Digital Noise: Music and Tech

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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A quick note from the continuing Yahoo drama: today the company agreed to sell off Launchcast, its streaming music service, to CBS. (Disclosure: CBS is the publisher of News.com.) This continues Yahoo's movement out of the music biz--it sold its subscription service to RealNetworks back in February.

If it keeps going at this rate, CBS will have to add an ear to its logo.

More interesting than Yahoo's exit is the buyer. Launchcast now sits alongside Last.fm and AOL Radio (which is best-loved on the iPhone) in CBS's online radio arsenal. According to this report in All Things Digital, Launchcast will become more like AOL Radio, focusing primarily on pre-programmed playlists and Webcasts of terrestrial radio stations, while Last.fm will remain the company's flagship property for user-generated playlists.

It's interesting that CBS still sees a lot of opportunity in preprogrammed (top-down) online radio. By way of comparison, look at News Corp's recent launch of MySpace Music, which is focused on the idea that users will hunt down their favorite artists and songs and then assemble playlists (bottom up). CBS's approach makes sense--you might as well appeal to all segments of the listening audience, and some Internet users simply don't have the time to bother with custom playlists, or even with recommendation-driven services like Last.fm and Pandora.

Lala.com has a history of coming up with innovative ideas that don't quite conquer the world. The company is best known for its online used-CD trading service, which is an interesting idea but works well only if you have a large list of CDs available to trade.

Lala.com will let you stream any song once at no charge, and an unlimited number of times for $0.10 per song.

(Credit: Lala.com)

It also offers a music "locker" service that allows you to upload your music then listen to it from any computer with an Internet connection...but it only works with MP3 files, so you're out of luck if you've been using (for example) iTunes to rip your CDs to AAC for the last four years. The site was also early to experiment with offering free streaming files, but has apparently shuttered that service because the numbers didn't work out.

Now the company's beta-testing another streaming service that lets you select any song to stream once. Then, if you want to stream it again, you can pay a one-time fee of $0.10 and get perpetual streaming rights to it.

Unfortunately, this pay-per-song streaming model occupies a weird space halfway between all-you-can-eat subscription services and the free streaming files available elsewhere. If I'm a hardcore music fan who likes to discover and listen to lots of new music online, I'll probably subscribe to a service like Rhapsody--one monthly payment gets me streaming access to all the music I want. But if I just want instant gratification--say, for example, I need to hear Iron Maiden's "Run to the Hills" right now--I can turn to Imeem, or Last.fm, or the Songerize site (which uses the Seeqpod search engine to discover music files all over the Web, then provides a simple embedded player).

So who would pay $0.10 for unlimited rights to stream a particular song? Probably people who are already using the Lala.com digital locker and want a cost-effective way to add new music to it without having to seek it out online or rip it from a CD and then upload it manually.

Like most online radio stations, Last.fm has been forced by music copyright owners to behave more or less like a traditional radio station. A highly customizable radio station--users could enter a favorite artist and Last.fm would pick a song by that artist, then add in songs from similar artists--but a radio station nonetheless. Content was pushed, not pulled. Users who wanted to pick songs to play on demand either had to download them from a service like iTunes or pay for a subscription service like Rhapsody (which does let you stream 25 songs a month for free).

Starting today, you can listen to this Animal Colletive song--all 12:33 of it--on Last.fm.

(Credit: Screenshot)

Today, Last.fm takes a big step forward, becoming the first online service to let users pick nearly any song out of its collection and play it, on demand, for free, three times. After that, users will have to pay download it from one of Last.fm's partners, such as iTunes or Amazon. A forthcoming subscription service that will give you unlimited listens, a la Rhapsody.

Last.fm, which was acquired by CBS last May, is also launching a program for artists without a traditional recording or publishing deal, which will allow them to upload their songs to the service and get paid each time a song is streamed. For small independent artists, this could become an important outlet like CD Baby--only instead of having your work hidden alongside thousands of other relatively obscure artists, it might appear on a user-customizable radio station squeezed between Animal Collective and Arcade Fire. (Although Last.fm will have to be careful to ensure that every band that claims they sound just like U2 actually sounds something like U2.)

The obvious caveats: the three play limit, the fact that these are streamed files and therefore can't (easily or legally) be transferred from a computer for listening elsewhere, and the on-demand tracks aren't presented on each artist's main page (although you can search for them directly, or click through to the album listing on the main artist page for a full list of songs from each album). Also, it's available only in the U.S., U.K., and Germany today, with other countries to be added later.

Still, hats off to Last.fm for delivering the free, on-demand songs to those of us who don't frequent file-trading networks.

When I first read about Jango in an alumni update from my alma mater (go Ephs), my first thought was "how many more streaming online music services does the world need?" We've already got Last.fm, Pandora, Slacker, iLike, Imeem, Ezmo...can I stop now?

But Jango offers a refreshingly clear and simple take on the theme. As with many of these services, you start by entering a favorite artist's name...and a song starts playing. You don't need to sign in, download any software, invite friends, choose other favorite artists, or let anything connect to your music library.

With Jango, the music player's always at the top of the screen.

(Credit: Screenshot)

Like Last.fm and Pandora, Jango immediately creates a personalized radio station with songs by similar artists--I picked Led Zeppelin because they've been in the news so much lately, and it immediately suggested guitar-oriented classic rock bands like Black Sabbath, AC/DC, and Pink Floyd. But unlike the case with many of these other services, it's super easy to tailor your station--if you don't want to hear a particular artist, click the trash can icon; if you hate a particular song, rate it with a sad face and it'll never play again; if you want to add another main artist around which the station will be built, click "edit station", then enter the name of the artist.

I added Ennio Morricone to see if I could throw it off, but it cleverly suggested Luis Bacalov and Angelo Badalamente, two other soundtrack composers in the same vein. (No Nino Rota, though.) When I added Pink Floyd, it suggested new age stalwart Vangelis, but it was easy to eliminate him by clicking the trash can.

There's a social-networking aspect to the site--isn't there always?--but once again the service offers a clear set of choices in an interface anybody could figure out. You can find people who have a certain favorite band, listen to their customized radio station, invite them to be your friend, send quick messages to friends, and so on. But the social aspect is secondary to the music: the interface always guides you back to artist names (such as "people who like the artist you're listening to now also like...."), and the player's always in the upper-right hand corner, and it's always playing a song (unless you pause it).

Clear mission, simple interface, lots of ways to discover new tunes. Jango's worth a visit.

In Seattle, there's a classic rock station, KZOK, that's been around forever. It was already old when I discovered it in junior high school in the early 1980s, and of all the music stations in Seattle, it's the only one that still has exactly the same format. I mean, the playlist yesterday is exactly the same as the playlist in 1982, although they might stick in a song by an artist that used to be known as "new wave" (U2, Talking Heads, Pretenders), or a band that didn't exist in 1982 (Guns and Roses), and there's probably a little bit less of the 70s guitar stalwarts like Robin Trower or Montrose (but only a little less!). It's still preset on my car radio for those rare times when I'm stuck without my iPod or Zune and am sick of listening to NPR and my usual college/indie radio station.

But one of the things that's always bugged me about "classic rock" radio--and this isn't to pick on KZOK, they're using a format that's common across the U.S.--is the definition of the word "classic." On one hand, it's obviously a marketing tactic--classic rock is music that was popular on FM rock radio in the 70s, and other songs that could appeal to the people who listened those stations--I'm guessing mostly white males born in the 50s. But there's always that song or that artist that makes you wonder "how did this make the cut?" Musical taste is subjective, but how many people get excited whenever, say, a Bob Seger tune comes on the radio? I mean, he sort of rocked back in the day, but do people still really love him? Do people ever come home from a hard day at work and grab a beer and put on Bob Seger? A whole album? All the way through? If not, then why is he still played on classic rock radio in such heavy rotation?

A couple of days ago, the Digital Audio Insider blog did an interesting thing with numbers from Internet radio service Last.fm. For each artist, that service shows how many individuals have listened to the station featuring that artist, and the total number of songs by that artist that have been played by all listeners. If you divide songs by listeners, you get the average number of songs each listener has played for each artist. This gives you a very rough measure of listener devotion to particular artists.

Of course the technique is flawed. It only measures a very particular audience: computer users who listen to this particular music service on their computers. Artists with deeper catalogs should tend to have higher numbers than artists with only an album or two. And artists with really long songs might have lower numbers than those with short songs.

Nonetheless, the results on Digital Audio Insider contained some interesting tidbits. For example, I listen to a lot of bands in a genre that some call "post rock." (Horrible term, but I use it for lack of a better one...it basically means long, heavily amplified, mostly instrumental songs played by fairly large ensembles, with lots of big building dynamics...sort of a poor man's classical music played by ex-metalheads or -punks, I suppose.) Within this genre, fans of Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Ros, and Mogwai apparently listen to lots of songs by these bands--their averages are all in the 30s. But Godspeed You Black Emperor, who practically invented the genre, has a much lower average--down in the 20s.

I really like Godspeed. But come to think of it, I often skip their songs when they come up on random shuffle. I like to think it's because they're too long, too heavy, and demand too much attention. Or that they're only listenable in the context of a complete album. But then again, Sigur Ros has many of the same qualities, and I always listen when they show up. So maybe I don't like Godspeed as much as I thought I did.

Digital Audio Insider's chart focused on newer indie-rock artists, with The Beatles as the control group. But that got me thinking about classic rock radio, so I did my own measurements.

Pink Floyd came out way at the top of the list, with 49.27 plays per listener (athough still way short of The Beatles' 64.48). This was somewhat gratifying, as I'm a big fan...then again, I guess I just fit right into Last.fm's target demographic. Bob Dylan (34.14) and Led Zeppelin (32.36) were in the 30s, which isn't surprising given their lasting influence and breadth of audience, and Rush also scored high (33.68), which shouldn't be a surprise to anybody who's ever met a hardcore Rush fan. Then again, the Grateful Dead have similarly hardcore fans, but they were much lower at 24.71.

Queen surprised me with a 27.59. Other relatively high scorers included U2 (26.76), David Bowie (26.29), and AC/DC (24.99). The Stones (22.27) and The Who (20.41) scored surprisingly low, given their breadth of influence and prominence on classic rock radio.

But guess who was at the very bottom of the list--below power-pop like Van Halen (15.85) and Journey (13.78), below quintessential 80s pop bands like Talking Heads (17.13) and The Police (13.36), even below my other favorite "why do they play this band?" band, Bad Company (8.52)...Bob Seger. On average, his listeners played only 7.89 of his songs on Last.fm.

(Sorry to pick on Bob Seger, but it had to be someone. He's just the one that always sticks out to me. For the record, I still kind of sort of like his songs "Katmandu" and "Get Out Of Denver," the latter of which contains the great line "cause you look just like a commie and you might just be a member.")