Digital Noise: Music and Tech

Free All Media, an Atlanta-based start-up, is the latest company to propose an ad-supported music downloading service. The company, which just announced its first seed round of funding Wednesday and expects to begin public beta testing by December, hopes to differentiate itself from flameouts like SpiralFrog with a unique advertising model that asks users to participate more directly in choosing the ads they'll see.

The company's CEO, Richard Nailling, explained how the company's Web site, Free All Music, will work. Users will select an MP3 they want to download and a sponsor they'd like to "buy" that MP3 for them. They will then watch a video advertisement, between 15 and 18 seconds in length, from that advertiser. Once the ad is completed, they'll be free to download the file, a 256kbps MP3 with no copy restrictions. No further advertisements will be served for that download.

But here's the unique part--Free All Music will then use the downloader's handle in other banner ads for that sponsor, which Free All Music will place around the Web using an (as yet undisclosed) third-party ad network, as well as through its own ad network, which will focus on music-oriented sites. In other words, you might be visiting CNET and see "MattR just downloaded 'Angry Chair' by Alice in Chains...sponsored by Converse." In this way, Free All Music will be able to sell multiple ads per download and perhaps earn enough money to cover the license fee for each song.

There's a catch, of course: users will only be able to download as many songs as Free All Music can sell sponsorships for. At launch, the company is aiming for what Nailling calls "typical iTunes behavior," which is 15 songs per month, spread over three sessions. If the site takes off and advertisers buy more space, the song allowance will increase.

The key to success will be whether the company can get all four major labels and enough indies on board to make for a competitive selection of music. So far, the company claims it's signed up one major label (unnamed), and is aiming for the "full digital catalog" from each label, giving it full parity with iTunes and sites like Amazon MP3.

Would you be willing to sit through an 18-second video ad in exchange for a perfectly legal and guaranteed legitimate MP3? Or will you stick with file-trading networks?

Correction at 7:13 a.m. PDT October 1: This post incorrectly stated the number of free songs that Free All Music aims to offer at launch. The site plans to offer 15 free downloads per month, spread over three sessions.

When Dada.net, a music site run by a joint venture between major label Sony BMG and Italian mobile-entertainment company Dada, first launched, $9.99 got you 15 "tokens" that could be redeemed for ringtones or MP3s.

Unfortunately, it offered only songs from Sony BMG, as other download services with a much larger selection--notably Amazon.com and Apple's iTunes--began to offer DRM-free downloads for a buck or less.

Despite some big holes, Dada.net does offer a complete selection by some artists, including Radiohead.

The service now has a free tier that offers unlimited streaming, and unlike other free streaming services such as Grooveshark or Spotify, you also get three free MP3 downloads per month. I tested it with a download of Beck's "Bolero", and everything seems legit--you do have to register with a valid e-mail address, but you aren't forced to give a credit card number to get your free service, as with eMusic.

The selection still has some gaping holes--no Led Zeppelin or Beatles, for example--but some non-Sony artists like Pink Floyd and Radiohead (the bulk of whose recordings are owned by EMI) are represented with a full complement of recordings, including obscure live albums and EPs. And, of course, Sony artists like Kings of Leon are fully represented. The free tier is definitely worth checking out, if you can't find a song you're looking for at one of the other free streaming services.

As far as the paid tier goes, I still think that it's a bad deal, at $9.99 a month, for 15 free MP3s (the first month, you get 25). You can get DRM-free downloads for about the same price, with no monthly subscription fee, from many other sources. Another possible deterrent: Dada has been accused of using questionable tactics to attract and retain subscribers. I haven't experienced any problems, and the most recent complaints date from 2006, but the reports are common enough that I have to suggest caution.

Back in January, I criticized Palm for not having a reasonable music strategy for the upcoming Pre, the touch-screen superphone that could save the company. At that time, I mocked Palm for suggesting that consumers would have to drag and drop music files from their PC to the Pre, which would appear as a mass storage device. As I wrote, "without iTunes, there's no iPhone. And without the iPhone, there's no consumer smartphone audience." (Users will also be able to buy downloads over the air with an Amazon MP3 client, but the vast majority of music on portable devices comes from the user's computer, not downloads.)

Why reinvent the wheel?

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

It looks like Palm took my criticism to heart: Thursday at the D7: All Things D conference, the company demonstrated the Pre and announced that its media sync capability would be built around...iTunes. That's right: when you plug the phone into your computer and hit the "media sync" button, it will launch iTunes and begin letting you transfer any DRM-free files to the phone. You'll still be able use iTunes to rip and store and organize your music, to sync it with any iPods you have, and to buy downloads. Why try to reinvent the wheel and risk disaster? Heck, why not go all the way and let iPhone applications run on the thing as well?

There's only one problem: what if Apple decides that it doesn't want a competitor using the software it built and developed? Could Apple force Palm into the sort of arms race that RealNetworks experienced when it tried to reverse-engineer iTunes' DRM scheme?

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As expected, Apple on Tuesday introduced variable pricing on iTunes, meaning that some popular tracks now cost $1.29 instead of $0.99. Less expected: Amazon.com has followed Apple into the fray. Scroll down today's list of top downloads, and you'll see a few tracks at $1.29.

I just stopped believing.

It was only a matter of time, but I didn't expect the price hike to come on the same day, given all the noise Amazon's been making about a special promotion in the U.K. (0.29 pounds for some selected track, down from the usual minimum of 0.59). I can't imagine Amazon's excited about raising prices in a recession--they're probably responding to price increases by the record labels, which were made possible by Apple's capitulation. Good luck with that!

Update at 9:45 a.m. Wednesday: It's not just Amazon. I heard from a contact at another large online music company that the impetus behind the new pricing models is indeed coming from the labels. Apparently, they approached all the major stores and asked them to begin selling certain songs for $1.29 on Tuesday.

Check out Rhapsody and Wal-Mart (which is selling tracks for $1.24, in keeping with its "5 cents cheaper" pricing strategy).

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I'll readily admit that I'm not in the target audience for the new SlotRadio MP3 player from SanDisk, which became available last week.

The $99 device comes with a microSD card containing 1,000 songs, selected by Billboard editors from top-charting radio hits of the last 40 years or so, arranged in seven playlists--rock, country, hip-hop, and four others.

You can't edit or rearrange the playlists, you can't move the songs to your computer or any other device, and the only way to get new songs is by buying new 1,000-song cards for $39.99 apiece.

For a music control freak like me--I used to be the jerk at parties who'd secretly rifle through the host's CD collection looking for something I liked more than what was playing--turning my audio programming over to somebody else isn't easy.

There's a wee tiny rock band in there, and they're playing my favorite Steely Dan song.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

But I got a chance to play with the SlotRadio today, and there's something refreshing about its simplicity. I took it out of the box while sitting on the bus and was listening to music in less than 30 seconds.

There's no software to install, no USB cable to plug in, no CDs to rip, and no need for the instruction booklet. It's an MP3 player for people who don't know what MP3s are--and don't really care--but just want to rock out to some good tunes without carrying their entire CD collection around in their car.

While I agree with CNET's Jasmine France that the sound quality is only mediocre, the bigger problem is the mainstream, middle-of-the-road selections chosen by Billboard.

SanDisk had to start somewhere, and Billboard is one of the biggest names in the biz, but each playlist sounded like a heavily audience-tested radio station programmed by some anonymous machine in a building in New York. That is fine...but if I wanted the risk-averse sensation of radio, I'd just turn on the player's built-in radio. I ended up using the skip button quite a bit.

As I said when I first heard about SanDisk's SlotMusic strategy, the format will succeed only if SanDisk quickly signs up some more eclectic curators. I'd gladly pay $40 for 1,000 blues songs curated by Buddy Guy, or 1,000 reggae and dub tunes collected by KEXP's Kid Hops, or the top 1,000 songs of the year as chosen by the editors of Pitchfork.

Better yet, what if SanDisk teamed up with Pandora? The target audiences seem almost identical: music lovers who can't find a radio station that matches their taste, and don't have the time or motivation to hunt down and buy (or steal) a lot of music themselves.

Users could order customized cards based on their musical profiles or Pandora stations. They'd have to be created on demand, which would be more costly than mass-producing the same card thousands of times, but Pandora already has the algorithms and infrastructure to create customized radio stations on the fly, so how much more expensive could it be to rip 1,000 songs onto a microSD card?

Anyway, SlotRadio is an odd but interesting little device, and I hope that SanDisk gives it the chance it deserves by branching out into the niche markets in which music lives today.

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I'm not a huge Phish fan. I've only seen them once, at the Warfield, a 3,000-set venue in San Francisco, back in 1994. I skipped their subsequent arena shows because I figured they couldn't top the intimacy of that experience. But I know from that one show that they're a great live band, and now they're back together and touring for the summer after a six-year hiatus. They haven't announced a Pacific Northwest date yet, but if they do, I'd be tempted to go.

Get your phree phresh phish, right here.

(Credit: LivePhish.com)

Here's the thing, though: six years is a long time. What if they don't have it anymore? Even some hardcore fans I talked to said their last few tours weren't as great as their heyday at the end of the 1990s. (There's this story, probably apocryphal, that guitarist Trey Anastasio knew it was time to take a break from the band when a certain trio of fans he used to see at every show stopped coming.)

Doubt no more. Now you can find out for yourself whether they've still got it because Phish has made a full recording of every show on the 2009 tour (three, so far) available, in its entirety, for free. Start here, click on the "DOWNLOAD FREE MP3s" link at the bottom of each page, and you're in. If you're a big fan, you can pay for higher quality FLAC files or ar triple CD of the show. You have to register with an e-mail address (you could enter a fake if you're paranoid) and password, and you might want to install a small Java applet to download entire shows at once (downloading individual songs requires the old right-click save-file-as kludge).

The site itself has short samples of each song. Want to see whether that performance of "Rock and Roll" on March 7 was the Led Zeppelin song or the Velvet Underground song? Find out here. Can't imagine their first-ever performance of George Jones' "She Thinks I Still Care" from last night? Right here.

See, most bands are scared to give recordings away. Why would anybody come to the show if they can already hear it online? But Phish is so confident in its live abilities, it knows that posting live recordings for free will serve as an incentive to draw fans to its show. So when will other big-name live acts start doing the same thing?

I love covering music software because the pace of evolution is so fast. I guess everybody's looking for the next billion-dollar business (after iTunes) to help replace declining CD sales.

Last week, I blogged about Spotify, a free and legal music player that offers a massive library of music on demand. Unfortunately, Spotify's library has some big gaps because of legal disputes with rights-holders, and it's not available in the U.S.

A couple days later, software developer David Nelson contacted me about Muziic, a company he started with his dad--he's 15(!) and has gone from public high school to online private high school to pursue this project. After checking it out for a few days, I think it's got just as much of a chance of revolutionizing how we listen to music as Spotify does.

Great selection, but black-on-black doesn't get high marks in most usability tests.

Like Spotify, Muziic offers a free downloadable piece of client software with an iTunes-like interface and offers on-demand access to millions of streaming songs. Unlike Spotify, I had no problem finding huge catalogs from artists that are notoriously prickly about posting their music online, including Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and Radiohead. It also did a great job with all of my more obscure test cases.

How did an unknown company run by a 15-year-old and his dad pull off this incredible licensing coup? Easy--they've basically built a customized front-end to YouTube. Any song that's been uploaded to YouTube is available in Muziic, including a lot of music that isn't available on most commercial services, like the full Pink Floyd's performance at Live 8 and Led Zeppelin's one-off performance in 2007.

Unfortunately, a dispute between Warner Music and YouTube earlier this year means that a lot of recordings owned by Warner are no longer available. But in a lot of cases, users have filled the gaps with (probably unauthorized) recordings from the artists--so while I can't get my favorite studio recordings from Neil Young or the Flaming Lips, there are dozens live nuggets from each of them.

With any luck, Warner and Google (YouTube's parent company) will resolve their dispute and these gaps will be filled. In the meantime, the Nelsons can work on some of the fit-and-finish problems I found with Muziic. The Web site doesn't render properly in Firefox 3.0. The high-quality audio option didn't work for me--I think it's supposed to render YouTube's default Flash audio into AAC on the fly, but the description doesn't make much sense so I can't really tell. (The default audio sounded fine anyway--at least no worse than MP3, which of course isn't so great.) They could use some professional design help--I couldn't maximize the player to fill the screen, there's a lot of unused space in the margins, and the black on black toolbar sliders are awfully hard to use for those of us who have no patience to download different skins.

Overall, though, this is a pretty interesting and impressive piece of work. Muziic also offers an encoder that apparently lets you upgrade your MP3s before uploading them to YouTube--I didn't test this as I'm more interested in listening than sharing, but I'll give it a look later this week and let you know what I think. More important, Muziic (and Spotify) are finally showing the world how compelling a free, legal, on-demand music service can be--nearly a decade after Napster introduced us to the concept.

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Cheap tools to help independent musicians sell their music online are proliferating like mushrooms after a rainstorm: last month I wrote about Audiolife, which gives bands an online store to sell CDs and merchandise with absolutely no up-front costs (they take a cut of sales as you make them). Since then, Audiolife was kind enough to send me a sample CD and t-shirts, and they look and sound adequately professional--certainly fine for independent musicians on a limited budget, although nobody's going to confuse them with the deluxe version of the latest U2 album.

Upload your files to iTunes and other major online music stores with no up-front costs.

(Credit: RouteNote)

But Audiolife's download store is a little weak: instead of placing your songs in Apple's iTunes store--which accounts for more than 80 percent of online music sales--and other high-profile venues like Amazon's MP3 store, Audiolife creates a widget that you can place on your own Web page or social-networking site. That's fine if you've got a lot of fans already visiting your Web site. But what about more general music fans who often shop for music online, but wouldn't go out of their way to go to your Web site--think friends of friends, or music lovers who read about new bands online or in a paper. Do you really want them to come up blank when they run a search on iTunes?

CD Baby and Tunecore already offer digital distribution through iTunes and other stores, but both of them charge you money whether you make a sale or not. In contrast, U.K.-based RouteNote charges you nothing until you make a sale, at which point they take a 10 percent cut of whatever the store pays out.

Specifics: CDBaby charges you a one-time set-up fee of $35 (which covers setting up a store for physical CDs as well), then takes 9 percent of digital download revenues. TuneCore, which does digital distribution only (no CDs) charges you $20 a year for each album they stock, but takes no cut. So on a straight numbers basis, RouteNote's a better deal than CD Baby for digital-only distribution, and a better deal than TuneCore if you expect to sell low volumes of downloads. Of course, there are a lot of other factors to consider, like customer service and speed of submission to iTunes and the other stores, but RouteNote looks like it's worth checking out.

CNET News' Greg Sandoval is already covering the story, so I won't belabor it, but kudos to Apple and the three holdout record labels--Sony, Universal, and Warner--for reaching an agreement that will result in more than 8 million songs being available on iTunes with no digital rights management (DRM) restrictions. (EMI has made DRM-free songs available on iTunes since last spring, but only 10 percent of the music sold in the U.S. comes from EMI.) As Greg reports, Apple will also let users with existing DRM-encrusted downloads upgrade to a DRM-free version at a higher bitrate--256kbps--for an extra 30 cents.

For only 60 cents, I can upgrade both of my iTunes Store music purchases to DRM-free versions.

To remind everybody why this is important: this now means that most of the songs you buy on iTunes will be playable on devices and software produced by other companies. Yes, the files are still going to be in Apple's preferred AAC format rather than the more widely supported MP3, but a lot of recent digital music products from other companies do support AAC, including Microsoft's Zune (software and device) and the next version of the Windows Media Player, as well as Sony's most recent Walkman digital media players. SanDisk's popular Fuze and Clip, however, don't support AAC--a failing the company will hopefully fix with a software update.

This truly means that DRM for single-song downloads is dead. iTunes is the No. 1 distributor of digital music by a huge margin, and in fact is the No. 1 music retailer in the U.S., ahead of all brick-and-mortar outlets. DRM will live on in subscription-based services--the record companies aren't going to let you download unlimited music for one month's $15 subscription, then cancel and keep all that music--but otherwise fuggedaboudit.

My only gripe: the news comes six days too late to make my No. 1 prediction for 2008 true. Apple is also making music downloads for the iPhone available over 3G cellular networks in addition to Wi-Fi--another prediction that I made for last year.