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.
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.
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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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Several CES booths had the telltale orange and black HD Radio sign, designating that they were selling at least one device with an HD Radio receiver in it. There was also some buzz over a new feature that lets you flag a song for later purchase on iTunes (this works only on models with an iPod dock). I stopped by iBiquity's booth--they're the developers of HD Radio technology--to get an overview of all the supported devices out there, and it's a pretty impressive list, including home radios from Creative, JBL, and Sony, plus automotive radios from many major manufacturers.
This JBL HD Radio includes an iPod dock; tag any song as it plays and your iPod will remember it so you can buy it later from iTunes.
(Credit: Matt Rosoff)The sales pitch is pretty simple: the high-definition version of FM radio sounds like CDs, and high-definition AM radio sounds like standard FM. HD Radio also lets broadcasters put multiple stations on the same frequency, so, for example, an alternative rock station could add a second country station. Which highlights the biggest problem with HD Radio: there has to be material on the radio that you actually want to listen to. The lack of variety on commercial radio is a big driver of the iPod's success, and a big reason why the recording industry's in trouble--people just don't find out about new songs on the radio anymore.
Speaking of the iPod's success, it seems like half the audio devices on the floor were designed to work with Apple's iconic device. One of the most interesting is Belkin's TuneStudio for iPod, a four-channel mixer that lets you record directly to the iPod. Each channel has an XLR (microphone) and quarter-inch (instrument cable, usually) input, and onboard compressors make sure you don't overload the iPod's capacity. This would be great for recording rehearsals or live sessions, but I'm guessing the tracks are combined into a single file, so you wouldn't be able to work with them after they were recorded (like use them in Garage Band). Still, this seems like a reasonable alternative to portable PCM recorders like the Olympus LS-10 or Sony MZ-M200. for high-quality live sessions where you don't want to do much post-production work.
And just in case you missed it, yes, they have sewing machines at CES. From Brother. Proof below right.
Everything's at CES.
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