The current online music industry has adjusted from exciting to a serious legal battle field. Since I have no real interest in politics it has really killed my productivity at the office.
Some interesting things have come out in the last couple of weeks, such as a search engine concept based on the distributed technology of Gnutella, a possible buy out of myplay by yahoo.
I have been think of what would be the next step in bringing music online, but I am having trouble thinking of a solution without a spur of legal madness. So the real question should be about how to build a better server-player relationship. Maybe a new codec such as Ogg Vorbis could help, but what I am really looking for is a better way to organize music using meta data such as MPEG-7 and ID3v2. Enhancing the relationship between the client and server could add much need functionality to the MP3 player world. Simply by implementing some HTTP/1.1 features you could implement an MP3 player that would have forward and rewind buttons or simply have a dragbar that would actually work while streaming.
We also recently launched our WAP-enabled events service, check it out and provide me with feedback.
Since this world has one major factor that doesn't seem to be able to be manipulated (time), I have been thinking about leaving the big corporation, I helped raise a company with a 6 people group of enthousiasts to a 280+ employee public company. I have met and worked with an awesome group of individuals that I will keep in touch with, but I find it might be time to move on and start something new. Hopefully this will give me the ability to have more time to focus on new developments and contribute more to the open source tools I appreciate so dearly.
