MOG offered me a free trial to its subscription-based streaming music service, MOG All Access, which launched on Tuesday. The service costs five bucks a month, and gives you unlimited on-demand streams of more than six million songs from all four major labels and plenty of indies. The site is trying to differentiate itself from competitors like Rhapsody and Napster with high-quality streams--all songs are 320kbps MP3s--and some fairly sophisticated music discovery features, like playlists posted by musicians (David Byrne got the featured spot on the day of launch) and other fans with similar tastes to yours ("Moggers like me").
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I've been sampling the service for about an hour, and I do appreciate the sound quality (although better volume-leveling between songs would be nice) and recommendation services. And I'd like to thank the designers personally for the ability to add any song to the already-playing queue--a feature I love on Grooveshark and my Zune HD and that I always miss whenever I use one of my iPods. But there's one big problem: song selection.
Because MOG is licensing content directly from copyright owners, there are big gaps from artists who simply don't want to participate in online music. The usual suspects like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and the Beatles are mostly missing in action. There are also strange gaps elsewhere. For instance, half the songs on the Pixies' "Surfer Rosa" are unplayable. Compared with Grooveshark, which relies on user-posted content, MOG has too many holes. And of course, Grooveshark remains free (although a $3/month subscription gets you a version without advertisements).
Song selection could improve over time as MOG signs more licensing deals, but I found some other related glitches as well. For instance, '70s folk artist Roy Harper, whom I often use as a test case to see how well an online service does with relatively obscure old content, has almost no playable content, but does offer a nice list of albums with links to Amazon. The only problem: when you follow the Amazon link on unplayable songs, it takes you to the Amazon Music front door--most of his songs aren't available for download there, either.
In its demonstration video, MOG touts its online radio service as a unique feature. When you're playing a particular artist, a slider lets you control how much variety you want, from "play only songs by this artist" all the way up to "play mostly songs from similar artists." It could use some fine-tuning, however. When I started a queue with a Modest Mouse song, it used Modest Mouse as the basis for its selection. Fair enough, but when I added songs by Talking Heads and Public Image Limited, the radio algorithm didn't account for those artists. It simply switched my radio playlist completely when the new songs started playing, showing all Talking Heads songs, all PIL songs, and so on. Pandora and Slacker do a much better job of creating custom stations based on multiple artists. (Although, of course, those services don't let you play individual songs on demand.)
Finally, as I wrote last week, I still think MOG's lack of mobile support is a fatal flaw, but one that could be easily remedied: Apple's approved iPhone clients for subscription services Rhapsody and Spotify, so why not MOG?
All of these flaws can be fixed, although licensing content takes time and convincing. I'm a big fan of competition, though, and MOG takes many of the best features of a lot of other services, combines them in one place, and improves on some of them. For that, the company should be commended.
Jelli is an online radio station whose playlist is controlled entirely by its users. It's different from radio stations that can be personalized, like Pandora or Slacker, which create unique stations for each user based on his or her tastes. Rather, Jelli is a collective--there's only one playlist, and it's ruled by the votes of the masses.
The concept is simple: Jelli shows you the songs on its playlist, then lets you vote whether each song rocks or sucks. Songs move up and down on the playlist based on their overall vote count. A few mischievous features add to the fun: each user gets a limited number of "power-ups" that will rocket a song to the next spot on the playlist, and "bombs," which send a song back to the bottom. If a song makes it to the top of the playlist but then garners a bunch of bad votes once it starts, Jelli will cut the song off mid-stream to a chorus of boos.
ZZ Top rocks. The Beastie Boys rock. But I'm not sure I want to hear them back to back.
The site's amusing for a while, although I hated the interruptions between songs to credit the person who "rocketed" each song to the top. Also, the lack of an embedded media player on the site means you have to launch a separate application like the Windows Media Player--old-school and kind of annoying. But the real fun will start on June 28, when Jelli will take over San Francisco radio station Live 105 for two hours.
Could crowd-sourcing save radio? Maybe, but Jelli's approach is a bit random for me. Even if you like both Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" and the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen," do you really want to hear them back to back? And if a playlist is decided entirely by voters, how will brand new songs and artists get a break?
I think the ideal radio station would start with a combination of fan-selected favorites and new songs selected by professionals who get paid to keep up with new music. Then, the playlist could be divided into segments--for instance, after Mix-A-Lot, it could offer a choice of other hip-hop songs, plus maybe a couple of transition songs in similar genres like funk. Users would still get to vote, but on a smaller selection. The flow would be better, and you'd hear the occasional pleasant surprise that traditional radio used to provide.
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After a rocky start, online streaming service Imeem has raced to the head of the pack, thanks in large part to an effective search engine and the variety and large selection of music that users upload and share via the site.
It also helps that Imeem has deals with the major labels, so it's in no imminent danger of facing a Seeqpod-style shutdown. (However, Warner Music recently wrote down its investment in Imeem and rival Lala.)
I uploaded this live track to Imeem, and now I have access to it from my iPhone--without having to load it directly.
Imeem launched an app for Android last year, but iPhone users were out of luck--until now.
I just downloaded the free Imeem app for iPhone. My first reaction was a definite ho-hum. The main point of the site is the ability to search and play millions of user-posted songs, but conducting a search on the iPhone app only creates a customized radio station based around that song or artist--disappointing, but probably part of Imeem's agreements with copyright holders.
Pandora and Slacker already do a fine job with customizable streaming radio apps for iPhone, so I'm not sure why I'd need another one.
Then I discovered a much better use for the Imeem app: storage in the cloud. If you create an Imeem account on the Web site, you can upload up to 100 songs to Imeem for free. (A VIP Subscription service is available as well--$29.99 per year gives you 1,000 uploads, while $99.99 a year gives you 20,000.)
My 8GB iPhone gives me enough space for some reasonably interesting playlists, but it's far from enough to store my entire music library, which runs at more than 20GB. Imeem's free level of service doesn't change the game, but it does provide a convenient storage place for huge music files that threaten to overload my phone's relatively meager flash drive. For instance, I'd never transfer the MP3 of Roger Waters performing "Dark Side of the Moon" live, which comes in at over 50MB. But I can upload it to Imeem, log in, and listen to it from anywhere with a strong 3G or Wi-Fi connection.
There's also a "share song" option that lets me e-mail a link to any song in my Imeem locker to my friends--a great way to share music you've recently discovered.
LyricFind has been trying to compile song lyrics into a searchable database since 2000, and after a few years of failed negotiations with rights holders, the company is finally getting some traction.
Earlier this month, it released a lyrics app for the Slacker RadioPlus service. The Web site has never been much use: it only lets you search on snippets of lyrics to try to find song matches; I'm much more interested in entering a song title to get the full lyrics for that song.
Pink Floyd "Echoes" = fail. The right result showed up in the fourth position, but when I clicked through, it wouldn't let me see the lyrics.
So I was excited when I heard that LyricFind was releasing an iPhone app that is supposed to do exactly that. The interface looks promising enough--there's a space to enter the song title and artist name, and a search button. Unfortunately, in my tests, it failed more often than it succeeded. When it did succeed, the correct lyrics were often buried several places down in the search results. A few times, it appeared to find the right match--such as with Pink Floyd's "Echoes," where it found a David Gilmour version of the song--but wouldn't let me click through to the full lyrics, probably because of a copyright issue. Other times, it appears to have pulled lyrics from random Internet sources that are not exactly authoritative--the matches for R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World As We Know It" are obviously wrong in a few places, for instance.
For now, it might be worth checking out the free ad-supported "Lite" version, but I can't recommend paying $3.99 for the ad-free version. I'll check back in a few months to see if they've improved the results.
LyricFind has also released a free Facebook application that not only offers lyric searches, but also lets users create quizzes, dedicate songs to their friends, and contribute lyrics to the database--maybe I'll start by uploading my own version of that R.E.M. song.
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Slacker released its radio app for the iPhone yesterday, and while it'll have a hard time topping Pandora (which was just updated to version 2.0), there's a definite place for it.
I fine-tuned Slacker's '80s Alternative station to play more fringe hits, and it did a nice job of balancing the obscure and the palatably mainstream.
Pandora's strength is the ability to create customized radio stations based on a particular artist or song--Pandora calls them "seeds." If the station's too narrow, you can add more variety by adding additional seeds, although this doesn't always work as I expect it to--for example, adding Yo La Tengo to my Pink Floyd station had no appreciable effect, still leaving me stuck in classic rock land (Zeppelin, Doors, John Lennon). If you don't even want to take this much trouble to customize a station, Pandora offers dozens of genre-specific stations, from Techno to Reggaeton.
The trouble with Pandora's genre-bound stations, though, is they're not customizable at all--you're stuck with somebody else's programming, and you can only skip six songs per station per hour (a concession to content owners, who want to sell you downloads and subscription services).
Slacker has a much better approach toward genre-specific stations: it lets you fine tune those stations along three spectra: personal favorites (play more or less of them), popularity, and year of release. (The Web version of Slacker is more like Pandora, with artist-specific stations.) This helped me create a lot of variety without having to muck about very much. For instance, when I fine-tuned Slacker's '80s Alternative station to play more "Fringe" songs, it did a nice job of mixing the obscure, like Flock of Seagulls' "Nightmares" (did you know they had more than one song?), with the weird but popular, like Peter Gabriel's "Big Time."
Both apps are free, so if you've got enough space, you can switch between them--Pandora when you're feeling finicky, Slacker when you just want somebody else to drive.
The FCC's approval Friday of the merger between satellite radio providers Sirius and XM won't solve the fundamental problems with satellite radio.
As I've written before, I was a Sirius subscriber for one year, before canceling my subscription in early 2007. It sounded bad--much worse than my current kludge of plugging my iPod Shuffle into an aux-input that connects to an unused frequency on my FM radio (don't ask...it's an '06 Subaru thing). It was a physical pain to set up. Most of all, it just wasn't worth paying $12.95 a month to hear what was essentially terrestrial radio without the advertisements. The DJs talked too much, their voices were annoying, and they stuck mostly with fairly safe major-label music fit into tightly conscribed genres. That's not how I listen to music.
As the FCC fuddled around trying to figure out whether to approve the merger, numerous alternatives for music fans have grown stronger. Terrestrial radio's still a dying joke, but the rise of mobile devices with anywhere connectivity is a real threat--I'm thinking about the imperfect but interesting Slacker, as well as the iPhone+Pandora combination that's going to take over the world. Instead of having a DJ broadcasting his selections to the world, these services narrowcast a specialized station based on your personal taste. There's still something nice about a great DJ, one who scours new releases looking for that nugget the fans will love. But even if Sirius/XM has that DJ on staff, is it worth $12.95 a month? Most music fans will say no.
There's one audience that could find the new landscape of satellite radio indispensable: hard-core sports fans. One drawback of XM and Sirius is that sports coverage was split between them, although I'm an NFL fan, so Sirius worked for me. The merger eliminates the split, meaning that fans will be able to hear just about every game they could possibly want.
MP3 players are great if you know what you like, own it, and want to listen to it exclusively. But what happens when you're sick of your music collection? Or when you're simply feeling lazy and want somebody else to do the programming for you?
Slacker has the answer: portable Internet radio. The company's been demonstrating its devices since the South by Southwest music conference in March, but it looks like the company's finally taking pre-orders.
You can get the basic idea just by visiting the Slacker home page, which has an embedded version of the software player on it. Choose from dozens of pre-set radio stations in the expected categories (classic rock, acid jazz, and so on) or program your own. Slacker's station-building process is much more customizable than Pandora, which uses educated guesses to build a station for you based on your favorite artist. With Slacker, you can add individual artists you like--imagine Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis, and Mr. Bungle on the same station, which you'll never hear on your FM (or XM or Sirius) dial--and each time you add an artist, Slacker suggests several dozen other artists in the same category.
Today, the company launched a Premium service that has no commercials, lets you skip any song you don't want to hear, and save favorite songs to playlists.
But it's the portable players that could take the service from merely interesting to potentially groundbreaking. Not only will they function like a regular MP3 player (playing AAC and WMA files as well), but they'll also connect over any public Wi-Fi network or a USB connection and update the stations automatically. And a car kit planned for next year will let you connect over unused TV satellite bandwidth.
There are some potential stumbling blocks--for instance, how will it handle the sign-in screens required by some public Wi-Fi networks?--but Jasmine over at Crave has gotten some hands-on testing time and didn't uncover any show-stoppers.
The devices will come in three levels of capacity: $200 gets you 15 stations with 500MB set aside for your personal collection, $250 gets 25 stations and 1.5GB for personal use, and $300 gets 40 stations and 4GB left over.
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