Vimeo Launches Audiosocket-Powered Music Store To Bring Tunes To Video

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

At F8 on Thursday, The Social Network will by all accounts be making its official foray into music, with scrobbling and music content galore headed straight for our news feeds. Ahead of Facebook’s new music service, Vimeo is announcing its own musical news, thank you very much, that has some interesting implications for artists and filmmakers and music technology. You may know Vimeo as the quality YouTube alternative that’s long been a place for semi-pro videographers, filmmakers, and Vloggers to host, share, and present their video content. Today, Vimeo is taking its long-awaited leap into the music world with the “Vimeo Music Store” — a custom-designed music licensing solution that will allow Vimeo’s video buffs to search for, discover, and license songs for both non-commercial and limited commercial use.

Powering the nuts, bolts, and backend of the Vimeo Music Store will be Audiosocket’s Music-as-a-Service (or MaaS) platform, a cloud solution designed to allow digital media companies to easily integrate music search, discovery, and licensing. The Vimeo Music Store, which represents the first commercial implementation of Audiosocket’s solution, will allow users to take advantage of all the benefits of a music library that contains more than 100 categories of integrated metadata, all from inside the friendly confines of Vimeo’s platform.

Vimeo users will also have the benefit of access to Audiosocket’s library of 33,000+ legit songs in the new music store, enabling the video platform’s users to select and license a wide variety of tracks that they can use as soundtracks for their video productions, with the ability to then distribute them over the Web, and film festivals, and so on, without worrying about an RIAA SWAT team descending from the roof.

On the flip side of the partnership, Audiosocket’s music artists will now have the benefit of a sizable new distribution channel (along with guaranteed royalty payments on licensed music) and exposure to Vimeo’s audience of more than 50 million monthly visitors — many of them semi-pro and professional filmmakers.

On this note, obviously the real key to Vimeo’s music store is that it opens the door for musicians to monetize their work in personal video creation: An area that’s traditionally been tough for artists to make any significant profits. In this way, Audiosocket’s MaaS platform could prove to be a great way for indie musicians to receive both widespread, multimedia exposure (with attributions) and make some extra income, potentially turning Vimeo into an even more appealing musical alternative to YouTube for the world’s melody makers. (Especially as Audiosocket’s catalog specifically features content from emerging bands, composers and record labels, making it a great tool for indie music discovery.)

It’s also great to see the evolution in the relationship between music and technology — and now the cloud — as Audiosocket’s MaaS platform, which is designed for integration into video and photo sharing platforms, virtual worlds, online games and social networks, could have a disruptive effect on the way music is licensed in digital media. And we all know how much music licensing has been in the need of workable, affordable solutions (really, innovation). Just ask Napster.

After all, when you get down to it, amateur filmmakers really have no idea where to start when it comes to music licensing, and vice versa; both parties want to take advantage of the benefits without the hassle, but they’re by and large clueless on where to start.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether Vimeo users will be willing to pay to license Audiosocket’s music content, the pricing structure of which currently stands at $1.99 per track for personal, non-commercial, and web-use for casual users and $98 per track for commercial, web-use licenses for professional users. Thankfully, much of the content will be available for free thanks to Creative Commons Licensing, but professional users may be heard issuing a few groans.

Nonetheless, this could really be a real future-altering partnership for Audiosocket and is no doubt a great bonus for Vimeo users, but it also seems as if the video platform will need to go bigger with its song catalog if it’s to truly make waves.

For more, readers can check out an embeddable widget which includes sample tracks from Audiosocket’s library here and for a look at the Vimeo Music Store, check it out at home here.

Vimeo is a cleanly-designed video sharing website that allows people to publish their videos for public consumption or just for friends and family. Vimeo launched support for high definition video in October 2007, further establishing itself as a leading video hosting platform. The website is owned by the media conglomerate IAC/InterActiveCorp and operated by Connected Ventures.

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Audiosocket is a music media and technology company that provides artists with the opportunity to monetize their work through both traditional and new media licensing. Placing high standards on the quality of their catalog, Audiosocket is very selective about the content it delivers to the market place. The company only works with artists, bands and composers that are active and creating culturally relevant content. When accepted onto the roster, artists have agents working to deliver their music to the market...

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Banned From The App Store: An Anti-iPhone Game Complete With Foxconn Suicide Mini-Game

Greg Kumparak is the editor of MobileCrunch.com, a mobile industry blog within the TechCrunch Network. Greg has been writing for the TechCrunch network since May of 2008. Greg was born in the outskirts of San Jose, CA, and now lives in the East Bay. ? Learn More

In the video game world, little can do more to send your sales soaring than being banned in one way or another. Be it because a country’s government got upset over how their people were depicted (a la Modern Warfare in Saudi Arabia) or because the developers slipped in a naughty little easter egg thereby triggering a recall (like Grand Theft Auto San Andreas’ infamous Hot Coffee scene), that little bit of taboo can be all it takes to rule the charts for weeks.

That is, unless you’re selling your game exclusively on the iOS App Store, in which case you’re totally boned… unless your goal was to spread a message, in which case it’s back to being the best thing you could have hoped for.

Such is the case for Phone Story, a blatantly anti-iPhone game that managed to wiggle its way into the App Store for a whole seven hours before someone pulled the plug. Why, you ask? Amongst other things, making a mini-game out of the Foxconn factory suicides.

The game was made by Italy’s Molleindustria. Their tag line pretty much sums up their mindset: “Radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment.“

Molleindustria seems to have four main qualms with Apple and the iPhone, with each given its own mini-game:

Coltan mining (wherein you’re seemingly supposed to keep miners mining with armed guards)Suicides (wherein you try to catch Foxconn workers as they jump from the top of the factory)Obsolescence (wherein you try to hoard customers into Apple stores as quickly as possible after a new release) eWaste (wherein you pass electronic components to workers for breakdown in an obviously hazardous work environment)

To be clear, the game was pulled before I got a chance to nab it (though a few people seemingly managed to grab it, dampening my worries that this was just a clever hoax), so my descriptions of the mini-games are from screenshots and what I’ve managed to piece together. If anyone has video of the game, please let us know.

Apple managed to find four App Store terms to cite in the banishment of the game, at least two of which are arguably a stretch:

15.2 Apps that depict violence or abuse of children will be rejected

16.1 Apps that present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected

21.1 Apps that include the ability to make donations to recognized charitable organizations must be free

21.2 The collection of donations must be done via a web site in Safari or an SMS

The last two are those that seem a bit questionable — while Molleindustria did promise to donate their cut of the App Store revenue to “organizations that are fighting corporate abuses”, the company says there was no mechanism for making donations built into the actual app. But really, Apple probably could have said “Er, yeah, you made a mini-game out of people killing themselves” and few would have earnestly questioned its banishment.

Of course, Molleindustria’s mission was almost certainly not to make a pile of money, be it for themselves or any charitable organization. Their mission was to spread their message. Mission accomplished.

IPO: September 14, 1980, NASDAQ:AAPL

Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod (offered with...

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Chrome Web Store Passes 30 Million Users, But How Bright Is The Future?

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

On September 1st, Google’s popular browser, Chrome, celebrated its third birthday. In a relatively short span of time, Chrome has gobbled up 22 percent market share among browsers, compared to Firefox at 28 percent and IE at 42 percent. The browser continues to iterate, now working in rapid-fire six-week release cycles, and its ecosystem at large has taken some big strides forward over the last year. For me, personally, I use multiple browsers daily, but Chrome has really become my go-to.

In December, Google debuted Chrome OS and the Chrome Web Store, followed by Chromebooks in June. But, as Jason pointed out in last week’s post, as well as our early coverage in January, the Chrome Web Store had seemingly gotten off to a slow start, perhaps not attracting as much traffic (and, more importantly, sales) as expected prior to launch. Some bolder members of the blogosphere even said, following CWS’ launch, “hey wait a second, isn’t this just a lame series of bookmarks?”

However, Chris Sorensen, Founder of ChromeOSApps.org, an independent website that monitors CWS app performance data, shared some stats with us today that give us a look at the Web Store’s growth since it launched, and the numbers are not quite at a “trickle”, as they were early on. For a bit of context, on January 13 (after about a month of being open for business), the Chrome Web Store had debuted 2,195 apps, and had attracted 4.5 million aggregate users, according to Sorensen’s numbers.

By September 1st, CWS had grown to over 6,000 apps with nearly 28 million aggregate users. On September 9th, CWS has passed 30 million, according to the numbers we’ve seen. As for downloads: The Chrome Web Store only started keeping track of downloads on May 15th, but the latest data from Sorensen indicates that CWS is attracting over 2.5 million weekly downloads.

As seen in the graph below, Google’s Web Store experienced a significant uptick in the number of apps and (more significantly) the number of aggregate users beginning in about June. The likelihood is that the increase the store is seeing to date is a result of early presale of Google’s Chromebooks, which don’t allow users to download native applications.

But what about sales? In January of this year, 2.8 percent of the app store’s total users were using paid apps. By September 1st, 2.1 percent of the 30 million users are using apps with a pricing “other than free”, Sorensen said. As per total apps, in June, 9.1 percent of CWS’ apps had pricing other than free, while on September 1st, that number was down to 5.7 percent. This shows that paid app usage on CWS have been, overall, decreasing since its launch — as has the number of paid apps (at least since June) — while usage and number of free apps has increased more significantly. Especially those bookmark apps and free extensions, which have gone like hotcakes.

While CWS’ numbers are looking more auspicious than they did 6 months ago, the problem for the web store is that it is still hampered by the fact that developer activity just isn’t growing at the same rate as it is on the Android Marketplace or Apple’s app store. Google has some great incentive for developers to offer paid apps, offering 70 percent revenue share to developers for paid app pricing, and 95 percent revenue share for in-app purchases. That’s plenty of incentive for developers to create paid apps, but users just don’t seem to be buying.

Compared to Apple, which will be generating $2.86 billion in app revenue and Android stores which will be pulling in $1.5 billion by 2016, according to Ovum’s research (though total revenue generated by the web store is not known), it seems pretty clear that CWS has a ways to go.

Not to mention, there’s the threat of Facebook’s Project Spartan, the social network’s secret coup to break up the Google/Apple lovefest reigning supreme over the native mobile apps world. For those unfamiliar, Project Spartan is the HTML5-driven mobile application platform Facebook is supposedly building with a group of third-party app developers — and its initial target is Safari, not Chrome.

If Chromebook sales really take off (and as the hardware stands right now, that’s far from a given), the web app store’s progress may well benefit as a result, as Sorensen tells me he predicts a serious rise in the demand for deep, full-featured enterprise desktop apps — but that remains to be seen. Google may also have plans to merge Android and Chrome, but there are a lot of unanswered questions in terms of how the company envisions the future of its web and mobile platforms. For now, Google will have to take solace in its uptick of free users, regardless of the correlation, but danger certainly looms.

Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....

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Google Chrome is an based on the open source web browser Chromium which is based on Webkit. It was accidentally announced prematurely on September 1, 2008 and slated for release the following day. It premiered originally on Windows only, with Mac OS and Linux versions released in early 2010. Features include: Tabbed browsing where each tab gets its own process, leading to faster and more stable browsing. If one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down with it A...

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Apple Opening Hong Kong Store, Should Prevent Future Crossbow-Related Smuggling

Biggs is the editor of TechCrunch Gadgets. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. ? Learn More

Apple will be opening a new store in International Finance Center Mall in Hong Kong this quarter. Ming Pao Daily, a local paper, noted that the store should open on September 24.

The store is the first in Hong Kong and should ameliorate some of the crossbow-related smuggling associated with the region.

Businessweek writes that this is the fifth store in China and the other shops have so far generated $8.8 billion in revenue, no small feat. The company has long depended on resellers in the area to support and sell Apple hardware and this store will create a more central location for Macheads to get their fix.

The store should be about 20,000 square feet when finished.

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