Digital Noise: Music and Tech

How far we've come in such a short time. When I began this blog in 2007, finding a particular song online was an exercise in frustration. You could subscribe to an all-you-can-eat service like Rhapsody, but cheapskates and occasional music listeners either had to dig deep, engage with a questionably legal file-trading service, or settle for 30-second previews from iTunes or one of its Web-based competitors.

Search results for "U2 Beautiful Day" earlier today. The box at the upper-right is an embedded version of the Lala player, which let me play the complete song multiple times.

Since then, as readers of this blog know, dozens of sites offering free streaming music have emerged, from the dead-simple like Songerize and its successor Songite (enter a song title to play it now) to the fiendishly complicated Imeem (whose original user interface gave me a headache, although it's since gotten much better).

But, let's face it, most people don't read this blog. Again and again, nontechnical music fans are blown away when I show them a site like Grooveshark, which lets you play any song, any time, and even arrange songs in queues and playlists. "Is that legal?" they often ask. (Answer: it depends.)

Today, that all changes. Google announced the integration of playable songs into its search results yesterday, and is slowly rolling the feature out to U.S. searchers. I finally saw the feature in action this afternoon, when I ran a search on "U2 Beautiful Day." (You can test it here.)

To an experienced online music listener, the feature seems a little bit random because Google is using both iLike (recently acquired by MySpace) and Lala to power playable results, and the two offer different experiences. For my first search, Google randomly chose iLike as the default player, and iLike only let me play the song once, then relegated me to a 30-second sample. When I cleared my cookies and tried again, Google made Lala my default player, and I was able to play the full song as many times as I liked. (The experience will also vary by song and artist, depending on what the copyright holders dictate--Led Zeppelin, for example, is available only in 30-second samples on iLike, and most of its songs are completely missing from Lala.)

Some searches also give you links to Imeem, Rhapsody, and Pandora, each of which offers yet another experience--Rhapsody lets you play up to 25 songs per month for free, Imeem is best for finding unusual versions of popular songs (like live takes), and Pandora requires you to create a virtual radio station based on a particular artist or song, which can be useful for discovering other music you might like, but doesn't give you an instant fix.

Whatever. For the average Internet user, this distinction doesn't matter. What matters: when users go to Google to search for an artist's name, song name, album name, or even a snippet of lyrics, they won't just get random text links or YouTube videos. Instead, the first set of links will be to the audio recording itself--in many cases, the entire song. Everybody knows that there's free music available on the Internet, but most casual listeners don't bother to find it. Now, the most-visited site on the Internet will put it right in front of their faces. As awareness spreads, it'll be another nail in the coffin of traditional music media--why listen to the radio?--and a boon for the five companies who signed this deal with Google. Artists and record labels might also get a shot in the arm, as users discover new music for free and perhaps eventually buy a copy to keep.

As for the rest of the online music start-ups out there? They better be on the phone right now, looking for a benefactor.

Microsoft is banking on multitouch support as one selling point for Windows 7, and HP--traditionally a loyal supporter of Microsoft's consumer strategy--is helping the push by releasing an update to its TouchScreen PCs.

The touch-enabled version of Rhapsody for HP's TouchSmart PCs lets you search by writing an artist's name on the screen.

HP has worked with several partners to create touch-enabled versions of various consumer entertainment apps, including Hulu, Netflix, and Pandora Internet Radio, but hard-core music fans will probably be most interested in the touch-enabled version of Rhapsody.

Among the cool features: you'll be able to write the name of an artist directly on the screen, and Rhapsody will take you to that artist's page so you can begin listening to their songs. (Check out the video demo on RealNetworks' blog.)

More generally, Rhapsody remains one of my favorite subscription-based services, with a great selection and strong editorial content. While my other favorite, Microsoft's Zune Pass, offers a slightly better deal with 10 free downloads per month in addition to unlimited streaming, Rhapsody works with Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. The Zune Pass does not.

Unfortunately, the TouchScreen only comes with a 14-day free trial, which seems a bit paltry: earlier this month Dell announced it would ship some new consumer laptops with a one-year free subscription to Napster, which includes the right to download 60 permanent files over the course of the year.

If you were hoping for Apple to announce a subscription-based music service for the iPhone and the iPod Touch on Wednesday like I was, suppress your disappointment: early this morning, Apple approved Rhapsody for iPhone, and it's available in the iTunes Store.

It's the second such service Apple has approved, but the first, Spotify, is not available in the United States. (The Rhapsody application is not showing up in search results quite yet, but it is showing up within iTunes.)

(Credit: Rhapsody)

Rhapsody was a pioneer in subscription-based music, and I'm a big fan of the service; in 2005, it was the first one to turn me on to the thrill of chasing your whims and surfing randomly among genres, which you can't do with per-download services like iTunes.

In my most recent trial late last year (in conjunction with the Sonos multiroom audio system), I wasn't able to find any significant gaps--if anything, there was too much music, including more versions of the novelty song "Kung Fu Fighting" than I ever imagined--and there is some excellent curation and editorial work, particularly for indie rock artists.

The iPhone app is pretty straightforward: you can search for songs, surf genres and chart-toppers, and create queues and playlists. If you're a fan of Pandora, you'll also appreciate the Rhapsody Radio feature, which creates tailor-made stations built around particular artists or genres. As long as you have an active Wi-Fi or 3G connection, the music should keep playing without interruption.

It's a free download, but to use it, you'll need a Rhapsody to Go subscription, which costs $14.99 a month. That's not quite as good a deal as Microsoft's Zune Pass, which costs the same and gives you 10 permanent MP3 downloads a month, but of course that service requires a Zune, which means that it applies only to about 1.1 percent of the MP3 player market (according to a statistic that Apple snarkily included in its presentation Wednesday) and exactly zero mobile phones.

Apple appears to have seen the light, as it is now allowing subscription-based music to come to the iPhone. It makes my phone's 8GB storage size seem a lot less limiting.

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RealNetworks has been having a bit of a bad run lately, but its Rhapsody streaming service continues to offer unparalleled selection at pricing levels that seem both fair to users and rights-owners--including the ability to stream 25 songs per month at no charge. Plus, I've got to give them credit for introducing me to the idea of on-demand music--you don't know you're missing it until you live with it for a while--even if their business has been hurt by a plethora of free competitors like Grooveshark, Spotify, and Imeem.

So I was glad to see that Rhapsody has added some simple functionality that will let users share full-length songs on their Facebook profiles and Twitter feeds. Every Rhapsody page now has a Facebook and Twitter icon. Click either of them, and Rhapsody will let you post the song you're currently playing to either service. It's not a new concept--iLike has had full-song sharing on Facebook for almost a year--but it's a simple step that should keep current subscribers happy while introducing the service to people on social networks who may never have heard of it.

Yes, I really was listening to that as I posted this.

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I'm not a lawyer, but I'm well-acquainted with legal filings from analyzing Microsoft's legal travails for the last nine years. I've seen a lot of aggressive lawsuits, but a copyright infringement suit filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for Middle Tennessee is one of the boldest--and, I'd argue, short-sighted--filings I've ever seen.

If only online music-streaming services were that lucrative...

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The suit appears to have been initiated by Music Copyright Solutions (MCS), which claims to administer copyrights for more than 45,000 compositions. MCS is named as the lead plaintiff, along with a number of songwriters including Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad fame. These folks allege that Microsoft, Yahoo, and RealNetworks improperly licensed the rights to more than 200 compositions that they offered as on-demand streams or limited downloads via the Zune Marketplace, Yahoo Music, and Rhapsody.

Surely these companies paid somebody for the rights to offer these songs. But there's a catch, which TechDirt pointed out earlier Tuesday: these companies may have licensed the rights to the recordings, but that doesn't mean they licensed the rights to the compositions (also known as publishing rights). As section 23 of the legal filing puts it:

In order to transmit, perform, reproduce and deliver any sound recording of any musical work via 'On-Demand Streams' or 'Limited Downloads,' Defendants must first obtain not only the rights for the sound recording itself, but also the rights for the underlying musical composition that is embodied on said musical recording.

Maybe, maybe not--that's up to the court to decide. But that's not the insane part. The insane part is that the plaintiffs are alleging that each time one of the defendants made any recording of a covered song available, that's a copyright violation, and they're seeking damages of $150,000 per violation (or the amount the defendants earned from streaming those songs, whichever is more). So, for example, the lawsuit claims that Yahoo Music offered Conway Twitty's recording of "Fifteen Years Ago" on six different greatest hits albums. The plaintiffs allege that constitutes six copyright violations, which would mean damages of $900,000. Overall, the lawsuit names more than 200 songs, and a far greater number of recordings, meaning that the potential liability for each defendant would be tens of billions of dollars--that's far greater than the total amount of revenues these companies ever earned from any of these services.

These types of cases are usually settled for a relative pittance--something much closer to what the defendant would have paid to license the songs properly in the first place. But imagine for a minute that this lawsuit actually goes to trial and the plaintiffs win damages amounting to 1 percent of what they asked for. No company would ever risk building an online music service again--the legal liability would simply be too high.

When it comes to online music, big legal music services like Zune, Yahoo Music, and Rhapsody are the copyright owners' friends--unlike file-trading networks or free on-demand streaming services, these companies actually collect money from users and disburse it to copyright owners. Perhaps the plaintiffs have a legitimate complaint. But by filing such an aggressive lawsuit to recover billions in supposed damages--I mean honestly, how many Grand Funk Railroad streams have been delivered via the Zune Marketplace?--these folks risk killing their allies and driving music back to the darknet where nobody in the value chain sees a dime.

Today, U.K. Internet service provider Virgin Media announced plans to begin offering unlimited song downloads for a monthly subscription fee. The songs will be DRM-free MP3 files, which means they will never expire, even if the user switches ISPs. Universal, the largest record label in the world, is so far the only label to sign on, but the other majors will probably follow.

The deal was announced along with a threat to crack down on illegal downloaders (perhaps through some sort of BitTorrent monitoring, although Virgin claims it won't be doing the monitoring itself), but the companies left the most important question unanswered: how much will it cost?

The labels won't want to settle for less than they're getting through iTunes and other download stores, so Virgin will have to guess how many songs will be downloaded per month, then divide that number by the number of subscribers. After some initial heavy usage, I can imagine users downloading about two albums per month. So I could imagine a rate of about $40 per month. That seems fair compared with subscription-based streaming services like Rhapsody, which starts at $12.99 a month.

But what's fair to the industry may not seem fair to users, who have been downloading free music for almost a decade now. People have proven willing to pay for downloads when they get some other tangible benefit--in the case of iTunes, it's the ease of transferring purchased songs to their iPod or iPhone. When the only extra benefit is a clear conscience and less chance of being sued, I think a lot of users will take the risk and stick with free.

Would you pay a monthly fee for unlimited downloads? If so, how much?

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I'm not sure if it's as cool as the Ruben's Tube video, but it's pretty close. According to the person who posted this miracle, YouTube handle bd594, the piano sounds are provided by an Atari 800 XL (which happens to be the first computer I ever saw at a friend's house rather than school), lead guitar is courtesy of a TI-99/4A, the bass is an 8-inch floppy, the gong a 3.5-inch hard drive, and the vocals are an HP Scanjet 3c. (I saw this first on BoingBoing.)

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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.

AUSTIN, Texas--At South by Southwest here, I had a short but interesting conversation Wednesday afternoon with Tim Quirk, the vice president of music programming for Rhapsody, wedged in around a set from Jersey punks Titus Andronicus (who had very tight and well-constructed songs with incredible energy and some interesting triple-guitar work, but I don't know if the singer's going to make it another three days).

Quirk, who's been with Rhapsody since before it was acquired by RealNetworks, suggested that streaming music on demand will change the mechanics of the music business because artists (and other stakeholders) won't be compensated based on how many people buy a song or a record, but rather on how many times people actually listen to it.

For labels, it won't make sense to sign cute, disposable artists, and prop them up with hired-gun songwriters and producers in hopes of selling a couple million units over a single summer. Rather, the real moneymakers will be bands whose fans absolutely can't live without their music, and who listen to songs over and over again, for years.

That requires finding artists who already have sizable fan bases and then cultivating them over the years. Terrestrial radio might become even less important--there's no reason to saturate the airwaves with a single song in hopes of selling as many copies as possible before the buzz moves to the next thing; instead, you'll want word to grow more organically, creating lifelong fans along the way.

Of course, this is all predicated on a big "if": somebody has to find a business model for streaming music that works for all parties involved. First, money has to change hands--whether it's through users paying a subscription (the Rhapsody model) or advertisers paying to reach those users (the model espoused by Spotify and others). Then the operators of these services will have to convince copyright holders to accept a level of payment that doesn't drive the operators out of business.

That level of payment may be lower than the percentage derived from CD sales today, which is a big stumbling block for labels to accept. But in the long run, streaming music will lead to greater music consumption overall. When you have no limits on the amount of music you can sample, you're more likely to become a music geek.

Quirk had some statistics to bolster this point: in traditional CD sales, nearly 50 percent of the revenue comes from the top 100 selling records. With Apple's iTunes, it's about 33 percent; lower prices translate to people willing to sample more music. With free peer-to-peer networks, it's less than 30 percent--again, it makes sense that users would sample more music when it's free.

With Rhapsody, it's even lower--less than 25 percent. I suggested that that's because Rhapsody self-selects for music geeks--who else would pay a subscription for unlimited music? But Quirk countered that his usage statistics suggest that Rhapsody turns people into music geeks. That is, once people realize that they can consume unlimited music for the same price, they begin exploring related songs and bands, checking out recommendations from friends that they never would have bothered with otherwise, and so on.

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