I’m pretty certain this is my favourite playlist on Apple Music, despite not being anything I listen to daily. Great for relaxing, but equally great for when I need to concentrate on things.
https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/classical-edge/pl.5a4f127f4ba54a7d82d15df510587aff
Music lover, reader, tea drinker, film watcher, web dabbler. IndieWeb novice.
“You may have seen this story in various forms over the weekend, starting with a big Wall Street Journal article (paywall likely) claiming that Genius caught Google “red handed” in copying lyrics from its site.”
There’s a separate issue here worth noting as well: all of this demonstrates just how idiotic the whole “licensing of lyrics” business is — considering that what everyone here is admitting is that even when they license lyrics, they’re making it up much of the time. Specifically, what people are noting is that they license lyrics from the publishers, but the publishers themselves rarely even have or know the lyrics they’re licensing, so lyrics sites try to figure them out themselves and “create” the lyrics file which may or may not be accurate.
But… if the publishers don’t even know they lyrics they’re licensing, then what the fuck are they licensing in the first place? The right to try to decipher the lyrics that they supposedly hold a copyright on? Really?
🤷♂
Good to know I’ve been “doing it right” all along!
[Source: Daring Fireball]
Winamp shutdown yesterday. Even though I hadn’t used it in years, this makes me a little sad, as Winamp was iconic. It was a hero of the early world-wide web, helping to kick-start the internet music age for a great many people like myself.
I first discovered Winamp around 14 years ago, during my first year at university. Back then, you could run Winamp from any old folder without installing it, so everyone used to have a copy in their network profile. This was the early days… MP3s were still a rarity here in the UK, so you would listen mainly to CDs (Windows Media Player was a world of suck on Windows NT), or the 2-3 MP3s you had downloaded from Napster.
As time went on, MP3s became more and more common, and Winamp became the defacto music player for a lot of people. Imitators sprung-up elsewhere. It was small, customisable, and with plugins was able to do almost anything – like managing an MP3 Player, if you were the early-adopter who splashed out a few hundred for one of the early, pre-iPod devices. Ahem.
Then the iPod happened, and with it, iTunes. Once iTunes for Windows hit, that was the end of Winamp’s glory days. Owned by AOL, it sank into irrelevance. Full-blown music library management, with integrated store and device management, was the order of the day – all things Winamp was woeful at, even with plugins – relegating Winamp to a niche of nostalgia and a small number of users who couldn’t do with out some feature or other. Winamp 3 was a mess, Winamp 5.5 moved away from the minimal UI. There was even an Android version. It was terrible.
By that time, we had all moved to streaming music services. Why store gigabytes of music files on your computer, when someone else can do it for you, and high-speed access is increasingly common? The need for an application like Winamp was increasingly shrinking. At least Spotify has honoured your legacy by releasing Spotiamp.
And so yesterday, Winamp ceased to be. The site is still there, and for now at least, it seems you can still download v5.666… but that will be turned off soon.
So long, Winamp. You really whipped that ass for as long as you could.
In a hasty move to try and head off a mountain of bad publicity, the RIAA settled out of court with the mother of the 12 year old girl they sued. The mother now has to pay $2000 in damages, for her daughters’ copyright infringements (and, I guess, promise never to do it again).
Personally, I think it should’ve been dropped all together…
The RIAA is sueing a 12 year old girl, for “massive copyright infringements through file-swapping”. Under legislation, this could mean her paying “damages” of upto $150,000 per song.
Just when you thought they could go now lower, they pull this one… I hope they get seriously nailed to the wall for it. Surely it can’t be long now before they get investigated by the feds, for what they’re doing?
Either that, or people should wake up and Boycott the RIAA.
