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 tend to stick to social networking sites like MySpace, and finding music on these sites can be painful. Plus there's no guarantee the music you want will be on the particular site you're searching.
That's why I was excited to read about Qbox, a new service that entered public beta-testing today. It attempts to be an all-in-one catalog of all music stored on social networking sites. At launch, the service catalogs tunes from MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube.
The Qplayer embeds MySpace music pages, but when I tested it out, I couldn't get the songs to play.
(Credit: MySpace, The Curious Mystery)I visited the site and ran a search for some fairly obscure Seattle-area artists I've played shows with before and really admire, like Wah Wah Exit Wound and The Curious Mystery. Sure enough, all the songs they've posted on MySpace appear immediately. It's not like MySpace, where I have to make sure I've selected "Music" rather than "People" from the dropdown menu, then wade through a bunch of sponsored links to visit the musician's site.
World-famous bands like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd also have songs on MySpace, and therefore appear in the search results. In theory, I could construct a playlist with all of these songs interspersed with one another. So far so good.
Until I hit the "play" button on the site and was informed I had to download a desktop application, Qplayer. Grumble grumble--if this stuff's all being streamed from the Web, why should there be a desktop app? Nonetheless, I downloaded, shut down my browser, installed the player, opened my browser again, signed in to the site again, conducted a search for Curious Mystery, and hit play. This time the player launched. As you might be able to tell from the screenshot on this page, it looks like little more than a modified Web browser: it basically displays the relevant MySpace page on the right, with a playlist on the left. The artist's graphic appears above the playlist, but below that appear two random images which link to other artists--presumably some sort of promotion.
Fine, but where's my music? Unlike the case when I load a MySpace page into my regular Web browser, it didn't start playing when the Qplayer loaded. So I hit the "play" arrow above my playlist. Nothing. I went back to the Web site and tried hitting the "play" icon next to the song I wanted, and it just relaunched the player. No music.
The audio-only user guide didn't help. The FAQ didn't help.
Alas, that's beta software. Take a deep breath. Uninstall. Come back next week and try again.
Helio's Buddy Beacon was hyped, but it's the social networking mainstays that are actually getting used by mobile customers.
(Credit: Flytip.com)New research from the mobile-focused statistics firm M:Metrics has focused on exactly how many mobile-phone customers are using their handsets to access social networks and blogs, and the results aren't particularly surprising: not a whole lot of people are.
In the month of June, a total of only 12.3 million mobile consumers in the United States and Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) accessed a social-networking site or blog on their phones at least once. In the U.K., this came out to a total of only 2.5 percent of mobile users; 2.8 percent in Italy; 2.3 percent in Spain; 1.9 percent in Germany; and only 1.5 percent in France.
Interestingly enough, the highest percentage (3.5 percent) was in the U.S., which is typically thought to lag behind European and Asian countries in mobile-media consumption.
Mobile social networking is something that you hear a lot about, and not just because Facebook has just launched an iPhone-optimized site. As the M:Metrics results show, Web and mobile-media companies can see plenty of potential for growth simply because there isn't a whole lot of social networking going on in the mobile space yet.
Sometimes, the potential for growth has led companies to attempt to develop strictly mobile social-networking features--often carrier-specific, such as those of Helio's GPS-based "Buddy Beacon" service. But not surprisingly, it's the mobile-optimized versions of existing popular social-networking sites that have proven to be the early leaders.
In the U.S. and U.K., MySpace.com's mobile site is the most popular (despite only being available on several carriers) with 3.7 million users in the U.S. and 440,000 in the U.K.; Facebook comes in second place with 2 million users in the U.S. and 307,000 in the U.K.
Third place in the U.S. was YouTube, with 901,000 mobile users; third place in the U.K. was Bebo, with 288,000. (Recently, another firm's statistics showed that Bebo may be passing longtime leader MySpace in the U.K. when it comes to unique visitors.)
In the four other European countries, MSN Live Spaces was the most popular mobile social network. Also of note is the fact that in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, the 13-to-17 age demographic was the one doing the most mobile social networking; in the U.S. and U.K., it was the slightly older 18-to-24 demographic.
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