No matter how much music you have on your iPhone or iPod Touch, sometimes you get bored with it or just want somebody else to drive.
That's the appeal of apps like Pandora and Slacker, which build personalized radio stations based on a particular artist, then let you customize those stations to various degrees.
A psychedelic nugget by the late great Syd Barrett, recommended by Effin Genius.
A new app called Effin Genius, from Seattle company Melodeo, takes a different approach: instead of forcing you to enter the name of an artist or musical genre--or anything at all--Effin Genius analyzes the playlists in the iTunes library on your iPhone or iPod Touch, then creates identically named playlists of other music it thinks you would like.
I tried it out last night. It took about 10 minutes to analyze the 3,000-plus songs on my Touch, but once the process was done, it came up with some pretty amazing playlists. For example, I have an playlist called "Psych," which contains rock and jazz songs that are a little noisy or abrasive, but not completely insane. For the most part, Effin Genius looked at the artists in that playlist and recommended other songs by them. The new Can and My Bloody Valentine songs alone made it worth listening to. Other good picks included guitar goddess Marnie Stern, a freak-folk song by Helio Sequence, and the always reliable Kings of Leon, none of which I own. If you really love a particular song, there's a link to buy it on iTunes.
Unfortunately it also included some horrible rap and hip-hop--including, hilariously, "U Can't Touch This" by Hammer--and '80s pop hits from Def Leppard and George Michael. I don't have those artists, or anybody like them, on this playlist, although I do have some Police and other '80s pop elsewhere on my iPod. Of course, any time a song comes up that you don't like, you can skip it and tell the app never to play it again. Presumably, Effin Genius learns more about your preferences over time and adjusts accordingly.
As is the case with other radio apps for iPhone, you can't go straight to a particular song on the playlist--you must listen in the order the songs are delivered--and you need an active Internet connection. The streaming worked great over my home Wi-Fi network.
Effin Genius, whose name is a take-off on the Genius feature introduced in iTunes 8, costs $1.99. That's not much, but it's more than Pandora and Slacker, which are free.
Overall, Effin Genius is an interesting take on the problem of what to do when you're bored with your own music collection. But I'll have to play with it a little more before I decide whether to remove Pandora.
(Credit:
Rhapsody)
For heavy music listeners and explorers of new tunes, subscription-based music services make a lot sense on a mobile device. Instead of being bound to your phone's limited storage, you have access to millions of songs for a single monthly fee.
That's why I picked RealNetworks' Rhapsody (and its competitor Spotify, which isn't yet available in the United States) on the Apple iPhone as one of my five most welcome products of 2009.
Now owners of a Motorola Droid, an HTC Nexus One, or any other phone running Google's mobile operating system will be able to get the same experience, as Rhapsody is coming to Android.
Announced on Rhapsody's blog Tuesday, Rhapsody for Android is in beta testing right now, and it will work the same way as the iPhone version--$14.99 a month for unlimited streams from the company's library of 8 million songs.
Nonsubscribers can try the service free of charge for seven days. To sign up to participate in the beta test, visit Rhapsody's Facebook page and shoot it a message.
Everybody likes contributing an opinion, especially in subjects on which we consider ourselves experts. Rank'em (located at gorankem.com), now in beta testing, uses this human urge as the basis for a crowdsourced song recommendation engine.
This obviously wouldn't work without some structure--asking users to pick their 10 favorite songs at random, for instance, would be too scattershot and yield useless results. So Rank'em has users select particular artists, then asks them to choose between 5 and 20 songs and rank them in order. Users must also rate their level of enthusiasm--or "fanstanding" as the site calls it--for each artist. These self-ratings are limited by the number of songs picked. If you only know a handful of Modest Mouse songs, Rank'em will assume you can't be a very big fan, and will only let you rate yourself on a scale of one to five. If you pick 20 songs, they'll let you give yourself up to 10 points.
Rank'em urges me to pick the original version of any song I select as a favorite, but how am I supposed to know which version of "Boris the Spider" is the original? They're all exactly the same, but released at different times on different albums.
When other users search for that artist's name, they'll see aggregate rankings of the songs, weighted by each voter's fanstanding, along with links to buy them on iTunes, Amazon, and eMusic (assuming they're available through these sources). Although the site is still in beta, so far it looks pretty promising: for example, the results for Jimi Hendrix place well-deserved fan favorites like "Spanish Castle Magic" and "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" above overplayed radio hits like "Purple Haze" and "Foxy Lady."
You can try it yourself: enter the code "CNET" when you register (you'll also need a valid e-mail address) and you can start ranking songs and reading aggregate rankings in a few minutes.
Unfortunately, Rank'em is only as good as the song data it offers, and that data's flawed right now. The site draws song data from the user-maintained MusicBrainz database, but MusicBrainz is obsessively complete, listing multiple releases for the same album. This completeness is a drawback when you're just trying to find a song and rank it. For instance, the Who--notorious for repackaging songs and albums--has some songs show up five times. This can really mess up the rankings, as votes are split among multiple versions of the same song.
There are other data-related problems as well: albums often have the wrong years associated with them and some albums are listed twice with two different years. Rank'em has neglected to import data from some singles and soundtrack albums, which means several of my favorite songs--"Hey Jude," "Hey Bulldog," and "It's All Too Much" by The Beatles, "Positively Fourth Street" by Dylan--are completely missing from the site. And many artists operate with different bands--Neil Young solo, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, and Neil Young & the Shocking Pinks, for instance. Rank'em lists these as separate artists, but casual fans just want to know which Neil Young songs are the best.
For the time being, rating songs on Rank'em is a fun diversion, and the site could be a useful starting point if you're just discovering a new artist. But the company will have to do some pretty heavy manual data scrubbing--or find a more appropriate data source--before it can become a truly great recommendation engine.
Muziic, the YouTube-based music application created by teenage programmer David Nelson, has been an impressive piece of work with one drawback: the desktop application only runs on Windows. Not anymore! On Christmas day, the company officially launched a Web-based version of its service, and it compares very favorably with other free online music services.
Videos from Vevo are integrated into search results on the new Muziic Web app.
Like the Muziic desktop app and U.K.-based TubeRadio.fm, the new Muziic Web player draws its content from YouTube, and allows you to queue songs and save playlists. But it's got a couple of interesting wrinkles.
First, you can get content from Vevo without the pre-roll video advertisements you'd see on the YouTube or Vevo.com versions of the advertisments. (Nelson explained that those ads are not yet incorporated into the YouTube API, so they don't show up on the Muziic player; knowing Vevo's business goals, look for this to be "corrected" soon.) A Vevo tab on the Muziic Web player lets you surf through videos on the service, but they'll also show up in search results. There's also a crossfade feature that lets you blend songs together with a 1- to 10-second overlap--that's nothing new for a desktop app, but rare in a free Web app.
In addition, there's a new Muziic Facebook app that lets you play Muziic's entire library from within Facebook and post songs to your profile, and an iPhone app is coming shortly. I still find that Grooveshark has a bigger selection, but the Muziic Web app is definitely a worthwhile addition to your bookmarks.
Bill Gates has said that prognosticators often overestimate the amount of technological change that will happen in a year, but underestimate the changes that will take place over a decade. With the Zeroes coming to an end this week, and Steve Guttenberg's recent column questioning the viability of recorded music in 2020 as inspiration, here's my pick of 10 trends in music and technology that will shape the next decade.
Will the original iPod become an object of fetishization in 2020, like vinyl records are today?
(Credit: Apple Computer, via Wikimedia Commons)
Songs instead of albums
Musicians will always find ways to record their music--it's a fundamental drive, like painting for a painter or writing for a writer. But I agree with Guttenberg that fewer musicians will release suites of songs organized around a common theme or sound. As much as I love my long-playing records, they arose out of economics rather than art--they were a convenient way for companies to bundle multiple songs (particularly songs that might not have sold as singles) in an affordable package. With digital files already taking the place of physical recordings, there's almost no economic reason for the album to persist. By 2020, the concept of the album will be an anachronism with a few vocal adherents--like vinyl records are today--but most music will be released and consumed as songs.
Streams instead of downloads
Where did we get the idea that digital music has to be downloaded? It started with the CD and file-trading networks--content owners wouldn't sell us music in a form that could be consumed on our computers, so we ripped our own and swapped the files through Napster and its brethren. But now, every time a new song or album comes out, or we rediscover an old act, we have to rip or download the recordings, then transfer them to whichever device(s) we want to play them on. There's got to be an easier way!
If you had access to every song ever recorded, on any device, from any location with an Internet connection, wouldn't you rather pay for that service than buy a new CD or two every month? People say they want to own music, but when it's just a digital file, what do they want to own--a collection of ones and zeroes sitting on a segment of their hard drive? Why bother?
I think the real problem is that today's streaming services don't give you every song ever recorded and don't work on every device, and broadband data access--particularly wireless--is not ubiquitous. Those flaws stem from business problems (licensing, DRM, format incompatibility, and insufficient broadband infrastructure) rather than technology problems. And the business problems are gradually being resolved--look at the introduction of Rhapsody and Spotify for iPhone, and Apple's acquisition of streaming music service (and music locker) Lala. By 2020, most professionally recorded music will be consumed as on-demand streams and people won't pay by the track.
In the cloud rather than on hard drives
Some songs will never be available on demand--think of tracks from friends or obscure independent acts, or live covers (where licensing can be incredibly complicated, involving multiple performers and songwriters). But as users become accustomed to listening to more professionally recorded music on demand, they'll expect their personal collections to be available in the cloud as well. After all, who wants to spend time backing up a 120GB music collection on an external drive, or choosing particular recordings to eliminate in order to clear space on a cell phone?
This is where Apple's Lala acquisition really makes sense--imagine if iTunes served not only as an on-demand music service but also as a locker for songs you'd previously downloaded, ripped, or obtained elsewhere. Suddenly, the 16GB of storage on an entry-level iPhone would seem generous instead of paltry.
Fidelity rather than file size
Once our music lives in the cloud, we'll no longer have to worry about running out of space on our local drives or devices. Microsoft's SkyDrive already offers 25GB of online storage for free, and I could easily see that increasing one-hundred-fold by 2020. That's right: free terabytes of storage. It'll take a little bit longer, but eventually bandwidth--even wireless bandwidth--will increase to the point where streaming lossless digital files makes sense. Listeners will rediscover what they've been missing--detail in the midrange, and tons of information at the low and high ends of the spectrum--and the era of the MP3 will be looked back (and down) upon as the dark ages of audio quality.
Extras become standard
Again, with concerns over storage gradually disappearing, what's to prevent artists from packaging their music with artwork, lyric sheets, video outtakes, and even interactive applications? Today's artist-specific iPhone apps will become standard. Casual fans will stream a couple songs for free. Hardcore fans will pay to download the entire app and pore over it obsessively.
Production rather than consumption
Digital technology has already democratized the recording process--what used to take tens of thousands of dollars and a professional studio can now be accomplished with a laptop and a free program like Garage Band or Audacity. The results usually don't sound as good, but the experimentation process is fun, and sometimes a gem emerges. Digital technology and the Internet have also made promotion and distribution far easier than they were a decade ago. By 2020, music fans will spend almost as much time creating and sharing recordings with their friends as they do listening to professionally recorded music. Don't believe me? Think of this: 10 years ago, writers were a comparatively rare breed. Now, everybody's got a blog, or at least a Facebook page. In another 10 years, everybody will be a musician--or at least a recording artist.
Suggestions rather than searches
In a world of on-demand music in the cloud, search will become vitally important. Users will want to be able to find songs not only by title, album, or artist, but also by a few snippets of lyrics, or even by humming or playing part of a melody. (Imagine a combination of the voice search function available on Google Mobile with an advanced version of technology like Shazam, which can identify recorded music from a few snippets.) But search is only part of the question--once everything's available, how will users decide what to listen to? By 2020, personalized recommendation services, like those provided by Pandora, Slacker, and MOG, will become even more important than search, and will have to be integrated into any on-demand music service that hopes to survive.
Festivals rather than big concerts
Live music is already a long-tail world--with the exception of old, established acts and the very occasional pop sensation, very few bands can fill large arenas or football stadiums. This trend will accelerate as the last bands from the golden age of radio retire, labels take even fewer big promotional risks, and the market continues to fragment under the explosion in recording releases. In 2020, no single act will be able to sell 50,000 tickets at Qwest Field like U2 hopes to do this summer. Instead, the only shows that will pack large arenas will be festivals, where listeners can pick and choose among dozens of acts and classes of entertainment--just like they'll be doing online.
Spectacle rather than personality
With recording revenue plunging, bands must draw fans to their live shows in order to make a living. The common wisdom today dictates that musicians need a personal connection with their fans. They must blog, tweet, maintain their MySpace and Facebook profiles, and generally act like your next door neighbor who's always pestering you to see his band. There's a word for receiving "personal" messages from your favorite 100 bands--it's called "spam." Eventually, this cloud of self-promotional noise will dissipate, and will be replaced by old-fashioned word of mouth. Only acts that put on a great show--not just singing and playing songs, but entertaining in the old-fashioned sense of the word, with video and stagecraft and humor and spectacle--will cut through the noise. Bonus points for the first act that somehow integrates an audience-accessible game console into their act.
Retro takes on a new meaning
In 2020, the original iPod will be almost 20 years old. As the music world is overtaken by a nearly infinite selection of high-fidelity music, streamed over super-fast wireless connections to increasingly inexpensive portable devices, hardcore nostalgists will drag out their first-generation iPods and fill them with treble-heavy 120kbps MP3s. Meanwhile, grandpa will still be down in the basement with his collection of LP records and his lava lamp.
Yesterday, I compiled my list of the five most welcome products for digital audio that came out in 2009. Today, I'm following it up with my list of the year's five biggest digital audio duds.
An image from the infamous online commercial for Songsmith, Microsoft's reverse-karaoke software.
(Credit: Microsoft)Zookz. The breathless pitch got me interested: a mysterious online service was getting ready to compete against subscription-based download service eMusic. But where eMusic limits users to a set number of downloads, this mystery service would offer unlimited music and movie downloads. How could this be? Wouldn't users just download all the material they wanted then cancel their subscriptions? How could content owners let this happen?
The trick: Zookz was based in Antigua, and according to the company, this meant it wasn't subject to those silly little things known as U.S. copyright laws and royalty rates. Unfortunately, the country of Antigua didn't agree, and days after the public beta launched, Zookz disappeared into the digital ether with a promise to refund subscribers' money.
Jango Artist Airplay. I liked Jango's online radio service back when it launched in 2007. This year, in what looked like a desperate bid for new revenue, the company launched a service called Artist Airplay, in which bands could pay for placement on appropriate Jango stations. While Jango's CEO tried to tell me this was a reasonable new marketing opportunity, I saw it as a new form of the old pay-for-play deal that beginning bands often fall for.
With regular marketing, everybody pays more or less the same amount for the same class of services and the music sinks or swims on its own merits. With pay-for-play, artists buy exposure. There's only one problem: the resulting conflict of interest drives discerning listeners--including people who might actually pay you for your music--away. Jango Artist Direct may not be as stark as those pay-to-play "showcases" and "band battles" where all the audience members are other bands and their friends, but I believe it's better for beginning artists never to start down this slippery slope. Then again, I thought users would never be ignorant enough to click on search advertisements in massive numbers, which is one reason why Sergey Brin and Larry Page are multibillionaires and I'm not.
Vevo. As long as we're talking about Google, let's talk about YouTube, which the search company owns. It's a great source for music videos, and its APIs have formed the basis for music-finding apps like Muziic and TubeRadio. Users love it. Unfortunately, the companies and artists who own the copyrights to many of those music videos don't love it--the videos are expensive to produce, and the ad revenues from YouTube and other online video sites are scanty to nonexistent. Google is also lukewarm about music videos on YouTube, finding that the cost of policing copyright and complying with take-down notices is more than the money they can earn from selling ads.
In December, two record companies--Sony and Universal--joined together with Google in a new joint venture, Vevo, to address the problem. This was supposed to be a back-end business-to-business kind of deal, where YouTube users wouldn't know (or care) that certain videos were actually being provided exclusively by Vevo, which would sell short video advertisements to run before them. Unfortunately, the glittery launch party drew undue attention to Vevo's own site, causing its servers to buckle under the load. The entire episode left music fans scratching their heads.
Songsmith. The idea wasn't all that bad. Karaoke is fun. Making music on computers is fun. So why not, reasoned some Microsoft researchers, create a program that fills in audio accompaniment as users sing. Unfortunately, the $29.95 price and unbelievably mockable promotional video turned Songsmith into an Internet laughingstock. Later videos featuring Songsmith's accompaniment to the vocal tracks of songs like Queen's "We Will Rock You" and Van Halen's "Running With the Devil" highlighted the silliness.
CMX. In August, reports broke that the four major record labels were considering a new type of "digital album" format that would include album art, lyrics, and extra content. There was just one problem: Apple was already building its own competing format, code-named Cocktail and eventually released as iTunes LP. I think the entire concept of a digital album is weird anyway: I'm not convinced that lack of album art is a big reason why users are buying singles instead of albums. (The real reason is the Chumbawamba factor, or the fact that a lot of albums contain only one or two good songs.) And iTunes LP doesn't exactly seem to be taking off, although some of the extras--outtakes and videos--are actually quite valuable. But creating a competing format that wouldn't be supported by Apple? That's just plain dumb. To be fair, we haven't heard anything about CMX since iTunes LP launched. Here's hoping this product is killed before it's ever born.
The economy took its toll on digital audio in 2009, with CD sales continuing to decline (even as vinyl makes a resurgence), digital start-ups going bankrupt or disappearing after takeovers, and labels expressing dissatisfaction with would-be digital saviors like MySpace Music. Even so, there was actually quite a lot to cheer this year. The following five products aren't necessarily the best, but to me, they did the most to move the state of digital audio forward in 2009.
Outside the tech press, the Zune HD didn't get the love it deserved in 2009.
(Credit: Microsoft)Windows 7. Microsoft appears to have recovered from Vista with a new OS that runs efficiently, looks good, and satisfies users. Released on October 22, the latest version of Windows also includes some important new features for digital audio lovers. I was pleasantly surprised by Microsoft's decision to support for Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), which is the default format used by Apple's iTunes. With this simple move (along with native H.264 video support), Microsoft has finally acknowledged that Windows Media isn't taking over the world any time soon, and will hopefully move to the much more sensible strategy of making Windows a sort of "Swiss Army knife" of digital media. In addition, the new Remote Media Streaming feature lets you access the media library on your hard drive from any PC over the Internet, reducing the need for third-party solutions like JukeFly or online music lockers like Lala. Plus, for professional audio recording, Windows 7 is much more stable than Vista was at launch. Love it or hate it, Windows is still the OS used on more than 95 percent of computers worldwide, and Windows 7 is probably going to be around for a long time--like XP was--so these advances, however overdue, are major news.
Spotify and Rhapsody on iPhone. Music fans have been waiting for the celestial jukebox--the ability to listen to millions of songs on demand from anywhere--for years. In 2009, the music industry finally started coming around to the idea that on-demand access to millions of songs could be the digital business model that saves it. Nowhere was this clearer than in Apple's decision to approve iPhone apps from Spotify in August and Rhapsody in September. These two subscription services--Rhapsody in the U.S., Spotify in Europe--give iPhone users access to millions of songs, on demand, for a few bucks a month. Single-song downloads have been great for Apple, helping iTunes become the top music retailer in the U.S. starting in 2008, but the company may be coming around to the idea that subscriptions--or at least on-demand streaming--represents the future, as evidenced by its acquisition of Lala earlier this month. When Apple finally takes the plunge, Rhapsody and Spotify subscribers can be smug, knowing that they've been able to stream songs to their iPhones since 2009.
Sonos S5. I've been singing the praises of Sonos's multiroom home-audio system for a couple years now. There's no other equivalent system that offers such easy set-up, solid sound, reliable streaming (thanks to its dedicated wireless network), and slick user interface--including an iPhone controller. The only drawback has been its relatively high price of entry, especially compared with cheaper competitors like Logitech. The release of the Sonos S5 this November (read the CNET review) is a major step forward in affordability, giving you single $399 device--receiver, amplifier, and speaker, all in one--that lets you get started down the Sonos path. You'll still need a $99 bridge if you have a wireless home network and want your S5 to be in a different room than your router, but the S5 is Sonos's most affordable product to date, and a move in the right direction for multiroom digital audio.
iConcertCal for iPhone. For live music fans, nothing's more frustrating than missing a show because you happened to miss the listing in your weekly paper. This year saw the release of several iPhone and iPod Touch apps for finding and tracking local gigs, but my favorite remains iConcertCal, released in July for $2.99. (It was briefly removed from the iTunes Store earlier this month to fix a bug, but it's back now and working fine.) Unlike other gig-finding apps, iConcertCal doesn't require you to enter a list of artists you want to track--instead, it grabs all the artists whose music you have on your iPhone. If you want an even bigger selection, you can download the free iConcertCal desktop add-in for iTunes (useful in its own right), link it to your iPhone with a user name and password combination, and the iPhone app will then track every single artist you list in iTunes. You can also use it to see all local shows happening in the next couple of days.
Zune HD. At last! The latest version of Microsoft's portable music player, released in October, has everything its predecessors lacked. Classy industrial design. Touch screen. Gorgeous on-screen interface that makes it easy to find favorite songs or music you've recently added and scrolls through images of artists as you play their songs. Well-designed PC client software that does everything you've come to expect from iTunes and looks way better doing it. It's not perfect--the browser and lack of app store are kind of weak, and I'm still bothered by what sounds like a bass roll-off and lack of oomph in the midrange--but the Zune HD has so many features that iPods still lack, like wireless sync, a built-in subscription music service (with 10 permanent monthly downloads to boot), and the ability to add songs to a currently playing playlist, that it makes my iPods seem a bit out of date. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the Zune brand is still tarnished by its initial weak launch, and outside the tech press, the Zune HD didn't get the love it deserved. Perhaps when (if?) Microsoft moves these features into the next version of Windows Mobile, we'll finally see Microsoft considered as a viable competitor to Apple's mobile music juggernaut.
Tomorrow, I'll follow up with the five least welcome digital music products in 2009.
Vevo CEO and President Rio Caraeff more or less confirmed on Wednesday my suspicion that the music service was not created to serve a new need for consumers. Rather, it was built to help advertisers and content owners (including labels, artists, and music publishers) capitalize on music videos, and to help Google (YouTube's owner) offload some of the cost associated with administering rights to them. In other words, this isn't a business-to-consumer play, it's more of a business-to-business arrangement.
As he put it: music videos are popular online, fans like them, and content owners think of them as premium content. But they're too widespread, appearing on YouTube, AOL, and many other sites, and the user experience is way too varied--when a user searches on a song name at YouTube, they might get multiple copies of the exact same music video, plus user-posted remixes, live versions shot with a cell phone camera, and even parody versions. More generally, music videos grew up as a promotional tool for albums, and advertisers and users have come to see them as a commodity rather than prime product. Consequently, advertisers haven't been willing to pay much to place their messages next to them, and online music videos have lost money at a "staggering" scale.
Vevo is meant to provide an online clearinghouse for label-approved music videos--the kind of professionally shot videos that often cost half a million dollars or more and used to form the backbone of MTV. Vevo will be the exclusive distributor of these videos, and will handle all licensing and ad sales, although partner Google is handling the actual video hosting and streaming. In other words, if you're running a video site and you want to post a video that's in Vevo's catalog, Vevo will be your only source. By enforcing scarcity, giving advertisers a central place to buy ads, and controlling the user experience--for example, ensuring that there aren't many copies of the same video on YouTube--Vevo believes that advertisers will be willing to pay much more to appear next to these videos. So far, this seems to be true: according to Caraeff, advertisers have been willing to pay between $25 and $40 per thousand views (CPM, in advertising parlance) for Vevo-provided videos, compared with average market rates of $3 to $8. Caraeff claimed that artists and publishers will get about 50 percent of all revenues from these ads--a much higher percentage than they earn from recordings. This is why Mariah Carey and U2 were so excited about the launch.
Interestingly, Vevo will also curate unlicensed videos. For example, if somebody creates a remix of a Beyonce song with an associated video, and it becomes a runaway hit, Vevo might try to claim the video, add it to the Vevo catalog, and handle licensing for its content owners. Caraeff claims they're not going after the home video of your dog skateboarding to your favorite song, but professional-looking videos that have never been claimed, and therefore aren't making any money for anybody. (YouTube doesn't sell ads against unclaimed content for fear of copyright liability.)
So what's in it for Google? Simple--although YouTube has tons of viewers, it also has more inventory than it can sell advertisements against. Licensing for music videos is complicated, and not in Google's core area of expertise. Google is happy to hand this task off to Vevo and accept a lower percentage of advertising dollars because it believes the cost savings and higher CPMs will eventually make business sense.
Finally, about the botched launch: As Caraeff explained, Vevo was basically a B2B play, and the company didn't expect many users to visit its site on the first day. But the publicity created by the big launch party drove massive interest, and the company got more traffic in its first hour than it expected for its entire first year. For what it's worth, the company has added 32 servers in the last 24 hours, and I'm now able to get videos to play on the site with no problem.
In addition, Vevo didn't think it was critical to launch with a full complement of content--remember, it's mainly a back-end and clearinghouse for YouTube and other sites, and if you were watching videos there yesterday, you'll still be watching those same videos there tomorrow (as long as a takedown notice hasn't been issued). So Vevo launched with only about 15,000 videos from Sony and Universal Music. In January, it will add about 30,000 more from EMI and several independent distributors.
I still don't understand why they launched Vevo.com as its own Web site, but at least I understand the thinking behind the company. It won't change my behavior--I'm still going to YouTube, and if a video happens to be provided by Vevo, I'll know that the artists are making some money from it. Fair enough.
Vevo, the new music-video site operated by Google (which owns YouTube) and co-owned by three of the four major labels (EMI, Sony, and Universal; Warner Bros. not participating), launched on Tuesday to some fanfare in New York. Big music celebs rubbed elbows with Google and label execs in the kind of self-congratulatory bash that only the entertainment industry can pull off.
This is as far as I got when I tried to play U2's video for "Even Better Than The Real Thing" on Vevo.
Maybe that's too harsh, but I visited the site on Wednesday and I quite honestly can't figure out who or what it's for. It's got music videos, but only from three of the four majors and some independent distributors, which leaves huge swaths of the entertainment landscape blank. As far as I could tell from a search of the site--and the search engine should work, given that Google's behind the site--Vevo is sadly lacking in classic rock and modern indie rock, which are the two genres I listen to most.
There's no Roger Waters or Pink Floyd. No Pixies. No Grizzly Bear. No Led Zeppelin. No Animal Collective. No Beatles. No Eric Clapton. And on and on and on. Go ahead and try your own, you'll get the idea--if you can get the site to work to work at all. (It's been plagued by glitches since launching, and my effort to play U2's "Even Better Than the Real Thing" around 1 p.m. Wednesday met in failure--the video froze around 80 percent loaded.) Apparently, if you can get a video to load, you'll probably have to watch a video advertisement before it starts.
The aforementioned artists are all over the place on YouTube--a site that everybody knows and loves and is largely free from video advertisements. And because Google is behind both sites, videos licensed for Vevo will also appear on YouTube, with Vevo getting the credit (and ad bucks) when a YouTube viewer watches a Vevo video. So why would anybody go to Vevo? Why bother building it, instead of just making it a new channel on YouTube? Who is this for?
The music industry, that's who. It wants to control the online music video experience--Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris flat out said so. They're tired of mean old Google using its content to sell advertisements. But I honestly can't imagine why Google agreed, unless the labels held it over a barrel, refusing to license their content for YouTube unless Google agreed to help them create a music-industry answer to TV-streaming site Hulu.
Here's the thing. The big winners in the old music industry of yesteryear don't like the Internet. U2 manager Paul McGuinness has said that Internet service providers should bear part of the blame for piracy. Doug Morris earned some scorn two years ago for a Wired interview in which he revealed that his label didn't even try to come up with a digital strategy in the early days, when P2P file-trading networks first started becoming popular.
If you don't like the Internet, you're not going to be able to create an Internet service that people like. More than 15 years into this Interwebs thing, some people still don't understand that if they create an experience that users don't like, it won't get used. It's like they're still living back in 1973 when we only had three TV networks and one or two daily papers and a handful of local radio stations. We now have unlimited choice. Offer me something better than what's out there now, or please, save yourself some money and effort and get out of my way.
Hulu succeeded not only because the TV companies played hardball, refusing to license their content too broadly to other distributors, but also because it launched strong, with a big selection of desirable content. Vevo could certainly turn itself around, but its launch doesn't look very promising. I suspect it'll end up like every other entertainment industry effort that offers no clear benefit to users: on the digital scrapheap.
Here's an interesting study in contrasts. When MySpace acquired iLike back in August, MySpace left the site mostly intact. The iLike home page is still there, you can still add iLike's music-finding and sharing application to your Facebook page, and iLike is given prominent placement in Google search results for music-related queries, thanks to an October deal between MySpace and Google. (That deal also included several other companies.)
On Tuesday, MySpace completed its acquisition of Imeem, a service that used to let users upload music and videos and share playlists. In the press release announcing the finalization of the deal, MySpace noted that it will be "working as quickly as possible" to migrate "aspects of" Imeem to MySpace Music.
What does that mean? As of Tuesday, it means that Imeem's gone. Imeem.com and my personal Imeem profile both redirect to MySpace Music. The press release promises that MySpace will "be working to offer users the Imeem playlists they've created on MySpace Music," but the phrasing on the FAQ doesn't leave me much hope--"will attempt to transition" leaves a lot of wiggle room.
The free Imeem app for iPhone is still in the iTunes Store, but it's going to be inoperable until MySpace pushes an update out, and there's no telling how close the new app will be to the old one.
I always found Imeem a little confusing--especially in its early days--but I did like its user-contributed content model, which gave it a large selection of music, and I personally used it to post a lot of recordings from long-dead bands I used to play in. But I suspect that user-contributed content is one reason why MySpace is treating Imeem so differently than it treated iLike: some of that content may not have been properly licensed from content owners. In contrast, MySpace boasts that its content is "fully licensed."
Unfortunately, using MySpace Music is still a pain. It's gotten a bit better since the last time I took a close look, but I still can't find the home pages for certain artists using the MySpace search engine (Google works), the advertisements are still annoying and intrusive (text ads above search results; audio ads on a music site), and there are still no playable Led Zeppelin tracks. (Although MySpace does have The Beatles and AC/DC, which most other services don't.)
There's no free lunch, and the recent consolidation among free online music sites is beginning to look like a crackdown.
