YrWall -Interactive Digital Graffiti - Lokey from Lumacoustics on Vimeo.

YrWall is like a giant computer screen that you can paint on with spray cans that use virtual paint. Pick your color and cap size, then spray and the wall does what you tell it to. No cops, no fumes, no drip - no bombing either. It looks like you can mess with the transparency, which is cool; but what would make this really fresh would be if you could spray different textures. Seems like a good way to add the physical element that’s missing from digital art, which is only important to the artist, not the viewer.

NEAR THE START OF THE NEW YEAR, Apple revealed that it would begin selling all of its music on iTunes without copyright software. The move was welcomed by many as the introduction of a new era. But where does the move actually take music?

By shedding the software, listeners have many more options about what they do with the music they buy. But there are hurdles on this path towards freedom of use, including new privacy issues and inflexibility in upgrading collections previously bought at the iTunes store. Furthermore, new copyright software - often called DRM, which is shorthand for digital rights management - is popping up at Apple and iTunes for other forms of digital culture.

Apple began selling 80 percent of its catalog without the copyright software immediately after its announcement at the Macworld expo on Jan. 6. The rest is expected to become available by the end of March. This means that users can now listen to their songs on a range of devices, and no longer just an iPod. They can also download them to as many computers as they like, whereas they could only do so five times previously. The songs will now also become compatible with many different kinds of software, so listeners could use an editing program, for example, to cut the intro out of a song if they wanted to.

FOR 30 CENTS A SONG, users can upgrade their entire collection to the new format. But this is where the issues begin. One has to upgrade their entire collection, and cannot upgrade song by song.

And the songs are not entirely free of copyright software. The digital music files now include the email address of the purchaser, in order to track where the songs go once purchased. (Click here for a screenshot of how visible your address is on iTunes.) Your email is included on a text file downloaded to your computer along with the iTunes file. It is easily alterable, if you were so inclined to get rid of it. But DailyTech wonders if the email is also included in the file elsewhere.

iTunes is not the only one to do this, however. Dance music digital retailer Juno Download also includes a watermark on songs purchased from them. Amazon MP3 does as well, although it is anonymous and simply tracks where the song was bought, not who purchased it. (Amazon began selling such DRM-free digital music lasy year.)

ALTHOUGH APPLE IS DITCHING DRM for iTunes music, they continue to use it for hardware and other forms of digital entertainment purchased at their store.

Accessory makers must now purchase a license to make their products compatible with the newer iPods. But the authentication chips on the new iPods do not work with older, properly licensed speaker systems, writes Twice.

Furthermore, new Macbooks can only be hooked up to external monitors that conform to copyright protection standards, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The advocacy group also points out that movies, TV shows, and audiobooks purchased at the iTunes store are still DRM-laden.

COPYRIGHT SOFTWARE MADE ITUNES songs compatible only with the wildly popular iPod. Apple argued that this was the only way to make the software effective. But by tying the two together, the move undeniably helped make the iTunes store the largest music retailer in the world, surpassing Walmart as title-holder last year.

But DRM software has proven very ineffective. Even with the prominence of iTunes and the growing popularity of buying digital music, illegal downloading of music is still rampant. Digital music sales grew by a quarter worldwide last year, and accounted for 20 percent of the music market. Illegal downloads, however, still account for 95 percent of all music online, according to a new report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

The music industry seems to be coming to grips with the fact that copyright software doesn’t tamp illegal downloading. It didn’t help record labels or artists. But it did benefit Apple, so good thing for them that the TV and movie industry seem to be making similar mistakes.

The study did note, however, that music heads and the "Internet cognoscenti", as the report called the web savvy, search for music in a different manner.

And a couple of new studies might help to shed a little light on this part of the population.

A recent non-scientific survey of users of the blog aggregator Hype Machine found that, like the first report, friends still played a large role in discovering music for Hype Machine users. But friends were only the runner up as a source of music, not the prime source. Online editorials were the go-to place for Hype Machine users.

But one of the readers was a little peturbed that the study didn’t include radio as one of the multiple choice options for sources of new music. A total of 7.6 users wrote this alternative into the "other" category.

Entertainment Media Research also just recently published(pdf) a study of digital music consumption in the UK. (Net, Blogs and Rock’n'Roll caught this one.)

In this online study of 1,700 people, MySpace ranks as the most important web site for music, with YouTube coming in second. More importantly, perhaps, is that 10 percent of respondents said the social networking sites have led to purchases. This is surely to increase now that musicians are able to sell MP3’s directly through their MySpace profiles. And it’s just in time: nearly half said it needs to be easier to buy music from the sites.

Regardless of their popularity, two-fifths agree with the statement that the networking sites "are full of idiots nowadays". Yes, they really asked that question. So scientific.

Sure, you could drop a couple thousand dollars on recording equipment and then travel around North America looking for field recordings like Amon Tobin did for his latest album, The Foley Room. But the rest of us are probably a bit too budget-challenged for all that.

For musicians looking for noises lifted from the real world, the world wide web can be a great resource. The three sites that I’ve found most useful so far are Freesound, SoundSnap, and FindSounds.

The first two use only Creative Commons licensed sounds and tag all of their samples for easy browsing. All employ high quality sounds, and can be downloaded in a variety of sound files. (If you run into a sound file you’re not sure how to use, like .ogg or .aiff, click here for file converters. You wont need to download any software.)

So, if you’re bored of hearing a setup that consists of a lead guitar, bass guitar, and drummer, work something out and flip it Musique Concrète style. With these sites, you can dig up sounds ranging from the audio from a factory floor to the rattle of a spray can to the purr of a tiger.

For a recent example of someone taking this idea as far as you could, check my post on Coldcut’s "Timber".

When anybody with basic computer skills can download music, buying it online has almost become an altruistic act. If it’s free, why pay for it other than to support the artists they enjoy? (Well, there is the remote chance they are scared of getting sued.)

Some internet companies are taking a "glass is half full" approach to this situation. They are banking on the goodwill of people who already buy online, and hoping they would be willing to pay more for music if it were to benefit the artist.

The older of the two companies out there - that I know of, at least - is MagnaTune. The site allows listeners to hear the site’s catalog of artists for free. But to download songs, users have to pay. The site has a base charge, but a buyer can choose to pay more for a song if they like. All money is split with the artists 50/50.

And the new cat on the block is SongSlide. They start songs off at 59 cents, and allow buyers to slide a bar up to donate more money, with all of the extra profits going to the artist.

The catalog of these sites is very limited and makes them more of an interesting experiment with a good faith business model.

But can it pay off? The co-founder of SongSlide, Devin Brewer, tells Freakonomics that the average song sells for $2.08. But this may be due to the novelty of the site, and its limited audience. More telling may be the sale prices at the older MagnaTune. While the site doesn’t provide average sales data on their statistics page, their albums with the highest average sales prices are not that encouraging. Few sell for much more than the base rate of $8.00.

"Music Burgler"

Another telling anecdote may be the experience of Jane Siberry. At first, she allowed listeners to download her music free, but gave them the option to pay. The model was successful… only until she got some media coverage. She then got a swarm of new listeners - who decided to download and never pay.

Take from this what you will, but buy music. (How much have you spent on alcohol this month, hm?) 

Mum’s 2000 self titled album was heavily funk influenced and more rhythmic than its more recent spacey, chill out stuff. The shining achievement on this album is the first song; “Zero Gravity,” the song remixed here. Coming with a tuff hip hop structure, it was perfect for the sample play of mashing up an Obama speech with music.

He chose Obama because of the ease of access to MP3s of his speeches (and because the bar he worked at was throwing a fund raiser for him.)

So, enjoy. It’s not bang you over the head with his political views or anything. It’s still unfinished, he only finished one "verse,"so the second half of it is just the original "Zero Gravity" song.

  

Number 5, from the 80’s movie Short Circuit.

It seems like most of the music technology institutions are after similar technology. I guess it’s the next "killer app" for the music world.

The Musipedia site also has some great links to comparable services.

<Via MusTech>

Lots of stuff, but not much I’d go out on a limb and see. This here is a little list of some of the more interesting jump offs.

Update: Hopefully none of you took any of this info too seriously or anything, because apparently, neither did the organizers of "Make Music NY". I only know about the shows I worte about here, but two of those four had the wrong listings. The Morningside event was nowhere to be found, and the Cave show didn’t start until sundown (that was a mission of a bike ride for nothing!)

In other corrections today - this one my own fault - the Cave Art Space is named after a natural cave, you know, like a hole in a wall? Nothing to do with virtual environments.