It's been a little while since a music related online service has come along which has made me drop everything and rush to try it out and find out more. MoreCowbell.dj is that thing. The service is a spin off of US tv show Saturday Night Live, where a special show featured Will Ferrell as Gene Frenkle, the cowbell player, and Christopher Walken as the music producer, Bruce Dickenson. It's simple but sure-to-be-massive mechanic allows users to add a variable amount of cowbell (and optional Walken) to any track they upload. They can then embed the newly modified track as a widget in their blog, social network profile etc. Here's one I made earlier:

The really exciting thing about MoreCowbell.dj is not the service itself, but the set of APIs that it's been built on. The Echonest provide a range of APIs which enable developers to build their own digital music applications without the need for expensive servers loaded with clever custom music software. Developers can use the service to analyse tracks and return important information like beats per minute and time signature which will undoubtedly lead to a whole raft of new browser based music apps.

DJ Chroma posted this article by Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker about live bands using laptops on stage, which made me think.

When I’m not colouring in or sticking bits of the internet together with gaffer tape, I also like DJing. I remember the day I finally got my own Technics 1200s and a bad-ass Ecler scratch mixer. I practised very hard at first, then gradually a bit less hard. Then one day I realised that I had no new records because I had become so busy doing grown–up daytime stuff that I had no time to go to tiny crowded record shops and stand in line to use one of three available turntables to skip through the noisy bits of a bunch of 12s I often knew nothing about.

So I started using a laptop. I gave up scratching, juggling and the like (which I was only OK at after years of practice) and concentrated on playing music that people actually liked to dance to. I found that most of the labels I like sell downloads directly from their sites, and this meant that the night before I had to go out and play I could spend a couple of hours panic buying tunes from the comfort of my sofa.

Now I’m DJing more than ever (which was never very much to be fair) and people are actually dancing. My mixes aren’t always perfect, but no-one seems to care except me. And it’s all thanks to the laptop. My 1200s still look cool in my flat and occasionally I fire them up, but mostly they’re just really expensive conversation pieces. Come to think of it that 12" laptop is still pretty bulky. Can I justify spending £400 on a Tonium Pacemaker?

I just found out from my friend Richard Hewitt than London’s legendary venue The End is due to close it’s doors in January after 13 years of top-notch dance floor action.

I've got a personal attachment to the club as I've spent many late nights over the last five years making interactive flyers for my long standing client Sancho Panza’s regular night at the venue’s AKA bar. I’ve also spent many late nights / early mornings in the club itself.

Looking back over the flyers in a misty-eyed sort of way, my favourites are:


The big long street that took a whole year to make


The one with the lighter


The one with the stop motion electronic man


The one which loads random 70s photos from Flickr that I made while on my holidays in Bermuda


The one where the users helped to brighten up London


The one where you could play along with the music on a drum

I'll miss The End & AKA dearly but it’s not the last of my work for Sancho Panza. We’re currently working hard on a brand new website which will be launching later this year.

For the first half of the twentieth century, commercial radio in the US was essentially illegal, and stations were subjected to the same kind of copyright lawsuits that P2P users are experiencing today. It was only after songwriters banded together to form The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) that radio stations went legit. In return for a fee the radio stations gained the right to play whatever music they liked.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an idea called Voluntary Collective Licensing which would apply a similar logic to digital music. The idea is that the music industry forms several “collecting societies” which offer file-sharing music fans the opportunity to “get legit” in exchange for a reasonable regular payment (something like $5 - $10 a month). The money collected would be divided among rights-holders based on the popularity of their music.

I think this is a good idea. It differs from a subscription model in that it allows users to choose the service that they want to use, and it also allows for user generated music libraries such as the ill-fated Oink to operate legally. The license fee could easily be rolled into consumer products such as broadband internet or mobile data packages (unlimited digital music sharing for an extra £5 a month!), and P2P users already do a much better job of publishing, cataloguing and documenting music than the music industry themselves.

You can read the full article over at Electronic Frontier Foundation where they have neatly set out their case and attempted to provide answers to many of the inevitable questions that arise.

I'm a lifelong music fan. I've been obsessed by both music itself and the design of music packaging since my dad first took me to the record shop when I was four years old. Whenever I got a new record, tape or CD, the first thing I would do (after putting it on the stereo) was tease the sleeve out of the cover and unfold.



Now I'm grown up and a graphic designer, I still buy music but the packaging is gone. I go to iTunes, find the music I want to buy, and hit the magic button. I get the audio files and a cover image, but the magic of the sleeve has gone. No more are the mysterious fold-out photographic spreads, cryptic illustrations and intriguing liner notes (who is Frankie the Horse?).

So the question is: when digital music becomes the norm, what will happen to the record cover?

A couple of years ago I put this question to Tony Wilson at a Q&A session. Music fans and graphic geeks alike will know that Tony commissioned some of the finest record sleeves ever created. With Wilson's Factory Records as client, Peter Saville produced a slew of brilliant designs for New Order and Joy Division. His response was that it was no longer relevant. This disappointed me at the time. I was annoyed by the way he so quickly dismissed the works of art which had been so important to me and other young designers. Now I can see his point.

Vinyl records were fragile so they needed packaging to protect them. The packaging employed for products of all kinds, from tobacco to toilet roll, have long been embellished in order to help them stand out from their competitors on the shelves. This naturally happened to the packaging used for records, and later for cassettes and CDs. Ever since the 1960s when rock and pop music exploded into youth culture, serious music fans could be pretty sure that their favourite band's new album would come in a pretty sweet package.

Digital music doesn't need to be protected from scratches or dust, and it doesn't compete for your attention on a shelf with a hundred other releases, so it doesn't need a package. Sure, iTunes and programs like it make an effort to show you a jpeg of the physical album cover, but this is a really just a stop-gap solution. With the mainstream adoption of digital music the album cover as we know it will cease to exist.

If you believe this, and you're anything like me you'll already be showing signs of stress and discomfort; but there's no need to retire to the shed with your precious gate-fold Led Zeppelin LPs just yet. Just because the record cover's days are numbered doesn't mean that graphic design for music is dead. In the new world of digital music, standing out from their peers is more important to musicians than ever. Having better design and art direction for their websites / widgets / blogs / adverts etc. will help labels, bands and artists do just that.