A new “recent” option now appears on MoodMixes’ music pages. We typically add 4 new albums every week.

You can see what recent albums have been added by genre, or for genre “all”. If you want to download them you can either click the “download” button for each new album, or else add the tracks to a playlist and download all the albums together in a zip using the download-a-playlist feature.

Artists are listed by date order, with artists who have had a recent release listed first. If an artist has other albums, these are also shown when you click on the artist. The date of each release is show next to the album name.

If you click the “recent” choice at MoodMixes and you’re not logged in, only albums that are from no collecting society are shown, and this is a much smaller list than if you’re logged in and are allowed to see music from all countries.

The “albums” page also has an “all” genre now too.

We’ve released a free iPhone app for MoodMixes, which:

• lets you play background music for your business directly from an iPhone or iPod touch
• features a simple flip-through-the-genres interface. Tap the image to play. Simple!
• plays music without needing any permanent connection to the Internet: shows are automatically stored on your iPhone.
• automatically downloads new music daily when the Internet is available, transparently rotating in new music.
• You can subscribe directly from iTunes and have Apple charge you the monthly fee, or you can sign up with MoodMixes and enter your name/password into the iPhone app.
• Has full support for shows that you create for yourself using the MoodMixes web site. These appear as new “Your shows” graphics in the app to the right of the standard genres.
• Automatically supports both “shuffle-play” and “album-at-a-time” versions of our shows.
• Lets you disable genres (shows) you don’t want your staff playing (i.e., Hip Hop or Intense Rock), giving them a limited choice of music that’s appropriate for your venue.
• full support for Apple’s “Airplay” standard, letting you pipe music to remote speakers using inexpensive “Airport Express” devices.

You can click here to install the app using iTunes, or just search for “MoodMixes” in the app store using your iPhone/iPod touch.

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Here are two pictures showing the classical and chill out genres, which you access by flipping right or left with your finger:

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The currently playing song is automatically displayed:

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You can double-tap an genre image if you want to see a list of downloaded episodes, as well as choose to play specific episodes. However, most people won’t bother with this and will simply single-tap the genre and let the music play automatically.

I received this lovely unsolicited email from one of our customers today, La Margherita restaurant in Rugby:

This is just a quick email to thank you for the email and above all for the music. We haven’t updated our playlist for quite a while and while doing it tonight, we realized how fortunate we are to have found your company. The music is of great quality, the software quite easy to use, an absolute we wealth of artists, styles and albums and all of it superbly managed. We love the fact that we don’t get endless emails and updates and basically we are left to enjoy it, unless there is a problem. A great satisfaction for us as well is the fact that we do not feed into the commercial mass marketed and marketing music out there. We feel that somehow the artists we play will benefit far more from our money than some celebrity. Thank you again and looking forward to discover some more exciting artists. -maria

I asked Maria if I could reprint her letter, also letting her know:

I don’t know if you already knew, but MoodMixes is a “fair trade” business, and 50% of what you pay us goes directly to musicians, not lawyers, managers or labels, so you are absolutely right in believing that the musicians you play benefit from your working with us! There’s a short paragraph about this on our ‘about’ page. -john

to which she replied:

Congratulations on maintaining your principles in these dire times. I am sure you will be able to make it though for more and more years to come, mainly because so many companies I know are tired of the charges and rudeness of PPL and PRS. Feel free to use our contacts for whatever you might need and if we can help in anyway let us know. -maria

Thanks for the love!

This week we launched iLicenseMusic, a royalty free music licensing web site, available as a subscription service.

-> We’ve been licensing music like mad for 10 years…

At Magnatune (our sister company to MoodMixes), we’ve licensed our music to over 5000 projects, of which almost 3500 were indie films! Two of these films have won “best film music” awards. I’m really proud of this, and part of what made this possible was being way out ahead of everyone else with what was (for many, many years) a one-of-a-kind model. Our success helped inspire the CCPlus license at Creative Commons as well has 3 copy-cat businesses.

10 years ago, there was no online music licensing : I grafted the stock photo licensing idea from Getty Images onto the music business. There had been one famous attempt by Gerd Leonhard (who is now a good friend, and who tried the idea with his licensemusic.com), that crashed and burned rather spectacularly.

Magnatune’s licensing model has been to sell each different use of our music separately, so people only pay for the rights they need. Ask a musician for all rights, forever vs 30 seconds in a film for a festival and you’ll get a very different idea of what the price should be. For many years, this unbundling worked well, and it got rid of the dreaded “music lawyers crafting a custom agreement” which has killed music licensing revenue for so many labels (well, the lawyers liked that arrangement).

But… in recent years we’ve found that almost all videos go on the Internet, and they also go global. The notions of restricting media types and distribution territories no longer make any sense.

Film festival organizers have been asking for complete clearance of the music, for all uses forever, in order to simply submit a film for consideration at a festival. Our unbundled approach no longer works.

In recent years I’ve also provided music to the same film makers year after year, as they’re a very committed bunch, and keep making movies one after another.

Finally, and unexpectedly, I always thought that Magnatune would be a money-losing idea, and that the real profit would be working with businesses. Much to my (happy) surprise, Magnatune as a consumer business has done just fine. We’re just about to work on a total rewrite of Magnatune, and a good part of that is having it only be a consumer-music-service, and not do double duty as a business-to-business service.

These thoughts and more were going through my mind, as I came up with the idea for …

–> The new idea

So… what if we were to change Magnatune’s music licensing approach to encourage repeat customers to stick with us, to use more of our music (and of course, less music from the competition), by having a low-cost subscription service? They pay a monthly fee, and all their music problems go away.

Magnatune and its musicians win, since we get a dependable income stream.

Film makers win by lowering their music costs, not having to negotiate, and having all the rights cleared so there aren’t any troubles later on.

So… that’s how iLicenseMusic works — for $89 per month, a film maker (or anyone else who needs a music license) can use our music in their projects and products, and there are no other fees. They can cancel at any time: after which they can’t use our music in new projects or products. Seems fair, no?

Nobody else is trying this business model with music licensing. I thought it’d be interesting to be the first, and to see how it works out. Our old way of doing things worked great for many years, but now it’s time for something new.

As of this week, all music licensing goes to either:

1) iLicenseMusic: film, video, internet, games, presentations, etc…

2) MoodMixes: background music for restaurants, stores, offices, etc…

I’ll let you know how it all works out!

-john

MoodMixes is now available, fully translated, in German and Spanish.

We also have people who can answer your emails in those languages.

If you visit MoodMixes from Germany, Switzerland or Austria, the site should automatically be in German. If not, you can choose “Deutsch” from the bottom of the MoodMixes home page, or simply visit http://moodmixes.de

If you visit MoodMixes from Spain, Mexico or a Spanish speaking South American country, the site should automatically be in Spanish. If not, you can choose “Español” from the bottom of the MoodMixes home page, or simply visit http://moodmixes.es

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German:

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Spanish:

We now have video tutorials at MoodMixes for all the common ways you’d want to download music from our web site into iTunes and your iPod or iPhone.

Each video also has a short bullet-list of instructions, both to remind you of the steps, or if you’d rather speed through the instructions.

You can see all the videos under the “tutorials” section of “info” when you’re logged into MoodMixes:
http://moodmixes.com/m/tutorials

We’ve also added them in the interface itself, so you can see them when you might need help:

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Downloading a playlist of songs into iTunes and your iPod:

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Downloading an entire album into iTunes and your iPod:

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Subscribe to a MoodMixes show, so that you automatically get daily fresh music in iTunes and your iPod:

Under each show, you’ll now find easy instructions (and a video) to help you automatically sync MoodMixes’ music to your iPod or iPhone.

Once you set this up, new music is every day downloaded onto iTunes on your computer. Then, whenever you sync your iPod or iPhone with your computer, the new music is automatically synced too.

To find these instructions, look at the bottom of the “ten shows” page, where you’ll see:

and in the “download” section of the “all shows” page, you’ll see:

if you click on the “Show” link (next to “Add this show to your iPod/iPhone”) , you’ll see concise text instructions.

In addition, we’ve made a Youtube instructional video, if you prefer watching a video to reading text.

Here is what the text instructions look like:

In an effort to simplify the “music” feature at MoodMixes, we’ve removed three of the less frequently used features, and created a new set of “settings” for those of you who want the features back.

Also, we’re just about to release a newly-created set of playlists, especially tailored toward MoodMixes use, which does a much better job of organizing our music than “all genres” or “collections” ever did, so this gives us an opportunity to clean things up and simplify.

This is what the music page now looks like (look at the menu on the left):

The menu is now 3 items shorter. Namely, we’ve removed:

1) Collections: this was a general “concept” to the album, such as “Woman singing electro-pop”

2) All Genres: this contained about 30 sub genres of albums, but not necessarily that well organized

3) Hot Artists: the albums that are most popular at the moment

Of these 3, only “hot artists” is still available, though it is deactivated by default.

Under the “settings” page at http://moodmixes.com/m/settings (under the “info” section) you’ll now find this:

which allows you to hide features you don’t want to use, or don’t want your staff to use.

You can even go so extreme as to disable all menu features, in which case only the 10 default moods will be available for your staff to choose from. You might want to do this if you want to keep tight control over what music is played.

Alternatively, you could create your own shows, and then hide all the menus except “Your shows” so that your staff can only play the music you’ve personally selected.

Note: we’ve also renamed some of the menu items for clarity. The “top shows” menu choice is now labelled “ten shows” to make it clear that there are more (i.e.: vs “All shows”), and the “Main Genres” choice is now labelled “Albums” because that’s the main place you would go if you wanted to find entire albums to download.

Ever since MoodMixes has been in business, our shows have been a shuffled mix of songs. We would create a playlist of songs for a genre, and each day, an algorithm would pick a randomized set of songs from that playlist, to create a new one hour show.

As of today, our shows are now album-based, created by a DJ, instead of created by a computer algorithm.

The reason for this change? We’ve received lots of feedback that the use of our music is to create a background mood, and when the music changes too much, it draws too much attention to itself, and can spoil the mood.

We’ve been working on this for quite a while, and we’re finding that playing an entire album by the same artist creates a more consistent mood, with less stylistic change, and that is a better choice for most businesses playing our music.

If you use the “Top Shows” feature to play music, then you don’t have do anything to enjoy the new album-oriented music mixes:

If you click on “all shows”, pick a genre, and click on the “songs” button, you’ll see that several songs by the same artist are featured in a row, creating a more pleasant music experience:

IF YOU PREFER SHUFFLED PLAYLISTS

However, if you prefer to “mix it up” a bit more, and to play a different artist after each song, we’re now offering
“shuffled” versions of all our shows.

You can find the shuffled shows if you choose “All shows” and then click a show that says (Shuffled) in parenthesis after the name, like so:

You can confirm that the songs are shuffled by clicking the “songs” button while listening:

We’re also in the process of adding lots of new genres, and I’ll be blogging about that soon, when the new genres become available.

-john

We’ve added several new features to the pricing page at MoodMixes.

New features include:

• preloaded iPods — we will postal mail you an iPod, fully loaded with our music. We’ll also include a fancy plugin charger and cables to connect it to your hifi system. We’re charging $20 per month, per location for this option.

• use our music in your ads — you can use our music on your TV and youtube ads, on your music-on-hold system, or anywhere associated with your business. Starting at $20 per month.

• exact number of locations — previously we had options such as “fewer than 200 locations”, but this means that if you had (say) 180 locations, you were paying more than you should. We now let you specify exactly how many locations you have, and the discount rate increases steadily and automatically as you increase the number of locations playing our music.

• pricing changes — we’ve changed a bit how discount pricing works, and other aspects of pricing too. If you’re currently a customer of ours, we’ve already adjusted your account with a “discount” to bring you back to the price you’ve always paid with us. In cases where your monthly price has gone down, you now get a free discount on our services!

• friendly reminder about bills — we’ve always issued your next invoice 30 days before it’s due, so that you have plenty of time to pay it, and never risk not having a valid music license.

However, this could often be confusing because the system would say you were “overdue” when an upcoming invoice was issued, even though it was not really yet overdue. We’ve remedied this. Now, 14 days before your account would be overdue, a much clearer message is displayed (see graphic below).

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Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or feature requests.