I had a fascinating conversation with MediaNet CEO Alan McGlade on Friday morning. Unless you're deeply involved in online music, you probably don't know MediaNet, but it's the back end powering a lot of music services you might have used, including MOG's subscription service that launched earlier this week, as well as Microsoft's excellent Zune Pass subscription service and iLike's online music marketplace. (MySpace acquired iLike in August, and in November, links to iLike's service began appearing directly in music-related search results on Google.)
Fox Interactive used MediaNet's technology to embed this list of Aerosmith songs in a story about the band. Readers could then listen to a sample or buy the song.
(Credit: MediaNet)They've also got more history in online music than just about anyone. The company started off as MusicNet, with part-ownership by three of the then-Big Five major labels: BMG, EMI, and Warner. They powered RealNetworks' music initiatives before RealNetworks bought Rhapsody. They powered Yahoo Music. They powered MTV's online music store.
These early stores went nowhere. Content owners insisted on digital rights management (DRM) restrictions, which meant that content from these stores had restricted use rights and couldn't be played on every device--including, in most cases, Apple's iconic iPod. Setting up a store using MediaNet's platform often took 18 months and significant technical expertise. In the meantime, Apple focused on a dedicated online store for its own devices, and completely dominated the market for music downloads.
But the landscape has changed. Labels don't want to be beholden to Apple. They no longer insist on DRM for single-song downloads, and have realized that the more outlets there are for their digital music, the more customers they'll reach, and the more sales they'll have. (Amazing it took this long to figure out.) MediaNet is, in my opinion, incredibly well positioned to take advantage of this sea change.
In October, the company released a set of technologies called MN Open that make it almost trivially simple for companies to add a wide variety of music consumption options to their Web sites. Sure, companies can still use MediaNet to build an end-to-end service like MOG.
But say you're Fox Interactive and want to make a story about Aerosmith more engaging. Using a MediaNet component, Fox created a link for the first mention of the word Aerosmith that took users to a page with more information about the band, and links to play and buy some of their popular songs. Fox also posted Aerosmith songs in a box directly on the story page.
MediaNet handled all the heavy lifting: licensing the music, streaming the samples, and fulfilling the transaction. Fox kept its brand and design throughout the process, and users didn't have to leave the site to buy the song. Best of all for Fox, it didn't have to make any up-front payment to use MediaNet's technology. Instead, MediaNet takes the customary cut of any song purchased through the site (about 30 percent, if it's anything like Apple). The model's the same for sites that offer free ad-supported streams or subscriptions--MediaNet takes a portion of each transaction, then handles payment to the content owners.
Now imagine this kind of integration on sites for radio stations, record labels, or your favorite bands. Imagine your ISP or cell phone carrier offering you a music subscription service bundled with your Internet service or smartphone. In this world, users won't have to go to iTunes or Amazon MP3, or subscribe to Rhapsody (or MOG for that matter). Music will be available for consumption everywhere. And content owners will get paid regardless of where users buy it.
According to McGlade, it's already happening--he said MediaNet is adding about one new distributor per day, and has already got about 50 customers using the MN Open platform. One site, GetPlaylists.com, was able to add playable song samples and downloads-for-sale in only two days with MN Open, according to McGlade.
Thanks to this upsurge, the company--which is owned by a private equity firm and no longer has any direct ownership affiliation with the major labels--has recently crossed over into profitability. A rare situation indeed in today's online music landscape.
It's a great vision, and something that Microsoft, the original platform company, could have done. But Microsoft spent years pushing the Windows Media Platform, which made heavy use of Microsoft codecs and file wrappers (instead of MP3s, which were becoming the industry standard). Microsoft also spent a lot of effort trying to enable the labels' DRM demands--for example, by building a platform to enable subscription-based downloads to be transferred to portable devices. Then, just as the labels were getting ready to abandon DRM, Microsoft basically gave up pushing Windows Media as a general-purpose platform for distributors and device makers, and instead started trying to mimic Apple's end-to-end software+service+device with the Zune strategy.
Talk about an opportunity lost! Instead of struggling along with something like 2 percent of the digital media player market, Microsoft could have ended up powering the music technology on thousands of Web sites.
Another aside: while MusicNet offers a lot of flexibility for distributors--downloads, samples, free streams, or subscriptions are all supported--McGlade is most bullish on subscriptions as the digital business model of the future. He admits that old fogeys accustomed to CDs and vinyl will have a hard time giving up the concept of ownership, but suggests that today's teenagers don't care--they want music on demand from any device, any time, in any location, and don't need to have the files physically present. McGlade thinks that subscriptions will have the best chance of taking off if they're bundled with some other product, like ISP service.
Scoff all you want about subscriptions, but the concept keeps coming up: music industry expert Donald Passman also believes they're the best chance for the music industry to thrive in the future. Even Apple finally seems to be bending to the idea of streaming music with its acquisition of Lala, although Lala isn't a straight subscription service, but more of an online music locker with some free streams, plus fee-based individual streams.
Online music provider 7digital is bringing over-the-air music downloads to recent BlackBerry phones, such as the Storm, Bold, and Tour. The rumors have been circulating for several months now. On Tuesday the company is set to launch its application--developed by DevelopIQ--on the BlackBerry App World store, as well as on the 7digital Web site.
After installing the free app, BlackBerry users will be able to buy and download more than 6 million songs from all four major labels and all the big independents, all in unprotected MP3 format. The app adapts automatically to the speed of the user's connection--when connecting over a wireless data network, it will download a relatively low-quality version of the song. Then, when the user enters the range of a previously known Wi-Fi network, it will automatically--in the background--update the MP3 with a higher-quality version (320kbps in most cases).
7digital is based in the U.K. and is fairly well known in Europe--it powers the download store for free streaming service Spotify, among other partnerships--but has been relatively obscure in the United States. That's changing Tuesday as well: the company is launching its online music store in the U.S., bringing more competition to the likes of iTunes and Amazon. Standard pricing for songs and albums will be 77 cents and $7.77 respectively, which is a play on the company's name (although variable pricing means that some popular material will cost more). The company also offers a free digital locker service, which backs up all your downloads in case you lose them.
Reading through Greg Sandoval's detailed reporting of SpiralFrog's demise, I once again found myself wondering--as I did many times during the late 1990s dot-com boom and subsequent bust--how anybody could possibly have thought this was a good idea. Ad-supported music downloads that are incompatible with the iPod, the device that basically created the MP3 player market? Who would possibly buy such a thing? SpiralFrog seemed like such an obvious nonstarter, I wrote about it once in 2007 and never wasted time revisiting it. But investors were spending serious sums of money on it, right up until the end.
Album art is fine, but I'm more excited about the music in the grooves.
Apparently, some folks in the music business still haven't learned the lesson about Apple and iPod support, as demonstrated by recent reports that the major labels are planning to launch a new format for digital albums. Operating under the working name of CMX (as a friend quipped, "8-track" was already taken), the new format will allow users to browse album art, read lyrics, and so on. Basically, it's trying to duplicate some of the fun of buying and unwrapping LP records.
Unfortunately, Apple's not playing ball, but is rather working on its own competing format, code-named Cocktail.
So let's get this straight. First, it's a new format. Unless it takes advantage of existing technology like Adobe's Flash, that means users will have to download some new software or plug-in to access these files. Second, this format is meant to be consumed from your computer. But in my experience, the main reason to put digital music on a computer is in order to move it to other devices. Third--and probably most important--without Apple's support, the format won't be compatible with iTunes, the iPod, or iPhone. You can count the market share of the other players in this field on your fingers. Finally, the entire premise assumes that people aren't buying complete albums in digital format because they're not getting the fetishistic experience they used to get--unwrapping the physical object, admiring the cover, reading the liner notes. But the sad fact is that a lot of albums aren't and never were worth buying, and customers grew tired of paying $18 for one song they liked. (Chumbawamba, anyone?). Digital downloads free us from bundling practices that we never liked in the first place.
Unless there's more to the story--a tie-up with another player like Sony's X Series Walkman or Microsoft's Zune, for instance--how can anybody possibly think this will succeed?
I love covering music software because the pace of evolution is so fast. I guess everybody's looking for the next billion-dollar business (after iTunes) to help replace declining CD sales.
Last week, I blogged about Spotify, a free and legal music player that offers a massive library of music on demand. Unfortunately, Spotify's library has some big gaps because of legal disputes with rights-holders, and it's not available in the U.S.
A couple days later, software developer David Nelson contacted me about Muziic, a company he started with his dad--he's 15(!) and has gone from public high school to online private high school to pursue this project. After checking it out for a few days, I think it's got just as much of a chance of revolutionizing how we listen to music as Spotify does.
Great selection, but black-on-black doesn't get high marks in most usability tests.
Like Spotify, Muziic offers a free downloadable piece of client software with an iTunes-like interface and offers on-demand access to millions of streaming songs. Unlike Spotify, I had no problem finding huge catalogs from artists that are notoriously prickly about posting their music online, including Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and Radiohead. It also did a great job with all of my more obscure test cases.
How did an unknown company run by a 15-year-old and his dad pull off this incredible licensing coup? Easy--they've basically built a customized front-end to YouTube. Any song that's been uploaded to YouTube is available in Muziic, including a lot of music that isn't available on most commercial services, like the full Pink Floyd's performance at Live 8 and Led Zeppelin's one-off performance in 2007.
Unfortunately, a dispute between Warner Music and YouTube earlier this year means that a lot of recordings owned by Warner are no longer available. But in a lot of cases, users have filled the gaps with (probably unauthorized) recordings from the artists--so while I can't get my favorite studio recordings from Neil Young or the Flaming Lips, there are dozens live nuggets from each of them.
With any luck, Warner and Google (YouTube's parent company) will resolve their dispute and these gaps will be filled. In the meantime, the Nelsons can work on some of the fit-and-finish problems I found with Muziic. The Web site doesn't render properly in Firefox 3.0. The high-quality audio option didn't work for me--I think it's supposed to render YouTube's default Flash audio into AAC on the fly, but the description doesn't make much sense so I can't really tell. (The default audio sounded fine anyway--at least no worse than MP3, which of course isn't so great.) They could use some professional design help--I couldn't maximize the player to fill the screen, there's a lot of unused space in the margins, and the black on black toolbar sliders are awfully hard to use for those of us who have no patience to download different skins.
Overall, though, this is a pretty interesting and impressive piece of work. Muziic also offers an encoder that apparently lets you upgrade your MP3s before uploading them to YouTube--I didn't test this as I'm more interested in listening than sharing, but I'll give it a look later this week and let you know what I think. More important, Muziic (and Spotify) are finally showing the world how compelling a free, legal, on-demand music service can be--nearly a decade after Napster introduced us to the concept.
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Earlier on Friday, Mufin launched its music player, which analyzes the songs in your music collection based on their audio content, rather than on human analysis or genre.
Human analysis, naturally, is subjective, and genre labeling is totally arbitrary and unreliable--I particularly hate the meaningless label "Alternative," which can apply to everything from dead-slow acoustic to fast punk; it's more about the hairstyles of the artists than the content of the music.
Once Mufin has analyzed your tunes, it can recommend similar-sounding songs from your collection. It also catalogs songs in its online database and can recommend music from its own sources, if it doesn't find anything similar on your hard drive.
My Mufin Player installation went smoothly, though it took a little more time than I expected, because I had to download and install the open-source SQL Firebird desktop database. But when I began importing my music collection, Mufin could only recognize metadata from files that had been originally downloaded as MP3s.
Anything I ripped or converted through iTunes simply showed up as a file name. I suspect that there is some sort of incompatibility between how iTunes and Mufin use the ID3 metadata format, but who knows? The Mufin help file offers no help on this matter.
Mellow, meet more mellow.
Mufin took quite a while to analyze my collection--as I write this, it's been plugging away for about 20 minutes and is through about 700 of the 3,400 songs on my hard drive--but once it got a reasonably large data set, the recommendations were spot-on.
For instance, I selected "If You Want Me," a downbeat acoustic-guitar-laden track by Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard from the "Once" soundtrack. Mufin selected Beck's "Sing It Again" as the most similar, followed by Beck's "End of the Day" and "Already Dead." (I'm sure the results would have been more diverse, if the program had had time to analyze a larger portion of my collection.)
For my second test, I had it analyze Cuong Vu's avant-jazz piece "Expressions of a Neurotic Impulse." Mufin's top similarity: a live version of "How I Learned My Lesson" by X, followed by the Butthole Surfers' "Some Dispute Over T-Shirt Sales."
Acid jazz and punk? The songs do actually sound similar--noisy, abrasive, lots of cymbal. This is the kind of unexpected recommendation I was hoping for, based on the sound of the music rather than the mostly artificial "genre" categories that artists and labels pick.
Once they work the ID3 bugs out, Mufin could become a useful piece of software. Still, I don't see it replacing iTunes any time soon--and for that matter, neither does Mufin.
If you want to apply Mufin's similarity engine to iTunes, the company offers a free downloadable widget that plugs into iTunes. Or you could just keep using iTunes' Genius feature, which may not be perfect, but is built right in.
It's been a long wait, but more than a year after Nokia announced its Comes With Music plan--free music downloads built into the price of the phone--the first Comes With Music phone is apparently coming to the U.S. in February.
(Credit:
CBS Interactive)
According to The Nokia Blog, the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music (a.k.a. The Tube) will go on sale at U.S. retailers on Feb. 26 for a suggested price of $399. No carrier partners have been announced, so there's probably little chance of a carrier subsidy reducing the price at launch. CNET reviewed a preview version of the phone back in December and liked it fairly well, but I'm most interested in how the Comes With Music plan will stack up against Apple's iTunes.
According to the information CNET got back in October, when the 5800 was unveiled in the U.K., Comes With Music tracks will be playable on the phone and one PC, and will not expire after the year is up. From the reviews I've seen, it's truly an unlimited downloading service--there's no hidden limit, although Nokia's terms of use would let them cancel your service for "abusive or excessive downloading."
The experience is a little clunkier than iTunes from what I've read in the reviews. The phone comes with a card containing a code; enter that code into the Web-based Nokia Music Store and all prices in the store disappear. Everything has to be sideloaded--there's no direct over-the-air downloading to the phone as you can do with the iPhone--and it's PC only. You can't transfer the songs to any other phone, even another Comes With Music phone, nor can you burn them to a CD without paying extra. Songs are encoded in the Windows Media Audio format (which I've always thought is an excellent audio codec, for all of the other flaws with Microsoft's digital media strategy and products), and of course come with DRM to limit what you can do with them.
Still--everything you download lives on your PC forever. So while $399 is a significant premium over the iPhone, add in the price of a few thousand PC-tethered downloads, and it looks pretty competitive. At the very least, it could be an extremely convenient way to discover music--you can always buy full CD-burnable tracks of the songs you really like, then transfer them to other devices in other formats later on.
Will it make a dent in iPhone sales? Not without a carrier agreement, no.
From Nielsen Soundscan by way of the LA Weekly and Rolling Stone, here are the top 10 vinyl sellers in 2008. I've added the years they were originally released, and what I imagine was going through the mind of vinylphiles when they bought it.
I haven't seen that poster since high school.
10. Radiohead, OK Computer, 1997. Great production, trippy artwork looks great under the lava lamp.
9. Metallica, Death Magnetic, 2008. Maybe the vinyl version won't be overcompressed to death.
8. Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes, 2008. Pitchfork likes it, it must be good.
7. Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, 1973. Remember those posters?
6. Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, 1998. With the LP, I can pretend I was hip to this record when it originally came out.
5. Portishead, Third, 2008. See number 8.
4. B-52s, Funplex, 2008. Remember that all-night dance party we had back in '82?
3. Guns 'n' Roses, Chinese Democracy, 2008. This will be a collectors' item someday.
2. The Beatles, Abbey Road, 1969. Now I can replace the copy my daughter stole when she went off to college.
1. Radiohead, In Rainbows, 2008. I feel kind of guilty about paying one cent for the download.
Overall, vinyl accounted for a whopping 0.1 of all music sales last year! How long before preloaded microSD cards surpass vinyl to become the third-most-popular music format?
CNET News' Greg Sandoval is already covering the story, so I won't belabor it, but kudos to Apple and the three holdout record labels--Sony, Universal, and Warner--for reaching an agreement that will result in more than 8 million songs being available on iTunes with no digital rights management (DRM) restrictions. (EMI has made DRM-free songs available on iTunes since last spring, but only 10 percent of the music sold in the U.S. comes from EMI.) As Greg reports, Apple will also let users with existing DRM-encrusted downloads upgrade to a DRM-free version at a higher bitrate--256kbps--for an extra 30 cents.
For only 60 cents, I can upgrade both of my iTunes Store music purchases to DRM-free versions.
To remind everybody why this is important: this now means that most of the songs you buy on iTunes will be playable on devices and software produced by other companies. Yes, the files are still going to be in Apple's preferred AAC format rather than the more widely supported MP3, but a lot of recent digital music products from other companies do support AAC, including Microsoft's Zune (software and device) and the next version of the Windows Media Player, as well as Sony's most recent Walkman digital media players. SanDisk's popular Fuze and Clip, however, don't support AAC--a failing the company will hopefully fix with a software update.
This truly means that DRM for single-song downloads is dead. iTunes is the No. 1 distributor of digital music by a huge margin, and in fact is the No. 1 music retailer in the U.S., ahead of all brick-and-mortar outlets. DRM will live on in subscription-based services--the record companies aren't going to let you download unlimited music for one month's $15 subscription, then cancel and keep all that music--but otherwise fuggedaboudit.
My only gripe: the news comes six days too late to make my No. 1 prediction for 2008 true. Apple is also making music downloads for the iPhone available over 3G cellular networks in addition to Wi-Fi--another prediction that I made for last year.
If you're a gearhead and have a bunch of MP3 players from different companies, the Amazon MP3 Store is your best source for buying music downloads. It's the only store in which all tracks are unprotected MP3s, meaning they can be played on any player and in any software. (Microsoft's Zune Marketplace is getting close, but you need to download and install the Zune software to access that store, while Amazon is accessible from any browser.)
Yesterday, Amazon took a step toward making its store a place you might actually want to spend some time, rather than downloading your tunes and getting out. There are now 70,000 dedicated artist pages, each with a list of physical CDs for sale, most popular MP3 downloads, biographies from AMG, and listener-contributed information from SoundUnwound (an offshoot of Amazon's IMDb). If an artist has a store, it shows up at the top of search results--a nice touch given how haphazard Amazon's search results can be.
This isn't a new concept at all; iTunes has had dedicated artist pages for ages, and they're the centerpiece of MySpace Music. But you can't buy a physical album, DVD, or book from iTunes or MySpace.
The great draw of portable MP3 players is quantity.
I remember when my wife and I took a six-month backpacking trip back in 1999. We never even considered bringing an MP3 player, which might have had a whopping 64MB of flash memory, enough for about a hour of audio compressed at 256kbps. Instead, we brought a Discman and about two dozen CDs in a soft case. We grew extremely bored with those CDs and ended up jettisoning or trading most of them.
Today, you'd laugh if somebody told you they were considering bringing CDs on a trip--why would you, when all but the most hardcore collectors could fit their entire music collection onto a hard-drive based player like the 120GB iPod Classic? I've even taken a stand against the audiophiles who decry MP3s and compressed audio--I think portability is worth the quality loss you have to endure, as long as you occasionally listen to uncompressed (or better, live) music to remind yourself how great it can sound.
But I've always assumed that this is a temporary state of affairs. Kryder's Law--which says that density of data on magnetic discs will approximately double each year--is presumably going to continue, and advances in flash-based storage could lead to an exponential jump in capacity. Of course, we'll all be listening to lossless files on our portable player someday. Right?
That's why it surprised me when a report by Todd Bishop--a former Microsoft reporter for one of Seattle's daily papers, who recently helped start a new Seattle-based tech site called TechFlash--cited representatives from Amazon's MP3 store and Rhapsody saying that they weren't really thinking about lossless music.
Selling lossless files won't make sense for the next year or two because of space constraints and the fact that many players (such as the iPod Shuffle) can't play them. But what about in 5, 6, 10 years? Don't you think kids who grew up with compressed files would switch to better quality audio if it cost the same amount? Don't you think they would notice the difference?
I think so. And Microsoft apparently does too. A Zune representative told Bishop she has a hunch that lossless audio will become extremely important in the future (although today's Zunes don't support playback of any audio at a higher bitrate than 320kbps, meaning they won't play back any lossless files). Her stance is in keeping with Microsoft's corporate culture, which has always bet on the next generation of hardware. With the exception of Vista, which received a media drubbing in part because of the steep hardware requirements for the Premium versions, most of the time this has turned out to be the right bet.
