Digital Noise: Music and Tech

The record industry better hope that Wednesday's Apple announcement is big news--pre-cut ringtones, a new digital album format, perhaps the addition of recordings from some obscure 1960s rock band who were apparently pretty good. According to an analysis in today's Billboard Online, the usual summer slump in digital download sales is more pronounced this year, and ringtone sales continue their steep decline. For an industry that's counting on digital to make up for declines in CD sales, that's very unwelcome news.

What if Apple brings Genius to the cloud? It might prove that subscription services have a chance after all.

The author, Glenn Peoples, suggests that ringtones and a new album format on iTunes could help, but there's another possibility that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere: what if Apple takes the plunge into subscription-based music? So far, subscriptions haven't been a successful business model, but I'm not convinced it's because the idea is flawed. The problem is that no subscription service has been available for the iPod or iPhone. (Spotify for iTunes is too new, and not available in the U.S., so I don't count it yet.) Look at Pandora for iPhone: it doesn't even let you choose individual songs, but once users realize that they have on-demand access to an infinite library of music, they can't seem to stop raving about it.

Imagine if Apple combined a new subscription service with the iTunes Genius function, which is conceptually similar to Pandora but currently limited to your existing music collection. (It also recommends songs in the iTunes store, but you have to buy them individually, which kind of ruins the delightful-surprise factor.) How much would you pay for that? Now multiply that by some percentage--20 percent might be reasonable--of present and future iPhone and iPod Touch users, and suddenly you're talking about meaningful annual revenue. I know that Steve Jobs has insisted that customers want to own rather than rent music, but remember that he once scorned the idea of a video iPod as well.

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In the last couple of days, I've been introduced to a couple new online sites, both calling themselves "radio," that encapsulate very different approaches toward distributing music over the Web.

(Credit: MTT Radio)

Goom Radio, which entered public alpha testing yesterday, claims to be trying to change the landscape of online radio. One big difference between Goom and other radio services is a radio widget that users will be able to embed in social-networking sites and other Web pages. Goom also makes a big deal about its audio technology, which starts with uncompressed WAV files instead of digitally compressed MP3 or Windows Media files, and then runs them through various boosters and filters equalizers tailored to each genre--sort of how traditional radio stations do it today. Eventually, users will be able to create their own radio stations (and I'll blog about it again when this feature's available), but today it's limited to a handful of professionally curated stations in particular genres.

In our conversation yesterday, Goom CEO Rob Williams emphasized that the company is seeking out the right kind of DJs--folks who truly care about music, and are as bored and fed up with the research-driven pap on mainstream radio as most other hardcore music fans are. Still--a DJ is a DJ, and most of the folks on the station so far come out of the traditional music industry. As a result, the stations on Goom radio today are cool--there's an Eels song playing on the indie-rock Tastemaker station as I write this--but not particularly cutting-edge or risky. This is the music that the pros think you should hear.

Contrast this with another service that launched last week, MTT Radio. MTT stands for Music Think Tank, and it's a relatively new blog and service for indie musicians, staffed and owned by people with ample experience catering to that market. Written content on the site is licensed under the Creative Commons license, and would-be contributors are encouraged to post for the MTT Open site, which is open to all writers. Think of it like a Huffington Post for indie musicians. MTT Radio works the same way as the Open blog site: anybody can contribute a song, and they're listed in reverse-chronological order and indexed by genre.

The two services aren't exactly comparable: Goom is a profit-driven business intended to reach as many people as possible, while MTT Radio is an experimental way for indie musicians to get exposure on the site. Still, the contrast made me think about how online radio is going to evolve. In a world of MP3 players and on-demand streaming services like Spotify, where users are accustomed to controlling every song that plays, and services like Pandora, which create customized radio stations for every taste, I don't know if a DJ-driven online radio station has much appeal. One-to-many, broadcast, top-down: no matter who's driving it, this kind of radio already seems outdated. A service like MTT (or, for that matter, MySpace), where anybody can post their music for the world to hear, seems like a more modern approach.

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Pandora is a great music-discovery service, so it's only natural that independent bands would hope to get their music placed on it. Unfortunately for them, Pandora just made that a little harder--and a little more expensive.

As I first saw on the Digital Audio Insider blog a couple weeks ago, Pandora recently changed its music submission process, and is now accepting solicitations only from bands who have a physical CD for sale through Amazon.com. That requires the artist to manufacture a CD with proper album art and bar code, which is much more expensive than creating a bunch of MP3s, and to pay Amazon $29.95 a year to participate in the Amazon Advantage program; Amazon then takes a 55 percent cut of the list price of the CD.

This shouldn't hurt too many artists--serious musicians want their CDs to turn up in a search on the world's largest retailer, and probably have a relationship with Amazon anyway. But you were planning on using CD Baby or another site exclusively, or hoping to save money with an online-only release, don't count on Pandora as a marketing mechanism for your music.

You know that old maxim about something being too good to be true? I wondered how my new favorite on-demand music-streaming service, Grooveshark, was able to avoid the record industry lawsuits that plagued its predecessors, such as Seeqpod and Imeem.

Is EMI's lawsuit just a negotiating tactic?

Turns out, it isn't immune. Grooveshark contacted me earlier this week to let me know that its negotiations with EMI were on the verge of breaking down. (You can read Grooveshark's official statement here.)

Yesterday evening, Peter Kafka at All Things Digital uncovered the fact that EMI had actually sued Grooveshark back in May--talk about tough negotiation tactics!

As much as I love Grooveshark's service, I have some sympathy for the labels. It seems that a lot of digital-music start-ups operate under the maxim that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission--they create the technology, launch the service, then count on the licensing details being worked out later.

Although I think that the labels have been incredibly short-sighted about the move to digital music, particularly on-demand streaming, they can't sit back and let every new digital-music start-up dictate its own terms--it's not fair to copyright owners, nor to online-music companies like Rhapsody, Pandora, and (now) Imeem, who are playing by the rules and probably paying higher royalties.

Hopefully, this lawsuit is just a negotiating tactic, and Grooveshark will emerge with the kind of business arrangement that Imeem was able to strike with Warner.

So far, EMI's threat doesn't appear to have had any effect on the service: I was still able to find songs from EMI artists like The Beatles, Radiohead, and--of course--the Sex Pistols.

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Jelli is an online radio station whose playlist is controlled entirely by its users. It's different from radio stations that can be personalized, like Pandora or Slacker, which create unique stations for each user based on his or her tastes. Rather, Jelli is a collective--there's only one playlist, and it's ruled by the votes of the masses.

The concept is simple: Jelli shows you the songs on its playlist, then lets you vote whether each song rocks or sucks. Songs move up and down on the playlist based on their overall vote count. A few mischievous features add to the fun: each user gets a limited number of "power-ups" that will rocket a song to the next spot on the playlist, and "bombs," which send a song back to the bottom. If a song makes it to the top of the playlist but then garners a bunch of bad votes once it starts, Jelli will cut the song off mid-stream to a chorus of boos.

ZZ Top rocks. The Beastie Boys rock. But I'm not sure I want to hear them back to back.

The site's amusing for a while, although I hated the interruptions between songs to credit the person who "rocketed" each song to the top. Also, the lack of an embedded media player on the site means you have to launch a separate application like the Windows Media Player--old-school and kind of annoying. But the real fun will start on June 28, when Jelli will take over San Francisco radio station Live 105 for two hours.

Could crowd-sourcing save radio? Maybe, but Jelli's approach is a bit random for me. Even if you like both Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" and the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen," do you really want to hear them back to back? And if a playlist is decided entirely by voters, how will brand new songs and artists get a break?

I think the ideal radio station would start with a combination of fan-selected favorites and new songs selected by professionals who get paid to keep up with new music. Then, the playlist could be divided into segments--for instance, after Mix-A-Lot, it could offer a choice of other hip-hop songs, plus maybe a couple of transition songs in similar genres like funk. Users would still get to vote, but on a smaller selection. The flow would be better, and you'd hear the occasional pleasant surprise that traditional radio used to provide.

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After a rocky start, online streaming service Imeem has raced to the head of the pack, thanks in large part to an effective search engine and the variety and large selection of music that users upload and share via the site.

It also helps that Imeem has deals with the major labels, so it's in no imminent danger of facing a Seeqpod-style shutdown. (However, Warner Music recently wrote down its investment in Imeem and rival Lala.)

I uploaded this live track to Imeem, and now I have access to it from my iPhone--without having to load it directly.

Imeem launched an app for Android last year, but iPhone users were out of luck--until now.

I just downloaded the free Imeem app for iPhone. My first reaction was a definite ho-hum. The main point of the site is the ability to search and play millions of user-posted songs, but conducting a search on the iPhone app only creates a customized radio station based around that song or artist--disappointing, but probably part of Imeem's agreements with copyright holders.

Pandora and Slacker already do a fine job with customizable streaming radio apps for iPhone, so I'm not sure why I'd need another one.

Then I discovered a much better use for the Imeem app: storage in the cloud. If you create an Imeem account on the Web site, you can upload up to 100 songs to Imeem for free. (A VIP Subscription service is available as well--$29.99 per year gives you 1,000 uploads, while $99.99 a year gives you 20,000.)

My 8GB iPhone gives me enough space for some reasonably interesting playlists, but it's far from enough to store my entire music library, which runs at more than 20GB. Imeem's free level of service doesn't change the game, but it does provide a convenient storage place for huge music files that threaten to overload my phone's relatively meager flash drive. For instance, I'd never transfer the MP3 of Roger Waters performing "Dark Side of the Moon" live, which comes in at over 50MB. But I can upload it to Imeem, log in, and listen to it from anywhere with a strong 3G or Wi-Fi connection.

There's also a "share song" option that lets me e-mail a link to any song in my Imeem locker to my friends--a great way to share music you've recently discovered.

A friend pointed me to Sourcetone Interactive Radio, which offers a sort of New Age twist on Pandora. Sourcetone's main gimmick is a colorful mood wheel--select your mood by clicking on the wheel, and the service will begin streaming appropriate music.

There's a lot of verbiage on the site about how Sourcetone is basing its selections on scientific research, including some conducted by a team at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, but so far there's only one published research paper on the site. The scientific angle is not particularly interesting to me--any music fan knows that music can affect mood, and mood can affect health, so scientists are just catching up with human intuition.

Sourcetone's worthwhile because of the excellent music selections--mostly long instrumental tracks in genres like classical, avant-garde jazz, traditional, or ambient, including better-known artists like fusion group Shakti (which features guitarist John McLaughlin) and Yo Yo Ma, as well as more obscure independent acts like Married Couple. (I'd never heard of them and was pleasantly surprised.) They even threw in one of my favorite Otis Redding songs, "I've Been Loving You Too Long" under the Melancholy category. The sound quality was also surprisingly good for a streaming audio site.

Don't expect it to cure any diseases, but it might help you get through the day and turn you on to some interesting new music in the process.

I'll readily admit that I'm not in the target audience for the new SlotRadio MP3 player from SanDisk, which became available last week.

The $99 device comes with a microSD card containing 1,000 songs, selected by Billboard editors from top-charting radio hits of the last 40 years or so, arranged in seven playlists--rock, country, hip-hop, and four others.

You can't edit or rearrange the playlists, you can't move the songs to your computer or any other device, and the only way to get new songs is by buying new 1,000-song cards for $39.99 apiece.

For a music control freak like me--I used to be the jerk at parties who'd secretly rifle through the host's CD collection looking for something I liked more than what was playing--turning my audio programming over to somebody else isn't easy.

There's a wee tiny rock band in there, and they're playing my favorite Steely Dan song.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

But I got a chance to play with the SlotRadio today, and there's something refreshing about its simplicity. I took it out of the box while sitting on the bus and was listening to music in less than 30 seconds.

There's no software to install, no USB cable to plug in, no CDs to rip, and no need for the instruction booklet. It's an MP3 player for people who don't know what MP3s are--and don't really care--but just want to rock out to some good tunes without carrying their entire CD collection around in their car.

While I agree with CNET's Jasmine France that the sound quality is only mediocre, the bigger problem is the mainstream, middle-of-the-road selections chosen by Billboard.

SanDisk had to start somewhere, and Billboard is one of the biggest names in the biz, but each playlist sounded like a heavily audience-tested radio station programmed by some anonymous machine in a building in New York. That is fine...but if I wanted the risk-averse sensation of radio, I'd just turn on the player's built-in radio. I ended up using the skip button quite a bit.

As I said when I first heard about SanDisk's SlotMusic strategy, the format will succeed only if SanDisk quickly signs up some more eclectic curators. I'd gladly pay $40 for 1,000 blues songs curated by Buddy Guy, or 1,000 reggae and dub tunes collected by KEXP's Kid Hops, or the top 1,000 songs of the year as chosen by the editors of Pitchfork.

Better yet, what if SanDisk teamed up with Pandora? The target audiences seem almost identical: music lovers who can't find a radio station that matches their taste, and don't have the time or motivation to hunt down and buy (or steal) a lot of music themselves.

Users could order customized cards based on their musical profiles or Pandora stations. They'd have to be created on demand, which would be more costly than mass-producing the same card thousands of times, but Pandora already has the algorithms and infrastructure to create customized radio stations on the fly, so how much more expensive could it be to rip 1,000 songs onto a microSD card?

Anyway, SlotRadio is an odd but interesting little device, and I hope that SanDisk gives it the chance it deserves by branching out into the niche markets in which music lives today.

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Slacker released its radio app for the iPhone yesterday, and while it'll have a hard time topping Pandora (which was just updated to version 2.0), there's a definite place for it.

I fine-tuned Slacker's '80s Alternative station to play more fringe hits, and it did a nice job of balancing the obscure and the palatably mainstream.

Pandora's strength is the ability to create customized radio stations based on a particular artist or song--Pandora calls them "seeds." If the station's too narrow, you can add more variety by adding additional seeds, although this doesn't always work as I expect it to--for example, adding Yo La Tengo to my Pink Floyd station had no appreciable effect, still leaving me stuck in classic rock land (Zeppelin, Doors, John Lennon). If you don't even want to take this much trouble to customize a station, Pandora offers dozens of genre-specific stations, from Techno to Reggaeton.

The trouble with Pandora's genre-bound stations, though, is they're not customizable at all--you're stuck with somebody else's programming, and you can only skip six songs per station per hour (a concession to content owners, who want to sell you downloads and subscription services).

Slacker has a much better approach toward genre-specific stations: it lets you fine tune those stations along three spectra: personal favorites (play more or less of them), popularity, and year of release. (The Web version of Slacker is more like Pandora, with artist-specific stations.) This helped me create a lot of variety without having to muck about very much. For instance, when I fine-tuned Slacker's '80s Alternative station to play more "Fringe" songs, it did a nice job of mixing the obscure, like Flock of Seagulls' "Nightmares" (did you know they had more than one song?), with the weird but popular, like Peter Gabriel's "Big Time."

Both apps are free, so if you've got enough space, you can switch between them--Pandora when you're feeling finicky, Slacker when you just want somebody else to drive.