Instant.fm Tech Stack

I’ve received a lot of emails asking about the technology stack of Instant.fm, so I thought I’d share this publicly.

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San Francisco Symphony Orchestra

Tonight, I listened to the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra play, and wow. What an amazing concert! It was called Distant Worlds: Music from FINAL FANTASY. All the music was composed by the Japanese video game composer Nobuo Uematsu and conducted by Grammy award-winner Arnie Roth.

This was my second time attending Distant Worlds (I also went last year), and it was even better than I remembered. Nobuo Uematsu was in attendance again, and as expected, the crowd gave him an extremely warm welcome. At the end of the concert, Uematsu got a 4-minute standing ovation from everyone in the Final Fantasy fan-filled hall.

Here’s my favorite song from their CD:

Zanarkand (Final Fantasy X)

Here was the evening’s setlist:

• Opening~Bombing Mission (FINAL FANTASY VII)
• Don’t be Afraid (FINAL FANTASY VIII)
• Memoro de la Stono (FINAL FANTASY XI)
• Medley 2002 (FINAL FANTASY I-III)
• Main Theme of Final Fantasy VII (FINAL FANTASY VII)
• Prima Vista Orchestra (FINAL FANTASY IX)
• Kiss Me Goodbye (FINAL FANTASY XII)
• Zanarkand (FINAL FANTASY X)
• FINAL FANTASY series: Main Theme
• The Man with the Machine Gun (FINAL FANTASY VIII)
• Theme of Love (FINAL FANTASY IV)
• JENOVA (FINAL FANTASY VII)
• Ronfaure (FINAL FANTASY XI)
• FINAL FANTASY XIII medley
• FINAL FANTASY XIV medley
• Opera “Maria and Draco” (FINAL FANTASY VI)
• Terra’s Theme (FINAL FANTASY VI)

“Empty Walls” by Serj Tankian

Beautifully crafted music video.

Breathturn by Hammock

What a stunningly beautiful music video…

Hammock – Breathturn from David Altobelli on Vimeo.

Copying Is Not Theft

When artists do work, they should be paid — no one is debating that. Musicians are paid when they perform at concerts, when they sell discs, and when they compose for someone. Artists are paid when they sell their artwork, when they are commissioned to make art, and when their art appears in art museums.

However, artists shouldn’t chase down and sue every adolescent who copies their work without advance permission. The job of artists is to create stuff — and for that they should be compensated. They should not necessarily be compensated for the distribution of their work, especially when computers and the Internet make it trivial to distribute bits at a near-zero cost.

At the end of the day, artists should be paid when they make stuff. Mozilla is a great example of a company that understands this. Let’s say that software engineers are artists for the sake of this example (in many ways, we are artists). So, Mozilla engineers get paid when they’re designing, programming, and submitting patches for Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey. Yet, when the time comes for the software to be distributed, Mozilla engineers are not paid anything. All Mozilla software is free (as in freedom) and open source, as governed by the Mozilla Public License. Read the rest of this entry »