Mavaru, a new web platform that allows artists to sell their music using a pay-what-you-want pricing model, has just launched into public beta. In addition to great design and solid technology, Mavaru is a welcome addition to the music industry landscape. While it’s understandable for people in music to be nervous about new platforms like Mavaru that upend traditional business models, I think what they’re doing is important in light of the fact that these traditional business models aren’t really working anymore (and haven’t for some time). Whether Mavaru has hit on a successful formula or not is yet to be seen, but I’ll certainly be watching to see how things unfold for them in the future.

If you’re not familiar with the pay-what-you-want pricing model, it’s exactly what it sounds like – allowing consumers to decide how much they want to spend for your music. This model first got a lot of attention thanks to how Radiohead released their last full-length album, In Rainbows. Other artists have followed suit, including Girl Talk and Nine Inch Nails.

Congratulations to the SoundCloud team for hitting 1,000,000 members! I joined the service during their early beta days and it’s been great watching new features roll out and the service become more and more important in today’s digital music world. SoundCloud empowers a lot of new artists and makes it easy for budding musicians to get their demos to more established people in the industry, a feature I wholeheartedly view as a Good Thing ™. Here’s to many more millions of users over the coming years!

You can read more about the story over at the original TechCrunch article.

Wired’s piece about a North Carolina start-up named Zenph Sound Innovation teases out a lot of the nuances with respect to how advances in artificial intelligence are impacting casual music listening and academic music education:

Using complex software, North Carolina’s Zenph Sound Innovations models the musical performances of musicians from Thelonius Monk to Rachmaninoff, based on how they played in occasionally old, scratchy recordings. Using that model, the company creates new recordings as they would be played by deceased musicians, if they were around to record with today’s equipment, to critical acclaim. And that’s just for starters.

Zenph also plans explore a variety of new markets, including licensing clear versions of muddy recordings to films and software that could eventually let musicians jam with virtual versions of famous musicians.

Zenph’s first application of artificial musical personality is its specially designed robotic pianos, which take high-resolution MIDI files created by software that simulates the style of classical and jazz performers from days gone by, and turns them into sound by literally depressing the keys using between 12 and 24 high-resolution MIDI attributes. So far, the company offers new albums by legends including Art Tatum, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Glenn Gould, and up next is jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.