Digital Noise: Music and Tech

How far we've come in such a short time. When I began this blog in 2007, finding a particular song online was an exercise in frustration. You could subscribe to an all-you-can-eat service like Rhapsody, but cheapskates and occasional music listeners either had to dig deep, engage with a questionably legal file-trading service, or settle for 30-second previews from iTunes or one of its Web-based competitors.

Search results for "U2 Beautiful Day" earlier today. The box at the upper-right is an embedded version of the Lala player, which let me play the complete song multiple times.

Since then, as readers of this blog know, dozens of sites offering free streaming music have emerged, from the dead-simple like Songerize and its successor Songite (enter a song title to play it now) to the fiendishly complicated Imeem (whose original user interface gave me a headache, although it's since gotten much better).

But, let's face it, most people don't read this blog. Again and again, nontechnical music fans are blown away when I show them a site like Grooveshark, which lets you play any song, any time, and even arrange songs in queues and playlists. "Is that legal?" they often ask. (Answer: it depends.)

Today, that all changes. Google announced the integration of playable songs into its search results yesterday, and is slowly rolling the feature out to U.S. searchers. I finally saw the feature in action this afternoon, when I ran a search on "U2 Beautiful Day." (You can test it here.)

To an experienced online music listener, the feature seems a little bit random because Google is using both iLike (recently acquired by MySpace) and Lala to power playable results, and the two offer different experiences. For my first search, Google randomly chose iLike as the default player, and iLike only let me play the song once, then relegated me to a 30-second sample. When I cleared my cookies and tried again, Google made Lala my default player, and I was able to play the full song as many times as I liked. (The experience will also vary by song and artist, depending on what the copyright holders dictate--Led Zeppelin, for example, is available only in 30-second samples on iLike, and most of its songs are completely missing from Lala.)

Some searches also give you links to Imeem, Rhapsody, and Pandora, each of which offers yet another experience--Rhapsody lets you play up to 25 songs per month for free, Imeem is best for finding unusual versions of popular songs (like live takes), and Pandora requires you to create a virtual radio station based on a particular artist or song, which can be useful for discovering other music you might like, but doesn't give you an instant fix.

Whatever. For the average Internet user, this distinction doesn't matter. What matters: when users go to Google to search for an artist's name, song name, album name, or even a snippet of lyrics, they won't just get random text links or YouTube videos. Instead, the first set of links will be to the audio recording itself--in many cases, the entire song. Everybody knows that there's free music available on the Internet, but most casual listeners don't bother to find it. Now, the most-visited site on the Internet will put it right in front of their faces. As awareness spreads, it'll be another nail in the coffin of traditional music media--why listen to the radio?--and a boon for the five companies who signed this deal with Google. Artists and record labels might also get a shot in the arm, as users discover new music for free and perhaps eventually buy a copy to keep.

As for the rest of the online music start-ups out there? They better be on the phone right now, looking for a benefactor.

Apple outstripped Wall Street's expectations for the quarter ended September 30, and while the blowout quarter was mostly thanks to higher-than-expected Mac sales, the company also sold a record 7.4 million iPhones. But a lot of commentators think that the iPhone is finally going to meet its match with Droid.

You don't need an instruction manual to figure out how to get music onto your iPhone.

Announced this weekend by Verizon in a cheeky TV commercial, the Droid is a Motorola phone running Google's Android 2.0 operating system. The advertisement notes that the Droid will do things that the iPhone won't, like take pictures in the dark and run simultaneous apps (apparently playing music in the background, as the iPhone can do, doesn't count), and touts its open development process (a head-scratcher for non-techies, but it could mean more apps than the iPhone, someday). The first preview I've seen, from Boy Genius Report, was also positive. People are excited, and for good reason--competition drives innovation, which is good for consumers.

But here's the thing: one reason for the runaway success of the iPhone--and one of the reasons why Apple still continues to sell more than 10 million iPods per quarter--is iTunes. Not so much the store, although that's an important component, but the software. Of course there are plenty of other applications out there that help you rip CDs and organize your digital music collection. And there are plenty of other sources for online music. But the real strength of iTunes is in the sync process--you plug your iPhone in, iTunes opens up automatically and recognizes it. Hit the large "Sync" button and it automatically loads your music (and video, and apps, and anything else you choose) onto it. (With some devices, depending on your settings, you don't even need to hit "Sync.") That's the simple, consumer-friendly, end-to-end experience that Apple figured out first.

Contrast that with the multi-step process required to transfer music from a Windows PC to the first Android phone that was available in the U.S., last year's G1. Amazon provided over-the-air MP3 downloads for that phone, giving it a rough equivalent to the over-the-air version of the iTunes store, but let's face it: most digital music is not purchased, but is ripped from a CD or comes from some other source (legal or not).

Verizon, Motorola, and Google haven't said much about music for the Droid. Maybe they still have a musical trick or two up their collective sleeves. But without some sort of equivalent to the iTunes desktop application, the Droid may be a great phone, but it won't be a great music phone.

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.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

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.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

The run-up to the holiday season always begins in September, and while I was overseas with no Internet access, the music and technology industries kept on churning. Fortunately for me, nothing's really changed. To wit:

SanDisk, in collaboration with the four major labels, announced a new physical format for albums called SlotMusic. You'll be able to pay between $7 and $10 and get a full album on a MicroSD card, which you'll then be able to plug into compatible cellphones or MP3 players to begin playing the MP3 files encoded at 320kbps. This one boggles me. If you need a physical artifact, CDs still exist, they play in billions of devices (car, computer, home stereo), they offer much higher quality sound, they have liner notes, and anybody with enough tech knowledge to know what a MicroSD card is can certainly figure out how to rip a CD to their hard drive and transfer the songs to an MP3 player. So why would I pay a dime for a tiny, easy-to-misplace "album" that offers lower-quality sound and compatibility with far fewer devices? Next.

MySpace Music launched with the support of the four major labels. This one has a huge built-in userbase, but the distribution model's all wrong: label-driven and top-down, unlike Imeem, where users post all the music. If I want to hear a song on demand--to see if I like a particular band, or just to satisfy a moment of curiosity--I'll go to the site with the largest selection, which is likely to be Imeem. If I want to buy a song, I'll do it in the store affiliated with my MP3 player of choice--iTunes, Zune Marketplace or (if I must) Amazon MP3. So what's the point of this service again, other than a too-little too-late attempt by the labels to capitalize on the MySpace name? Next.

Google and T-Mobile announced and demonstrated the first phone based on Google's Android operating system, the T-Mobile G1, manufactured by HTC. It's an obvious bid to compete in the consumer smartphone market, which was first tapped by Apple with the iPhone (before that, smartphones were generally business devices--think Blackberry and Windows Mobile). To compete in that space, there has to be an iTunes equivalent, so it's going to ship with a mobile music player that connects to a mobile version of Amazon's MP3 store. Call me a skeptic. I've tried the Amazon store and found it to be an exercise in frustration. So without having seen the G1 in person, I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that, at launch, the Amazon/Android app's going to fall way short of iTunes when it comes to ease of use. Give it a couple revs to catch up, but at launch, this won't change the competitive picture.

Maybe it's just coincidence, but this week two executives have left major Web companies for roles in the music industry.

Earlier this week, Google VP of Engineering Douglas Merrill left to lead EMI's digital music initiative. According to his Google bio, his core background is in finance--not music and not really technology, although apparently he has done a lot of work in information security. Apparently, singing the Sex Pistols' anti-label song "EMI" to EMI head Guy Hands helped him get the job. Too bad MCA's gone--maybe I could have gotten a job by singing Lynyrd Skynyrd.

This morning, Yahoo Music head Ian Rogers announced that he's leaving for Topspin Media, a mysterious startup that apparently hopes to "help artists earn a living through software"--based on the old Wired article that Rogers links to, I'm guessing Topspin is trying to pioneer some new form of digital distribution or rights tracking. Rogers has expressed some interesting ideas about standard labeling for downloadable music files, and while Yahoo might have been a great venue to help push these standards through, the attempted Microsoft acquisition throws everything into doubt. In fact, one of the first moves Yahoo made after the acquisition announcement was to scrap its own music subscription service and move customers to Rhapsody. I honestly can't see how a pure Web-based music service like Yahoo's could survive in a Microsoft that seems devoted to pushing its own Zune ecosystem as a competitor to Apple's iTunes.

Two pieces of news don't make a trend (although if you go back two years, I guess they're following MSN Music's Hadi Partovi, who left to help his brother start iLike). Even so, it's interesting that executives are leaving Web companies to make waves in an industry that's supposedly dying. The obvious answer: music isn't dying, but the current distribution models are, and whoever figures out the next distribution model stands to make a lot of money.

When old rockers go digital, they go all the way. Led Zeppelin was one of the longtime holdouts from iTunes and other digital music stores, but in 2007 they relented and released a greatest-hits collection, Mothership, simultaneously online and on CD. (A good business move: the physical album charted charted at #7, but the digital album came in at #2.) Since the album's Nov. 13 release, the band has also launched a new Web site, the coolest feature of which is a timeline with the setlist of every single Zeppelin concert. This Seattle show looks particularly astounding, with about twice as many songs as their typical concert.

Giants Causeway, located on the northern coast of Ireland, was the setting for Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy album cover.

(Credit: Screenshot)

Now, fans who always wondered where the cover to Houses of the Holy was shot can find out. Somebody--presumably with the band, or perhaps just a huge fan--has posted a custom list of Led Zeppelin landmarks on Google Maps. Seattle once again makes the list, in this case for an incident that reportedly took place at the Edgewater hotel, which is still there and much swankier than when the band stayed there in the early 1970s.

Lime Wire is best known as the latest in a long chain of software that makes it easy to find and download music for free, replacing Napster, Grokster, eDonkey, Kazaa, and all the other applications and networks that shut down or cracked down on the sharing of copyrighted material.

Lime Wire LLP, the company that makes the Lime Wire software application, has also been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), but has so far refused to cave, saying that it only manufactures the software and has no control over how users choose to employ it. Moreover, it filed a countersuit in September 2006 on antitrust grounds, calling the RIAA an illegal cartel that conspires to destroy any distribution channel that the recording industry doesn't control.

(Credit: Lime Wire)

A couple of days ago, the company announced that it would begin to offer approved downloads for sale from directly within the Lime Wire application. Unsurprisingly given their ongoing legal dispute with the RIAA, Lime Wire's distribution partners, IRIS and Nettwerk, represent small independent labels and artists rather than the majors. The files will be MP3s, and unprotected by DRM, meaning users won't ever face the problem that former Google Video downloaders now face. (DRM-protected files + cancelled service = the content you paid for can no longer be played.)

So does this mean that LimeWire is eventually going to follow Napster's path of trying to negotiate and build an industry-approved service? I would guess not--we all know how well that worked out for Napster. (The new Napster is merely the name, which Roxio bought for $5 million; Roxio changed its name to Napster when it sold off its other software busineses.) In fact, in a recent interview, anonymous LimeWire staffers told Slyck News that the company is improving its existing Lime Wire application, adding a technology that improves the ability to search for files on Gnutella (the P2P network on which LimeWire operates) and is adding support for the BitTorrent protocol, which supports swapping of much larger files (like video). For the time being, the business model will remain the same: offer a free version of the LimeWire application and hope to upsell consumers to a version with more features.

Still, this could be the beginning of an exit strategy in case the courts force Lime Wire to stop distributing its software in its current form.

A few months ago, JimmyR-dot-com (aka Jimmy Ruska) posted a YouTube video that showed users how to conduct a Google search for free, unprotected music files. Essentially, by modifying search terms with a few extra key words, a user can limit results to underlying directory pages rather than user-facing Web pages. The video proved quite popular, garnering more than 300,000 views.

Recently, he went one step further and created a Web page that modifies the search for you--all you have to do is enter the song title, and you'll receive a Google search page with links to directories containing an MP3 file with that text in the file name. These are often full MP3 versions of the song in question. Artist or album names also work.

This just shows the complete inadequacy of the record industry's attempts to crack down on illegal file-sharing by suing file-sharing networks and their users. Even if the RIAA tried to shut down this site, others could easily spring up. And suing Google would be a much harder task.

The root problem: audio CDs aren't copy-protected. Anybody with the right software can rip an audio track and post it publicly. The methods of discovering these postings might change over time, but the root problem won't go away.

(Thanks to Coolfer for pointing out the site.)