Digital Noise: Music and Tech

TechCrunch broke the story Tuesday that Seeqpod, a Web search engine for music files, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company is facing lawsuits from record company Warner and EMI because even though it doesn't post any material itself--it's just a search engine--it makes no effort to filter out copyrighted material.

Another one bites the dust.

So far, the site itself still up and running, but my absolute favorite name-it-and-play-it service, Songerize, which uses Seeqpod as its back end, appears to be broken. The labels have been targeting independent developers who use Seeqpod's API, so I wonder if the heat got to be too much for whoever was running Songerize. Seeqpod's troubles could also affect plenty of other sites, including Bandloop, an excellent and relatively new live music listing service that I wrote about in January.

If Songerize is indeed gone forever, you can turn to Imeem (although it has business troubles of its own) or, if you're lucky enough to be in a supported geographic region, Spotify. Other services also offer a limited number of streams for free--Lala.com gives you 50 before charging you $0.10 apiece, and Rhapsody lets you stream 25 songs a month without a paid subscription.

I've often praised JamBase, which lists tens of thousands of shows across the United States. If you want to know who's coming to town or who's playing tonight, it's infinitely more convenient than scanning the listings in your local paper.

23 minutes of "Crosseyed and Painless"? If that doesn't get you excited to see Phish this summer, what will?

(Credit: Bandloop)

Now it looks as if JamBase has some strong competition in the form of Bandloop. It's hard to improve upon JamBase's near-perfection, so Bandloop works in basically the same way, with a few improvements here and there.

Artists and fans populate the show database, which keeps it up-to-date--the site has more than 50,000 gig listings, the company claims. Once registered, fans can search among more than 500,000 artists and add any of them to their "loop" by clicking a big plus symbol--a bit easier than the similar tracking method on JamBase, which requires you to enter band names in a blank field.

Once you've added 20 bands to your loop, you can become a VIP member, which allows you to post your own listings. To encourage participation, Bandloop is offering gift cards for Amazon.com, iTunes, Ticketmaster, and InSound.com. The more shows you list, the more VIP rewards you earn.

I still think JamBase has a much better story with local listings: it automatically lists all shows happening tonight in your area, while Bandloop only lists shows from artists that you've selected. I guess that prevents you from getting overloaded--JamBase can be a bit daunting, if you're in a city with lots of live music--but what about serendipity? I simply can't remember to list all the bands I might be interested in seeing.

But Bandloop tops JamBase with its on-site song samples. JamBase uses an embedded control from Lala.com which won't let you fast-forward to a specific point in a song. This is a problem if, for instance, you're checking out Phish and want to skip through the applause at the beginning of its cover of the Rolling Stones' "Loving Cup."

Bandloop's audio samples are powered by Seeqpod, which scours the Web for fan uploads. This might lead to some bad title information--this Phish songlist displays a couple of incomprehensible garbles--but it also leads to some great finds, like a 23-minute cover version of the Talking Heads' "Crosseyed and Painless" (I'm still reeling from seeing David Byrne play that song earlier this week, but it wasn't anything like this).

And if you get bored with the space jam breakdown in the middle of the song, there's a slider that lets you fast-forward it to the part where Trey starts mumbling the lyric "still waiting" again and again.

I'm guessing that the Lala.com control is hampered by business rather than technical limitations--the U.S. record industry for some reason continues to resist the experience of easy on-demand music, and Lala is attempting to work legally with the industry.

Seeqpod's just a search engine, and it doesn't seek any approval from the record industry--which, unsurprisingly, landed it a lawsuit from Warner Music last year.

I wrote about the latest version of Lala when it started beta-testing back in May. At the time, I dismissed it as a weird hybrid between all-you-can-eat subscription services like Rhapsody and free streams from the likes of Imeem. I didn't understand who'd pay 10 cents to stream a song an unlimited number of times when there are already plenty of free (mostly ad-supported) streaming sites out there.

So I was surprised to see reviews of that service Monday that used words like "spectacular" and "revolution." As it turns out, Lala has made a couple of small but crucial changes that could turn it from also-ran into the first indispensable online music service since Pandora.

The changes affect Lala's music locker service, which lets you store songs from your personal library "in the cloud" (that is, on Lala's Web servers) and then access them from any computer later.

Back in May, the locker service worked only with MP3 files, which meant that anybody with a large collection of CDs ripped from iTunes (which uses AAC by default) or a Windows Media-based player was essentially out of luck. No more--the Music Mover application now recognizes both AAC (.m4a) and WMA files as well as MP3s.

Lala's online player looks a lot like iTunes, but why mess with the industry standard?

(Credit: Lala)

Second, the company has worked with the major labels to give users the right to access songs they already own without having to upload them. If Lala has the rights to a particular song, and it recognizes that you've got it in your library, it just lets you stream it for free. (Eight years ago, the labels sued the original MP3.com out of existence for doing exactly the same thing. How times have changed.)

That means you can get started quickly--so far, after about an hour of scanning, the Lala Music Mover has recognized 500 of the songs in my collection and added them to my locker without forcing me to upload them manually. (The final tally after running it overnight: 1,971 songs recognized and added, 1,474 that I'd need to upload manually. That's a ratio of just under 60% recognized.)

Finally, Lala is reportedly planning an iPhone application. That would mean iPhone access to your entire music library--goodbye capacity limits! I can't wait to download it.

One annoying bug: I couldn't resize the window for the Music Mover application, which meant I couldn't read some of the error messages songs that Lala couldn't upload. In particular, it rejected three songs because they were too large, but the error message was cut off before I could read the maximum size. Turns out, these songs were all over 50,000KB--huge epic songs, 25-plus minutes in length--so that seems like a pretty reasonable limit.

Once you're using the music locker, the other parts of the service begin to make much more sense. For example, if you're already streaming all your music via the Lala player--which looks a lot like iTunes in a browser --then buying perpetual rights to stream one more song for only 10 cents becomes a very reasonable idea. That's the whole dream of "cloud computing" in a nutshell--once Internet access becomes ubiquitous, the differences between online and offline blur until the distinction eventually becomes meaningless. There are also some interesting social networking and sharing features that could help users discover music on the site, such as a widget you can post on your Web page that lists four favorite songs.

A great idea, well executed. Nicely done, Lala.

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.

Lala.com will let you stream any song once at no charge, and an unlimited number of times for $0.10 per song.

(Credit: Lala.com)

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 CDs to AAC for the last four years. The site was also early to experiment with offering free streaming files, but has apparently shuttered that service because the numbers didn't work out.

Now the company's beta-testing another streaming service that lets you select any song to stream once. Then, if you want to stream it again, you can pay a one-time fee of $0.10 and get perpetual streaming rights to it.

Unfortunately, this pay-per-song streaming model occupies a weird space halfway between all-you-can-eat subscription services and the free streaming files available elsewhere. If I'm a hardcore music fan who likes to discover and listen to lots of new music online, I'll probably subscribe to a service like Rhapsody--one monthly payment gets me streaming access to all the music I want. But if I just want instant gratification--say, for example, I need to hear Iron Maiden's "Run to the Hills" right now--I can turn to Imeem, or Last.fm, or the Songerize site (which uses the Seeqpod search engine to discover music files all over the Web, then provides a simple embedded player).

So who would pay $0.10 for unlimited rights to stream a particular song? Probably people who are already using the Lala.com digital locker and want a cost-effective way to add new music to it without having to seek it out online or rip it from a CD and then upload it manually.