Online music services

The Filter's recommendations hew to the mainstream

The Filter is an entertainment recommendation service that asks questions about your taste, then tries to refer you to CDs and DVDs you might be interested in buying. (The site will eventually add other forms of entertainment, such as TV shows.) It's been in a closed beta since earlier this year, and has gotten some press thanks to the involvement of art-rocker Peter Gabriel. On Tuesday, it opened to the masses.

The idea's not new--Amazon.com has had a recommendation engine for years, and many online music services like Pandora, iLike, and Jango employ variations on that theme. … Read more

Qbox could be the ultimate music player...

Update: Qbox seems to have fixed the problem, and songs from MySpace now play fine within the Qplayer. See my updated post here.

With the Web allowing any artist to present music to the masses, listeners are less likely to distinguish between the local band they saw down the street and major label acts they heard on the radio. Of course listeners know the difference, but they don't care--they want to be able to flip between all the music they're interested in without hunting each song down on a particular Web site. Unfortunately, local artists with limited resources … Read more

BurnLounge gone?

I first heard about BurnLounge about a year ago when a fellow musician was approached by one of its representatives in a mall. He asked me if I'd ever heard of them and what I thought.

I did a little digging, smelled a multilevel marketing scheme, and suggested he proceed with caution. Sure enough, later that week the Federal Trade Commission announced it was investigating the company on suspicion of being a pyramid scheme, and a couple weeks later, BurnLounge said it would get rid of its Amway-style program where representatives earned compensation from signing up other reps.

Now … Read more

Lala.com's pay-per-stream program faces tough competition

Lala.com has a history of coming up with innovative ideas that don't quite conquer the world. The company is best known for its online used-CD trading service, which is an interesting idea but works well only if you have a large list of CDs available to trade.

It also offers a music "locker" service that allows you to upload your music then listen to it from any computer with an Internet connection...but it only works with MP3 files, so you're out of luck if you've been using (for example) iTunes to rip your … Read more

Napster MP3 store: great selection, bad interface

Napster launched its Web-based MP3 download store yesterday, and it seems to be the latest digital music whipping boy, with negative reviews in several places.

Let me start with the positives. Napster claims the store has 6 million tracks, which is 50% larger than any other MP3 store out there. They do have a single download of "The Promise" by When in Rome, an obscure 1980s single my wife loves but that iTunes will only let you buy as part of the full Napoleon Dynamite soundtrack. I'm sorry, Apple, but I won't pay more than $0.… Read more

Update: events on Imeem

Note: I corrected this entry to make clear that Imeem licenses its event listing information from Jambase.

A quick follow-up to my earlier post on Imeem. A representative of the company contacted me to let me know about some of the other services offered on the site, including one that lets you find local events. Testing this feature in "search by venue" mode, I discovered that Return to Forever, whose 1973 album Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy is one of my favorite jazz records (fusion for you purists), is coming to my favorite Seattle venue in a couple … Read more

Another look at Imeem

When I first looked at Imeem last December, I was boggled by the site's interface--I couldn't tell if it was a social networking site, a streaming audio and video site, or a library of user-posted content for downloading. At the risk of sounding like Grandpa Simpson or Doug Morris, I dismissed the site as a symptom of widespread attention deficit disorder among the younger set.

Last week, market research firm Compete, which measures Web traffic by compiling and measuring data from various sources, reported that Imeem had surpassed Yahoo Music as the number-one streaming music site on the … Read more

Add MP3 clips to your Web page with Amazon widget

Amazon released a new MP3 Clips Widget today that lets you build playlists with 30-second samples from any of the 5 million+ songs on Amazon's MP3 store, then embed those playlists in any Web page. The process is brain-dead simple: first you run a search of song titles or album titles against Amazon's database, then select from the results. Second, choose the size of the widget. Third, select from a list of 15 popular blogging and personal home page sites (Blogger, Yahoo 360, and so on), or paste the code directly into your page, as I've done … Read more

Adventures in music analysis

Founded to two MIT Media Lab alums, The Echo Nest is focused on what it calls "music intelligence." The company is developing software technology that can analyze the sounds within music files, text within online articles and blog postings about music, and other online data (such as songs being downloaded in a particular week). It will then license this technology to developers--commercial and non-commercial--to help them create a whole new class of music software and Web applications.

It's possible to imagine hundreds of possibilities. A music company could build an application to identify current trends in order … Read more