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
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.
In its typical stately and slightly behind fashion, The New Yorker magazine this week published a piece (subscription required) about big changes in the live music industry. The article used as its grounding point a recent dispute between Bruce Springsteen and Ticketmaster over scalping and ticket withholding by artists, but the larger point was that the concert industry may be following the recording industry down the tubes--a prediction I made more than a year ago. The article has reams of supporting statistics and quotes, but the simple point is that the big acts aren't selling as many tickets as they used to, and some industry insiders are worried that there are no young bands today who will be able to fill stadiums in 20 years.
iLike Local Concerts has a wealth of information about local shows, plus crisp little images for each one.
But I was struck most by the optimism of Irving Azoff, who's currently the CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment, but who's better known as a long-time big shot in music management--he handled The Eagles, among many other acts. As he put it: "The performer on stage receiving the adulation of the fans--there's nothing like it, and that's never going away."
He's absolutely right, but I still think the days of paying more than a hundred bucks for the right to be herded into a stadium where they charge $8 for a beer and the ushers don't allow dancing and the other "fans" yell if you stand up and the sound sucks and the performers can't play their instruments and they look like tiny ants--that is, the big stadium concert experience--is becoming a relic like corded telephones and huge microwave ovens. It's too expensive, it's not fun enough, and there are far more opportunities for collective entertainment today than when I was a teenager back in the dark (pre-online) ages. Where are kids going to spend their allowance--on Xbox Live for $50 a year, or the latest enormo-tour for $50 (or more) an hour?
That's bad news for Ticketmaster, but good news for smaller venues. The only trouble with these smaller shows is that you might not hear about them unless you've got a good local weekly paper and are willing to scan the club listings regularly. That's where a new crop of Web and mobile applications come into play. I'm still enjoying iConcertCal for iPhone, which I've only had for a week, but has already guided me to one amazing band (Garaj Mahal) I had no idea was in town until I opened the app.
Today, Seattle social-music company iLike upped the ante with a update to iLike Local Concerts, a very attractive iPhone app that was originally released in May. It downloads and caches a bunch of local concert information on first connection to reduce wait times in the future, and features a slick user interface with images for each listed artist. The updated version, which should be in the iTunes store shortly, will match iConcertCal's ability to build a list of favorite artists based on your iTunes library, and will add notifications when one of your favorites announces a show in your town. Best of all, while iConcertCal costs $2.99, iLike Local Concerts is free.
Live music's far from dead. You just have to know where to look.
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If you're not using Grooveshark to try out music on-demand before buying it, you should be. I've found no other service that offers its combination of simplicity, features, and song selection--10 million and growing, according to the organization.
Today, Grooveshark announced a couple of extensions that should increase awareness. If you're on Facebook like most of the world seems to be, Grooveshark Share Song will let you share any song in Grooveshark's database in only three steps. There are other Facebook apps that offer similar features--iLike has been offering full-song playback on Facebook since last August--but Grooveshark is impressive in its simplicity. It doesn't ask you to register. It doesn't try to get you to take quizzes or create playlists or listen to world exclusives. Just type a song name--you can add the artist if you want--then share it with individual friends or post it to your profile, and you're done.
That's really all there is to it.
Grooveshark also released a Wordpress plug-in that lets you post songs to your Wordpress blog, and a new API for its link-shortening service, Tinysong, which makes it easy for anybody with a Web page to create a short, simple link that goes directly to a song on Grooveshark. Simple enough for a rock musician to understand!
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I tend to be skeptical of "battle of the bands" contests in the physical world. There's often an entry fee to participate, which basically means bands are paying to play in some sort of showdown showcase. Often there's no quality gate--if you can afford the entry fee, you're in, and that means that the only people in the audience are other participating bands. The prizes tend to be loaded with catches, like a "recording contract" that forces you to sign over your publishing rights to the organization sponsoring the contest.
But it appears that some online competitions are actually worthwhile. The other night I took a look at OurStage, which launched in September. There's no fee to enter, and artists retain full rights to their music. The prizes are worth competing for: winners of each monthly contest can take home $5,000 in cash, win mentoring sessions with music industry folks, and even earn slots at festivals people actually care about like Bonnaroo.
The song on the left is good, but it's not experimental--clean vocals, jazz chords, and a drum machine. The song on the right isn't particularly experimental either, but there's no New Age category, so it's a reasonable fit.
(Credit: OurStage screenshot)From a fan's perspective, the voting interface is excellent, and the company claims to have taken pains to make it hard for artists to game the system--you're seldom asked to vote on the same act twice, and never asked to vote on the same head-to-head matchup. After spending a couple hours with it, I can say that the artists on the site compare favorably to Garageband.com, a very similar service that later spawned iLike, a social-networking service for discovering and recommending music.
Still, OurStage suffers from the same problem that I experienced with Garageband.com: there's not much incentive to keep voting. I like to hear new music, but of the 20 or so songs I sampled on OurStage, only three were interesting enough for me to listen all the way through. I can't imagine that casual music fans will spend a lot of time listening to unknown bands on the site unless OurStage offers some incentive--say, a chance to win free downloads from big-name artists, concert tickets, or other prizes.
The other problem: lax enforcement of genres. I like experimental music, but found lots of other types of songs in that category, including Christian guitar rock, hip-hop, and jazz-pop, all of which would fit better into other genres. I imagine these artists thought it'd be easier to win in the experimental channel than in the more popular channels. I guess they didn't expect any Moonchild fans to check them out.
The Filter is an entertainment recommendation service that asks questions about your taste, then tries to refer you to CDs and DVDs you might be interested in buying. (The site will eventually add other forms of entertainment, such as TV shows.) It's been in a closed beta since earlier this year, and has gotten some press thanks to the involvement of art-rocker Peter Gabriel. On Tuesday, it opened to the masses.
The idea's not new--Amazon.com has had a recommendation engine for years, and many online music services like Pandora, iLike, and Jango employ variations on that theme.
I filled out the survey asking what genres of music I like, and was somewhat surprised that it only offered about a dozen genres. After noting that I liked jazz, "rock/pop" (a genre so huge as to be basically useless), and electronic, it kept recommending mainstream modern hip-hop, like 50 Cent and Ludacris. Not my bag, although I do own music by Outkast, plus more obscure artists like Mos Def and DJ Spooky. (How can an algorithm ever reconcile those types of contradictions? I have no idea.)
I cleared that up by going back and giving hip-hop my lowest rating. Then the engine kept throwing up pop-rock acts that I'm already familiar with and know I don't like, such as Good Charlotte and Fall Out Boy. After a few more low ratings, it seems to have realized that I'm in my late 30s, and on the front page it recommended three CDs that I heard about a million times back in the early 90s--Pearl Jam's Ten, the Counting Crows' first record, and "Mother's Milk" by the Chili Peppers. All OK records for their time, but not exactly new discoveries. It also recommended a Bruce Springsteen collection--not his last album, Magic, which is actually his best in years and which I might theoretically not have heard since it got very little radio play.
The recommendations interface could also use some improvement: when I click "Improve My Recommendations" it takes me back to the genres page, which I've already filled out once. It doesn't offer me any artists to rate (like iLike does). There's a slider that lets you tell the engine to make recommendations "more surprising" or "more expected" but it's only available when you click through to an album page, and it didn't seem to make much difference when I moved it all the way to the "surprising" side. (Question: if you want recommendations that are "more expected," why would you need a recommendation engine at all?)
Maybe the interface and recommendation engine will improve over time. But based on my early testing, I'm guessing The Filter's meant for busy Internet users who view "entertainment" as an occasional product to be consumed, but don't know where to start. It doesn't seem to be for music (or movie) geeks or collectors. Fair enough. Just not for me.
Online community Imeem launched in August 2005, and although I wasn't familiar with the service at the time, it sounds like a blend of several popular features: social networking, instant messaging, blogging and photo sharing. At some point, the company added a feature that would let users create playlists from their personal music collections, then stream these playlists to other users. By spring 2007, the service claimed 16 million active users.
The concept was a bit like MySpace.com, and like that site, Imeem eventually drew a copyright infringement lawsuit from a major record label--Warner Music Group, in this case.
Imeem quickly responded by licensing more than 3 million tracks from various independent labels and publishers, and signing a deal with Snocap to help run a new ad-funded service.
Created by original Napster founder Shawn Fanning, Snocap provides a technology platform to track usage of particular songs so that the owners of those songs can be fairly compensated. It's a nuts-and-bolts kind of business, which is a good place to be in the music industry today: nobody knows exactly how the next-generation music business is going to look, but most agree that it'll involve digital files being exchanged over some kind of network, and somebody needs to track all those exchanges if there's going to be any music industry, rather than a billion independent artists all trying to chase their own narrow slice of action.
A couple of days ago, Warner agreed to drop its lawsuit against Imeem and offer its catalog in exchange for a cut of advertising revenues.
Could this be the model that finally causes legal content-sharing sites to take off? It's not enough for the record industry to build yet another file-sharing network, then wait for customers to show up.
To compete with the "darknet," new services have to offer something singularly interesting, such as ease of use, attractive social-networking features, or integration with existing products and services (which seems to be an approach that's working for iLike). If that's the case, these services will build an userbase until they finally cross the threshold where one or more major content owners recognize them, at which point they'll have to take the necessary steps to get legal. Sort of a completion-backward principle for online music.
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