The first free on-demand music service I ever encountered was Songerize. The page was a simple white box on a red background. Enter the name of a song, and it would scour the Seeqpod database of user-posted content, find the song, and begin streaming it immediately.
Pick a song, any song.
There were no fancy playlist features like Grooveshark, no social-networking features like Imeem, no embedded player or song locker like LaLa, just instant gratification. Unfortunately, Seeqpod declared bankruptcy and around the same time, Songerize became useless.
Now, Songerize creator Will Johnson is back with a second take on the same concept: Songite. The interface looks almost identical to its predecessor, and the concept's the same: instant gratification.
There are two important differences between Songite and Johnson's last work, however. First, you can now arrange songs into playlists, then share those playlists via simple URLs. Second, Songite now draws content from YouTube and Imeem, two sites that have more or less received the blessing of the big record labels and are in no danger of being sued out of existence. Bookmark it for the next time you've got a song stuck in your head and simply have to hear it right now.
YouTube's a great source of music, including live shows and bootleg recordings that are hard to find anywhere else, and application developers are taking advantage of YouTube's relative openness to help users find and organize that music in new ways.
Last month, London-based start-up TubeRadio.fm launched a Web application that lets you search YouTube, organize the content into playlists, and share those playlists with friends via an e-mail link, Twitter post, or Facebook profile update. If you go through the free registration, you'll be able to save playlists as well. The concept is very similar to that of Muziic, but without any software to download and install--this is strictly a Web application, like Grooveshark.
TubeRadio.fm offers an iTunes-like interface on top of music content from YouTube.
TubeRadio has a few interesting wrinkles that make it worth checking out. If you select the "Discography" tab, then search on an artist's name, it will return a list of that artist's albums. Select any album, and it will cobble together a streaming playlist of songs from the album in in the proper order--not all of the songs will be the original studio versions, but might be lower-quality live or bootleg recordings. It all depends on what YouTube has available.
For each album, TubeRadio also provides links to buy the physical CD from Amazon, or MP3 downloads from 7digital.
When a song is playing, a window at the bottom of the screen contains tabs with information such as lyrics (this doesn't work all the time, but seems reliable for studio-based recordings), plus an artist biography, discography, and suggestions for other albums you might like (the last three features are provided by Last.fm, which is owned by CNET News publisher CBS Interactive).
All in all, it's a slick and convenient way to discover the great wealth of music available on YouTube, and it doesn't cost a dime.
Teenage developer David Nelson has been busy since launching Muziic, which lets users access the millions of songs on YouTube from a convenient Windows desktop application that recalls iTunes. The fledgling company managed to gain approval from YouTube by changing the size of the video display and making other user interface changes. Since then, Nelson has been working on version 2.0 of the application, which became available Thursday.
The most notable features are the addition of some Internet radio stations organized by category, and the ability to play MP3 and Windows Media Audio files stored on your hard drive. (It doesn't seem to support AAC files. Judging from the video "visualization" that appears when you play a local file, I think he basically customized a version of the Windows Media Player, which won't support AAC until Windows 7.) There's also a text-chat function, automatic posting of the currently playing song to your Twitter feed, and the ability to save playlists to your hard drive. The user interface has been improved as well, making much better use of available screen real estate.
Muziic 2.0 includes online radio.
But the main draw of Muziic is still the incredible amount of material that's available through YouTube. You might not find all the studio recordings you'd get through a subscription service like Rhapsody, but I've found no better single source for live recordings and interviews. A single search can keep you going for hours--I've got days' worth of Charlie Mingus sessions right here in front of me, all of which showed up with a single search on the jazz composer's last name. All in all, this is a fine update to a very useful free download for Windows users.
RealNetworks began public beta-testing version 12 of its venerable RealPlayer today. Like the last version, the free RealPlayer SP (which stands for "social and portable") lets you rip streaming Flash videos from the Web to your hard drive. What's new: you can also transcode them into appropriate formats for playback on portable devices. If you're using an iPod or iPhone, the RealPlayer will even generously insert the transcoded version directly into your iTunes library.
RealPlayer SP adds an unobtrusive "Download This Video" box whenever you encounter a Flash-based video in your Web browser.
Then I remembered that one of the best features of Microsoft's new Bing search engine, which launched earlier this month, is its video search. (The predecessor to Bing, Live Search, had most of the same video search features as well.) There's nothing wrong with Google's video search, but I personally prefer the Bing interface, and I like the way the video is previewed right in the search results.
Using them together was a breeze--once installed, the RealPlayer automatically adds a small pop-up message to any embedded video in your browser (I tested it with both Internet Explorer and Firefox), asking you if you want to download the video. Transcoding takes a few minutes, particularly for long videos, but in the last half-hour I've managed to rip the new Grizzly Bear video, the reunited Pink Floyd's entire Live 8 performance, and a live version of Ozzy's "Crazy Train" with Randy Rhoads into iTunes in both video (H.264) and audio-only (MP3) formats. All came from different original sources, but all were available through Bing.
I'm particularly impressed with the RealPlayer's video-to-audio transcoder--my 8GB iPhone is way too small to fit a lot of videos on it, and transcoding video to audio files has been a bit of a hassle in the past. Now I can do it on the fly, as I download them. Kudos to RealNetworks on a nice piece of software.
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The jukebox in the sky is a reality. When I started this blog two years ago, it was all but impossible to open a Web browser, type a song name, and have that song start playing immediately. Now, it's commonplace.
Meuzer found Roy Harper's "The Game," while Grooveshark didn't.
I still like the simple approach of Grooveshark--the other night, my brother and I set up a running DJ battle on it to reminisce and introduce each other to new tunes--but Meuzer is an interesting alternative. Search on a song or artist name, and Meuzer pulls results from YouTube--very similar to the Muziic app I looked at earlier this year--as well as Imeem and other third-party sources. Click any of the results, and you get a four-arrow widget that lets you play, share, rate, or add the song to a playlist. Hit "play," and the song begins playing in an embedded window depending on the original source (a YouTube result begins playing a small YouTube video, for instance). Other features require you to log in, and currently the only way to do that is with a Facebook ID.
Meuzer seems to have a broader selection of music than Grooveshark: a search on Roy Harper's "The Game"--a song I couldn't find on Grooveshark for the DJ battle with my brother--got several results from YouTube. But I don't like the forced log-in, particularly for the essential playlist feature, and the search results aren't organized nearly as well. For instance, searching for the dub artist Scientist returned multiple results for "The Scientist" by Coldplay (eww) but no Scientist. On Grooveshark, I simply selected the Artists tab and the top 10 results were all Scientist tunes. Still, Meuzer could be a useful fallback for songs I can't find on other services.
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Last week, producer Danger Mouse (best known as half of Gnarls Barkley) finally released his new album, a collaboration with noise-pop artist Sparklehorse called "The Long Dark Night of the Soul." The catch: because of an ongoing legal battle with record label EMI, the "album" isn't an album at all, but rather a blank CD-R with artwork created by movie producer David Lynch. If you're interested in supporting the cause, you can order the CD-R with a poster ($10) or full book of artwork ($50) here.
But how do you get the music? NPR has an exclusive first listen, and the album's also available on YouTube (for now). But turning these streams into music files that you could burn onto the CD-R used to require a desktop application like Audacity.
Not now. Farkie is a Web site that offers the ability to rip the audio from YouTube videos into a variety of file types, including WAV, AVI, and MP3, as well as save entire videos as QuickTime (MOV), Windows Media (WMV), or Flash Video (FLV) files. It's a little clunky: you have to enter the URL of the YouTube video into the address bar on Farkie, then select the proper element from the results--it helps to uncheck all the boxes except "media" so you'll see only audio and video files. Then you have to wait while Farkie converts the stream to your chosen file type on its servers. Finally, you have to right-click to download the file from Farkie to your hard drive. It's not fast, but it's free and it works.
In theory, it should be able to convert streams from other sites as well, but I had trouble with the NPR link because it's an embedded Flash application and Farkie could only find the JavaScript files used to launch the application and various other side-links; it couldn't find the underlying media files. But there's plenty of material on YouTube to fill your hard drive.
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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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On Saturday, Warner Music pulled all videos involving its music from YouTube after failing to reach a licensing deal with the Google-owned video site. (More accurately, it asked YouTube to pull them, and YouTube was forced by law to comply.)
Now, Silicon Alley Insider reports that Warner and the other three majors--Universal, Sony, and EMI--may be in talks to create their own YouTube competitor.
Before you scoff, recall the lesson of Hulu. First announced in late 2007 by NBC Universal and News Corp, Hulu was originally scorned as the "clown company"--everybody assumed that these old media dinosaurs wouldn't be able to figure out how to offer users a clean Web experience, and that users would never sit through advertisements. A year later, it's getting about a quarter as many unique viewers as YouTube--and with much less content and no presence outside the U.S. AP just picked it as its Web site of the year.
A label-sponsored video site may be a similar winner, if they design it for ease of use and are able to negotiate all the rights to post the content we really want. (Like videos of the one-off Zeppelin reunion last year, which were pulled from YouTube almost as quickly as they appeared.)
There may not be a ton of demand for watching music videos on the Web, but think of all the user-generated videos featuring major-label music. The big problem is that nobody really knows how to sell advertising against online video yet, but look ahead five years, and this is a good bet.
It's sometimes lost in all the flavor-of-the-week mix-remix-download-social networking sites, but eMusic has been selling DRM-free MP3s--meaning they can be played on the iPod or any other player--from independent labels and artists for a decade now, and has a reasonable claim to be the No. 2 music store behind iTunes.
The venerable MP3 retailer is getting a redesign.
(Credit: eMusic)A planned redesign is meant to help eMusic retain this position. According to reports in Fortune and Digital Music News, the site's slated for an overhaul beginning next week. Artist pages will be updated with Wikipedia biographies, original editorial content, and embedded YouTube videos. In a nod to Web 2.0, fans will be able to embed portions of these artist profiles, including streaming song samples, in their Facebook pages, as well as on other social-recommendation sites such as Digg. A navigational update is also in the works--for such a well-established site, eMusic is kind of hard to get around.
One thing they're not getting rid of: the subscription-based purchasing model. That's always been a deal-breaker for me, as I simply don't download 30 songs from independent artists and labels per month. Still, if you're a voracious consumer of new music, and prefer legal downloads to file-sharing or buying physical recordings, eMusic remains an excellent choice.
A follow-up to my previous post on Qbox: they fixed whatever was preventing the player from playing songs embedded in MySpace pages, and I can now happily recommend it anybody who frequently listens to music on MySpace, Bebo, or YouTube.
As the Qplayer plays this Sigur Ros video from YouTube, I can conduct a search for a friend's band, and add songs from their MySpace to my playlist. The only drawback: search results appear in a separate window.
(Credit: Screenshot)A quick recap: the Qbox Web site lets you conduct searches for artists across MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube simultaneously. When results appear, you click a small play button on the Web page and the Qplayer launches and begins playing the song or video. You can conduct other searches and add them to your currently playing list, mixing audio and video in whatever order you like. The service is interesting because--like many younger music listeners--it makes no distinction between multiplatinum artists and your best friend's garage band. As long as they're on MySpace, Bebo, or YouTube, they're easily available from Qbox.
Qbox has the concept right, but the overall experience is a little more awkward than it could be--you can conduct searches from the player, but the results appear in a separate Web browser window. Then, when you select an option like "play" or "add to player" from the Web page in the browser, it adds the song back to the Qplayer playlist. I'm not sure why this back-and-forth has to exist, given that Qplayer is basically a modified Web browser--why not just display the search results window in a separate tab within the player? It also has an annoying habit of asking you if you're sure you want to close the player every time you try to shut it down--unnecessary dialog boxes are a pet peeve of mine. But I trust this is just a first iteration, and I'll be keeping track as they improve the service and the software.
