to use in their work, with absolutely no upfront costs! Free to join. Free to upload products and you set your own price for each of your products. When your products sell, you keep 80% of the purchase price…it’s that simple. Very cool.

Here is what co-founder Ron Wikso had to say users can do with Bitvibe. Read More