November roundup

Vikings, yes we can!

Another month has passed, and all of the Innotune vikings are busy decorating for christmas at the Innotune HQ. But before we stuff ourselves full of christmas food, candy, and viking aquavit – let’s take a look at what we brought you in November.

Marcus showcased the very talented producer Fredrik Ohr from Sweden in his post, and we took a look at a really facinating online production suite (?) called Hobnox. It’s absolutely worth trying out, and you can do so right here. All of the guys at Innotune were born among leather jackets and hairy guys; yes, I’m talking about the 80′s. And guess what, the 80′s are back stronger than ever. Endal showed us this by recommending Relation, a UK based duo making lovely 80′s synth-pop.

We caused quite a few discussions among people on forums and in social media this month (Believe me, we’ve had a LOT of discussions internally as well), and it all started with the fantastic Way Out West podcast that you can download right here.

The source of the discussion was that we received mails from some prominent labels that they mean a “podcast” is defined by Steve Jobs. In other words: Our extravagant, fantastic, fabulous, classy, trashy and smashing (yeah, we’re proud…) podcast was only to be distributed via iTunes. So we had to choose: Drop a very important label and risk to loose even more of them, or drop the mp3 download. Our mission is to bring fantastic electronic music to our listeners, and we need labels approval for doing so. So the result is that you now have to subscribe through iTunes, or stream it on mixcloud. All in all, it’s not what we wanted at first, but in the iTunes version you also get cover art, chapter markers, tracklisting and more. So go subscribe here.

Bring on December, we’re ready for you Santa Claus!

What is podcasting?

Picture by Flicr user zoomar under a Creative Commons License.

As you may have noticed we have removed the MP3 feed of the podcast. The iTunes feed continues, as good as ever.

This happened after a discussion with one of our cooperating labels. From the beginning we have intended to do the Innotune podcast the right way, so we’ve asked the labels about permission for playing previews of their music in the podcast. It just turns out we have different opinions about what a podcast is.

Podcasting raise legal issues. It’s fundamentally different from the regular broadcast as the podcaster can download the file and do whatever he or she pleases with it. The move of control of the content from the broadcaster to the user, which on demand services like podcasting represents, is hard to get used to for the music business, no matter how short and distorted the music is. However, the EDM record companies has shown to been more liberal than their colleagues in the mainstream music business. We’ve gone directly to the labels in stead of negotiating a deal with any musical rights organisation. And they’ve been cool about our project. Therefore it’s very important for us to communicate in a good way with the labels.

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