Digital Noise: Music and Tech

In 2008, the Council for Research Excellence, a research group funded primarily by Nielsen and staffed by researchers from various media and advertising organizations, studied the media consumption habits of U.S. adults. Researchers followed about 300 people around for two days, in the spring and the fall, using a handheld device to track every single 10-second interval of media that they consumed. The study was mainly focused on video, with the unsurprising result that we watch a lot of TV (more than five hours a day on average).

On Tuesday, the group released a follow-up analysis focused exclusively on audio. The results are somewhat surprising for those of us who have been steeped in digital music for the last decade: the most popular form of media for audio is good old broadcast radio.

No static at all!

(Credit: Wojciech Pysz, via Wikimedia Commons)

In fact, it's not even close. About 77 percent of U.S. adults listen to some broadcast radio on any given day--much more than listen to a CD or tape (37 percent). Satellite radio came in third with 15 percent. And the vaunted digital music revolution? About 12 percent of users listen to portable MP3 players on any given day, about 10 percent listen to digital media files stored on a computer, and only about 9 percent listen to streamed audio (including online radio). The study has tons of other data about age groups and time spent listening to each form of audio and so on, but an important point is that even digital music consumers still listen to the radio: nearly 82 percent of people who listen to MP3 players on a given day also listened to the radio. (This 38-page PDF has all the details.)

Now, the caveats. The study had a small sample size--300 people in only five cities. It didn't try to adjust for demographic differences between the sample audience and the population at large. And it didn't measure the type of audio content being consumed. So while we know that nearly 80 percent of U.S. adults listen to the radio, it's harder to know how many are listening to music. My suspicion is that people with MP3 players are turning to radio primarily for news and sports and other talk formats, and sticking primarily with their own collections for music.

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.

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.

Online radio service Last.fm has always seemed to occupy an awkward middle ground between on-demand streaming music services that let you pick and play any song--like free services Imeem and Grooveshark, and Rhapsody, which charges for its service--and the radio-to-your-taste service pioneered by Pandora. (Disclaimer: Last.fm is owned by CBS, which is the parent company of CNET News.)

In my opinion, this is partly because of some flaws with the service itself. The radio service has a lot of powerful features for serious music fans who are willing to do a little work, as CNET's Donald Bell recently explained, but it doesn't work very well as an on-demand service. How do you add songs to a now-playing queue? Why hasn't Last.fm secured on-demand rights for huge artists like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin?

But there's also a bit of a branding gap. Compared with the organic buzz I hear about Pandora and Rhapsody, for instance, Last.fm hardly comes up. Now it looks like CBS is trying to address that issue. In an effort to increase brand awareness, CBS Radio will devote four broadcast HD Radio stations to Last.fm. The playlist will be drawn from listeners' favorites--Last.fm does such a fantastic job of tracking usage, I've referred to it for non-scientific measurements of artist popularity--as well as live performances in Last.fm's New York studio. The stations will make the cutover on October 5, and include KITS-FM (105.3 HD3) in San Francisco, WWFS-FM (102.7 HD2) in New York, KCBS-FM (93.1 HD2) in Los Angeles, and WXRT-FM (93.1 HD3) in Chicago. All four stations will play the same playlist.

HD Radio itself is still in a niche phase. Although it's available in more than 90 percent of major U.S. markets, the receivers are still fairly rare. That might change tomorrow with the launch of the Zune HD, the first MP3 player with a built-in HD Radio receiver. If nothing else, it shows that HD Radio technology is getting small enough and cheap enough to begin building it into a variety of consumer electronics devices--imagine when it starts becoming a feature in smartphones, for instance.

SanDisk's new Sansa Clip+ sounds like a solid choice for an inexpensive MP3 player, but I'm more interested in how it could boost SanDisk's slotMusic and slotRadio--two types of microSD cards preloaded with music.

The new Sansa Clip+ lets you load music from a microSD card.

(Credit: 2009 CBS Interactive)

When first announced last year, slotMusic seemed like a misfire: I couldn't imagine why consumers would pay almost the same price as a CD for a microSD card loaded with lower-quality files. The release of the $19.99 slotMusic player changed my opinion a little bit, but it still seemed too limiting: the only way to get music onto the device through microSD cards. I had the same problem with the slotRadio player, which came out earlier this year--yes, it comes with 1,000 songs for only $99, and you can add additional blocks of 1,000 songs for $39.99, which is great if you're not too picky about your music. But I am.

The Clip+ doesn't force any such choices. For your control-freak moments, you can sideload MP3s (and nearly every other type of music file except, inexplicably, AAC) from your computer, or attach a microSD card of your own making. Or, if you just want to add a bunch of new music without fiddling around with ripped CDs, downloads, and USB cables, you can use slotMusic albums or slotRadio bundles. Add the other features--voice recording, FM radio, and support for Rhapsody--and this seems like an amazing deal for a very flexible portable music player.

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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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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I canceled my subscription to Sirius more than two years ago, and haven't had much chance to listen to satellite radio since Sirius and XM merged. So this weekend I was happy to I discover that my rental had a Sirius receiver and a package with about 80 stations. I know the company has been struggling lately, so I was curious to hear if the service had improved.

I was pleasantly surprised. The annoying DJs who talked between every song have been scaled way back, although they still talk more often than I'd like. The programming is more eclectic than I remember--Boneyard (classic hard rock and metal) and Little Steven's Underground Garage (well-curated rock and punk) turned me on to some killer music I'd never heard before, like BeBop Deluxe and the Purple Hearts, and the Grateful Dead are always welcome when cruising through redwood groves to the beach. I also forgot how much I missed those moments of serendipity that radio sometimes provides--listening to my own music collection on an MP3 player guarantees I'll always hear music I like, but it leaves very little room for hearing the first notes of Eric Burdon's "San Franciscan Nights" just as the city's skyline appears in the distance.

But I still didn't like it well enough to consider re-subscribing, even for only $7 a month. Here's why:

Quality of service. The service dropped out pretty frequently, and it wasn't like I was deep in the wilderness--just driving through the mountains south and west of Silicon Valley. There's also something strange about the sound quality itself, perhaps too much compression? No matter how loud I turned it up, it didn't sound full enough. Playing with the EQ didn't help either. The FM radio sounded better.

Repetition. I spent about three hours in the car each day on Friday and Saturday, and by Sunday I was already hearing repeats! It was fun hearing the Who's "The Good's Gone" and Art Brut's "Alcoholics Unanimous" on the radio, but do I really need to hear them twice in two days?

Safety. I know my musical tastes are a bit off-center, but with the exception of the Underground Garage and XMU, the selection of tunes was pretty safe major label stuff. Not much independent music, no local acts, and nothing too far out. One of the best radio experiences I've ever had was driving through a blighted part of San Jose last year and stumbling across a half hour of soft noise (if you can imagine that) and feedback on KFJC. Surely with so many stations, Sirius could devote one to way-out music like Sun Ra and early Zappa+Mothers and Fantomas.

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After months of increasingly wild rumors, CNET's Ina Fried got the official scoop yesterday: Microsoft is indeed releasing the Zune HD this fall. The device will feature an OLED touch screen, high-definition video output (with an optional add-on), a version of Internet Explorer (it sounds similar to the version planned for Windows Mobile 6.5, which uses the core IE6 engine but adds Flash support, as well as some technology from IE8 to better support JavaScript), and HD Radio.

(Credit: Microsoft)

I spoke to the Zune marketing team this morning, and they didn't have much to say beyond those points. In fact, they weren't originally planning on saying anything until later this summer, but felt they needed to set expectations for Zune customers in light of all the rumors.

Here's why: the Zune HD isn't going to be the super-device that some geeks had been hoping for. It will play games--just like today's Zunes, which ship with a couple simple games--but it won't be a full-fledged gaming device like the Sony PlayStation Portable or Nintendo DS. It won't have its own application store, although Microsoft hinted it might connect to the forthcoming Windows Marketplace for Mobile, which could let third-party apps like Facebook and Pandora find a home on the device. It won't feature WiMax connectivity, although that might be planned for a future touch-screen phone with a similar form factor.

In other words, this is Zune 3.0, a music-focused device with a nice touch screen. It'll support video and apps, sure, but the team is focusing on improving the music-playback experience--think album art, more detailed artist pages with images, perhaps lyrics or video content.

Will these features be enough to get users to choose a Zune HD instead of an iPod Touch? The main difference seems to be HD Radio. I believe Microsoft when they say FM radio is the Zune's second-most important selling point, but Zune users are a very small portion of the overall MP3 player market--the tens of millions of users who bought an iPod didn't care about radio. There may be some other killer features we don't yet know about, and there's always the Zune Pass to consider--a great deal at $14.99 a month for unlimited streams and 10 permanent downloads--but I think the uphill battle against Apple will continue.

As far as the other half of the news goes, it's been clear for some time that Microsoft was getting ready to integrate the Zune Marketplace into Xbox Live. The company will have more details to show off next week at E3, so I'll save further comment until I see what they've got.

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