Warning: Industry punditry ahead. Adjust your speed and headlamps. 

So, yesterday Apple expanded “iTunes Plus”, which removes the proprietary DRM use limitations on songs. It’s not a digital media industry game changer but rather a significant game accelerator and a net positive for Apple and iTunes, Pioneers and Songbird and the digital media ecosystem.

Non-DRM’d songs from the iTunes Store improves interoperability and portability for users switching away from iTunes. Amazon has been selling DRM free since Q3’07 so this is a step towards a la carte non-DRM song parity for Apple. However Amazon has made scant progress in  the market despite the non-DRM head-start because consumers value integration convenience over other factors including DRM hassle and  price combined. (And FWIW, the iTunes Store continues to sell DRM’d music videos, TV shows, movies and audiobooks.)

iTunes remains a closed ecosystem, stymying transactions between digital media consumers, service providers and device manufacturers. Like iTunes, Songbird’s value prop is a user’s control point for digital media. Like iTunes, Songbird supports DRM and non-DRM content. Unlike iTunes, Songbird is built to streamline third-party service integrations (e.g., Amazon, 7digital, Last.FM, etc.) and third-party device synchronization (e.g. Philips, Sony, Sandisk, etc.) into a consumer’s media player, which is key to user utility and convenience that underpin customer satisfaction and willingness to recommend.

Apple’s done a great thing here by furthering the current thinking with respect to the digital media market past the real and imagined pitfalls of DRM’d content and to awareness of the emergent Internet digital media value chain — a segmented, multi-vendor, open market ecosystem of content producers, consumers, developers, service providers and device makers.  

The industry just lurched towards the inevitable.

Chirps,
Rob

In the time since the first rev of mashTape was written, we’ve had some other add-ons crop up such as Concerts & LyricMaster which have removed the need to cover those features within mashTape itself.
The new mashTape focuses on 4 types of info:

• Artist Info
• News (via RSS feeds)
• Photos
• Videos (or any sort of Flash-y thing)

This information is presented in tabbed panes, just like before.  The major difference now is that mashTape is now extensible via additional add-ons.  Developers can create new add-ons that add new providers to bring in even more content.  We’ve uploaded Delicious & Vimeo providers as examples of this.

Of course, along with all this work, we’ve expanded the types of information mashTape now delivers.

Showing the artist biography, photo, discography, tags, links, and members of the band.

The Artist Info now shows the artist photo, biography, discography (with cover art), members (if it’s a multi-member act/band), related links, and tags.  By default we use a combination of Last.fm+Wikipedia+Freebase+MusicBrainz to get this info, but we’ve supplied a second provider using Wikipedia Japan as a demo of a single-source provider.

The News tab pulls in information from multiple RSS feeds.  We ship with Digg, Hype Machine, Google News, Yahoo News, Google Blog Search, and MTV providers for this tab.  You get an index view of all the results, and you can click on them to read the excerpt directly in mashTape.  You can then click off to launch the full detail view within Songbird’s browser.

Photos streaming in and animating smoothly

For Photos, we ship with both Flickr & SmugMug providers.  The animation is a lot smoother and less CPU intensive now.  Additionally it now overlays information on each photo.  What’s super cool is that you can now resize the display pane and mashTape will load in higher resolution photos for a more immersive experience.

And lastly, for the Videos tab we ship with YouTube & Yahoo Music providers.  As with the News/RSS tab, you get an index view with thumbnails and title.  You can click them to load them up within mashTape and play them directly.  As with the Photos tab, if you resize the display pane, the video will scale up or down accordingly.

We’re looking to launch mashTape as a “first-run” add-on (meaning included by default) with Genesis; but in the meantime, I’ve uploaded it to the add-ons site for you to download.  However, mashTape requires bleeding-edge bits, due to its dependency on the new Media Core API, as well as the display pane tab header changes.  You must be running a nightly from 2008-09-25 or newer in order to use the new mashTape 0.2.0 builds.

RSS feeds pouring in

Resizing the photo stream and loading in high res photos for a more immersive experience

Loading and playing YouTube videos directly in mashTape

RIA (the acronym) has jumped the shark. I find that I can no longer use RIA to describe anything anymore. The definition has been watered down and twisted to the point that nearly any application can be called RIA.

I agree. Finkle names names of Adobe and Microsoft software evangelists pushing proprietary app frameworks that have obfuscated the meaning of RIA and, in their wake, the user-centric, community-directed utility promise of the RIA class.

However, I don’t follow Mark’s conclusion to retire the term RIA. The term has currency and fluency; Let’s re-appropriate, replenish and sharpen it. With a new definition, Firefox, Thunderbird and Songbird are practical and aspirational leaders of the RIA class.

The key is to emphasize the I in RIA. The Internet is global network of community-centric client-server systems including the Web, email, DNS, etc. An RIA implements the client-side of at least one of these Internet systems.

Also, the R in RIA should be measured by “richness” found in exemplary IAs, Firefox first among them. The metric is user utility and community adoption of the client. Firefox’s open source, vibrant community, Open Web manifesto, widespread adoption and 5,000+ community-contributed add-ons establish a very high “richness” bar.

With this definition it’s easy to discern the real RIAs from the wishful: RIAs implement the client-side of Internet methods, formats and protocols. In the Web client-server system, RIAs are better known as user-agents or Web browsers. In the email client-server sytem, RIAs are better known as email clients.

By this definition, is Twirl, a useful desktop app for Twitter built from Adobe AIR, a RIA? No, it’s a proprietary app, platform and service integration. However, if someone built an desktop IM-like client from the open source Mozilla stack that posted your Twitter-like status to your OpenID via Attribute Exchange and thus accessible to all Twitter-like status tracking services like Twitter — that would be a really cool RIA.

Your comments are welcomed!

ryan seemed to grok things spot-on with accurate critique as well as understanding the premise of what we’re shooting for. i like that he specifically pointed out our upstream work (e.g. our contributions to GStreamer, and Mozilla) and the promise of the webpage API in terms of breaking down silo’d music services.

I was super-psyched to meet a couple of the Me.dium devs when they came out to our last Songbird DevCamp where they, armed with our Developer Centre references, and documentation, made quick work out of building in Songbird support.

Music is inherently a social activity… we discover new music by seeing what artists our friends are listening to, and by recommendations from trusted sources. With Me.dium, you get that in both the browser context, and now in the media library context. Anyway, go check out Me.dium at their Me.dium site, or install their Songbird add-on and add some friends (I’m ‘donuthole’ on the network), and start exploring and sharing your music listening and browsing experience.

This month we’ve decided to talk about mashups from a musical point of view. We’re bringing in some pretty awesome DJs (DJ Earworm and Kid Kameleon) to demo, talk about what tools they use online to find, create, mashup, distribute and promote their music and what really irks them about the current state of the web.

Rob Lord will help tie this back to technology, the open media web and mashups online and how this can address some of this.

6pm (yes that’s in 2 hours) at our office!

My comment was that Mozilla Firefox browser gained market-share at the expense Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Firefox’s early success was propelled by its open source, open standards and Open Web approach, while Microsoft Internet Explorer’s proprietary, single vendor solution stagnated. Duh. =)

Thanks to Paul Kim at the Mozilla Foundation for catching it.

Rob

Birdwatchers, ‘birders, builders, and bird friends,

Thank you for making 2007 a great year for Songbird. Your continued support has helped make our project a success. Your growing numbers are also a sign of our growing popularity, keep spreading the word! Meanwhile, we’ll be hard at work at improving both the ‘bird and the ‘nest for your Open Media Web consuming pleasure.

Much thanks and a Happy New Year,
Koshi.

This one promises to be awesome; we’ve got some heavyweights in the realm of portable playlists coming over to have a panel discussion about the future of how music lovers are going to listen to their media on the go.

On the panel so far: Tantek Çelik (former Chief Technologist of Technorati, and microformats expert), Lucas Gonze (XSPF and portable playlist guru), Scott Kveton (Open Technology Lead at MyStrands) and Tom Conrad (CTO of Pandora).

Wow! How star-studded is that cast?

The panel starts at 6pm at our offices here at 585 Howard, but Lucas will be giving a one hour talk on XSPF and the history of portable playlists to provide some context to the panel at 5pm.