Digital Noise: Music and Tech

I've been checking out a new social-networking site called SuperFan, and I think it could eventually become an interesting resource for music fans. But only if they make it easier to post and share content about favorite bands.

SuperFan is a bit like Facebook, only organized more around your likes and dislikes than around your friends.

If you've used Facebook, MySpace, Imeem, or any of the other countless social-networking sites out there, the drill will be familiar: enter your information to create a profile (here's mine), invite your friends, then engage in various activities like updating your status and uploading video and photos.

The key difference is that SuperFan is organized around the stuff you really like--movies, TV shows, sports teams, and--most relevant to me--music. Once you've created your profile page, you can run searches on particular musicians and albums, and declare yourself a fan. There are multiple different levels, the top being a SuperFan. Once you become a SuperFan of a particular artist--say, Roger Waters--you can embed YouTube videos, upload photos, create quizzes, and so forth. You basically become the maintainer of a fan site about your favorite artists and albums.

The template's pretty simple today--I'd like to see the ability to embed other videos, and even upload MP3 files like I can do on Imeem--but the idea has potential. If enough fans sign up and participate, SuperFan artist pages could become a go-to destination for musical information: instead of going to a band's home page or MySpace page, which tend to be strictly promotional, or to a Wikipedia entry, which tends to be pretty dry, you could go to a page that's lovingly curated by a fan.

But here's the catch. You can become a Fan of as many artists or albums as you want for free, but becoming a SuperFan--where you can actually populate a page with content--requires credits. You get some for free just by signing up, but to declare yourself a fan of a really popular group, like Led Zeppelin, you need to earn additional credits by creating content for other pages, or buy them with PayPal or by such as Netflix.

That seems like a bit of a hassle to me. As a music fan, I prefer Imeem's approach--while it's not as well-organized, there's no barrier to posting content, which means that it's easy to find just about anything you're looking for. And as a social-networking user, I'll probably stick with Facebook, where my friends are today.

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Both TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider posted stories this week about how MySpace is in big trouble. Traffic's down, users aren't spending much time at the site, Google hates its current ad deal that's up for renewal this year, and the relatively new CEOs are apparently planning to lay off up to 50 percent of the company--another 750 people--to save the company.

What happened? I remember when MySpace was the site of choice for musicians and music fans to keep track of their local scenes, and it seemed to have a pretty strong lock on general-purpose social networking until Facebook came along. Now, it looks like one big electronic billboard, and the only people who care about it are band managers and publicists trying to get "adds" for their artists so they can sell these acts up the chain to club bookers, radio stations, and record labels. There was always a commercial aspect to MySpace, but it's overshadowed everything else: Fox Interactive seems to have killed the goose that laid the golden egg, and covered its corpse with blinking Christmas lights spelling the name of the latest disposable major label act.

I exaggerate, but not much. If MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta wants to save the business, here are several steps he should take as soon as possible.

Get back to your core mission. What am I supposed to do at MySpace? I know what I used to do--I used to follow bands to find out when they were playing in my area, and perhaps exchange messages with them. As a musician, I used it to communicate with other local bands and fans and to post gig listings. Simple.

One of many areas that needs improvement.

(Credit: MySpace)

I don't understand how MySpace Music, which lets you watch videos and play songs from bands of all sizes and popularity levels, ties back to this initial vision. Why should I go to MySpace to hear this stuff? How does it tie back with my friends? How does it tie back with local and famous artists I'm following?

Solution: Get rid of MySpace Music as a separate site. Let any artist with a musician's page make their music available to all users in exactly the same way--users run a search, visit the musician's site, and add any content on that site to a playlist that they can post on their own site. Any user can ask any musician to become his friend. And so on. Forget the distinction--it's all music. Which gets me to my next point...

If you're going to offer free music, do it right. As I wrote Thursday, a couple years ago, free online streaming music was hard to find; now, it's commonplace. So let's try using MySpace Music to add some Led Zeppelin songs to my profile page. Nope--the first result is a promotional page for the band's 18-month-old "Mothership" compilation, and the rest of the results are various cover bands.

OK, what about Pink Floyd's "One of These Days"? Once I scroll past the sponsored listings that take up most of the page, the first result is a MySpace home page for a Pink Floyd cover band. Eventually there are some listings that appear to be the song I wanted, but by this time I've pretty much given up and decided that I'll be using Grooveshark or Imeem or any of the other countless competitors that give me the song I want, on demand, right away.

Solution: figure out how your competitors got those deals with the majors, and sign the same deals.

Fix your advertising. Online advertising pays for all the free content (including this blog--hooray!) that we're accustomed to getting, so I'm all in favor of reasonable and relevant ads. But MySpace has littered its most important pages with intrusive and annoying advertisements. My personal home page has two big graphical advertisements for Bank of America, plus graphical plugs for a game by Zynga, a MySpace Karaoke site, and sponsored listings for a concrete company. Admittedly, there hasn't been much action on my page for MySpace to use to target ads, but even when I visit other musicians' profile pages--the main reason I use the site--I'm bombarded by graphical banner ads for low-value products I have no interest in, like mortgage refinancing and online education classes. When I search for a particular song on MySpace Music and the top two-thirds of the page--nearly everything above the fold--is devoted to sponsored links and annoying video ads.

Contrast that with Facebook, where the ads on the most popular pages (home and profile pages) are limited to a clearly labeled right-hand column and are sometimes surprisingly relevant. One relative, a big Jerry Seinfeld fan, didn't know he was coming to her town until she saw an ad on her Facebook page. She actually bought a ticket through the site! I'm willing to bet that hardly ever happens on MySpace.

Solution: devote less space to advertising, eliminate the super-annoying blinking flashing banner ads, and do a better job of optimizing advertisements to individual users.

Fix search. It's better than it used to be, but it's still not very tolerant--unless you enter the exact band name, you might get a lot of irrelevant results. When I look for one of my favorite new Seattle bands, The Curious Mystery, I have to enter the "The" or it won't find them. If I search for one of the bands I used to play with, Half Light, I must enter it exactly: I can't enter "Half Light Seattle" even though that's the exact spelling of their unique MySpace URL (there was another Half Light when we tried to get that space).

Solution: wasn't that Google deal supposed to be about more than advertising? Maybe your next one can include some technology transfer as well.

Let the geeks run the company. One of the most interesting things going on at MySpace right now is the development platform: I'm seeing more digital start-ups who are essentially using MySpace like the Windows of online music, tapping into the functionality and social networking connections that have already been established there, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. This shows promise: build the ecosystem of apps, and users will have to keep coming back.

Solution: I don't know how MySpace is organized today, so I can't get too detailed here, but put the people with technical chops in charge, and don't let the marketers, ad salespeople, and record-industry business development folks run the show.

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If you're not using Grooveshark to try out music on-demand before buying it, you should be. I've found no other service that offers its combination of simplicity, features, and song selection--10 million and growing, according to the organization.

Today, Grooveshark announced a couple of extensions that should increase awareness. If you're on Facebook like most of the world seems to be, Grooveshark Share Song will let you share any song in Grooveshark's database in only three steps. There are other Facebook apps that offer similar features--iLike has been offering full-song playback on Facebook since last August--but Grooveshark is impressive in its simplicity. It doesn't ask you to register. It doesn't try to get you to take quizzes or create playlists or listen to world exclusives. Just type a song name--you can add the artist if you want--then share it with individual friends or post it to your profile, and you're done.

That's really all there is to it.

Grooveshark also released a Wordpress plug-in that lets you post songs to your Wordpress blog, and a new API for its link-shortening service, Tinysong, which makes it easy for anybody with a Web page to create a short, simple link that goes directly to a song on Grooveshark. Simple enough for a rock musician to understand!

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LyricFind has been trying to compile song lyrics into a searchable database since 2000, and after a few years of failed negotiations with rights holders, the company is finally getting some traction.

Earlier this month, it released a lyrics app for the Slacker RadioPlus service. The Web site has never been much use: it only lets you search on snippets of lyrics to try to find song matches; I'm much more interested in entering a song title to get the full lyrics for that song.

Pink Floyd "Echoes" = fail. The right result showed up in the fourth position, but when I clicked through, it wouldn't let me see the lyrics.

So I was excited when I heard that LyricFind was releasing an iPhone app that is supposed to do exactly that. The interface looks promising enough--there's a space to enter the song title and artist name, and a search button. Unfortunately, in my tests, it failed more often than it succeeded. When it did succeed, the correct lyrics were often buried several places down in the search results. A few times, it appeared to find the right match--such as with Pink Floyd's "Echoes," where it found a David Gilmour version of the song--but wouldn't let me click through to the full lyrics, probably because of a copyright issue. Other times, it appears to have pulled lyrics from random Internet sources that are not exactly authoritative--the matches for R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World As We Know It" are obviously wrong in a few places, for instance.

For now, it might be worth checking out the free ad-supported "Lite" version, but I can't recommend paying $3.99 for the ad-free version. I'll check back in a few months to see if they've improved the results.

LyricFind has also released a free Facebook application that not only offers lyric searches, but also lets users create quizzes, dedicate songs to their friends, and contribute lyrics to the database--maybe I'll start by uploading my own version of that R.E.M. song.

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Personality tests are fun nonsense, in line with horoscopes and fortune tellers. I've taken a bunch of them over the years, both online and offline, and never learned anything consistent or surprising about myself.

The results are always in vague, yet flattering, language that's impossible to dispute: Hmm, I guess I do like being with people, and I enjoy parties. And yet, I also enjoy quiet time to myself, as well as contemplating the nature of the universe. Oh, and I love taking personality tests!

Signal Patterns offers a twist on the "know yourself" personality test site. In addition to the typical personality survey--which apparently shows that I'm aesthetic, intelligent, and organized (why, thank you!)--it has added a test (available Wednesday) that claims to determine one's "musical personality" based on 40 music samples, each lasting just 10 seconds.

The samples in my test were all by obscure artists, so, in theory, you'll judge them without prejudice. (Although, through a weird coincidence, I used to play with a drummer who also played with one of these artists, Anna Coogan and North 19. I rated the sample a 3 out of 5.)

I don't hate all relaxing music--just the 10-second New Age samples that were played.

The trouble is, you can't tell anything about a song from 10 seconds. I might hate a cheesy synthesized introduction, if the rest of the song is a standard R&B ballad, but I might like it, if it's Beck or Funkadelic, which border on parody. I might hate a rockabilly tune with hiccupy vocals, but love a good Reverend Horton Heat tune or Speedy West instrumental.

Case in point: my Music Patterns result said my most preferred trait is complexity, followed closely by instrumental (rather than vocal) songs. True--I've got a bit of a prog-rock fetish, and love instrumental freak-outs like Battles. But it also said I detest relaxing music--tell that to my totally scratched Bill Evans and Kind of Blue LPs--and don't like sad music, which wouldn't predict that I own every single Pink Floyd recording ever released, mostly on vinyl. (Although I've never personally seen Zabriskie Point on wax, and don't buy used LPs sight-unseen, I've still got the cassette.)

Some of the app's choices for me look reasonable, though--Ornette Coleman and Anton Shoenberg showed up in the top tier.

At any rate, it's fun to go through the process, and there are some clever links with social-networking services--for instance, it will let you post results to compare with your Facebook friends, and it will create an embeddable playlist of songs it imagines for Imeem.

Imeem is starting to break away from the pack of countless music start-ups that have launched in the last two years. I hated the service when it first launched--confusing interface, unclear mission--but since then it's grown to become the third-largest social networking site on the Web with 27.7 million unique visitors--that's nearly double its traffic from last year. It's still well behind Facebook and MySpace, which are in a heated battle for top spot, but has been helped by MySpace's difficulty in launching MySpace Music, which is supposed to offer tracks from major label artists.

Thanks to this Imeem user, I now know how Steely Dan ended "King of the World" live.

Imeem already has revenue-sharing agreements with all four major labels, and while the company may be paying out more to the labels than it's earning from advertising (it won't discuss detailed financials, but admits it's losing money), this is the key to its success. It's not the social networking, it's not the ADD-inspired interface, it's not the wide range of opportunities for personal expression. It's simply that you can find almost any song on Imeem. Try it yourself--a free-for-all of individual contributors, combined with immunity from lawsuits and a search engine that actually works, makes this my go-to site any time I want to hear or demonstrate a song right now.

Plus, unlike other music-finding sites like Songerize (based on Seeqpod), Imeem sometimes surprises you with multiple versions of the same song. Take for example Steely Dan's "King of the World," the capper to their 1973 album Countdown to Ecstasy. The jam at the ending is the best part, but, in a moment of masochism against the listening public, the engineer fades the song out just as the guitar solo's really kicking. So I always wondered--how would they end the song live? (They didn't play it on their 1994 reunion tour.) Now, thanks to Imeem, I know.