As someone who used to produce and engineer dance music as a hobby to professional standards over ten years ago, the idea of being able to create high quality, fun tracks on an iPad sounds great.

So the news from ReelSEO that the guys at EastMidWestMusic had released a remix of a pretty crap (Jason Derulo’s “It Girl”) song using only iPad apps, I was intrigued.

As a Youtube channel launch I have to say it has a great novel factor, and it was delivered with class.

Apple must love this showcase:

You see where Samsung have resorted to getting personal with rivals Apple, the iPad makers still make sure that when they are selling you their products they show you what YOU can do with them. So this all singing, all dancing (literally) video and showcase of the iPads excellent music apps is a great selling point.

So what was used?

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• Rebirth
• Alchemy
• GarageBand
• Magic Fiddle
• iSynpoly
• MadPad
• Animoog
• Magic Piano

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Love it or not Android looks dull on many occasions:

Now come on Android lovers, sorry, but you can not compete with this kind of fun right now.

The most expensive of these apps is the Animoog version costing a reasonable $29.99 but you will need quite a few iPad’s and friends to deliver this “truly” live, though you can sequence this up with just the one iPad once you have mastered the likes of garageband, which is pretty simple compared to Cubase and Logic.

You see Apple can not lose when they have an army of people using their products in such creative and intriguing ways.

People out there daily, effectively selling their apps and tablets for free, and extolling the virtues of such a great piece of technology, yes it is not as fast as competitors but it does more!

And seriously I still receive no money from Apple…this must change…;)

Apple’s much anticipated spotify rival has finally arrived two weeks after its scheduled date for US subscriber sot enjoy.

Unfortunately for UK music lovers it seems that Apple are no closer to a date for launch but it is likely to be fairly soon once legal agreements have been sorted between publisher and owners of content.

What is iTunes match?

With MP3’s being a pretty poor approximation of a high quality CD music track, progress was always going to move toward bringing the high fidelity of a CD to the compressed version that we all love due to its very small size.

What iTunes match will do is take your existing (and sometimes dubious) record collection and then do two things:

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• 1 – Replace all your tracks with a cloud based high quality track to stream at your leisure from the iTunes cloud.
• 2 – Legitimise the tracks that you may or may not have bought through iTunes or from your own CD’s.

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How can you stream your content?

The iTunes match service will run on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple TV, Mac and PC devices, so you will be able to stream or download the tracks in your collection without having to manually sync to iTunes.

iTunes match cost?

Coming in at $24.99 for a full year the service seems quite reasonably priced especially if you have literally tens of thousands of tracks. For this you will get your entire collection offered to you via a 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free format with vastly improved quality over compressed MP3’s

In the process your music collection will also be “legitimised” even if you perhaps were not the true owner all along, this no doubt is why the UK music industry is taking so long to agree to terms.

If your track can not be found in the 20 million library at iTunes, then the technology will simply upload your existing track and use that.

It is not fair to compare the service to spotify as the iTunes service means you have to actually own the music in the first place, and is about quality not quantity, but it is reasonably priced and for what it offers (easy access to your tunes in a much more improved quality) it seems to be quite a fair price.

Google music beset by slow uploads:

With Google offering something close to iTunes match we wonder if Apple will ensure that speeds are better when uploading tracks than the poorly received Google music technology which is currently free and in Beta.

Ticket Texts product Ticket ABC aims to give back control to venue owners and promoters and allow these people and companies to have more control over pricing, and customer data.

With over $1 million in investment they aim to take the service to Europe and the US.

How do Ticket Text monetise their service?

For new customers such as venues and promoters, there are no fees upfront, and any data is fully owned by the clients. A 5% flat fee exists and a 99 cents rev share for every transaction, this includes credit card fees, payment service provider costs, and hosting fees.

Mobile ticketing the way forward

Ticket Text believe that mobile tickets hold a great deal of potential for up selling and other cross promotional activities that are difficult to achieve when a third party is involved in the sales and delivery process.

Ticket ABC’s current clients include Fabric, Pacha, and Bird On The Wire.

Limited Beta initially:

The service will initially be open to a few invites on a beta release to iron out potential issues if you want an invite go to this link here:

Pre-registering seems the best option and the one to bring you the quickest results in getting a working account.

Once you are accepted and things are working as they should, you will be able to access 15 million songs, these will all be totally free with advertisements making up the revenue on the basic accounts, subscription services will start at $5 a month with no ads, and a $10 a month option will include streaming to mobile and slightly higher quality audio by virtue of larger bit rates being offered while streaming the audio files.

Native spotify application is fantastic

Users in the US will no doubt be unaware in the main that the fantastic native application for Mac and Windows is a seriously well designed bit of kit and users will no doubt enjoy the experience of getting knee deep in the beats with their new found toy!

Let us know what you think when your in, we are sure you will love it!

Techcrunch are reporting that the unlimited spotify plan will cost around $4.99 a month.

Spotify US version will cost more then the European equivalent?

Whereas the premium service will cost $9.99 a month; this will allow access to mobile music (using your smart phone or tablet to access spotify via an application) plus off-line access or through a music system such as Spotify’s brother in beats, Sonos.

Is this fair?

Well lets do some calculations:

US version

Unlimited Plan:

$4.99 = £3.13

Premium Plan:

$9.99 = £6.26

UK version

Unlimited Plan:

£4.99 – (an extra £22 a year)

Premium Plan:

£9.99 – (an extra £45 a year)

While nit-picking about small fractions of prices seems a bit crass, the truth is the Premium plan difference compared to the US is 1/12 of an average UK smartphone contract per year….i.e one months bill.

The McIndex replaced by the Spotify Screw:

We all know the US is seriously in a mess so could the much vaunted “McIndex” now be replaced by the “Spotify Screwing”?

Yes, it would appear that Spotify’s accounts team could know a little more than we do about the expendable income of your “average Joe”, and have priced accordingly.

Facebook Collaboration?

With news that Facebook have something “BIG” up their sleeves, many listening closely to the technological grapevine belied that a collaboration is in place and the final deals have yet to be sorted, causing the slight delay in the release of an official US Spotify.

Will the prices be as quoted above?

Spotify says:

“No details are set for the pricing or details of our US service yet – we’re still testing a number of different options. We’ll be sure to let you know when we have something to announce.”

Do you think a price fluctuation such as the one detailed above is fair? Or, do you think that mobile bill payers already pay too much in the UK/Europe and deserve a balancing up of costs in light of their investment so far?