Digital Noise: Music and Tech

Last week, a music site called BlueBeat made headlines by offering Beatles songs as free streams and 25 cent downloads. The Beatles are known for not making their songs legally available on iTunes or any other online forum, so observers rightly asked "how are they doing this legally?"

EMI, the record label that owns The Beatles' recordings, has a simple response: they're not doing this legally. But here's where the story gets very strange.

The legal reasoning in this case is straight out of "Alice in Wonderland."

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons (public domain illustration))

BlueBeat is owned by a company called Media Rights Technologies, which specializes in digital rights management technology. DRM is supposed to be used to prevent copyright infringement. But according to a 2007 blog post on HuffingtonPost.com by the company's founder, Hank Risan, MRT backed into this business after being--get this--targeted by the RIAA for copyright infringement.

As Risan explains in his post, he and a partner had posted a bunch of streaming-audio files to a Web site about the history of music. The RIAA issued a takedown notice, and the site took the streams down.

The streams had been protected by Windows Media DRM, but according to Risan, an update to the Media Player broke the DRM. In response to this flaw, Risan created MRT and built his own DRM system, which he claimed would be far more robust than the systems on the market at that time. Then, in 2007, MRT sent cease-and-desist letters to Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and RealNetworks, ordering them to use MRT's DRM technology instead of their own, on threat of legal action.

The legal reasoning was twisted--basically, MRT argued that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act should force these companies to use the most robust DRM technology available, even if that technology was created by somebody else. Predictably, nothing ever came of this demand.

MRT's legal reasoning is equally funny this time around, as Ars Technica reports. According to the report, MRT claims that it didn't post the exact Beatles recordings. Instead, it posted "psychoacoustic simulations," then added simple video content to them. This constitutes a new audiovisual work, and isn't covered by the existing copyrights, MRT argues. In fact, MRT even went so far as to apply for copyrights on the "new" works!

Perhaps this is all some kind of metacommentary on the frustrating inconsistency of U.S. copyright law, but I predict that MRT is going to be laughed out of court. In the meantime, if you want your Beatles music online, it's still available on BlueBeat as of the time I posted this. I didn't want to give the company a credit card to test the whether the downloads work, but the streams sound pretty close to perfect...especially considering that they're only psychoacoustic simulations.

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.

I had a quick conversation with Lala co-founder Bill Nguyen this afternoon, and he filled me in on some of the company's plans to expand its presence in Google's new music search feature. Today, when you search for an artist's name, Google uses mathematical algorithms to determine which songs to display--no editor is involved. But eventually, artists will be able to use Lala's platform to ensure that specific content, such as a new song, shows up in the music search results at Google.

An example of Google's embedded Lala player, which appears on a search for "Joy Division."

Artists and labels will also be able to work with Lala to sell products other than MP3 downloads through Google's search results. For example, Lala is working on a deal with Rhino Records where users will be able to buy vinyl Joy Division records directly from Lala. Eventually, the offer will appear within Google search results on queries like "Joy Division" as well.

For Rhino, this kind of deal is a no-brainer: they're suddenly getting free placement for a relatively high-priced physical product in Google's search results. But it's also beneficial to users: if they buy through Lala, not only will they get the records, but they'll also get all the digital tracks on the LP immediately added to their Lala locker, which lets them listen to those tracks from any PC with an Internet connection. (I've been using Lala's excellent locker service for about a year. Basically, it uploads your entire music collection to the Web, then lets you add additional songs for only $0.10 apiece.) And if users like the deal, then they're more likely to use Google for future music searches. Wins all around.

And that gets me to the most exciting Lala announcement of all: The company has submitted its iPhone app to Apple and hopes to have it approved some time in November. The app will allow users to stream any song in their online Lala locker to their iPhone, over both 3G and Wi-Fi connections. Conceptually, it's similar to iPhone apps from Spotify (in Europe) and Rhapsody, but without the subscription fee; any song you've uploaded to your music locker will be available on your iPhone. And of course, you'll still be able to buy streaming-only versions of new songs for $0.10 a piece. (Lala might charge something like $5 for the app itself, but the company hasn't decided.) I'm getting an early look some time in the next few days. I'll try it and report back on how it works.

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.

If you listen to music on your iPhone or iPod Touch while you're driving, you probably don't exercise much control over your playlist--skipping and pausing songs without looking down at the screen is almost impossible. Fortunately, there are apps for that.

One of many background and font choices that come with SongVoo.

SongVoo, which released version 1.1 last week, is my latest discovery in this realm. It's similar to PlaySafe in that it places a skin on top of your iPhone's music player, superimposing the artist, song, and album name in large letters, and lets you control music playback with simple hand gestures that don't require you to look at the screen--in the case of SongVoo, you touch anywhere on the screen to pause, touch twice to fast-forward to the next song, and touch three times to reverse.

It has several advantages over PlaySafe, however. With PlaySafe, you have to choose songs or playlists and add them to the app before you can start using it, and it can take a little while for PlaySafe to index them. With SongVoo, this process is much more efficient--it added all 800-plus songs on my iPhone in under five seconds.

Alternately, you can begin playing your music from the normal iPod music app and then open SongVoo to superimpose SongVoo's skin on top of it. SongVoo also offers tons of backgrounds and fonts, and lets you switch among them simply by shaking the device. There are also smaller finger-buttons for setting your playlist to shuffle, to loop songs or the entire playlist, and to see detailed song information.

Version 1.1 of the app adds a couple of features that seem geared toward the attention-deficit-disorder set. You can preset the app to skip the intro and/or outro of every song (you set it by time length, such as 25 seconds), and post updates to your Facebook page simply by drawing a "W" on the screen with your finger. (By default, it posts "I am dancing to..." and the name of the song and artist, but you can change the message to something cheekier if you like.) Useful, fun, and only $0.99.

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.

Once the world's largest social-networking service and an essential tool for musicians, MySpace has fallen upon hard times, but I'm encouraged by one of the new services the company announced Wednesday.

The MySpace Artist Dashboard is a new free tool for any artist with a music profile page on the site. For artists, it offers demographic information about the people who are visiting your site, and a breakdown of what they're doing there. The geographic data could be particularly useful for small touring bands to help plan their routes. I was also encouraged by the statement from MySpace Music President Courtney Holt, who's been running the company's music initiatives for a couple years now: "Whether you're a small-town garage band, an emerging indie, or a well-established act, our ultimate goal is to provide the right mix of tools and real-time data to help you gain a deep understanding of who your fans are and how best to reach them." That's exactly what MySpace should be focusing on.

An example version of the new MySpace Artist Dashboard. The Black Eyed Peas probably don't need this feature--they have teams of marketers working for them--but your band might.

Unfortunately, the other new piece, a music video service, will languish in obscurity as part of the misguided MySpace Music site. I've always argued that creating a special MySpace Music site for major label acts, and shutting out the unsigned and indie artists that made MySpace in the first place, was a tragic mistake. Now MySpace is perpetuating the exact same mistake with MySpace Music Videos.

Here's an example. The Curious Mystery--a great Seattle band that recently signed with indie label K Records--has a new video out for their song "Black Sand." It's available on their MySpace page. But if you run a search for "The Curious Mystery" or "Black Sand" on the Music Videos hub, this video doesn't show up. That's a failure. (Overall, MySpace still needs a lot of help with music search.)

So MySpace Music Videos is trying to focus on the big numbers--big bands, lots of hits, big advertising bucks. But fans already know where to watch videos from famous artists--it's called YouTube--and therefore have no particular reason to check out the MySpace Music Video hub. The fun of MySpace used to be that your roommate's band could appear right alongside names like Radiohead, and you could surf easily between content from all types of acts. Until MySpace Music stops distinguishing between big and small artists, it will remain irrelevant.

And in case you're wondering, yes, you can find The Curious Mystery's new video by searching YouTube.

Back in the dark ages before Internet access, staying on top of the coolest new music required some work. You could read about new bands in magazines and newsletters--the more obscure the better--but most music fans had a few people they trusted to be their personal music experts. Record store clerks, friends in bands, and people in the local art scene all competed to be up on the latest new sounds coming out of Austin or Detroit or Seattle, and the rest of us reaped the benefits of this competition.

Miracle Fortress, one of the recommended albums from a real live record store owner, Sonic Boom's Jason Hughes.

Panel, a new Web site and associated $2.99 app for iPhone and iPod Touch, updates this old world of trusted experts for the new world of on-demand digital music. Created by Los Angeles record producer Darius Fong, Panel will enlist a new expert every couple of weeks to recommend two recent favorite albums. The iPhone app lets you stream these albums in their entirety or on a song-by-song basis, and provides information about the album and panelist (this information--but not the music--is also available on the Web site). If you want to buy it, the iPhone app has a link to iTunes, and the Web site links to both iTunes and Amazon's MP3 store. You can even share your recommendations via your Facebook update status or Twitter feed, allowing you to pretend that you discovered this obscure gem all by yourself.

Panel's first expert is Jason Hughes, the owner of one of my favorite Seattle record stores, Sonic Boom. Future panelists, according to the company, will include Justin Gage, who created the Aquarium Drunkard music blog and XM/Sirius radio show, producer and musician Matt Bayles, who used to be part of Seattle band Minus the Bear, and bronze sculptor Peter Harper, who also runs an online Musician of the Month contest from his Web site and happens to be Ben Harper's brother.