Concept Albums are making a comeback, and the music industry is searching for a new business model. Enter ‘Soul Delay’ by The Mischief Engine, which is free in a standard version, or available via iTunes as a concept album.

Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead and others have offered “special editions” of their free albums for a price. These usually take the form of hard copies with extensive printed material, and perhaps a signed poster or t-shirt.

‘Soul Delay’ by The Mischief Engine takes this business model a step
further. In this case, the special edition unlocks the secrets within the free version, contextualising each song as part of a narrative.

You can obtain the “economy class” version of Soul Delay for free. Its eleven tracks are standard radio-friendly length.

The “business class” version is available via iTunes. It’s a concept album, telling a story from beginning to end. It features extended mixes, additional tracks, a revised track order, and narrative interludes which connect the songs.

Tipped by Stuart. Thanks!

Trendwatching: Moodagent automatically analyzes and profiles a user’s music collection, and then creates playlists of their favorite tracks to suit their mood, distinguishing songs by sensuality, tenderness, joy, aggressiveness and tempo.

Innovation Extravaganza [Trendwatching]

Swissmiss: The Dow Piano audiovisualizes the ups and downs of 2010 into musical notes. Using a five-note scale spanning three octaves, pitch is determined by the daily closing numbers of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The variance in volume mirrors the trading volume changes throughout the year. The notes are clustered in series of five, representing Mondays through Fridays. The weeks are punctuated, separated, and started by drum hits. Follow along with the graph to experience the market in a (somewhat) musical way. Created by Bard Edlund.

Dow Piano [Swissmiss]

technabob.com: Alyce Santoro’s Sonic Fabric line of neckties not only look cool, but they should hold a special appeal for New Yorkers: they’re made using 50% colored thread and 50% cassette tape, and the latter has been recorded with “loops and samples collected on and under the streets of NYC.”

Recycled cassette tape neckties: audible wear [technabob.com]

RitmoTM – Pregnancy App from Nuvo Group LTD on Vimeo.

Extensive scientific research shows numerous positive contributions of music to human fetal development. The Ritmo Advanced Sound System by Nuvo is the most advanced and complete prenatal music player, delivering quality and safe sound to the tiniest listeners.
Ritmo allows you and your baby to share the sensory and emotional experience of bonding through sound and music, while being supportive, safe, and stylish at the same time. Reactive listening begins at 17 weeks, so choose classical music for the calming Mozart Effect, the classic rock of The Beatles, or the upbeat show tunes of Broadway. Any type of audio you can listen to on your iPod/MP3′s earphones can be enjoyed by your baby at the same time.
Ritmo was designed with your lifestyle in mind! Its soft fabric belt is lightweight, elasticized and supportive.

iMinds offers 8-minute audio books that deliver bursts of knowledge on an array of topics through their iPods and other MP3 devices. MindTracks are designed to be a well-rounded subject overview of a general knowledge topic.
iMinds researched and found that adult attention spans lapse approximately every eight minutes. This was an optimal length of time to get a concise overview on a new topic to increase spheres of general knowledge. iMinds’s new audio book format combines high-quality and heavily-fact checked research by award-winning writers with entertaining production that includes top voice-over artists and sound-scapes that engage and entertain listeners as they learn about new topics.
Perfect general knowledge companion for the time-poor, knowledge-thirsty and savvy MP3 user.

ThinkGeek: Here at ThinkGeek were just wishing for a fully playable guitar built into a t-shirt when along came the Pixie of ROCK… she wailed with face melting guitar solo and *POOF* there it was in our hands… The Electronic Rock Guitar Shirt. We turned on the mini amp, cranked the volume to 11 and started to rock. As the Pixie explained, the Electronic Guitar Shirt is incredibly easy to play because each button on the neck is a major chord. She went on to mention how you can play dozens of classic rock songs with very little skill. However she warned us never to use the Guitar Shirt for evil lest, we are prepared to summon the Demon of Rock and duel to the death for musical supremacy.
Electronic Rock Guitar Shirt [ThinkGeek]

The idea behind livemusicmyway.com is to bring the power of live music back to the consumer, and with the help of a community of online fans create unique, intimate live music events with a strong emphasis on what the consumer desires.
In their own words: “So the idea is, people pre-register online now to show there interest and guarantee there place in the community, then in early December we will email the people who pre-registered to see if they still want to be part of the community. If they choose to be part of the community then pay there £35 fee for the year and then they are taken through to the members area, where the fun begins.
When we have 1000 people signed up and payed up then we will start organising our first event, the community will decide on every aspect of this from where the event is held to how much to charge for tickets to which artists play. The idea is to start off small to build up our brand presence and increase event size slowly with the ultimate aim being to organise a music festival with every detail being decided upon by the community from the toilet facilities to the bands to the camping and even down to the on site caterers.”
Members are offered tickets to the events and merchandise at a discounted price before being put on sale to the general public. then at the end of the year 30% of the profit from the ticket sales, advertising and merchandise will be split amongst the community with a further 10% going to a charity decided upon by the community and the final 60% being put back into the company to grow the brand.

The Earth Times: MixMatchMusic announced today the launch of its beta music service and dynamic music community, www.mixmatchmusic.com. MixMatchMusic enables musicians to collaborate on, profit from and engage fans with their music. The company is introducing its service at the DEMOfall 08 conference, one of the premier venues for launching
new companies and services.
MixMatchMusic is part of a music industry that touches more than 100 million households in the US alone, according to NAMM, and that generates nearly $47 billion in annual sales from recorded music, concerts and music gear.
Participation in the MixMatchMusic community and use of its MixMaker audio sequencer are free to musicians and casual fans alike. Fees are incurred when stems, works in progress or finished songs are downloaded for sale or other use.
“Indie musicians benefit when their music gets discovered – by other musicians who can use it to complete their musical ideas, and also by casual fans looking for new ideas and new artists. Providing both with the ability to mix and match stems and works in progress transforms music from a passive to active experience,” said Feinn.
MixMatchMusic expects to generate revenues from targeted and contextual advertising, participation in the sale of content created on its site and by its community, and also from the sales and licensing of future premium services.
MixMatchMusic Launches Service Enabling Musicians to Collaborate on, Profit From and Engage Fans With Their Music [The Earth Times]

High-tech music is emerging as a new trend in the sound industry. The laser harp, by Stephen Hobley, gives us music created by using laser beams. The home-built DIY system allows for playing a harp by using your hands to disrupt the various laser beams. Hobley designed the system so that the sensor detects only the laser beams (and not just any light) and then transforms the hand movements into sounds. You can produce awesome melodies and tunes, right in the comfort of your living room. Pretty groovy.
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TrendsSpotting.com is a trends agency focused on developing exciting tools for Trend Spotting. We follow current trends and are constantly looking for new ones. We specialize in trends research and the social media. Dr. Taly Weiss, TrendsSpotting CEO, is a Social Psychologist, with extensive experience in branding strategy and marketing research. Feel free to explore our trend spotting tools on www.trendoScope.com.

Springwise: 3VOOR12, a multimedia platform for music that’s run by Dutch broadcaster VPRO, is piloting a new heat-mapping system at this year’s Lowlands music festival, which takes place next weekend.
Using familiar web terminology—Hot or Not—the festival’s visitors will be able to let others know which of twelve venues is hosting the hottest show at any particular moment. The voting system will run on a mobile app that users can download to their internet-enabled phones. (Those with wifi-enabled phones will be able to use 3VOOR12′s free festival-wide wifi.)
Using their phones, crowds create heat maps of hot gigs at music festival [Springwise]

Every artist has the same problem of obtaining capital for their next recording. Tune Your World provides the solution of applying micro-financing to the music industry.
Tune Your World is an Open Source music project that enables artists and fans to co-produce new works of art and share in the creative process. Its groundbreaking approach is the creation of peer-to-peer micro-financing of new music projects – enabling fans to deliver start-up capital to aspiring musicians from developing countries. Tune Your World operates on a people-to-people model. Musicians obtain funding for new recordings directly from their fans without giving up ownership or control. The aim is to revitalize the music industry in places where the music industry has never worked very well.
http://www.tuneyourworld.com

Tune Your World is a finalist for May at the Ideablob.com competition where entrepreneurs and small business owners can share and grow their business ideas – and have a chance to win $10,000 towards fulfilling them. CoolBusinessIdeas.com will be highlighting some of the winning ideas weekly.

Guardian.co.uk: In a barn on Oxfordshire Park Farm, Finnish musician Kimmo Pohjonen is holding up a microphone to a six-tonne tractor. “Turn the engine over again, please,” he asks the farmer. The barn fills with sound. “Beautiful,” he says. “Fabulous.”
Pohjonen is Finland’s most internationally celebrated contemporary musician and, arguably, the world’s only avant-garde accordionist.
Pohjonen’s current project, Earth Machine Music, involves him sampling sounds from four English farms, before returning to Finland where he will compose music from these samples. He is returning to perform at these same farms later this month and, at each concert, will blast the samples of that specific farm from his accordion while the farmers pitch in with occasional live tractor accompaniment.
“An environmental art piece” is how he describes it. “I grew up in a small village in northern Finland, so I’m used to being on farms, familiar with their sounds. I like the idea of making music with everyday farm machinery.”
Farming today [Guardian.co.uk]

Iconoculture: For anyone who has ever said, “If I had a dollar for every time I turned a friend on to a new band … ” — well, now you can cash in, thanks to Surrge.
Publicly launched at this year’s South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, Surrge is an iTunes for populists, empowering its listeners, dubbed “scouts,” to act as amateur A&R teams for the online music store. Beyond the usual rewards for exposing undiscovered bands to the masses, Surrge ups the ante by throwing in cold hard cash.
Fans referring bands listed on Surrge to other fans get a percentage of sales on any referrals, and “scouts” who sign up new artists to Surrge get 1% of all future sales from the artist on the site.
In a rapidly evolving music industry where individually powered blogs can wield more consumer tastemaking power than major record labels, old-school concepts like A&R are competing with more egalitarian models. How long before a rash of other user-driven content sites start cashing in on this model?
Show me the money: Surrge incentivizes music fandom [Iconoculture]