Ludovic Copéré

On the Wrong Track

That's the title of an interesting article I found on Thursday's edition of The Wall Street Journal Europe. It highlights the increasing issue of music metadata, i.e. information on digital music files, like track name and number, artist(s), album title, genre and so forth. Back in the now old days of physical medium like LPs and CDs, one didn't have to look very far to find those information printed on the disc cover.

Today, music metadata has become as important, if not more, than the actual music they describe, a fact taken early on by grass-roots efforts like CDDB (CD DataBase - acquired since then by GraceNote) doing a great job at giving information on CDs. But while CDs were still providing some structure, the proliferation of "non-physical" music sources such as homemade rips, digital music stores, and above all file-sharing, makes it far more complex to organize gigabyte-sized music libraries.

In that sense, I have been positively surprised after several months of using it by the quality of MusicBrainz, a self-moderating metadatabase that helps identify not only CDs but also mp3 and other digital formats through some clever fingerprinting as well as community-powered updating and editing - in short a Wiki for music information. In my view, the next logical step is to have such smart recognition directly integrated into media players like iTunes: as Suw underlines, the comings and goings between MusicBrainz and iTunes are tedious, to say the least. Even better would be coupling such a music recognition tool with a recommendation service like Last.FM: information not only about the track I'm listening to, but on the ones I may also like as well.

Once again, bringing back relevant context to the digital media experience.

HDTV preps up in Europe

The day after seeing beautiful HD Ready screens almost at every corner of the CeBIT (with special mentions to the always fantastic Qualia 004 projector, 005 LCD and 006 rear-projector as well as the massive 57" LCD and 102" Plasma Samsung was showcasing), I was in London to attend the 2nd European HDTV Summit. More than just the buzz created around the recent public announcements of major broadcasters like TPS, Premiere and BSkyB to launch HD offerings before the 2006 World Cup, the first and most striking impression that comes out of such a gathering is the increasing momentum to make HD a pervasive component of audio-video entertainment for the years to come.

Beyond the now obvious choice of satellite operators, HD is positioning itself as a key growth element in the IP world: NTL, a large cable and multi-service provider in UK, announced today that they had been experimenting with ADSL2+ and HDTV. This example, among the many other significant trials and plans to massively move towards HD + IP over Europe, amplifies the formula of combining easier accessibility (in terms of networks capacity, but also relevance of the service  and "triple play" packaging) with better quality (first with DVD-quality over ADSL, and now with HD).

The missing link could therefore well be on the content side itself. However, with digital production being more affordable than ever, and distribution being one of the turning point of the nascent "Internet 2.0" (think Peer-to-peer, torrents and recommendation-based diffusion), it is only a matter of time before the long tail shows its true power: more than a niche filler, a working alternative and complement to vertically integrated broadcast media.

Going to CeBIT

Okay, I know the CeBIT 2005 has already opened its doors for two days (with glittering pictures and live impressions for instance on Gizmodo), but anyway I'll be in Hannover on the 16th to have a (first-timer) view at the newest and trendiest in the IT world. I'm already preparing good shoes (thanks Rodrigo for the foot-saving tip!) for what looms itself as a heavy walking  and brochure-picking day.

If you happen also to be there on the 16th, drop me an e-mail so that we can catch-up.