Digital Noise: Music and Tech

MOG offered me a free trial to its subscription-based streaming music service, MOG All Access, which launched on Tuesday. The service costs five bucks a month, and gives you unlimited on-demand streams of more than six million songs from all four major labels and plenty of indies. The site is trying to differentiate itself from competitors like Rhapsody and Napster with high-quality streams--all songs are 320kbps MP3s--and some fairly sophisticated music discovery features, like playlists posted by musicians (David Byrne got the featured spot on the day of launch) and other fans with similar tastes to yours ("Moggers like me").

(Credit: Screenshot)

I've been sampling the service for about an hour, and I do appreciate the sound quality (although better volume-leveling between songs would be nice) and recommendation services. And I'd like to thank the designers personally for the ability to add any song to the already-playing queue--a feature I love on Grooveshark and my Zune HD and that I always miss whenever I use one of my iPods. But there's one big problem: song selection.

Because MOG is licensing content directly from copyright owners, there are big gaps from artists who simply don't want to participate in online music. The usual suspects like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and the Beatles are mostly missing in action. There are also strange gaps elsewhere. For instance, half the songs on the Pixies' "Surfer Rosa" are unplayable. Compared with Grooveshark, which relies on user-posted content, MOG has too many holes. And of course, Grooveshark remains free (although a $3/month subscription gets you a version without advertisements).

Song selection could improve over time as MOG signs more licensing deals, but I found some other related glitches as well. For instance, '70s folk artist Roy Harper, whom I often use as a test case to see how well an online service does with relatively obscure old content, has almost no playable content, but does offer a nice list of albums with links to Amazon. The only problem: when you follow the Amazon link on unplayable songs, it takes you to the Amazon Music front door--most of his songs aren't available for download there, either.

In its demonstration video, MOG touts its online radio service as a unique feature. When you're playing a particular artist, a slider lets you control how much variety you want, from "play only songs by this artist" all the way up to "play mostly songs from similar artists." It could use some fine-tuning, however. When I started a queue with a Modest Mouse song, it used Modest Mouse as the basis for its selection. Fair enough, but when I added songs by Talking Heads and Public Image Limited, the radio algorithm didn't account for those artists. It simply switched my radio playlist completely when the new songs started playing, showing all Talking Heads songs, all PIL songs, and so on. Pandora and Slacker do a much better job of creating custom stations based on multiple artists. (Although, of course, those services don't let you play individual songs on demand.)

Finally, as I wrote last week, I still think MOG's lack of mobile support is a fatal flaw, but one that could be easily remedied: Apple's approved iPhone clients for subscription services Rhapsody and Spotify, so why not MOG?

All of these flaws can be fixed, although licensing content takes time and convincing. I'm a big fan of competition, though, and MOG takes many of the best features of a lot of other services, combines them in one place, and improves on some of them. For that, the company should be commended.

For the last year or so, it's become clear that the economics of ad-supported streaming music services are not good for their creators or investors. As CNET's Greg Sandoval reported last week, the acquisition of streaming service Imeem by MySpace Music for pennies on the dollar is the latest bad news for the sector, following the bankruptcies of SpiralFrog and Ruckus and the similar fire sale of iLike to MySpace.

Offering your music via Spotify might help you fill up your piggybank.

Who's left? In the U.S., we've still got LaLa, which has the blessing of the major labels and seems to be enjoying dramatically increased traffic (as measured by Alexa) thanks to its recent deal with Google, and Grooveshark, which has kept a low profile. Neither of these services is purely ad-supported--particularly LaLa, which hopes to charge customers for downloads and "permanent" streams once they surpass a quota of 50 free streams a month.

But the service most often cited as the future of online music is Spotify. It's only available in Europe right now, but it seems like everybody who tries it loves it, myself included. Spotify offers a premium service as well, which offers portability and higher-quality streams, but the free service offers unlimited ad-supported streams, and that's the service that has everybody so excited.

But there's one small problem with the Spotify-as-savior story: it doesn't pay artists very well. According to this story in a Swedish publication, as translated and explained by the TorrentFreak blog, Spotify delivered more than one million streams of Lady Gaga's hit single "Poker Face" over five months. From these streams, she reportedly earned about 1,150 Swedish kronor--about $167--from the Swedish agency responsible for paying royalties. That's not even enough to cover the cost of four tickets to her upcoming concert in San Francisco.

If this story's true, why would any artist agree to make songs available on Spotify? With these kinds of payouts, it looks like music business expert Donald Passman is right--advertising is never going to support an online music service.

Whenever the band Phish plays on Halloween, they pretend to be another famous rock band and do an entire album by that band. This year, they did one of my all-time favorite records, "Exile on Main Street" by the Rolling Stones. It's a double album, 18 songs worth of blues boogie, and I was very curious to hear whether they pulled it off.

Friday morning, a relative who knows of my fixation with that record sent me a link to the show, but the link--as is so often the case--wasn't working. Of course I could have purchased the entire set for 99 cents a song from the LivePhish.com site, but the samples on that site are only 30 seconds long, and I wanted to try it out before committing with a credit card. So I did a little hunting on my own. Lala didn't have it. Imeem didn't have it. I couldn't find it on a Google search.

I used Grooveshark's playlist feature to arrange the songs from Phish's cover of "Exile" in order.

So I turned to old reliable Grooveshark. Sure enough, a search on "Phish Ventilator Blues" (one of the song names from "Exile") turned up a hit. From that result, I saw that the name in the "Album" column included the date, 2009/10/31. I ran another search, "Phish 2009/10/31" and there it was, the entire show. I took all the songs from "Exile" and arranged them in order on my playlist, and soon I was enjoying the band's faithfulness to the original recording, down to the horn parts and backup gospel singers, mixed with some very extended jam sections. The bit between "Ventilator Blues" and "Just Want to See His Face" is miraculous.

One of my complaints about Phish is that they often sound too perfect and clean, especially the singing. But in this particular case, it was great because Phish obviously studied the lyrics very carefully, and I could finally understand whole lyrical sections ("there's fever in the forecast now") that I've never been able to figure out despite hundreds of listens. (Mick mumbles, and he's buried pretty deeply in the mix on the original.)

I have no idea whether the recording was posted with the permission of the band. Probably not. But the beauty of Grooveshark is that users post the content themselves, in a similar fashion to YouTube, so you're not reliant on content owners.

Correction 2:22 p.m. PDT, Nov. 13: This post mischaracterized how Grooveshark gets content. All content on Grooveshark is uploaded by users. Grooveshark says it complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and pays appropriate royalties for live and other types of recordings.

Updated, 4:59 PM PDT: After much experimenting, I was able to access my music library remotely using JukeFly. The problem was, my songs didn't show up in search results, so I assumed JukeFly wasn't working. This assumption was bolstered by the fact that when I tested my connection with JukeFly's settings tester, it said that I needed to check my router. As it turns out, all the songs in my personal library are available under a different link, Library. They are not integrated into search results, and the debugger simply didn't work right.

One of the most interesting digital-media features in Windows 7 allows you to stream music (and other content) from your Windows 7 PC to any other computer over the Internet--essentially, it turns your home PC into a streaming-media server, sort of like Slingbox does for your TV source.

But what if you're not planning on upgrading to Windows 7 anytime soon? JukeFly, which first launched in 2008 and was updated to version 2.0 Wednesday, promises a free alternative for streaming music from your Windows PC (sorry, not Macs) to any other computer over the Internet.

First, you have to download and install a piece of software called the JukeFly Personal Music Server--a process that took about 30 seconds on my Windows XP PC. Then, you log on to the JukeFly Web site and select the folder on your PC that you want to index--it was able to complete indexing more than 3,000 songs in a couple minutes. So far so good. Once complete, you should be able to log into JukeFly from any other computer with an Internet connection and stream every song on your hard drive to that device. (I say "should" because the service might not work with certain firewalls or routers, and might require manual tweaking--a problem that most users won't want to get into.)

Playing the Velvet Underground on JukeFly.

Version 2.0 adds a robust Internet-based player: if you can't get your personal media server to work, or don't want to install the software, or don't have any music on your home computer, the site will compile music from publicly available sources, such as YouTube. This also lets the service work even when your home PC, the music server, is turned off or disconnected from the Internet. So, for instance, if I search for Mr. Bungle, it returns 20 songs from YouTube and other sources, complete with lyrics and biographical information.

JukeFly would be amazing if it combined these public results with my personal collection, but unfortunately it sequesters my library under a separate "Library" link, and I can't search both sources simultaneously. Nonetheless, this is a slick application and Web site, and a great way to get access to tons of music from any PC with an Internet connection. Check it out.

The first free on-demand music service I ever encountered was Songerize. The page was a simple white box on a red background. Enter the name of a song, and it would scour the Seeqpod database of user-posted content, find the song, and begin streaming it immediately.

Pick a song, any song.

There were no fancy playlist features like Grooveshark, no social-networking features like Imeem, no embedded player or song locker like LaLa, just instant gratification. Unfortunately, Seeqpod declared bankruptcy and around the same time, Songerize became useless.

Now, Songerize creator Will Johnson is back with a second take on the same concept: Songite. The interface looks almost identical to its predecessor, and the concept's the same: instant gratification.

There are two important differences between Songite and Johnson's last work, however. First, you can now arrange songs into playlists, then share those playlists via simple URLs. Second, Songite now draws content from YouTube and Imeem, two sites that have more or less received the blessing of the big record labels and are in no danger of being sued out of existence. Bookmark it for the next time you've got a song stuck in your head and simply have to hear it right now.

Grooveshark, my favorite free music streaming service, made an important announcement earlier today: the company has settled a lawsuit brought against it by EMI, one of the big four record labels, and has licensed EMI's catalog.

The company is still negotiating terms with other copyright holders, but to my knowledge EMI was the only one that had sued Grooveshark. So with this legal uncertainty out of the way, I can more confidently recommend Grooveshark's $3-a-month premium service, which offers early access to new features (the latest update includes better organization of search results and a slider to move you to particular parts of a song). If other licensing deals follow, Apple might finally approve Grooveshark's planned iPhone app, offering on-demand streams from Grooveshark's massive user-sourced music library.

YouTube's a great source of music, including live shows and bootleg recordings that are hard to find anywhere else, and application developers are taking advantage of YouTube's relative openness to help users find and organize that music in new ways.

Last month, London-based start-up TubeRadio.fm launched a Web application that lets you search YouTube, organize the content into playlists, and share those playlists with friends via an e-mail link, Twitter post, or Facebook profile update. If you go through the free registration, you'll be able to save playlists as well. The concept is very similar to that of Muziic, but without any software to download and install--this is strictly a Web application, like Grooveshark.

TubeRadio.fm offers an iTunes-like interface on top of music content from YouTube.

TubeRadio has a few interesting wrinkles that make it worth checking out. If you select the "Discography" tab, then search on an artist's name, it will return a list of that artist's albums. Select any album, and it will cobble together a streaming playlist of songs from the album in in the proper order--not all of the songs will be the original studio versions, but might be lower-quality live or bootleg recordings. It all depends on what YouTube has available.

For each album, TubeRadio also provides links to buy the physical CD from Amazon, or MP3 downloads from 7digital.

When a song is playing, a window at the bottom of the screen contains tabs with information such as lyrics (this doesn't work all the time, but seems reliable for studio-based recordings), plus an artist biography, discography, and suggestions for other albums you might like (the last three features are provided by Last.fm, which is owned by CNET News publisher CBS Interactive).

All in all, it's a slick and convenient way to discover the great wealth of music available on YouTube, and it doesn't cost a dime.

A couple of weeks ago, my favorite free music-streaming site, Grooveshark, began rolling out version 2.0. It's currently available to paying VIP customers only, but I managed to finagle a pass and can report that it's a solid upgrade, although nothing groundbreaking.

Grooveshark's selection of free songs compares favorably with big commercial download stores like iTunes and Amazon MP3, and the improvements in version 2.0 are mostly geared toward helping you sift through search results more efficiently. For instance, now you can organize results alphabetically by song, artist, or album, and with one click you can add any song to your Grooveshark library, which makes it available on future log-ins without forcing you to run another search. Other than that, my favorite improvement was a slider bar that lets you fast-forward to any point in a song--a feature that we've long taken for granted on iTunes and most other commercial streaming and download services, but which didn't quite make the cut the first time around.

The new Grooveshark 2.0

So is it worth paying $3 a month to get these new features ahead of everybody else? I'd say yes--especially since most all-you-can-eat streaming services start at around $15 a month--if it weren't for Grooveshark's questionable legal status. The last time I asked the company about this, it responded by saying it was pursuing many different revenue streams---artist promotion, advertising, mobile subscriptions (if Apple approves Grooveshark's iPhone app as it did with Spotify, that would be a huge win), API licensing, and these VIP subscriptions. It also claims that it's been able to keep costs low. But there's enough question whether any of the recent crop of music start-ups can survive given current usage patterns versus licensing fees--never mind one that seeks to undercut big and well-established players like RealNetworks and Microsoft on streaming subscription prices. So, until the big labels and publishers give Grooveshark their explicit blessing, I'd advise caution--remember what happened to Zookz.

Follow Matt on Twitter

RealNetworks has been having a bit of a bad run lately, but its Rhapsody streaming service continues to offer unparalleled selection at pricing levels that seem both fair to users and rights-owners--including the ability to stream 25 songs per month at no charge. Plus, I've got to give them credit for introducing me to the idea of on-demand music--you don't know you're missing it until you live with it for a while--even if their business has been hurt by a plethora of free competitors like Grooveshark, Spotify, and Imeem.

So I was glad to see that Rhapsody has added some simple functionality that will let users share full-length songs on their Facebook profiles and Twitter feeds. Every Rhapsody page now has a Facebook and Twitter icon. Click either of them, and Rhapsody will let you post the song you're currently playing to either service. It's not a new concept--iLike has had full-song sharing on Facebook for almost a year--but it's a simple step that should keep current subscribers happy while introducing the service to people on social networks who may never have heard of it.

Yes, I really was listening to that as I posted this.

Follow Matt on Twitter.