Just a short note to point out that Apple, with its recent update to iTunes, has done something we've all been asking for for years: Amazon-style predictive marketing of music.
And that's what it is. I'm ecstatic to see this arrive on my local jukebox software on the MacBook, but I've been lamenting for at least half a decade that if Amazon can predict what books and CDs I want to buy after knowing what I've bought, iTunes should do it too.
I'm not exaggerating about the five years. The iTunes Music Store launched in April of 2003, according to Wikipedia. It didn't take me long to imagine that some day the massive amount of data about my musical preferences contained by my iTunes Music Library could help recommend new music for me.
In the meantime Pandora and others have served this purpose, and it turns out I almost never use those services (though the streaming Pandora to iPhone service is pretty cool). What I've been aching for is something a little more mundane and critical, if you want robust data-driven analysis of my tastes. Which I want. I don't expect you to care about my tastes, but I bet you care about yours.
- iTunes needs to be able to keep data after a reinstall. Once upon a time I had about three years of data on how many times I'd listened to what in an iTunes library. It's still on one of these hard drives around here. But then I got a new computer, or had to reformat something, or had to reconsolidate my music collection. And it was gone. I was zeroed out. That's now happened so many times I don't bother keeping the data anymore. I've built the loss into my music psychology.
- Speaking of reconsolidating iTunes libraries... It's a monumental pain to handle a library larger than can fit on one's laptop drive. External drives are great, but you may not carry them with you, and even if you do, it's hard to have even a pocket drive connected while the computer's balanced on your leg. iTunes needs to allow users to choose which files will be mirrored on the laptop and which will just be waiting home on the external.
- This one's for the non-Mac users. A good friend of mine and I have shared a lot of music. I assure you we obeyed copyright laws at all times. But he has not frequently been a Mac user, and his various Windows and UNIX/Linux-based software do not always play well with an iTunes file structure. iTunes should facilitate my and his music lives by allowing more robust file naming and cataloging options in terms of where and how files are stored.
That's all. We'll be back to China in the morning. For now, it's back to whatever "genius" decided that an Antibalas song is similar to a dance by Kitaro.
The iTunes Store was blocked in China two weeks after an album released by Tibet activists appeared, but after the Olympics Games concluded, it was available once again.
Silicon Hutong has written a concise summary of what happened:
- The album was featured on the front page of the site - a choice I would wager was made by Apple, not by the activist organization that produced the album;
- The album went live in the days leading up to the Olympics;
- Pro-Tibetan activists have been attempting to leverage Beijing's hosting of the Olympics to draw attention to their cause;
- The activists told the Associated Press that they had contacted athletes directly and provided free downloads to the athletes and urged them to play it in Beijing as an act of solidarity.
- The activists then issued a press release telling the world that this was, in effect, a protest, and that at least 40 athletes in the village had downloaded the tunes.
- The site was then blocked, fifteen days after the album went up.
- The Games ended, the athletes went home, and the site was unblocked.
- The album is available for purchase here in Beijing under the same conditions as everything else on iTunes - got a foreign credit card that bills to a foreign address, and the songs are yours.
The post goes on to examine at great length the ups and downs of Apple's apparent decision to feature this content. It also opines that "the content itself was not a problem - what set the Chinese government off was the concern over a potential protest in the Olympic Village. Apple was a target only to the extent that it was seen by the Chinese authorities as aiding that protest."
I tend to think this particular episode, in contrast to Yahoo China, Google China, and MSN's complicated dealings with Chinese censorship, is really not such a big deal. I also think this degree of examination of possible motivations on the part of the censors is a stretch.
It's very possible that rather than concerns specifically about a protest, the album (and whole store) was blocked after the activists' press release merely because that was the first the censors heard of it. Unblocking the store after the sensitive political period of the main Games is pretty standard behavior, just as many sites were restored after the actual unrest in Tibet earlier this year.
Baidu.com, the top Chinese search engine, gets lots of its traffic from a service that tracks and links to MP3s, most of which are illegally posted. Now a Chinese music industry group is suing the site over alleged copyright violation.
The AP reports:
Music Copyright Society official Qu Jingming said in a statement posted on the society's Web site Friday that Baidu.com provided "music listening, broadcasting and downloading services in various forms on its Web site without approval, and through unfettered piracy, earning huge advertising revenue on its huge number of hits."
The copyright society said its lawsuit, filed in a Beijing court in January, claims Baidu used 50 songs illegally and demands compensation. The alleged piracy forced legitimate online-music providers to shut down, the industry group said.
This comes at a time when Google, which is hoping to catch up to Baidu in the Chinese market, is working with record companies to provide legal links to music for searchers.
Baidu, China's leading search engine, gets 7 percent of its traffic on a service that eases access to free music downloads. Google, determined to catch up after two years in what is now the second largest Internet user base on earth, may follow suit.
The Wall Street Journal describes Google's possible plans thusly: "Vivendi SA's Universal Music and about 100 other foreign and domestic record labels have been working with Top100.cn, a Beijing-based Web site that currently sells licensed music downloads for 1 yuan (about 14 cents) each, and Google. Together, Top100.cn and Google would provide free MP3 downloads with value added services, people familiar with the plans say. The new search options, for example, promise to give users free access to a database of information about their favorite artists--from concert listings to links to special ring tones."
This stands in contrast to Baidu's service, which the Journal says has led to legal disputes with record labels because illegal downloads are accessible. You get no shortage of illegal download options when you run a Baidu music search for Björk mp3s. (Sidenote: Björk herself plays Shanghai March 3.)
It will definitely be striking if Google puts legal music online. Like DVDs, CDs here are almost always illegal copies and it would take some doing to find the legal ones in many cases. Perhaps they will share ad revenue from the search pages with the record companies. Something like the ad-supported free music we hear on the radio, but available anytime and as a high-quality file...
P.S.: The Journal article includes a useful outline of the Baidu-Google competition in China.
- prev
- 1
- next
