January 18, 2012
Why Larry Lessig isn't at the center of the SOPA fight
— the root cause of SOPA/PIPA is the corrupting influence of money on Congress #
Alexis Madrigal on the SOPA blackouts
— "to solve this particular problem, Congress merely has to do what it does best: nothing" #
Why SOPA and PIPA Must Die
Today, you’re going to hear a million solid reasons why SOPA and PIPA — the two proposed bills sponsored by the entertainment industry to censor the web — have to die. Wikipedia, Google, Reddit, craigslist, Metafilter, and many, many more have made their cases. Here’s mine.
Virtually every project I’ve ever worked on is threatened by this legislation:
Upcoming.org faced copyright complaints for event posters and listings that users added to the site.
Kickstarter gets DMCA takedowns from artists who find their work used in pitch videos, and from project founders quarreling with each other.
Supercut.org indexes hundreds of video remixes that reuse copyrighted content.
Kind of Bloop faced a lawsuit over the cover art.
And here on Waxy.org, I’ve had a number of battles over copyright. Among them, I received a cease-and-desist from EMI for being the first person to host DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album on the web, from Disney for hosting the Kleptones’ Night at the Hip-Hopera, and from Bill Cosby for hosting House of Cosbys, which was clearly fair use as a parody.
Every cease-and-desist and DMCA request I’ve received wasn’t fun to get in my inbox, but it allowed me to deal with the issues directly with the copyright holder or using the due process of the court system.
Imagine, instead, a world where a bill like SOPA or PIPA passes. A copyright holder could bypass due process entirely, demanding that search engines stop linking to my sites, ad providers drop me, and force DNS providers not to resolve my domain name. All in the name of stopping piracy.
The chilling effect would be huge.
Every online community that allows for community-contributed content — discussion forums, imageboards, Usenet newsgroups, photo sharing communities, video sites, and many more — would be forced to pre-emptively self-censor, shut down, or risk getting blown off the net entirely.
That fucking sucks.
Everything I love about the web requires the unfettered freedom to build new ways to let people express themselves, and with that, comes the risk of copyright infringement.
Breaking the web isn’t a solution.
Please take 10 minutes today to call your representatives — or show up in person! –and let them know you won’t stand for this. SOPA and PIPA must die.
Stop the Wall
— great video from Reddit's Alexis Ohanian on stopping SOPA/PIPA, and a handy tool to make calls #
The Oatmeal on SOPA
— love that he says he's pirated constantly, but that this is the wrong way to address it #
Visualizing Twitter conversations about SOPA
— nice graph work by Fred Benenson using Slurp 140, Google Refine, R, and Cytoscape #
Algorithmic Search for Love
— an automated supercut machine, it uses a locally-hosted film collection and caption transcripts (via) #
Reddit's technical examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP
— Wikipedia, Reddit, Boing Boing, and others are all going dark tomorrow in protest; join them #
The Fixie Bike Index
— tongue-in-cheek guide to measuring hipster cities based on used bike listings (via) #
Cut the Rope in HTML5
— smoothest game I've seen so far, how it was made; related: Command and Conquer (via) #
Spotify vs. Rdio, Part 2: The Billboard Charts
Streaming music services like Spotify and Rdio are transforming the way we listen to music, but spotting differences in their catalogs is nearly impossible for the casual listener. The licensing landscape is constantly shifting, with songs appearing and disappearing as labels try to make up their minds.
To help you decide which service is right for you, I’m using the developer APIs provided by each service to go crate-digging into each catalog to see which service comes out on top.
Last time, we looked at 5,000 critically loved albums on both services, with Rdio barely edging ahead of Spotify. That’s great for music geeks who can’t live without “Marquee Moon,” “Bitches Brew” and “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” But it leaves more mainstream, single-oriented music fans out in the cold.
If you love pop music, this is your week. We’re digging into 56 years of Billboard charts, searching Spotify and Rdio for every year’s top 100 from 1955 to 2011 — from Elvis Presley and Dean Martin to Rick Ross and Waka Flocka Flame.
How It Works
The Billboard chart data comes from the Whitburn Project, a group of obsessive music collectors who have been quietly compiling historical chart data on Usenet since 1998. Originally intended to help complete their MP3 collections, they used multiple sources to create a spreadsheet of over over 38,500 songs dating back to 1890, with 112 columns of raw data, including each song’s duration, beats per minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart position.
Here’s a sample of the most recent Whitburn spreadsheet from November 11, 2011, so you can see the fields they entered.
With the spreadsheet, I selected the top 100 songs that stayed at the top of the charts the longest each year starting in 1955, and pulled it into a database for easy manipulation.
With these 5,700 songs, I then wrote a script to search the Rdio and Spotify APIs for each track. To standardize artist and song names, I used the Echo Nest’s Song.search API. As before, I’m only checking U.S. availability, since Rdio is limited to the United States and Canada only.
Disclaimer: Variations in artist and song names can lead to some missed results, and false positives can crop up due to karaoke versions and tribute bands. I’ve tried to weed out most of the bad results, but didn’t check all 5,700 results by hand. That said, it doesn’t seem like any error favors Spotify or Rdio, so the results should be fair, if imperfect.
Results
Of the 5,700 songs in the top 100, 5,026 (88 percent) were available on both Spotify and Rdio. An additional 81 (1.4 percent) were only on Spotify, and 100 (1.7 percent) only available on Rdio. If we limit it to only the 570 top-10 singles, 518 songs (over 90 percent) were available on both Spotify and Rdio.
The chart below shows the percentage of the top 100 available per year on Spotify and Rdio. At a glance, you can see how deep both of their catalogs are. It’s very rare for either service to have less than 80 percent of the top 100 in a given year. (Note that the Beatles singlehandedly lower their coverage in the mid- to late-1960s.)

Here’s the average percentage by decade:

Let’s start by looking at the holdouts, the top-charting artists that aren’t available for streaming on either service. As in the album analysis, The Beatles top the list with 35 missing hits, but the rest of the list is very different. All 11 of the Eagles’ top hits are unavailable, Bob Seger fans will be bummed to hear his 10 (!) charting singles are missing, and most of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ post-1991 hits are unavailable for streaming. The Dave Clark Five’s eight hits from the mid-1960s are all missing, and Aaliyah’s estate is apparently protective of her work, blocking access to her eight big singles.
Other surprising holdouts: Hootie and the Blowfish, Joan Jett, and Roberta Flack. A handful of one-hit wonders are missing entirely, depriving the world of songs like Another Bad Creation’s 1990 debut “Iesha” and Rick Dees’ “Disco Duck” from 1976.
The Exclusives
Both services stream virtually every song every to appear on the Billboard charts, but they don’t overlap perfectly. Each have secured different licenses with record labels, giving each exclusive access to some songs and artists.
If you want to hear the 14 singles released by Paul McCartney, solo and with Wings, you can only hear them on Rdio. Same for LeAnn Rimes, Monica, and Fergie. Spotify, on the other hand, didn’t have exclusive access for any artist with more than two charting singles in the yearly top 100 charts.
Below, I’ve listed the top 20 tracks exclusive to each service, ordered by their overall yearly ranking.
Only on Rdio | Only on Spotify |
---|---|
Paul McCartney — My Love (#3, 1973) Paul McCartney — Say Say Say (#4, 1983) Monica — The First Night (#4, 1998) Christina Aguilera — Lady Marmalade (#6, 2001) Kyu Sakamoto — Sukiyaki (#7, 1963) Monica — Angel Of Mine (#7, 1999) Fergie — London Bridge (#7, 2006) *NSYNC — It’s Gonna Be Me (#11, 2000) Paul McCartney — Coming Up (Live At Glasgow) (#12, 1980) LeAnn Rimes — How Do I Live (#12, 1997) Fergie — Big Girls Don’t Cry (#12, 2007) Wings — With A Little Luck (#13, 1978) Divine — Lately (#13, 1998) Red Hot Chili Peppers — Under The Bridge (#20, 1992) LL Cool J — Loungin’ (#20, 1996) Monica — For You I Will (#20, 1997) Enrique Iglesias — Hero (#21, 2001) Paul McCartney — Band On The Run (#22, 1974) Merril Bainbridge — Mouth (#23, 1996) Wings — Listen To What The Man Said (#24, 1975) | Mariah Carey — Don’t Forget About Us (#7, 2005) Steve Miller Band, The — Abracadabra (#9, 1982) Patti Austin — Baby, Come To Me (#10, 1983) Dr. Dre — Nuthin’ But A G Thang (#14, 1993) Shocking Blue, The — Venus (#20, 1970) Mike & The Mechanics — The Living Years (#24, 1989) Salt ‘N Pepa — Shoop (#29, 1993) Ashlee Simpson — Pieces Of Me (#33, 2004) String-A-Longs, The — Wheels (#36, 1961) Irene Cara — Fame (#38, 1980) Climax Blues Band — Couldn’t Get It Right (#42, 1977) Yael Naim — New Soul (#43, 2008) Madonna — Don’t Cry For Me Argentina (#48, 1997) Dr. Dre — Dre Day (#49, 1993) Technotronic — Move This (#50, 1992) Erykah Badu — Love Of My Life (An Ode To Hip Hop) (#54, 2003) Paperboy — Ditty (#55, 1993) Johnny Thunder — Loop De Loop (#57, 1963) Tee Set, The — Ma Belle Amie (#59, 1970) Gerry and the Pacemakers — Ferry Across the Mersey (#61, 1965) |
Conclusion
Both services do an extraordinary job at including music history’s most popular songs. Virtually every song was available on Spotify and Rdio, a huge change from the previous album-oriented analysis. Again, much to my surprise, Rdio comes out slightly on top. Spotify’s international catalog fills most of these gaps, so expect things to heat up rapidly over the next year as they secure more of those licenses for the United States.
Have any questions about this analysis, or anything missing you’d like to see? Leave a comment and let me know.
(Note: This was originally published for my column at Wired.)
Mocality's sting operation to catch Google Kenya's poaching their listings
— missed this while I was out last week, some fantastic investigative work starting with unique user-agent/IP combos #
Dying Fetus – Grotesque Impalement (Radio Disney Version)
— another brilliant genre-bending cover from Andy Rehfeldt; related: Justin Bieber as death metal #
Where the top 100 box office films of 2011 are streaming
— Netflix only had four of the top 100, less than half the previous year #
My Guantánamo Nightmare
— also: Notes From a Guantánamo Survivor; commemorating its shameful 10th anniversary (via) #
Kickstarter's Year in Review 2011
— amazing look back, don't miss the interactive stats post with nearly $100M pledged last year #
Key Features
— commissioned interactive fiction by Andrew Plotkin, with in-game objects available as MakerBot-printable designs #
NASA goes open-source
— finally, I can process National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project Sensor and Environmental Data Records! #
SOPA-supporting news networks uniformly ignored SOPA
— CNN was the only network to mention it, once (via) #
horse_ebooks: This is a romantic story. If you do not
— from a wonderful Tumblr of fanfic inspired by everyone's favorite spambot #
Vi Hart joins Khan Academy
— my favorite mathemusician working one of the best online learning resources (via) #
Google penalizes Chrome homepage after paid links debacle
— bizarre story of an ad buy gone awry and the self-flagellation that followed (via) #
Robot avatar brushes a cat remotely in virtual reality
— using a Kinect, head-mounted display, Wii remotes, and treadmill for navigation #
Real-life Wipeout using quantum levitation
— sadly, appears to be a rendered fake for a viral ad; but it's very doable #
Clay Johnson on confirmation bias and the election cycle
— this should be an Internet law: "Anything we want to be true we can find online." #
Metafilter's Best Post Contest winners announced
— some incredible entries, including Falco's career, Muppet Labs, and the untold story of Sesame Street's David #
js.js, a Javascript interpreter in Javascript
— yo dawg; related: Narcissus, a more practical take on the same idea (via) #
Code Year, learn to code in 2012
— free service from Codecademy sends an interactive coding lesson to you weekly (via) #