globallistic

Metadata, Microformats and Tomahawk... Oh My!

2011-04-15T12:17:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I wrote a post over on the Tomahawk Blog showing how with just a little html markup, any page could be made to work with Tomahawklet.

Today, I wanted to just do a little bit more showing how you could make song info in sentences/paragraphs playable. It's actually the same exact thing, but the idea I am toying with is how bloggers can add more value to their context and keep their writing more fluid and natural if they didn't have to jam a big flash widget (e.g. YouTube, MP3 player, etc.) in the middle of all their paragraphs.

Please excuse my inane drivel, this is why we need real bloggers and reviews to provide better context than my example below... (hint: if you have dragged the Tomahawklet button to your browser toolbar, click it now)

I'm digging the new song "Lippy Kids" by Elbow. It's pretty mellow, but still sticks to your ribs. You don't like that?
OK, maybe give Grouplove's "Colours" a spin. A nice upbeat ditty, no?

Too much? Alright maybe we can bring it back down a bit with
Sadie from Fences.

I'm thinking a Wordpress widget that let users just highlight/indicate what word is an artist name, and which track belongs to it, could be pretty cool....

(Just click "close" and the shade will close but continue to play. To reopen, just click the bookmarklet button in your browser toolbar again.)

Why I think Tomahawk is the future of music consumption...

2011-03-28T06:39:00.002-05:00

If you follow me on Twitter then you know I have been very vocal lately about the new media player (nay, music player) called Tomahawk. Perhaps some of you hopped over to the site, looked at the screenshot and thought... "oh, yet another spreadsheet for music files". If you did, I urge you to look further as it is so much more.

Instead of me explaining the features (you can get better descriptions of those at www.gettomahawk.com), I'm going to talk about some of the value propositions that I hope to see Tomahawk deliver. Specifically, a day in which music fans can easily share their tastes across a range of music service providers. Today, if you subscribe to Rhapsody and I get my music from eMusic, we can't easily share our music. And no... I'm not talking about sharing your music files, I'm talking about your music taste and discoveries.

Today we live in a world of seemingly endless number of content silos, your playlists and taste data largely locked up within their walls with no easy way to get them out or share them. Twitter and Facebook have, in many ways, made this specific problem much worse. For example, let's say you post a link to your favorite new song. Unless I subscribe to the same service (or you have linked to a free source) then I have to click the link, see what the song was (maybe listen to a snippet), then go and search for it from whatever source/service/store I use. Not really the poster child for an easy user experience. The increasing fragmentation of the music provider market means that every day my Twitter stream is filled with virtual spam for music services I don't use (and that's saying something because I use many). I don't blame the people I follow, they just want to tell their followers about some great new discovery, but the link is largely noise as it provides no value to me - unless I establish a relationship with whatever source/service/store they use. In my mind, this is one of the main contributors to YouTube (and MP3 links) becoming the defacto music sharing standard. Yes, they are free, but more importantly they "just play".

Last.fm (which I love), is the closest thing to a music taste translation layer we have today, but it doesn't solve the problem in the way Tomahawk has the potential to. While I can get loads of great data around other peoples' (as well as my own) tastes, that data is not easily actionable. I can visit their profile pages, or subscribe to an RSS feed of a friends' data, but then I'm stuck having to manually resolve that information against my music sources. Why can't I subscribe to this information as a dynamically updated playlist in my media player, and have each of those tracks automatically resolved against all of the content I have the rights and ability to access?

This brings me to my next pain point. I have the rights, and ability, to access content from a large number of sources - yet no single interface that lets me easily do so. Content from my home computer, my laptop, streaming tracks from my Ex.fm library, SoundCloud, Topspin widgets, band sites, label sites, music blogs. The list is endless.... and unfortunately so are the required number of interfaces one has to use. Not to mention that many of those web-interfaces provide (in my opinion) a suboptimal user experience.

"What tab is that music coming from?!"
"Bah, I accidentally navigated away from the page/closed by browser and interrupted playback.

Now imagine a world where we share music metadata, and the logic of how that audio gets rendered is determined by the consumer of the data, not the sharer. Under the hood that user can can add plug-ins/content resolvers for all of the music sources that they have rights too (local machine, remote machine, subscription service, web sources, etc.). Spotify users sharing with iTunes users sharing with Rhapsody users, sharing with Mog users. Tastes and curation freely flowing. Music discovery propagates like never before.

OK, so now we are all able to speak the same raw musical language (metadata), but what about the context? But wait... (as they say on bad TV commercials)... there is more! Tomahawk has a web server, API (see the awesome Playdar for more info), and authentication mechanism built-in. Now bloggers, writers, curators, reviewers and more can provide context around music without having a way to provide the files/streams too (or go through the legal/licensing gauntlet required to do so). Instead of providing links to a half dozen music providers, or a bunch of MP3 links, or embedded YouTube videos - these curators can rely on you to bring your (accessible) content to their context. They can just provide metadata that Tomahawk can see, and use, to go out and automatically fetch the streams in background and play back to you (through their websites).

Not only does this benefit the consumers and the curators, but also the music subscription providers. Why should they be incuring the royalty obligations to stream me a song that I already own? As I have worked 3 music subscription services myself, I can - without hesitation - tell you that every penny saved is another penny closer to a having a sustainable business model. With Tomahawk's cascading content resolving framework, if you already have a copy of the song it will play that one instead of unnecessarily streaming it. When it comes to the next song in queue, it independently finds the best source for that one and seamlessly, and invisibly, handles the transition between the two. As a consumer, you no longer have to know or care where the music is - you get to just focus on what you want to listen to. For those that have heard me on this soapbox before, they know that I like to call this "taking the work out of play".

There are a lot of previously impossible user experiences that this content resolution approach enables. I have tried to touch on some of them, and hopefully I haven't confused the hell out of you. As with many innovative technologies it is sometimes hard to convey the value until you try it yourself. But, in the meantime maybe these screencasts can help:

Screencast of Tomahawk (and bookmarklet) showing the beauty of decoupling metadata from the file source. http://t.co/nqs0Lba
Firefox + Greasemonkey + Playdar HTTP API + Wikipedia + Tomahawk = true love. http://www.screencast.com/t/iEyaewmuo
Creating a custom artist station (using the @echonest api). http://t.co/PRyVzgm.

The good news is that Tomahawk is totally free and open-source. So not only can you use it, you can directly participate in the realization of the value the platform can deliver. I hope you enjoy it, I know I sure am.

My Favorite Albums of 2010 (Updated)

2010-12-07T08:07:00.002-05:00

There are still a couple of weeks to go, but taking a sneak peak at my favorites albums of 2010 (via @mark_reeder's hack).

Filterable Music Charts

The problem with always listening via shuffle all is that I don't agree with the order of my list, I may need to editorially override some of my implicit play behavior (as represented by this list below). Alas, no one seems to have reliable release date - making these hacks a bit hit-or-miss at times - but Mark has enabled you to manually set the release date on the albums it doesn't have data for (by setting the slider to start a Year 0).

What albums did I totally sleep on this year?

The Suburbs by The Arcade Fire

Romance Is Boring by Los Campesinos! (2010)

Mavericks by Johnossi (2010)

American Gong (Original Version) by Quasi

Gorilla Manor by Local Natives (2010)

The Courage Of Others by Midlake (2010)

Go by Jónsi (2010)

Astro Coast by Surfer Blood (2010)

The Winter Of Mixed Drinks by Frightened Rabbit (2010)

Black Ribbons by Shooter Jennings & Hierophant

Sleep Mountain by The Kissaway Trail (2010)

July Flame by Laura Veirs (2010)

American Ghetto by Portugal. The Man (2010)

The Big To-Do by Drive-By Truckers (2010)

God Willin' & The Creek Don't Rise by Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs

There were also a number of albums that came out last year that I missed. So in comparison, here are my most listened to albums over the past year that includes those one was released at some point in 2009.

Reservoir by Fanfarlo (2009)

The Suburbs by The Arcade Fire

Romance Is Boring by Los Campesinos! (2010)

Mavericks by Johnossi (2010)

There Is No Enemy by Built to Spill (2009)

The Knot by Wye Oak (2009)

American Gong (Original Version) by Quasi

Gorilla Manor by Local Natives (2010)

When The Devil's Loose by A.A. Bondy (2009)

The Courage Of Others by Midlake (2010)

Go by Jónsi (2010)

Astro Coast by Surfer Blood (2010)

Horehound by The Dead Weather (2009)

The Winter Of Mixed Drinks by Frightened Rabbit (2010)

Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons (2009)

These Four Walls by We Were Promised Jetpacks (2009)

At The Cut by Vic Chesnutt (2009)

Black Ribbons by Shooter Jennings & Hierophant

Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros (2009)

The '59 Sound by The Gaslight Anthem (2009)

Sleep Mountain by The Kissaway Trail (2010)

July Flame by Laura Veirs (2010)

Invisible Violence by We Are Wolves (2009)

American Ghetto by Portugal. The Man (2010)

The Big To-Do by Drive-By Truckers (2010)

God Willin' & The Creek Don't Rise by Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs

Eskimo Snow by Why? (2009)

Keep It Hid by Dan Auerbach (2009)

Poll: Does your ideal music service take the (primary) form of an application or a website?

2010-03-05T10:20:00.000-05:00

What I Did at Music Hackday...

2009-12-19T12:46:00.018-05:00

Image by teamstickergiant via Flickr

A few weeks ago I spent the weekend up in Boston at the first stateside "Music Hackday". It was a fantastic event all-around... the organization, the facilities, the people, the panels (even though I was on the panel about "The Future of Music") and the hacks.

For me, the highlight was really just spending time hanging out with other music tech geeks (metabrew, toby, jwheare, __lucas, lucas_gonze, dankantor, plamere, fascinated, theineke, bwhitman and many more)... bouncing ideas off of each other, and collaboratively building interesting things.

Why wife, somewhat famously, referred to it as like "a dungeons and dragons conference from music geeks".

Being in the same room with all of these other folks meant that I could not-so-subtly plant ideas for other people's hacks that would support some use cases that I am interested in. Toby Padilla appeased me (thanks Toby!) by adding some support to his great Playgrub app to support scraping artist and track metadata from Twitter so that the content could be resolved using Playdar (or more specifically by the content resolver plug-ins for Playdar that I have installed).

Not sure what I am talking about? Maybe it's easier just to watch. Want to try it yourself?

Just tweet:

★ artist name ♫ track name #playtapus (or any other hashtag/playlist name)

Then use the Playgrub bookmarklet and let Playdar to do the rest.

In short, we are just dealing with extracting and moving song metadata around and handing it off to Playdar (which runs on your local machine). Playdar takes it from there and figures out the best place to source the content from and fulfills the link/play action.

Definitely check out Playgrub (and all of the other sites it supports), as well as the other excellent Playdar-powered web apps like Playlick (by James Wheare), PlaydarTunes (by Dan Kantor) and iTunesAirBridge (by Lucas Hrabrovsky).

Read more about it...

http://musicmachinery.com/2009/12/01/boston-music-hack-day-is-in-the-can/

http://blog.hypem.com/2009/11/music-hack-day-boston-wrap-up/

http://notes.variogr.am/post/255966005/music-hack-day-boston

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/11/music_hack_day_boston.html

http://www.grantcerny.com/blog/2009/11/22/music-hackday-boston/

http://savetherobot.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/boston-music-hackday-links-round-up/

Last, but not least, big thanks to Dave Haynes, Jon Pierce and Paul Lamere for making the whole thing a reality. When's the next one in the U.S.?! :-)

My Top Albums of 2009

2009-12-15T22:24:00.005-05:00

So, last year I bitched about how hard it was to post your top albums of the year and swore I would make it easier (at least for me) this year. Tonight I threw together a quick hack to do that. It is still definitely a hack, but at least 2 steps easier than the way I used to do it.

Basically, I take my Last.fm data for most played albums of the year, and then filter it to only show albums that were released in 2009.

I then took the resulting RSS feed and headed over to Widgetbox to create a widget that would display it...

UPDATE: Mark Reeder managed to take my idea and make it a lot better. Below is the embed code from his Filterable Charts hack.

My chart looks pretty representative of my taste, even though if asked to provide the list editorially I would probably posture a bit by adding some albums that I think were good (although my actions didn't actually prove it out). The only real exception to my list above is that U2 album... I gave it a bunch of tries to get me on board but ultimately failed (I think it is pretty bad actually).

It would probably be pretty interesting to look at some music bloggers' and critics' charts to see how different their "best of" lists are from their "top played".

Years of Refusal by Morrissey (2009)

The '59 Sound by The Gaslight Anthem (2009)

Mean Everything To Nothing by Manchester Orchestra (2009)

White Lies For Dark Times by Ben Harper and Relentless7 (2009)

Sun Gangs by The Veils (2009)

Now We Can See by The Thermals (2009)

Blood Bank by Bon Iver (2009)

Swoon by Silversun Pickups (2009)

Hospice by The Antlers (2009)

No Line On The Horizon by U2 (2009)

Hazards Of Love by The Decemberists (2009)

Back & Fourth by Pete Yorn (2009)

Keep It Hid by Dan Auerbach (2009)

These Four Walls by We Were Promised Jetpacks (2009)

A Lot of Love, a Lot of Blood by Florence and The Machine (2009)

One Last Century by The Damnwells (2009)

Fantasies by Metric (2009)

OK Bear by Jeremy Enigk (2009)

Lime Wire Adds Digital Media Exec (aka Me) to Oversee Product

2009-06-29T11:42:00.004-05:00

I have been a bit cagey over the past few weeks about what was next for me in a professional sense. Those you that follow what I am up to have probably noticed that my work on Playtapus has dropped off considerably, and I have been talking about moving to NYC. Well, today the cat comes out of the bag.... and I am very excited about it. I am moving up to Brooklyn tomorrow and will start my first day at Lime Wire the following day (July 1).

As you can imagine, there is a lot of exciting stuff going on over there, a massive worldwide audience and huge opportunities to do even more great things. I am honored to be able to join the team over there...

Lime Wire Adds Digital Media Exec to Oversee Product: "NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - June 29, 2009) - Jason Herskowitz has joined Lime Wire as Vice President, Product Management, it was announced today by George Searle, Lime Wire CEO. In this newly created position, Herskowitz will oversee Lime Wire's integrated product strategy, planning, design and management. Lime Wire's product teams will report to Herskowitz. Herskowitz reports to Lime Wire CEO, George Searle."

Herskowitz comes to Lime Wire from TotalMusic, where he held the position of Vice President, Product Management, managing a team of product managers, UX architects, designers, and QA engineers in the creation and management of music platform, products and services. Prior to TotalMusic, Herskowitz was Vice President at Strands, where he managed the Social Media business unit in the creation of holistic content discovery recommendation engine and critically acclaimed content sharing experience at Strands.com. Strands.com, music.Strands.tv, mystrands.com and the Strands Tracker software were all defined, launched and/or managed by Herskowitz.

Prior to Strands, Herskowitz was the Director of Music Products for America Online (AOL). While there, he defined and managed the product releases, and roadmaps and strategies for a range of AOL's digital media products and services. He directed product teams in the strategic and tactical definitions for a wide range of digital media products and services including AOL Music Now, AOLmusic.com, AOL Radio, SHOUTcast, and Winamp. Additionally, he spearheaded integrations of these experiences across a wide range of other AOL products including AIM, AOL Search as well as a host of connected media devices via partnerships with major consumer electronics and networking device manufacturers.

Prior to AOL, he was with Analog Devices. He joined as Director of Market Development of the company's Audio Rendering and Technology Center, and then was named Director of Product Marketing for their Media Platforms and Services Group. Earlier in his career, he helped launch DigiScents, a biotechnology offshoot that developed hardware and software platforms for incorporating scent into all forms of digital media including movies, music and video games. Prior to launching DigiScents, he was with video gaming giant, InterAct Accessories, which he joined as Director of Product Marketing and was subsequently promoted to Vice President-Strategic & Product Marketing.

He was President and founder of Prodigal Sun Records, one of the first record labels to provide streaming audio clips of artists online.

Herskowitz holds a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Georgia and a Bachelor of Science from Virginia Tech. He is currently relocating from Potomac Falls, VA to Brooklyn, NY, with his wife, Karen, and two children.

About Lime Wire LLC

Founded in 2000 by Chairman Mark Gorton, Lime Wire LLC (http://www.limewire.com) is a leader of innovative peer-to-peer software development and solutions in the file sharing industry. The company currently employs the largest number of expert Java developers at the forefront of the file sharing revolution. Its signature products, LimeWire BASIC and LimeWire PRO, run on the decentralized Gnutella Network and are the world's most popular peer-to-peer file sharing applications with over 70 million unique monthly users. The programs are downloaded 350,000 times every day and boast approximately 5 million active users at any moment. It is reported that up to 18% of the computers worldwide have LimeWire on their computer. LimeWire Store sells high-quality, DRM-free MP3 downloads a la carte and through low-cost subscription plans. Intelligent product placement, unique editorial content, and links within Lime Wire's ecosystem are utilized to market and merchandise its licensed music. Additional titles from established and developing artists are produced and sold exclusively through LimeWire Store. The Lime Wire team enjoys a dynamic work environment at company headquarters in New York City.

Good Riddance, Shiny Plastic Discs

2009-06-04T09:28:00.006-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

I have been going through a spring cleaning/purging for the past few weeks... a neighborhood garage sale helped me get rid of the numerous old PCs, routers, tape decks, video game consoles, cell phones and MP3 players I had accumulated over the years. But, one of the biggest space-hog culprits in my house has been the boxes of CDs (with jewel cases).

I went through the extreme pain of ripping all of my CDs probably 7 or 8 years ago (over the span of a couple weeks), and I have not bought a physical CD since that time. I don't know why I held onto the CDs for so long... I don't read the jackets and I don't look at the artwork. My CD player (along with my dual cassette deck and turntable) have been disconnected from my stereo for a few years. So, when it came to (spouse-mandated) de-cluttering, I started to do some research on the best way to get rid of them. To me, these CDs were no longer anything more than non-biodegradable packaging for the music that now lived on my hard drives and network. I didn't want to just throw them away... with them spending an eternity in a landfill somewhere. I gave some away to anyone that would come and take them but, given the choice, most of my friends would prefer to have them as MP3s on a thumbdrive. I could drag them to a record store that buys/sells used stuff... but to be honest, I don't even know where one of those is around me. The thought of listing them all on eBay, individually or even as "collections" (e.g. 80's Hair Metal), just seemed like way too much work.

Google led me to SecondSpin.com, a used CD/DVD/video game retailer (online and physical) based in California. So, I bit the bullet and went through and manually entered the UPCs for each CD (to see what each was worth). I then filtered out all the ones that were worth less than $1 (a lot of stuff is only valued at less than what it would cost to ship) and the cut-outs (those are accepted on an "as-needed" basis). I then had to do some re-configuring.... putting the "valuable" ones in jewel cases that weren't cracked and falling apart. After all of that, I ended up shipping around 250 of them (media rate via USPS was only about $15). A couple of weeks later, I got an email from SecondSpin saying that they have accepted about 2/3 of them - they rejected ones that I had written on the disc (a requirement if you have ever lived with roommates!).

All said-and-done, it was a lot of work to get $175... but if nothing else, it is a greener way to dispose of CDs than putting them in a landfill. And that $175 will go right towards more digital purchases. What about the CDs they didn't accept? I didn't ask... it is SecondSpin's trash to dispose of now.

Weekly Top Songs MP3 Playlist

2009-05-28T13:36:00.003-05:00

I just extended my Playtapus Project to create MP3 playlists out of a users Weekly Top Songs chart from Last.fm. I have embedded the list into the sidebar of this page, and then let Streampad handle the playback of them (at the bottom of the page).

To get your your own MP3 playlist for Weekly Top Songs, go here: http://tr.im/mIkv then get as RSS.

Check it out, and let me know what you think...

Mediaor Infrastructure Upgrades

2009-05-12T07:28:00.006-05:00

Image by Frank Hamm via Flickr

After suffering thr0ough continued issues with Yahoo Pipes and other infrastructure pieces used in Mediaor (loosely pronounced "meteor"), I finally "reassembled" the music/technology news and views mashup. I think the new set up will be much more reliable, plus it lets me update, add and filter news sources easily and quickly.

There are some more improvements that I still would like to make to the front-end (www.mediaor.com) and the twitter bot (@mediaor) but wanted to get the backend sorted out first.

As always, if there are any other blogs or news sites that you think would make a good addition just let me know.

Latest Experiment - Blip.fm Recommender Bot

2009-05-03T21:33:00.003-05:00

Image via CrunchBase

For heavy Twitter users, we are all seeing the communication platform being used more and more heavily as a viral music/taste distribution tool. In my last post, I showed the traffic numbers of some of the more popular music services. One of the fastest growing at the moment is Blip.fm. That information served as the inspiration of my latest mashup... I wanted to create an easy way to request recommendations to be pushed back to me based on a song that I "blipped".

So, a rainy weekend later I present to you the basic concept. Here's how it works.

just add the tag #recsplease to any "blip" (that gets published to Twitter)
the mashup monitors Twitter for blips that have the tag/recommendation request
from the Blip.fm URL I go and fetch/scrape the artist name for the song that was shared
this "seed" artist is then used to generate an array of similar artists
it constructs a tweet and replies to the requester with the list of recommendations

The next piece will be to link those recommendations off to a playlist, mix or radio station that includes those recommendations (in addition to trying to optimize the whole thing to be better, strong, faster). Maybe later this week. As always, let me know if you have any suggestions.

State of (Part of) the Industry

2009-04-29T08:38:00.010-05:00

Free Streaming and Social Music Sites:

The chart above includes Last.fm, Imeem, MySpace Music, Playlist.com, Pandora. While not on this graph, iLike's traffic has (according to Compete.com) now surpassed Last.fm's.

Above we show Lala, 8tracks, Hype Machine, Mog and Finetune.

Twitter-centric Music Services

Included are Song.ly, Twt.fm, Blip.fm, Twisten.fm and Twiturm.

MP3 Search Engines

Seeqpod (R.I.P?) and Skreemr.

Subscription Music Sites

Including Rhapsody and Napster.

Portal Music Sites:

Includes AOL Music, Yahoo Music and MSN Music.

Hackintosh: It's Alive!

2009-04-22T09:41:00.006-05:00

This week I became the proud owner of a Hackintosh (aka Dell Mini9 running Mac OS X). I needed a new laptop, and have pretty much become a complete Mac convert over the past few years, so my options were limited. Either spend $1000 - $2500 for a MacBook, or spend a 1/10 of that on a homebrewed Hackintosh. For both the obvious reason of price, combined with the benefits of a small, light, fast (solid state storage) and long battery life, I went with the Hackintosh.

I was nervous for sure, but I knew a few people that had done it and said good things, so now I am paying it forward. Here's how I got a full-blow pseudo MacBook Air for under $200.

Redeem some of my American Express points for a Dell gift certificate (they best you can generally do with Amex points is 1 penny/point and this fit that bill). 20,000 Amex points = $200 Dell gift certificate (that's the max allowable)
Go to Dell.com and order and customize your Dell Mini 9 - the most compatible netbook for running OS X (and all of the device drivers seem to work). You need to upgrade to 16GB SSD (at minimum). I also included the webcam upgrade (higher resolution) and Windows XP. The total came out to around $390 (with 2 day shipping). You could get cheaper if you went Linux instead of XP (since you are going to install OS X over it anyway, but I wasn't sure whether I was going to do this so got XP as the backup plan). Enter your gift certificate number and voila... now you are billed only $190.
Wait for you Dell to arrive (mine took a couple of weeks - which they neglected to tell me until AFTER I paid extra for 2 day shipping). Boo Dell!
Dig up (or buy) a larger USB flash drive to use for the install (at least 8GB but 16GB is probably better). I found a 16GB online for about $30.
If you don't already have the RETAIL version of OS X (Leopard), you need to get it... the OEM version that ships with Macs won't work. I saw a special advertised the other day to MobileMe subscribers for $99. Luckily, I already had a copy so I didn't need to get another.
While you are still waiting for you Dell to arrive, get your USB drive ready for the install. Basically, you create 2 partitions on the drive where you copy a bunch of bootloaders and small utilities needed for the install on the small partition, and a copy of the OS X disk ISO image (.dmg) to the large partition. One of the files requires a Windows machine to execute/copy to the USB drive, but you could use the Dell when it arrives (if you got XP on it) or it will also work with Windows running in Parallels or Fusion on a Mac. The detailed directions (and links to required files) can be found here: http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/how-to-mac-os-x-dellefi-installation-t3925.html. There are multiple methods to install, but the single USB drive method in "Section B (New)" is what I followed.
Unfortunately, I made the mistake of not doing the "custom OS X install" (where I should have deselected all of the language packs, printer drivers, etc.) so that made my install take longer (over an hour) and eat up a lot of valuable storage space. So, now I had to uninstall all of the stuff I don't need to free up space (used a program called Monlingual).
Otherwise, I followed those directions and everything worked great. There was one part that wasn't completely clear in Step 7 (how to boot from the smaller USB drive into the Dell's SSD after install - I ended up having to hit ESC and then type "80" to get that option).
After I was done, everything worked out of the box except one minor issue with noisy sound output (sounded like some sort of interference). I read in one of the forums that if you encounter this just put the Dell into sleep mode and wake it back up. Sure enough, that did the trick. Everything worked right away... webcam, sound, trackpad, etc.

All-in-all, this seems like it is going to be a great travel machine for me. My only complaints with the hardware so far are that a) the vertical height of the screen is constraining... some windows are too tall to be able to get to the bottom of (e.g. system preferences) and it takes some finagling, and b) the keyboard takes some getting used to... the main keys are fine, but I am still having trouble finding some of the punctuation and secondary keys.

Now, my list of "must have apps" for your Hackintosh (after OS X install I only have a few gig of space left for apps).

SimplifyMedia - don't waste your limited space on music, just stream from your home library (I also put Playdar on this machine which can serve the same purpose, but that is still very alpha)
Firefox - I use a number of extensions that I really like (e.g. Delicious, Zemanta, etc) and have never gotten used to Safari
Skitch - I can't live without it, although I may see if Jing can replace it since it handles screencasts & image capture
Dropbox (or something similar) - online storage and syncing is a must for a small machine like this.
Tweetie or Nambu - Adobe Airs apps can be resource hogs, so I opted for a native Mac app instead.
Xslimmer - a small utility that will strip out all the bloat from other applications.)
OnyX - a utility that will help you tweak settings and manage resources
MobileMe Account - this makes things much easier when it comes to syncing everything between your machines. It also comes with iDisk remote storage/sync which could eliminate your need for Dropbox.
Skype - I forgot this at first. I actually prefer iChat/AIM for voice and video chats, but Skype is a must have if you do any international business.

I also put Microsoft Office on it for now, although I don't recommend it. I will probably start to use Google Docs more now for this, and other hosted apps for presentation creation, etc. Everything else you need comes with OS X (iTunes, iChat, Mail, Calendar, Address Book, etc.). That comes close to maxing out the on-board storage, but between the online storage solutions and the new 16GB USB drive I bought for the install process, I think I should be good to go.

Uncovery Revisited

2009-04-15T17:41:00.005-05:00

A while ago I messed around with the idea of a Twitter bot that, using hashtags, would rebroadcast anything that someone thought that others should know about (e.g. "check out this band they are great"). The idea wasn't that these recommendations were directed at anyone in particular, but instead played upon the human nature of people wanting to tell other people about something they think is great (see latest buzz on Susan Boyle video from Britain's Got Talent).

I only took that original project so far, but today I revisited it briefly and made some tweaks (influenced by the existing Twitter bot @new_music).

Basically, it looks at Metacritic's movie feed, scrapes the scores off the pages (since they aren't in the feed itself) and filters the results to only display the stuff that has an aggregate metascore of 65 or greater. When it finds one of those, it then hits YouTube to pull the trailer for the video. From there it shortens the URL and then tweets the results out at @uncovery.

I may also start to splice in music, DVDs and other content too... but will let this run a while to see how it feels. As always, comments and thoughts welcome.

UPDATE: I also have spliced in Rotten Tomatoes feed too.

xBetween

2009-04-07T19:19:00.001-05:00

Just because I have an endless need to tinker, I planted the seed of another idea today. It isn't much more than this so far....

xBetween: "How many times have you heard the phrase “it’s like a cross between…” when you ask someone to describe something to you? That most simple idea, and how it could be applied to the web to help other discover new stuff (or just have fun), was enough of a spark that I went out and got the domain names today for xbetween.com and crossbetween.com (as well as the Twitter name @xbetween).

I’m not sure what exactly, if anything, this will turn out to be. But, I think there could be some potential to create something interesting out of that simple idea."

I'm starting to formulate some more ideas about what this could turn into, but given the idea is still only a few hours old I'm sure it will continue to evolve. Ideas? Suggestions?

iLike No Longer Means I Listen (in full)

2009-04-01T16:15:00.005-05:00

Image via CrunchBase

In yet another unfortunate string of recent blows to free music streaming sites (see recent news/rumors on Imeem, Playlist, Seeqpod, Last.fm, et al). It looks like iLike, who had recently struck a deal with Rhapsody to power free full-track streaming of content from their site, is no longer doing so.

I'm not sure what the terms of the deal between the two where, but according to the Rolling Stone article linked above, it sounds like iLike was covering the streaming royalties on the 25 free streams a month the deal enabled and was hoping to make that back in bounties from subscriptions to Rhapsody they drove?

Playdar in Action

2009-03-31T08:13:00.006-05:00

I realize that trying to explain the concept of content resolution (and Playdar) can be a bit technical for most, so I figured I'd just show you the power behind what is going on with a quick screencast of the latest alpha build in action over at Spiffdar.org.

The project is still in it's early stages, but if you are like me then you head is already spinning on where this could go and what types of experiences it could enable.

Pretty cool, eh?

UPDATE: Screencast Part 2: Retrofit existing sites to support Playar

Program Directors > Recommenders

2009-03-26T08:32:00.008-05:00

The endless debate on the best approach for providing music discovery experiences continues rage. This continued with a SxSW panel put on by Paul Lamere (from The Echo Nest) and Anthony Volodkin (from The Hype Machine). For some background, here is their presentation:

Help! My iPod thinks I'm emo.

View more presentations from Paul Lamere.

Additional notes from Anthony are here: http://fascinated.fm/post/89782283
And notes from Paul can be found here: http://musicmachinery.com/2009/03/26/help-my-ipod-thinks-im-emo-part-1/

My take? There are many ways to classify these different approaches, and some can be considered subsets of others. But, in short there are more approaches than most can shake a stick at... with some of the more notable examples being (as I see it):

"Musicologist"/Expert Analysis - a hundred people with headphones on categorize songs on a few hundred different attributes (e.g. minor chords, upbeat, heavy piano)
Content-Based/Waveform Analysis - a computer looks at the sonic attributes of a song (e.g. tempo, harmonic range, etc) and then looks for other songs that posses similar attributes
Collaborative Filtering - people who listen to/buy/highly rate song X, also have a high correlation to buying/listening to/highly rating song Y
Editorial (e.g Bloggers, Pitchfork, Radio) - some one broadcasts their opinion... "hey, these guys sound like so and so and they are good. I give them 5 stars".
Semantic (e.g. tag clouds) - by matching tags, genres and sentiment keywords (either manually input by users or extracted from web articles)
Curator (e.g. playlist sharing) - community generated "top song" and "just listened" charts, curated playlists, TV/movie soundtracks. These could be actively curated lists of songs (e.g. playlists) or passively programmed by the curator (e.g. "just listened").
Shuffle - just a random selection of tracks from a fixed set of songs
Biographical - this artist you like was influence by this other artist or was also in this other band
Friend-to-Friend - the most common, one friend tells another... "hey, have you heard X? You'd like them".

For each, you generally have two sources of information which to base your recommendations on:

Implicit - input/feedback is collected passively/automatically (e.g. listening history)
Explicit - input/feedback is solicited and manually provided (e.g. user ratings)

Some of the approaches above are exclusive to one type of data input (e.g. "editorial" is explicit feedback only), but most incorporate both.

And, as we speak there are hundreds/thousands of Music Information Retrieval PhD candidates figuring out new approaches, there are new spins (and terminology) on the existing methodologies, and companies combining two or more of the approaches above. Having spent some time in the discovery/recommender space myself, my take is this...

There is no magic bullet.

We all discover content everywhere, and from every context.... friends, TV soundtracks, recommendation engines, radio, etc. In my opinion there is no such thing as a "better recommendation".... there is only a "good enough" (in that what I discovered was satisfying) or a "bad" recommendation. What is required in both cases is transparency as to why it was recommended. I say often when it comes to recommendations... "the why is usually more interesting than the what". That is because the "why" helps user identify the sources that they trust, can relate to, and can be turned to again in the future for inspiration. Sometimes that source may be a machine, sometimes it may be an editor, sometimes it may be a chart. They all have their value, and they all serve the same purpose.. to be one my personal "program directors".

I had a conversation this morning with J T. Ramsay where he told me: "[music] discovery is one of the biggest fallacies of all time. If people were so amped on discovery, radio would have been formatted differently." And I have to admit, I don't disagree.

What consumers have continually asked for is "programming", whether is be playlist builders, charts, "just played" data, recommendation engines, DJs, mixtapes or CDs. Basically, it just comes down to "don't force me to make a decision every 4 minutes about what I'm going to hear next". As music services continue to move to small UI devices where search and destroy is not a viable use case (mobile, car stereos, etc.), programming becomes even more essential.

The title of this post "Program Director > Recommenders" is not meant to imply that they are different and that one is better.... what I mean is that one is a superset of the other. Trying to pit them in a battle with each other is akin to asking... "which is better when you are hungry, a sandwich, a hot dog, or an apple?". The answer for me is, "they will all do the trick... it's just a matter of what temporal mood I'm in weighed against how much effort I have to expend to get each ."

The Importance of Playdar

2009-03-25T08:18:00.011-05:00

One of my most recent posts discussed (and/or ranted about) "content resolution". In that post I mentioned a very compelling new open-source project called Playdar. This project was started by some of the folks from Last.fm, but is rightfully gaining attention of the digital music innovators very quickly. What is it exactly, and why is it so important?

Playdar - About: "

About Playdar

Playdar is designed to solve one problem: given the name of a track, find me a way to listen to it right now.

It will search your local disk (iTunes library, MP3 folder etc.), it will search your home or office network (kinda like searchable iTunes shared libraries) and it will search other sources. You can write plugins for Playdar to enable it to search additional sources. It's fast. If a matching song is within reach, it can start playing in less than a second.

This is called Content Resolution. Playdar is a "Content Resolver" - it will take metadata (artist, album, track names) and resolve them to a location of a matching music file. This might be on your disk, or over the network - regardless, sources are always presented as URLs that point to your local machine. Playdar runs a lightweight webserver on your machine - this is how you talk to it, and it's how other desktop apps and web apps talk to it.

Playdar has an HTTP API that returns JSON. It supports JSONP, so any website that you authorize can use Javascript to talk to the Playdar server on your machine. This means:

Websites can automatically put play buttons next to songs they reference.
Streaming services and music blogs can save bandwidth by playing you your own copy of a song instead of streaming it from a central server.
A lot of interesting web-app mashups are possible. Pull interesting music data from an API, and play people content they already have.
You could build an iTunes-Genius-like web app using Playdar and the Last.fm API, all in-browser.
You could build a playlist sharing site that shares playlists, not mp3s. Think muxtape, but it will only play songs found on your machines.
If you run Playdar on your laptop and desktop on the same network it will take advantage of songs on either machine.
Music on the web can be marked up so you can always take advantage of local content."

Sure, there are other remote access/webserver solutions out there that enable you to access your content (and your friends') remotely - see Simplify Media and Orb. And there are P2P clients and torrents that enable you download virtually any song available. But, what gets me excited about this is the single interface with cascading resolution logic that it enables - and how it can seamlessly integrate the (existing) web with local/network/free-range/streaming service content. In short, it keeps checking sources in priority order until it finds what it's looking for.

It fosters the development of sites and apps that can add value with context (editorial, informational, social) and discovery features without putting them in a position of having to deal with content licensing and streaming costs.

It has the potential to drastically cut costs of existing music services since they wouldn't have to foot the bill (both royalty and bandwidth) to stream content to users that they already have - thereby helping enable more viable economics around music discovery and sharing sites. Or perhaps lets existing music content sites exit the content licensing/streaming business altogether (some speculate that Last.fm's recent moves away from free streaming everywhere but US, UK and Germany are the first step in this direction) and instead focus on adding value *around* the content.

Sites and applications without their own music content could be marked up to support Playdar... adding click-to-play scenarios in Google search results, Facebook, Twitter (site and apps), IM clients, Wikipedia, news articles and more.

It promotes the use of standard markup to identify music content (e.g. hAudio, XSPF, etc.) that enables users to share content (links) and playlists across different service providers. You keep your provider of choice, I keep mine.

It could be extended to support comparison shopping of content across multiple vendors.... e.g. "just give me the cheapest MP3 provided that it is at least 256kbps".

It could tie into your existing social graph, giving you a single view and interface into all of your friends' local/network content. For example, you see in your AIM status that one of your friends is listening to a certain song... you click play. If you have the song, it plays from your machine. If you don't have the song, it streams to you from your friend's machine, if that friend doesn't have a local version of that song then it streams from another friend's machine that does have it. If none of your friends has a local copy of the song, then it finds it on the web. You don't need to know where the song is, Playdar does the work of finding the best source for you.

It could enable the darknet, where you can get access to all of the content on not only your and your friends' machines...but also the friends of friends (of friends). All unmonitorable and untrackable (unlike torrent sites) since each person only accesses content via people they trust - no one in the chain has knowledge of where the content originated from or where it terminated (see OneSwarm for more on this). Taken with the notion of "six degrees of separation"... you theoretically could get access to any file/song from anyone in the worlds in 6 hops or less.

There are a lot of directions this project could be taken and extended, which is the beauty of it being open-source. Have some ideas? Contribute.

In my opinion, this has the potential to be one of the most disruptive music/tech developments we've seen in a long time.

Playtapus Now in the Wild

2009-03-16T15:00:00.003-05:00

I've decided to expose a bunch of the pieces behind my "Playtapus Project" on a new wiki at: http://playtapus.pbwiki.com/.

My hope is to get some more people involved - hopefully some that are far more proficient at writing code than me - as well as anyone else that has ideas or/or the talent to help those ideas to be realized. I'd love to see where a group of people can take this, and whether it opens all of our eyes to any new opportunities.

Take a look, and come on in... the water is fine.

What's In A Name?

2009-03-07T12:07:00.002-05:00

I am a closet brand marketer. I often create "brands" (OK, I make up words - usually by combining multiples that when pronounced sound like another existing word) that I think could be interesting or evocative. Over the past decade, I have kept a running list of potential brand names (or tag lines) for the most random things... from fictional band names to non-existent apparel companies to portajohns (toilets) to my own music/tech aggregator "mediaor" (pronounced like "meteor").

As backwards as it sounds, sometimes these words provide a spark for a product idea that I may explore in the future (yes, I have a separate list for those).

For the "brands" that I think have some real potental (or just amuse me) I will go grab the domain name for too. In my opinion, the most promising ones are the ones that express an idea or feeling ("Google", "Amazon", "iPod", "Twitter"), not a literal product implementation or feature ("Search.com","Toys r Us", "CDnow") .

What does this have to do with anything? Well, I have been struggling with how to refer to my latest projects (e.g. "friendP3", "meP3", "ambient signal".). The labels of the implementations were constraining the larger ideas around passive publishing, content resolution, data aggregation and portability, the social graph and sharing. I know some will say that is stupid... "why try to brand it at all?". Well, if you want people to talk about something then I believe you need to provide them a common lexicon to do so (it also helps people find and track the conversations on topic - see Twitter).

So, now that I have made a short story long, I come to my point. For now on I am going to be referring to the collective of my recent music/tech science experiments as "Playtapus".

Yes, it is a combination of "play", "tap" and "us"... but also more a play on the fugly yet lovable platypus. No one is quite sure what it's place in evolutionary history is, but if nothing else... it's at least interesting. Really all this project aspires to be...

Content (Resolution) is King!

2009-03-06T09:32:00.003-05:00

For those of you that know me, you've probably heard me ramble on for years about how we need to decouple media content and the service from whence it comes. At the drop of a hat I will often start spewing off the same tired example...

Imagine your music service of choice is Rhapsody and mine is iTunes. Or your use iLike and I use Last.fm. You use Spotify and I use Imeem. Or you use Blockbuster and I use Netflix. I should be able to follow your tastes, history and recommendations without having to join your service (or vice versa). We are now starting to see some lifestreaming apps/aggregators that solve the first piece of that puzzle.... I can see what you what media you are consuming without having to join your service.

But, currently when I see that you've played a song that I want to check out, the link takes me to your service provider, not mine. Sure, this is in your service provider's best interest (page view, conversion opportunity, etc.) but certainly not in mine. Now, I have to copy the info, got back to my service provider, and manually re-enter to find and acquire.

The way it should be (IMHO), is that the consumer of the media should get to decide what service provider fulfills it. Basically, it's a massive translation layer that can take content in from anywhere and map it back out to anywhere else.

This is what often referred to as the "resolver" problem. Back in 2007, there was a thread between Lucas Gonze, myself and a couple of other people where we talked about this issue... and who should take the lead in solving it.

In the absence of these "portable music identifiers", people that are passionate about greasing the wheels of taste and content sharing are forced to the lowest common denominator... MP3 search engines. This has been the basis of the projects I've been done recently.... mapping multiple services play history down to free-range MP3s (or at least what it could find). Of course, the rights-holders are not big fans of this approach (see "world vs. seeqpod" suits) - and the consumers are often frustrated by bad files, dead links and just poor overall quality of content delivery.

I've recently been vocal about the idea that the solution to this problem is an API platform that any/all services could use in lieu of MP3 search. Conceptually, an advertising/commerce supported (ok, subsidized in the near term) free-streaming catalog provider that most music could be mapped to - a fully licensed central digital music catalog(more on this later). Granted, this is a rather gradiose idea and anything in this industry that upsets the status quo is often met with resistance (at best) and endless lawsuits (at worst).

So, my rambling has finally led me to my point... content resolution. If there is no central catalog that everything can be mapped to, then what we need is that translation layer that lets content links be mapped back and forth across endless catalogs. Gradiose? A bit, but seems accomplishable without buy-in from the existing establishment. In fact, there is the very early stages of an open source project called Playdar whose goal is to provide the framework that lets content be mapped from one source to another - from the web to your local library, to your other networked devices, to your friends' machines, to music service providers, to search engines.

I'm pretty excited by the idea - I think it could enable some very compelling consumer experiences that the community is empowered to enable on their own.

"Post" MP3 of Current iTunes Track to Twitter

2009-03-05T14:07:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I talked about how I wanted to be able to use the track and artist name from the currently playing track in iTunes to automagically find/publish a free-range MP3 link for that track to Twitter. After digging around into AppleScript this morning, I'm happy to say that I've got it basically working (see screencast).

I'm guessing there is probably a more elegant way to do this, but the Frankenstein continues to grow appendages. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Active Publishing of meP3s (in addition to Passive)

2009-03-04T18:23:00.004-05:00

Here is the next piece of my Frankenstein (watch screencast).

It adds active publishing to the passive publishing that I'm doing from aggregated play data from multiple music services. So, when you are thinking of a song you just type it in, and it looks for a free-range MP3 version of that song, shortens the URL, and formats it so that playTwitter knows how to deal with it. This is similar to what I talked about before except I have automated the formating, finding and posting to Twitter to make it more user friendly.

I've also added a field that let's users create collaborative playlists using Twitter hashtags (see previous post). This lets any/all people to add songs to a particular playlist. For example, see the "bestof2009" playlist. By default anyone can add songs to this playlist just by using the same name/hashtag. Well, that's great, but what if you don't want other people's junk in your list? Just use the "advanced search" features of Twitter Search to filter it down. For example, here is the list with just my contributions.

Just like on any other webpage with MP3 links, the playTwitter bookmarklet lets you "play the page". So, filter it however you want, then play it.

Collaborative Playlists via Twitter and Hashtags

2009-02-23T18:39:00.004-05:00

Collaborative playlists are a great idea that often gets bogged down and limited by the fact that everyone has their own music service/platform of choice and there is generally no interoperability between them. Fred Wilson blogged on the topic, and the challenges, about a week ago. The problem is that most collaborative playlisting options require a lot of overhead... either everyone needs to join/use/switch to the same playlisting site or the creator of the playlist has to engage in a lot of manual labor to curate the playlist.

I talked a bit recently about how some service are already set up to handle the exact use cases that people are interested in, just that the other pieces of the puzzle haven't been put in place yet. By using the "web as the music catalog", listening data as automated search queries and free-range MP3s as the universally supported format, it is actually easy to create collaborative playlists with a combination of existing technologies that can all work on a common platform. Hashtags, Twitter Search (aka Summize), friendP3 and playTwitter.

To create a collaborative playlist, one just needs to manually post (or retweet a friendP3/meP3 link) with a playlist name as a hashtag. For example, I just started one with the name of #fp3Bestof2009 (where "fp3" stands for "friendP3"). I posted a couple of songs, and others can as well without any overhead required by me to manage. To see the collaborative playlist, I can use Twitter Search to search for that hashtag/playlist name.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=fp3Bestof2009

Click on the playTwitter bookmarklet and you are off and listening to the community programmed list that continues to be dynamic over time. If you want to filter the playlist, you can simply use the "advanced search" fields of Twitter Search and you can limit posts/songs by contributor, date, keywords, and more. Find a filter you like, and then you could subscribe to the RSS feed for those filters and just watch what continues to come in from users across the web.

User friendly? Uh... nope, not yet. Powerful? I think so. What do you guys think?

Radio @AmbientSignal

2009-02-18T10:04:00.007-05:00

I've been publishing my meP3 stream out to a bunch of different platforms (e.g. FriendFeed, Tumblr, Soup.io) but the one that I'm most fond of right now is the Twitter station that I'm passively programming @ambientsignal. There are actually many parts of the experience that are substantially worse on Twitter than on the other platform - most notably the lack of an integrated media player - but you've got to go where the people are, right?! A quick addition (and hopefully future evolution) of playTwitter and StreamPad (shoutouts to both Lucas Gonze and Dan Kantor) could make this even more powerful.

While I was originally focused on constructing a station by crawling a single user's social graph, I've shifted focus a bit more to the simple aggregation of a users *own* stream. Each user can publish their own, then just simply follow the others they want. Where I think it could get really interesting is in Twitter clients. Each user could create their own "group stations" comprised of any single or collection of meP3 streams. Then just throw a small media player into those Air and iPhone apps and you've got a social listening and discovery service that I think would be as compelling as any out there. TweetDeck, Twirl, Twitterific, et al... are you out there? Not only does it power great content discovery (I've personally been exposed to at least 5 new bands that I like in as many days from @friendP3), but it would/will stimulate endless water cooler conversations around the content.

My friend Dave now is also powering his own Twitter station @ZprocketRadio. It's just starting to load up with tracks, but when I hear something I like I will inevitably reply to @ZprocketRadio with a 140 character note on what I think about it. He also has brought up some interesting ideas around the use of #hastags to power collaborative playlists that I may play around with today.

If anyone out there is interested in being one of the first stations (or wants to build a killer Twitter Radio client) drop me a line at jherskowitz (at) globallistic (dot) com and I'll help you out. It's still super-hacky and exceedingly geeky... but I'd be interested to see if a community evolves around this concept.

@friendP3 - Add to Favorites Playlist

2009-02-17T07:48:00.004-05:00

When you are just a guy trying to hack something together in your free time, you are quickly and constantly reminded to not reinvent the wheel. That, along with my complete lack of programming skills, forces me to brute force and re-purpose stuff wherever possible (see last 5 posts or so for proof).

The great thing about that, is it helps open my eyes to features/products out there they will perfectly handle the use case I'm looking to implement. The newest ephiphany is that Twitter's "favorite" feature is ideal for creating a playlist of favorite songs that you may hear on @friendP3 or any other "twitter radio" station (current or future).

A video speaks 10,000 words...

http://screencast.com/t/IHoNJ5kkL

(by the way, I *love* Jing's screencasting app but they fact that the videos aren't resizable is a major problem since they are all too big - dimensionally - to fit into my blog)

@friendP3 on your iPhone (sort of)

2009-02-17T07:04:00.003-05:00

When you deal with hosted MP3s you are reminded how much you *could* do with music if all of the shackles and protections were removed (e.g. DRM and required Flash players). Here is a video highlighting how things "just work" on your mobile...

@friendp3 Radio on iPhone from Jason Herskowitz on Vimeo.

There is no reason that this same scenario won't/doesn't work with simple SMS alerts, email, IMs, etc. The only real work needed is for playlisting of these tracks to be supported in these apps...

Now Playing: Twitter Radio

2009-02-16T16:34:00.003-05:00

Image via CrunchBase

The latest ingredient in this grand mashup experiment I embarked on last week is what I'm calling (for lack of a better term right now) "Twitter Radio". The idea being that a user can either passively, or manually, program a soundtrack as a backchannel to their tweets. This can either be done for you personally - with links to songs you listen to systematically injected into your regular twitter account or into a secondary dedicated "radio" account. Also, collaborative "group stations" can be automagically programmed by the listening behaviors of one or more people and posted to a Twitter account.

For now, I'll probably use a secondary dedicated account (TBD) so I won't overwhelm everyone that follows me @jherskowitz. Once it's more stable maybe I'll integrate them... too bad Twitter doesn't have filters that could better handle this scenario.

To listen to one of these stations first-hand, you just need to do a few things:

Install the "playTwitter" bookmarklet from (http://www.gonze.com/playtwitter)
Go to @friendp3
Clock the playTwitter bookmarklet in your browser's link bar (after dragged there in step 1)

That's it... now you can listen to everything that shows up there. There is still plenty more I would like to have it do... but it's a start. And as with all things that I hack together, it will probably break more than once... but I'll try to fix the stuff as I can.

Confused? You could just watch this: http://screencast.com/t/DS1CwwoMw

Get Your Own meP3 Stream

2009-02-14T10:18:00.006-05:00

I've been distracted lately, but figured I would let others build their own personal aggregated meP3 feed just by calling the API directly.

Basically, you just construct and RSS feed with parameters for your own user names/IDs. For example, here is mine:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=60d303c2d8c4f64cb685d4c9ecc9881e&_render=rss&hypeID=jherskowitz&ilikeID=jherskowitz&imeemID=IC4FmMqO&lastfmID=jherskowitz&pandoraID=jherskowitz&rhapID=2DF5AE86A33B862C1931C18C71D733EC

So, if for example your username on Last.fm, Hype Machine and Pandora were "fredwilson" and you didn't have any accounts at, iLike, Imeem or Rhapsody, then your feed would simply be:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=60d303c2d8c4f64cb685d4c9ecc9881e&_render=rss&hypeID=fredwilson&ilikeID=fredwilson&lastfmID=fredwilson&pandoraID=fredwilson

Note that most parameters are your username, but both Rhapsody and Imeem IDs are harder to come by. Your Rhapsody ID is found in your My Rhapsody RSS feed URLs. Your Imeem account number is even harder to find, but I'm working on trying to find a better way to get to it.

If you can then take that feed and do anything you want with it.... embed in a widget on your blog, feed it to Streampad or Yahoo Music Player, subscribe to it as a podcast, dump it into your lifestream, feed it into your Twitter account, etc.

One thing I was thinking about is playing around with "rooms" on FriendFeed to see how this would look as a collaborative "station". Other ideas? I'd love to hear them.

UPDATE: I found some issues with the way I was dealing with and rationalizing dates across all of the services. This needs more work and until it is fixed you may see stuff jumping around in time like the castaways on "Lost".

More meP3s

2009-02-13T13:45:00.003-05:00

My experiments involving the social graph, aggregation, data portability and MP3 search continue. I've now got my Imeem just played feed automatically producing MP3 search results as well. Unfortunately, I don't yet see a way to easily get your Imeem UserID from your username/login info... so it's not really user friendly for anyone else at all at this point since I had to manually dig mine out and hard code it. Regardless, I've added it to my lifestream and it seems to be working as well as the others.

Unfortunately, Soup.io (my current publishing platform) nor Tumblr seem to be able/want to keep up with the feeds. That being said, I'm also pushing my aggregated MP3 stream to some other lifestreaming services that seem better equipped to keep up. FriendFeed feed seems to deal with it pretty well (http://www.friendfeed.com/jherskowitz). And while Lifestream.fm (http://lifestream.fm/jherskowitz) won't embed a flash player in the stream automatically like FriendFeed and others, it does have a cool feature (powered by Beam-It-Up-Scotty) that lets you send links via SMS to anything in your or others' lifestream(s). So if you see a song you like, you just "beam it" to your phone, click on the link, and listen to the track stream over the air. Pretty cool.

Playlist Reanimator

2009-02-10T08:05:00.011-05:00

So, I'm still hacking around with some of my science projects and I now have an MP3 resolver for XSPF playlists working. You give it an URL to for an iLike or MyStrands playlist and it will go and try to rebuild it using free-range MP3s.

Why? Well, I started with those two services because their client software (iTunes/Winamp/etc.) plug-ins can automatically publish your playlists from your media player to the web. Since most people make their playlists on their desktop, this cuts out the step of having to manually recreate it on the web so you can share it with others. Also, it lets you leverage any other "playlist builders" (e.g. Apple Genius) on your local machine and then publish those machine generated playlists too.

For example, the URL for this (actually the URL of the XSPF file, not the page):

http://www.mystrands.com/playlist/9dbf0c1b6c932965

turns into this:

http://is.gd/jGuc

I still need to add support for Last.fm playlist and I'm digging around to see if I can get at the data for the playlists at iMeem and Playlist.

Yesterday, I also added the javascript Yahoo Media Player to this page, so now all of the MP3 links being spit out from my friendP3 stream are now playable as a playlist directly from the player.

More to come (hopefully)....

Trying to Get a Clue

2009-02-09T12:03:00.002-05:00

Apparently I don't have any fans at The Register. I'm not sure why the personal attacks, but perhaps I ran over the writer's dog in another life. That aside, I just wanted to briefly comment on this...

TotalMusic goes totally titsup • The Register: "Uh, now - let's see, Jason. Why didn't TotalMusic crack it? Well, you don't make it easy to find and share music. You don't allow people to keep music. You fail to make all the music in the world available - but you don't allow people to share what content they have, either? And you want to keep the billing relationship?"

I'm not sure what product or offering is being referred to here, because there is nothing in this statement that is representative of what I was working on. Although, I do agree that I would find a model built on those principals to more than a bit distasteful. That, and we also seem to have a similar view of my skillset.

Hey, who tripped over that cord?

2009-02-07T22:05:00.006-05:00

The Record Industry’s TotalMusic Experiment Is Sinking Fast: "TotalMusic, the digital music distribution initiative created by Sony BMG and Universal Music Group, appears to be on life support - or worse."

And so it goes. And, so do I. I know what you are thinking... "Hey Herskowitz, you were only there 3 months, how did you manage to screw it up so quickly?!". Heh... all I can say is that in that short time I had the privilege of working with some great people on something that I *know* was going to be extremely compelling. I regret that we didn't get to show you guys more about what we built - but in these extremely hard economic times (particularly for those in the music industry) it's hard to blame them from pulling the plug on a still-highly-speculative offering .

I only hope that someone else figures out how to crack this music-on-the-web nut in a way that is a win for everyone in the value chain. The problem is that to make a music service a win for everyone, then they all of the famished participants have to sit at the table - and be content to let all the others have a little bit to eat, even though they are still hungry themselves.

I, first and foremost, am a music consumer - so I'm always compelled by the innovation happening down at the consumer-level and then try to follow it back up the chain to the content creators. This gives me a decidedly different perspective than the artists and labels that are trying to solve this from the other direction. But, from where I sit at least, I see all of the innovation in digital music services coming out of bootstrapped companies and passionate tinkerers. Hell, there are very few private investors or venture capitalists that want to get anywhere near this space right now... and rightfully so considering no one has really figured out how to make any money out of this industry (and its products) that so many people love.

It should therefore come as no surprise that these small sites and services don't have the resources, or desire, to deal with licensing content directly. And for that matter, nor do the content owners - imagine the legal and contractual management overhead. So, where is the middleman? The platform? The catalog? The APIs? The no/low-involvement licenses? These are all required to not only stoke innovation, but to ensure people get paid. Without this we find ourselves in the same place repeatedly. Virtually all of the small "music 2.0" services go one of 4 routes for their content. 1) MP3 search engines like Seeqpod and Skreemr, 2) YouTube music videos (either with or without actually rendering the video frames), 3) Remote access offerings like Simplify and Orb, 4) User-generated uploads.

What I truly believe is that the market needs an alternative to #1/#2 that lets innovation be built quickly and painlessly upon open APIs - where people are paid, costs are covered, streaming is free and drm-free commerce is to be had. Simple, right? Well, maybe not so much...

In the meantime, yesterday I started to experiment with a couple of things that simply leverage what is available to me... MP3 search APIs, playlists, community charts and play data. I was able to quickly mash together some of this freely available and flowing data and stood up "friendP3" . It's simple really, it aggregates your (and your friends' if you desire) play data/favorites from the APIs and feeds of Last.fm, iLike, Pandora, Rhapsody, Hype Machine and others. For every track/artist name it sees, it hits some search APIs to see if it can find a MP3 version of the track out in the wild. If it finds one, it then automatically embeds a flash player with the track loaded (along with the link to the MP3). This is all done from afar... the mashup was all done in Yahoo Pipes, the MP3s sit on other sites from around the web, the front end is just a hosted microblogging platform, and the recirculation and sharing back across multiple social networks and services is a simple "AddThis" implementation.

Currently, what is on www.friendmp3.com is stuff that is being automatically generated from *my* friends on Last.fm. But when one of them listen to a song in iTunes, or on Last.fm radio, or bookmark a song they hear on Pandora (web or iPhone version) and the MP3 just shows up the front door of friendP3 for others to enjoy. Conversley, I've also generated a feed that is made up of solely my history across these services and dumped that into my lifestream at www.ambientsignal.com (as well as my FriendFeed and Strands streams). For that matter, you could just take the "podcast" feed and to subscribe to it in iTunes or Winamp. I listen to stuff, and your local library would just get filled up in the background. Now mind you, I'm not endorsing that people use this in lieu of buying music. But, I do think that all of the above are fabulous discovery tools - and I know that I have already bought a couple of albums that I have a heard a track from friendP3 since yesterday.

The first question my friends ask me when they see it is... "is it legal?". The answer I give... "no one really knows", because there is no blanket statement that can be applied. Some of the content was made freely available by their rights holders, all reside on other people's servers, search and "content discovery tools" are generally deemed to be protected under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (although the Seeqpod/Warner Music case will test that), downloading (I've been told by some lawyers) is not a crime (it's the "making available" to others that is gray), and the endless number of other nuanced legal questions open to interpretation. The answers to all of which are/will have massive implications to the future of the web.

But wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to do this on a platform that plays nice with everyone? And compensates those that deserve compensation? And somehow can magically cover the costs associated with all of the above (hint: this is the kicker)? I sure think it would be. If anyone wants to build/fund that, drop me a line (jherskowitz at globallistic dot com)... I'm currently looking for something to do.

Album of the Week: "We Have Cause to Be Uneasy" by Wild Sweet Orange

2009-01-24T08:38:00.002-05:00

Just discovered this today. I'm actually only a couple of songs into it, but it resonated with me right away. Take a listen....

Album of the Day: "Not Animal" by Margot and the Nuclear So & So's

2009-01-09T09:54:00.003-05:00

I have heard of Margot and the Nuclear So & So's but never really listened to them before. I discovered this album last night, and am really digging it (even though the story is the band was not happy with this version of the album). Take a listen and see what you think....

What the Hell Have I Been Up To?!

2009-01-08T09:34:00.002-05:00

So, one of my last posts a month or so ago was... "I'm going to start blogging again". Well, it turns out I lied. After my time at Strands (formerly MyStrands), I thought I was going to take a few weeks off and catch my breath. But as supreme luck (and perhaps good karma) would have it, my dream gig landed landed in my lap about 24 hours into my psuedo-retirement. There has been a fair amount of speculation about what this new company is up to... some right, some wrong, but all compelling enough that I jumped at the chance to be part of it.

So, I quickly cranked through the extensive "honey do" list I had been assigned (involved lots of painting and fixing of stuff) and got back to work. And what a busy 6 weeks it has been so far. Those that follow me on Twitter (@jherskowitz) have probably seen me talking about numerous all-nighters as we've been hurtling towards unveiling ourselves to the public.

Drumroll please..... because here is. MY NEW PLAYLIST IS FINALLY DONE! :-P

Yes, that is what I believe those in the marketing world call a "tease". More info to come on what (and who) is behind all that made my new playlist possible soon. In the meantime, just enjoy some free and legal music above. There are some new albums that I've been really digging lately too, and I'll be posting more in the coming days/weeks. Enjoy.

Favorite Albums of 2008

2008-12-24T17:02:00.010-05:00

It seems like every year I'm trying to figure out the best way to bookmark and display my favorite albums of the year. This year was no exception. To determine my favorites, I looked at a number of sources... first I created a smartlist in iTunes that just included music that was released in 2008 (and then another for 2007 to see what was "new to me" in '08 even if it was technically released last year). That information combined with some of my chart data from Last.fm and MyStrands.com helped me figure out what I listened to most. I then went and searched for each at AmazonMP3 (and eMusic for one import) and then bookmarked them using Delicious. Take the rss feed for those "bestof2008" tags and then feed them into an embeddable widget from YourMinis.

Yes, it shouldn't be this hard and I'm sure (or at least I hope) there is a much simplier way that I just happened to overlook. There were were things that *should* have worked much more easily but all seemed buggy and weren't producing the desired output. If there isn't then my resolution for 2009 will be to make sure something gets built. Anyway... enough soapboxing, here's the list. Enjoy them... I know I did.

UPDATE (1/08/2009): Here are a few of them for your listening pleasure... in their entirety.

Macrovision's IPTV Discovery Guide

2008-11-17T15:57:00.005-05:00

Macrovision's IPTV Discovery Guide
Originally uploaded by jherskowitz

Want to know what Macrovision is working on with their acquisitions of AMG and TV Guide? Check out their promotional video, specifically the "Everything Guide" chapter.

Personally, sign me up... or more accurately, sign Comcast up. Their programming guide is one of the biggest frustration-generators in my life. Something like this on my Set-Top Box would be a very welcome addition. Although judging by the speed at which the cable and satellite companies move, I'm not going to hold my breath....

The Times Are-A Changin'

2008-11-11T22:44:00.009-05:00

This was my first email of the day...

"Today is my last day at Strands. I feel fortunate to have worked with many of you, and I think together we have built something really special - and something that was, and will continue to be, the foundation of something even bigger and better.

Whenever so much of one's spirit and soul are invested into the creation of something from nothing to a full, living and breathing product, it is saddening to not be able to take it further with you all. I hope to see everyone succeed on the path that we began down, regardless of what direction it ultimately takes.

I wish you all well.

- J"

What's next for me? I'm not quite sure yet other than a deep-breath and spending a little time evaluating a few options. I'll probably get back to blogging in depth on a few topics that I've been spending some time thinking about lately. I've got a couple of loose product ideas that I may further work through. And I've got www.mediaor.com (and now www.ambientsignal.com) that need some TLC. After that, I'm not sure yet... but I'll let you guys know once I figure it out.

I Don't Blog Much Anymore... I Taste Stream

2008-09-30T11:09:00.010-05:00

I was going to write a long blog post talking about why I don't write long blog posts much anymore. But instead, I figured I'd just create a video...

You will also notice that I added a bunch of Strands Tips & Tricks videos in the sidebar that you may be interested in. Meanwhile, if you want to come follow my on Strands, feel free to come join. Just go to www.strands.com, click on "request an invite" and then enter your email address and promo code "jtwit".

I look forward to seeing you over there. And don't worry... when I do have something to ramble on about I will still do so here, but you will get it there (www.strands.com/jherskowitz). Along with my photos, bookmarks, favorite videos, songs, etc.

Share on Strands:

Deja Vu - Physical Retailer (Best Buy) buys Digital Music Provider (Napster)

2008-09-15T09:13:00.003-05:00

Image via Wikipedia What's old is new again, eh? News just broke that Best Buy purchased Napster for $121 Million. Congrats to Napster for finding an exit, but I'm not all that bullish on the prospects for Best Buy to be successful with this. This has been tried numerous times in the past by physical retailers, without one highlight coming to mind. The one I am most familiar with was Circuit City's purchase of MusicNow several years ago, only to see Circuit City (re)sell it to AOL (for cheap) after being unable to capitalize on it.

I've spent all of 10 minutes thinking about the implications of this, but I'll start with these knee-jerk reactions:

Yet another subscription model disappears... do you want a subscription relationship with a retailer? I don't. I'm not sure why I find this so unappealing when I have subscription relationships with many (less trusted) companies than big box retailers, but it just doesn't *seem* right to me.
Would Best Buy consider selling off the subscribers to Rhapsody and just focus on selling DRM-free MP3s? Perhaps... that's an easier sell to their current customers. Buy and iPod at Best Buy and get 10 free MP3s? That could actually be a pretty interesting conversion strategy.
Most consumers have relationships with a digital goods provider right now (e.g. Apple) and I don't see an incentive for them to switch. Granted, Amazon has been successful in selling both physical and digital goods, but I think they are the exception not the rule. Although, I'm thinking that Best Buy sees the digital platform giving them the ability to more proactively push digital commerce affiliate relationships with "click to buy" MP3 links that are meant to compete with Amazon's and iTunes.

I'm sure my thoughts will continue to evolve on this over the next day or so, but what is for certain is that the digital music space continues to have more rehashed storylines and drama than your average daytime soap opera...

iTunes.fm?

2008-08-28T07:16:00.003-05:00

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown I just read a really good post from Read/WriteWeb with more speculation on what is coming with iTunes 8.0 software next month (click the link below to see the whole story):

The Case for an Apple iNetwork: Welcome to the Social - ReadWriteWeb: "While most of that is common knowledge, what most people overlook is the glaring lack of any community aspect to iTunes. There are millions of people, many of them with similar tastes, flocking to the same destination every day, yet they never interact with each other... because they can't. If Kevin Rose is to be believed, however, (as discussed on TWiT 157) that all is about to change with iTunes 8.0.

He says, '... the one thing I hear about iTunes 8.0 is that it's gonna do something along the lines of, um, looking at your music, and, uh, kind of recommendations based on certain things.' In other words, the next version of iTunes will monitor your media purchasing and consuming habits and correlate them with everyone else using the system to figure out which songs you will probably like but haven't bought/listened to. If you're a fan of collaborative filtering systems or internet radio (Pandora, Last.fm, etc), you're probably familiar with the idea already and that iTunes may be considering implementing this doesn't come as a surprise (I found myself wondering why this wasn't introduced 2-3 years ago)."

To make a real play at being a music network I think Apple needs to give iTunes a web presence (outside of the client application), but nonetheless the potential notion of Subscription + Cloud + iPhone + Taste Networking = pretty compelling proposition. Last.fm, iLike and iMeem have established the market for such experiences now. This is about the time when Jobs likes to walk in with an offering (while claiming they *invented* it).

I still think that they will come in with subscription at some point (if not now), but I'd put pretty good money that September announcements include MobileMe + enhanced taste networking/discovery features (with still an outside shot of full-blown subscription being announced too). Apple wouldn't be going through the headaches with MobileMe transition (aka "upgrade") if it wasn't key to their strategy moving forward - the next logical step for it is cloud storage (and playback) of your iTunes library with the additional kick of wireless (push) sync management of that media down to your iPhone/WiFiPod. Once your content is in the cloud and universally accessible, then limited sharing (streaming) to a small social network of your friends enhances discovery of new content, with easy "buy" links back to iTunes which can then push the newly purchased content to your device, computer and cloud all simultaneously.

Thoughts?

iTunes Unlimited Coming Next Month?

2008-08-20T21:21:00.002-05:00

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown We'll see if this actually plays out... but news is (re)surfacing that Apple's iTunes subscription plans are for real.

Rumors of iTunes music subscriptions fly again | The Industry Standard: "MacDailyNews says the service will be called 'iTunes Unlimited' and offer 50% of the songs currently on the traditional U.S. iTunes store through the program at launch. The subscription will be for one year and be available through iTunes or a retail box, similar to how MobileMe/DotMac is sold. iTunes Unlimited would launch, initially, on the U.S. store only. The subscription would cost $129.99 on its own, $179.99 with MobileMe or $99.99 for existing MobileMe subscribers. The site claims a late September announcement with late October rollout, just in time for the holiday season. TUAW received (almost certainly from the same source) a similar report."

But if it does, I won't hesitate to be the first to say "I told you so". :-)

Also check out some of my speculation on Apple's continued subscription world domination plan from January of this year.

Radio Royalties on Repeat Mode

2008-08-19T18:09:00.004-05:00

Image via Wikipedia The latest (yet not new) story on Pandora claiming they will pull the plug if there isn't relief on the proposed new streaming radio royalty rates has people talking again. The discussions and debates on these potentially crippling rates (see previous posts and savenetradio.com) are heating up again thanks to the Pandora story (and the recent RIAA-backed shutdown of Muxtape).

I agree that it is a very complex issue - with many parties to be considered. Webcasters, songwriters, artists, record labels, technologists, legislators, consumers. There are some that think that the music "establishment" (aka major labels, RIAA, SoundExchange) are doing everything in their power to reverse the clock so they can go back into history and undo some of their previous actions. The hope is, that in doing so, they create a better future for recorded music sales - one in which they own and control every piece of the pie. Others go so far to say that the labels actually have a vested interest in *killing* streaming radio as they see it as actually a replacement to sales. By killing the existing ecosystem, they can start over (an idea I don't totally disagree with). It's like those movies where some madman wants to nuke the planet so we can "start anew" and cleanse the sins of humanity's past.

I don't really know where I am going with this... other than, this is how I see the most recent actions of the "establishment". I may be somewhat naive, this is how this whole thing seems to be playing out:

Act 1

labels give terrestrial radio the rights to broadcast royalty-free (to generate awareness and sales of physical product)

Act 2

labels want more promotion so they start *paying* to get the content played (payola)

Act 3

labels told that "pay for play" is illegal and start looking for additional (free to them) promotional outlets

Act 4

labels want more promotion so they give MTV rights to royalty-free broadcast of music videos

Act 5

labels see other parts of the music ecosystem starting to make money (or *not* make money, but attracting users) and think "hey, that should be ours too"

Act 6

labels start demanding/increasing payment on plays (where they used to gladly pay for such a thing and would still be doing so if the federal government deemed it illegal)

Act 7

streaming/radio ecosystem can't afford to be in the radio business and all exit - or move to royalty free programming (talk, news, etc.) - this is in addition to MTV/VH1's continued shift to reality TV and away from music

Act 8

labels don't have any promotional outlets to get their content heard

Act 9

labels continue to explore new media distribution outlets for their content (commercials, soundtracks, etc)

Act 10

due to limited inventory and increased competition to get song "placement" labels offer royalty-free content

Act 11

go to Act 1

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” - Albert Einstein

RealPlayer 11 + Mac = No WiFi

2008-07-17T16:34:00.004-05:00

Image via WikipediaI have been having major connectivity issues on my MacBook for the past week. Dropping the connection, pages not loading, streaming media stuttering. I spent days searching Google to find out what the issue could be and tried everything - deleting preference files, clearing my PRAM, rebooting, reconfiging my Airport, reboot, reboot, reboot.... all with no luck. There are tons of forums that have lots of theories as to what is causing it (and lots of people yelling at Apple to fix the problem).

In my case, it was something simple. RealPlayer 11 was the cause. Presumably something to do with the "stream catching" feature. Granted, it is a cool feature that will let you rip YouTube videos, songs from Pandora, and more... but the damn thing my computer virtually unusable for 3 days. I dragged the app to my trashcan and all my issues were resolved instantly (didn't even need to reboot).

I'm not sure if there was a setting or config in RealPlayer 11 that could have been switched to remedy the problem, but if you are having similar problems you may want to see if this is the culprit.

Apple's SDK Restrictions Limit Innovation in Social Media Applications

2008-07-14T14:14:00.004-05:00

The lack of multitasking support is a bigger limiting factor than what appears on the surface for the iPhone (e.g. "it sucks that I can't view my calendar and listen to Pandora at the same time"). Particularly hamstrung are the social music and discovery applications, and the consumers that love them.

You can't run apps in the background therefore you can't build a "scrobbler" for things you listen to locally on your device - see the (shameless plug) Strands Social Player that runs on Symbian, Windows Mobile and other mobile OSes but can't be implemented on the iPhone due to their restrictions
The SDK doesn't allow you to touch any of the local music, only streaming content (or so I've been told), so you can't build an alternative local music application that has social features built-in (who else is listening, top fans, etc.)
No support for flash - so you can't port/expose existing flash players in the Browser

Therefore, if you are a social media company/developer that wants to do something with music you are really pretty limited to building streaming applications (much to the chagrin of AT&T I'm guessing). Unfortunately, that hinders many discovery companies and applications from doing really compelling stuff around helping people discover new content based on what they are currently listening to (locally).

As for the streaming apps, it is interesting to note the impact of their format decisions on performance (at least on EDGE).

Last.fm is basically unlistenable on EDGE - each song buffers for an extended period of time (a minute +) so once the song starts playing back it is good but the in-between song silence is almost longer and more unlistenable than a commercial break. This is presumably a byproduct of their 128k MP3 streams (or so I think).
Pandora *almost* will sustain a stream in my car at high speeds - I believe they are streaming 64k AAC(plus?)
AOL *was* in a prime position to offer a great EDGE streaming use case, for many years they were supporting 16k AACplus streams for their dial-up users - I don't know if this infrastructure was abandoned or whether it was a business decision by CBS, but they disable all but terrestrial simulcasts when you are on EDGE.

Dear Apple, let the reins loose a little bit and let the ecosystem thrive. The first batch of music apps is a great start, but there is so much more that can be done if allowed.

iPhone Music Apps

2008-07-10T06:56:00.005-05:00

iPhone Music Apps - Page 1
Originally uploaded by jherskowitz

The iTunes Apps store has started to surface this morning (installiTunes 7.7 update and then click here.

Here is a screenshot of them, with the ones I find most interesting circled. (Not pictured: TapTheBeat, Tuner and TyroTuner.)

I assume that both Pandora and AOL Radio are only streaming over WiFi but at 64kbps AAC/MP4 it is certainly possible that streaming over 3G is possible too. The "Remote" app lets you use your iPhone and/or iPod Touch to control your iTunes - think about your laptop (or AppleTV?) hooked up to your stereo while you site on the couch or sit in the backyard controlling the tunes.

The rest don't look all that interesting to me, but I'm sure there are thousands more in the works as we speak.

Share on Strands:

Wordle - My Delicious Tags as Art

2008-06-24T07:20:00.001-05:00

Wordle - My Delicious Tags as Art
Originally uploaded by jherskowitz

Cool site (www.woordle.net) will take your delicious tags and let you turn them into a customizable collage that lets you edit your fonts, colors, etc.

Here is mine...

NPR's Poll for Album of the (half) Year

2008-06-23T06:30:00.001-05:00

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

tweetiaor

2008-05-09T11:40:00.003-05:00

So, I built me*dia*or a while ago so I could drink from the music 2.0 firehose from a single place. As it was selfishly built to just make my life easier, I'm glad that a handful of others have seem to found it useful too. Although, I haven't done much to improve it lately, although that's the beauty of it I suppose... you don't have to since the content keeps you coming back.

But, yesterday I decided to get me*dia*or on to Twitter. Using twitterfeed I now @mediaor shooting me news updates to my phone every 30 minutes. A bit overwhelming at times, but many times I find that if things don't jump out at me every once in a while and say "look at me!" then I will often miss them as they float on by.

If you're like me... then I hope you get some use out of it. If you are like most of my friends and didn't understand more than 3 words above, then keep on moving... :-)

Strands - Tying it All Together

2008-04-28T19:51:00.007-05:00

I've been really quiet lately, and that is always the first sign that things at work are really humming along and keeping me busy. Lots of things are going on, and we are quickly approaching the time when we will unveil some of the new big pieces. But, leading up to that point are a number of new Strands releases that are quickly becoming available. To begin with, last week we announced that we were changing our brand from MyStrands to just "Strands".

We have also unveiled a new business solutions initiative that "delivers advanced social recommendation and personalization technology as an easy-to-use Strands hosted service that enables high quality individualized discovery and community features in your site."

Perhaps you've also seen us starting to bang the drum about the importance of data portability. We strongly believe that a user's taste data should be their own - and given that, they should be able to control who they share it with (or not).

What else? Well, since you asked...

Since we partnered with MTV to run partyStrands at their New Year's Event (on the big screen on Times Square), the website just got a shiny new facelift and has been rockin' large and small nightclubs and events across the country.

Also, a few weeks ago our Social Player won the MobileRules 08 "best multimedia application" award. And today we are announcing the last version of that application that adds the ability for users to send playcount data (aka "scrobble") from your mobile phone to Last.fm in addition to MyStrands.com.

Strands Blog: "We have just released version 3.1 of Nokia’s Mobile Rules! 2008 winning application, MyStrands Social Player, which allows you to scrobble tracks to Last.fm as you play music on your Symbian S60 3rd Edition and J2ME (optimized for Nokia S40) devices (download for S60 devices here and for S40 devices here). Recently listened tracks on your mobile device will now be available on your Last.fm profile.

The MyStrands Social Player is a music player for mobile devices that lets you discover new music, connect with people, and share your tastes with friends. Version 3.1 works with Nokia S60 3rd edition or S40 devices (optimized for most recent Nokia S40 devices), which brings the MyStrands Social Player not only to 10s of millions of smart phones but to the true mass market of 100s of millions of Java devices.

Powered by Strands’ Recommender, MyStrands Social Player provides artist and song recommendations from over 6 million songs, automatically shows cover art and fully integrates with a social network of music enthusiasts.

The “Who’s Listening” feature lets you discover like-minded people who are listening to the same songs you are playing. You can send messages, see the listening histories of your friends, and keep an ear on what’s hot."

The next event in this year's award season for the Social Player is our nomination for a Mobile User Experience award. If you like what you see, vote for us!

This stuff is just the tip of the iceberg, with much more to come. I promise.

In the meantime, don't forget to enjoy your personalized music video channel on MyStrands.TV, or a personalized radio station of indie/unsigned artists (and upload your own band's stuff for inclusion), and of course - track your listening behavior, get personalized music recommendations, and much more at www.mystrands.com.

UPDATE:

Today we announced our acquisition of Expensr and the beta release of moneyStrands.

Reply Channels

2008-04-25T13:30:00.003-05:00

Every once in a while, when I'm in a music rut and being lazy, I will just ask people for recommendations on what I should be listening to. Yeah, everybody does that, I know. But want I find interesting is the different modes in which the recommendations come in.

Take today for example... I tweeted (or is "twittered"?) the following:

Need some new music... what do you guys suggest?

Because of the multiple status broadcast and aggregation tools I use, that message found it's way to my Twitter account, Pownce account, Facebook status, FriendFeed (and other lifestreaming sites), and a number of other channels.

What I found interesting where the multiple modes of response I received.

public @replies via Twitter
direct Twitter replies
posts to my Facebook wall
private (inbox) messages via Facebook
messages from friends with links sent from their music site of choice
comments on a number of lifestream aggregators (to where my tweets get published)
instant messages
emails
and I'm guessing that I get some more recommendations from people via comments on this post

I find it to be a very interesting (and growing) phenomenon. What do you guys think? What's your preferred channel?

Sony Buys Gracenote

2008-04-22T18:23:00.000-05:00

Wow... hello left-field. I didn't see that one coming....

SunHerald.com : Sony Corporation of America to Acquire Gracenote: "NEW YORK, April 22 --
Sony Corporation of America (SCA) announced today that it has signed a merger agreement with Gracenote, Inc. Sony will pay approximately $260 million plus other contingent consideration."

Two Minutes and 42 Seconds in Heaven

2008-04-19T08:24:00.003-05:00

Great story. Follow the link and learn why 2:42 is the ideal length for the perfect song.

Two Minutes and 42 Seconds in Heaven by Joshua Allen - The Morning News: "How many horn solos does it take to kill a perfect pop song? JOSHUA ALLEN applies science and taste to determine the exact best length—down to the second—for the platonic song, including a full mix tape of samples."

Then head on over to Muxtape to experience a mixtape comprised solely of 2:42 long songs.

Seems Like Old Times

2008-04-06T11:20:00.003-05:00

It seems like it has been forever since I've been to a club show (when it fact it probably has indeed been the lifetime of my children). Last night I finally got motivated to get back out there - with the help of my wife and a babysitter.

The show that finally got me off my parental ass was the incomparable Mike Doughty, the venue... the 9:30 Club in DC. He played probably 15 songs, with an even mix of tracks off of Haughty Melodic (my favorite album of last year) and Golden Delicious (released last month). For good measure, he threw 2 Soul Coughing tunes ("Circles" and "St. Louise is Listening") and a cover of Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler". A couple of technical problems ruined the flow at times, but Mike and his band adeptly filled the time with amusing banter.

Mike: "This is a very important time of the night. This is the song before the *fake* last song. We are going to play this song, then the *fake* last song with a big rock-and-roll ending. I will introduce the each guy in the band by their full christian name - then the lights will go out. We will turn around and you will pretend we are off the stage. You will cheer and we will turn around and then play 2 more songs".

The show was good, but not great. The technical problems aside, the Soul Coughing songs sounded a bit flat in my opinion and I swear "St. Louise" was in an entirely different key. But, for a $20/ticket it is was a no-brainer. Although when you throw in the $10 service charge + $4 box office charge + $10 parking + $6 beers + $60 babysitter the return on investment becomes a little obvious but still worth it.

The thing that most struck me was how much older Doughty looked to me. Then I remembered that the last time I saw him was in 1995 playing a stellar Soul Coughing show at The Point. He was probably saying the same thing about his mostly 30-something crowd. Where does the time go?

Never Go Up Against a Sicilian When Death is on the Line!

2008-04-03T19:59:00.008-05:00

Image from WikipediaVizzini vs. The Man in Black in "The Princess Bride"... one of the most quoted and memorable movie scenes of my generation. The battle of wits to the death comes to mind often when I sit and watch what is going on right now in the music industry. The labels are Vizzini... overconfident, over-thinking, but also over-looking (the obvious). The consumers are The Man in Black... practical, nimble and immune.

For those of you that watch the industry, you have seen a flurry of announcements lately about the new approaches the labels are taking, the partners that used to be defendants, and how everything is the next "iTunes-Killer". While hyperbole is aplenty, clarity is hard to come by when it comes to making bets on what happens next.

Last.fm offering free streaming of millions(?) of tracks has also just announced that they will also offer streaming simulcasts of CBS Radio stations (sister division)
imeem cutting deals with all the majors with other "gray" services being coerced into similar deals
MySpace Music's announcement today about offering free streams (from 3 of the 4 majors) and selling both DRM'd and DRM free tracks
Nokia's "Comes with Music" offering (aka "the hardware tax")
Apple's rumored discussions around their own subscription plans ("hardware tax")
Omniphone's music subscription as bundled with wireless plan service in Europe ("wireless tax")
Universal Music Group's "Total Music" plan(s) that are still unclear ("hardware tax"?)
Warner Music Group's announcement last week that they hired Jim Griffin to drive and promote a service offering that would be bundled with your ISP bill (aka "the ISP tax")
MP3 Search Engines (aka "information retrieval tools") and online storage lockers, like Seeqod and MP3tunes, being sued by major record labels
New playlisting and music services popping up daily (see Muxtape and Mixwit)
Other services getting acquired (Foxytunes, Qloud) while others close up shop (Ezmo)
XM & Sirius merging
EMI hires ex-Google CIO to head up their digital division
Yahoo and MTV shedding their subscription music services (to Rhapsody)
Yahoo Music VP, Ian Rogers, decided to move on to a new job focused on the *creation* side of the industry... presumably because the consumption side is such a mess?
AOL farming out their radio programming (and presumably royalty liabilities) to CBS Radio
Amazon is now the second biggest digital music retailer, but iTunes is now the biggest music retailer (digital or physical) surpassing Wal-Mart

The list goes on and on. The good news is that there are a lot of smart and passionate people dedicated to trying to change the way the music business operates. The bad news is that most of the business models being pursued above can only succeed at the expense of all the other models.

I like the notion of making music "feel free" even if it's not. The problem is are you going to pay Nokia, Apple, Verizon and Comcast all an incremental fee for the same rights (all the music you can enjoy)? Some would say the labels have finally gotten smart by recently making some online bets after years of just trying to wish the internet away. Others would say that they are extorting the digital music companies, forcing them to make huge upfront deals and trade away big chunks of their companies in the name of self-preservation. Taken a step further, many claim the labels are moving towards extorting the consumers directly (after years of suing them) by trying to inflict an "optional" ISP music fee that basically buys you (and the ISP) immunity from being sued.

The only thing clear to me is that there is a nuclear bomb coming, and I'm not betting on any of them until the smoke clears. Any one of the (r)evolutionary models will send ripples throughout the music/tech community.... anointing new kings while massacring hundreds of others in the process.

That is, of course, if Steve Jobs decides to let any of it happen or not.

Qloud's Sunny Day

2008-03-31T10:10:00.004-05:00

Rumors today that LA-based Buzznet has bought Qloud for "slightly more than Qloud's last round valuation". I don't remember what Qloud's last round valuation was, I will have to go see if I can find it mentioned online somewhere.

Congrats to Mike & Toby, I hope this is a good thing for them and their company. Selfishly, I also hope they get to keep their office in DC as I'm a big fan of the growing digital media startup landscape in this area.

I keep going back to my predictions a couple of months ago, and I'm looking pretty good so far (one quarter into the year)...

Warner Music's Take on Subscription Music

2008-03-28T10:01:00.005-05:00

Source: WikipediaNews yesterday that Warner Music is pushing forward with their own take on subscription music... one that bundles a monthly fee (around $5/month) into your ISP bill and then lets you download any/all things you want (presumably most happening via P2P networks) with immunity from litigation.

As I have said numerous times, I am a big fan of the value proposition offered by subscription services, but this opens stirs up far more questions for me than answers based on my (assumed) use case below...

Comcast pays some collection agency a couple/few bucks for on every ISP customer they have
Comcast either then charges me an extra couple of bucks on my $50/month ISP bill or throws a few more ads at me to cover their incremental cost
I (and they) now have "immunity" for anything I download over their network - from MP3 search, P2P, etc.

If that is correct, then that sparks a bunch of related questions...

Does it matter how many people are on my network? Theoretically, my ISP is monetizing each user but in reality they would be monetizing the household, no? What if I open up my wireless network, and invite my neighbors that don't have broadband to jump on? What if I open a coffee shop and let hundreds of users a day get on free of charge? What if I resold access, is it then different?
How does my ISP cover their incremental costs via advertising? Many people don't ever visit their ISP's webpages (myself included). Do they they have to require their users to use/frequent their portals/sites? Do they require some application (like some of the old free ISP models) that throws pop-ups at me?
What about wireless? Is my cellphone company considered an ISP and subject to the same fees? If so, then isn't the consumer getting charged twice for the same rights (e.g. once by Comcast and once by AT&T)?
This is repeatedly denied as being "a tax", but to make this work it would have to be a *required* fee to every ISP, no? Otherwise, there is the danger of people switching to the *cheaper* ISPs that don't have cover this cost?
If the ISPs need to monetize these music consumption experiences (to cover their incremental costs of contributing to the pool) that seems to dictate that they (or at least some of them) can no longer just be a dumb pipe to 3rd party music sites.
Does this force Comcast and Verizon Fios (and others) to invest in building out there own music destinations to compete with Yahoo Music, AOL Music and MTV?
Does this trigger an avalanche of music service acquistions by the ISPs? Does Comcast buy Napster? Does Verizon buy imeem? Does Cox Communications buy Seeqpod? If they don't "own" the music experiences of their customers then how do they cover their additional licensing costs? If the ISPs can't cover these costs (or generate additional revenue around music) then what's in it for them? Just immunity from lawsuits themselves?

Public perception will be one of the biggest hurdles (and in my opinion, most important) to overcome in this new plan. The labels have done a fabulous job painting themselves as the bad guys over the past few years and most consumers don't really care whether or not they survive. While there are lots of reasons why the blanket licensing plan has merit, it will be all for naught if the consumers aren't convinced it's in their best interest.

I suggest that Warner Music gets a great PR firm on retainer quick before this rhetoric gets loud enough to smother the plan.

The next *big* question is then... how does this ISP-fee plan work in conjunction with the other approaches that Nokia is pushing with their "comes with music" plan and rumored Apple subscription plan that would put the tax on the devices themselves. How many times do I need to pay for my music... once with my phone + once with my iPod + monthly with my ISP + monthly with my cellphone???!

Sony BMG to Launch Own Subscription Service (Again)

2008-03-26T06:27:00.003-05:00

News is surfacing that Sony BMG is going to try (yet again) to a launch their own subscription music service. You know the saying about the "definition of insanity", right?

I don't get it at all. Where I used to think that Sony must have some well-thought out plan for their future (that I just didn't have visibility into), I now see them as just completely desperate, completely dis-"Connect"-ed, delusional label that has somehow convinced themselves that consumers know (and care) what label an artist is on.

Would you subscribe to a cable TV tier where you would only get access to shows produced by Ubu Productions (sit, ubu, sit.... good dog). Arguably, Ubu has stronger brand equity than Sony BMG and I still can't name what shows they produce.

It seems to me that these guys are just floating any idea to try and and stem the possibility of Apple beating to them to the punch (remember my 2008 predictions?) and taking what little semblance of power the labels once had in the music industry away from them.

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

2008-03-25T09:06:00.002-05:00

Great video highlighting the massive gap between *real* consumers and the rest of us....

AOL Buys Bebo Just to Resell It?

2008-03-13T08:15:00.005-05:00

News this morning that AOL is buying social network Bebo for $850 million. This comes one day after the news that Time Warner has finally gone on record that they want to dump AOL. What the hell is going on? Are they acting as middleman here? Buy Bebo for $850 mil, do some simple/basic integration with AIM and then claim it is now worth $1.5 billion in a couple of month? Perhaps Yahoo is interested in Bebo too, and the quickest way for them to get there is to have AOL as their broker? Got me... it all seems a bit odd to me.

Oh yeah, this all comes a couple of days after AOL's "Platform A" division (supposedly the company's saving grace) canned their head honcho... and then today mentioned they are going to cut half their Ad Sales force.

I hope there is some master plan behind all of this, but I have to be honest... I don't hold out hope. At this point I'm going to sit on my TWX stock until AOL is dealt away... I expect a pretty good bounce in price as soon as that happens. Considering the stock price is getting sucked down the toilet lately, that can't happen soon enough in my opinion.

Oh yeah, I consider this the death knell for Bebo. They are going to have to now go through what will likely be not one, but two, excruciating integrations. One with AOL (who have a bad record at this) and another with whoever (if anyone) buys AOL. Facebook and MySpace send your thank you cards to Dulles c/o of Ron Grant & Randy Falco.

Off Topic: My Latest "Lost" Theories

2008-02-29T19:29:00.004-05:00

I love the show "Lost". I think it is by far the best show on TV and the only one that I actually look forward to every week. The first couple of seasons of the show I used to try to "figure it out". I gave up continually revising my theories last year, and just relaxed and let it wash over me. "Wow, that was crazy... I guess I'll just see what unwinds next week".

Well, yesterday was a big show. One with a lot of questions answered, and that got me going again on my theories. Below are the most recent thoughts, theories, questions and WTFs that are rattling around in my head since last night...

Parallel Lives

OK, they are not dead and in purgatory (as I thought in Season 1)... but are living parallel lives, in different time periods, and different "speeds"

Time moves slower on the island than in "real" life - that's why it takes so long (island time) for the helicopter to make a "40 minute" trip to the freighter

Also some of the "others" haven't really aged since Ben was a little kid (per flashback)

Desmond's parallel life is 8 years behind "island time"

Per Daniel Faraday, people that are exposed to radiation or electromagnetic activity suffer "side effects" (time/space jumping)

Jack (a doctor who deals with XRay machines and other like-equipment) sees his father

Hurley sees his "invisible friend" from the looney bin.... was he exposed to radiation/electromagnetic fields at some point? I don't recall anything but who knows....

The radio engineer on the freighter (works in highly electromagnetic environment). Is this the same "crazy" WW2 radio engineer (in his "real self") that Hurley gets the "numbers" from in the looney bin????

Desmond was in the electromagnetic "blast" when the hatch blew up (and could then see the future regarding Charlie's pending demise)

Daniel Faraday did all of those radioactive tests on the mouse. Remember when Faraday was shown watching the story of the plane crash and he starts crying? Someone asks "why are you crying?" and he doesn't know.... it's because he can almost make the connection to his parallel life on the island (and whatever ends up happening there)

Rousseau's crew members were studying the electromagnetic properties of the island (?) and "went crazy" and she killed them all. Why not Rousseau herself? Well, she was pregnant so it would make sense that she stayed away from any radioactive/electromagnetic dangers

By the way, Locke was in that hatch blast too.... so look for him to be next.

Remember in season 1 or 2 when Desmond met Jack at the stadium (in Jack's flashback before he was on the island) and Desmond asked "do we know each other"? That's because Desmond can kind of remember from his parallel life in the future (on the island)

Kids can't be conceived on the island because every life has to have a parallel life in the real-world (do the writers have a "life starts at conception" agenda?)

Widmore (Penny's dad) learns about the secrets of the island from the journal of the First Mate of the Black Rock (he bought it at the auction) - he sends Desmond there on the race to see if it's true/works. How did the First Mate (or at least his journal full of secrets) make it off the island?

Hmmm... could some of the "slow aging" others mentioned above actually have been the crew on the Black Rock???

Master of His Domain

Ben knows how to control the mental jumping between the parallel lives/time - as well as physically leave - this is why the scientist team is looking for him... they want to learn how he does it. But, without his submarine is he now physically stuck on the island??

Ben can also control other people's jumping between the parallel worlds... that's how he got Locke to see his dad locked in the closet

Ben sends Sayid and other's into the parallel world (past) to do his bidding. Are Sayid and the others of Oceanic 6 are actually off the island, or he has just "mentally" sent them there (either by their choice or negotiation to keep the others safe in their alternative realities)?

Jack and Kate had to "memorize" their (fake story) of how they escaped the island - the one Jack spouted out at Kate's trial. But how were their "real" bodies saved/recovered considering the reports were that *all* of the victims where found at the crash site????

My Brain Hurts

Now, here is the thing that currently has my head spinning the most...

Since time runs slower on the island (the island is currently 8 years ahead of "real life" per Desmond) - at some point "real life" will pass "island time" and the parallel lives will move from being in the past to being in the future!

Then what happens?!!!

All Quiet on the Eastern Front

2008-02-25T09:27:00.003-05:00

I realize I have been pretty sparse with my posts lately. I blame that on a couple of things...

1.) I have been using Twitter to more quickly (and granularly) express what I am thinking/doing.

2.) I've been very busy with work. We are starting to get close to with a new product, and that has been keeping me more than occupied. But, once we get closer I will probably get to the point where I won't shut up about it.

That being said, I'll be at the Digital Music Forum East conference tomorrow/Wednesday in New York. Let me know if any of you guys are going.

Imeem Acquires Snocap

2008-02-13T16:14:00.001-05:00

More moves by Imeem.... they are piecing together an interesting puzzle over there. I'm not sure how many people come with the Snocap acquisition, or how this will be integrated with both Imeem and Anywhere.fm (who they acquired a few weeks ago).

Imeem Acquires Snocap: "Digital music wholesaler Snocap, long searching for a buyer, is being acquired by music streaming site Imeem. The price will likely not be disclosed."

Song of the Day: "I Just Want The Girl In The Blue Dress To Keep On Dancing" by Mike Doughty

2008-02-13T15:48:00.008-05:00

Man, I love Mike Doughty. Something about his music that just gets me bouncing. Ever since his Soul Coughing days I've been a big fan and after Doughty's Haughty Melodic album a couple of years ago I've been jonesing for what's next.

Well, the wait is just about over. The new album, Golden Delicious, comes out next week, and here is my new favorite song of the moment....

I Just Want The Girl In The Blue Dress To Keep On Dancing by Mike Doughty

Danger, Danger, Will Gates

2008-02-11T20:18:00.000-05:00

News today that Microsoft has just bought Danger (creator of the Sidekick phone/PDA). I've never owned a Sidekick (apparently it is the only device I have not owned a version of) - but I know that there was a fairly large group of people that are/were big fans. I don't see them around as much as I used to though... I'm not sure if maybe I'm not the target demographic or whether their sales have tailed off due to increased competition.

Either way, it was Microsoft's Xbox/Zune/Windows Mobile group that drove this acquisition.... so you've got to figure this is the first step in a rush-to-market iPhone competitor. Besides the fact that it just seems like another reactionary "how do we keep up with the Joneses" move, it also once again directly pits Microsoft against their licensees. This is far from the first time they have done this... most recently, this was the shift taken by the same group when they realized that their PlaysForSure/Windows Media Player storefront strategy wasn't working. When none of their PlaysForSure partners (CinemaNow, Napster, Rhapsody, FYE, AOL MusicNow, etc.) could mount a truly competitive offering against Apple, they (MS) went back to the trenches and said.... "ok, let's do what Apple has done and see if we can beat them at their own game".

In mobile phones, the tack was to license Windows Mobile to be the de facto standard of mobile device operating systems. The good news... they managed to kill Palm. The bad news.... Apple and Nokia not so much. So, what about a Zune-phone? I'm skeptical, but I'll be interested to see how it unfolds.

Oh yeah, there is actually another device that I just thought of that I have never owned.... a Zune.

Google Doing Music Search... In China

2008-02-06T12:11:00.000-05:00

This market gets more interesting every day...

Google planning China online music tie-up: report | Technology | Internet | Reuters: "NEW YORK (Reuters) - Web search leader Google Inc is planning to boost its presence in China by tying up with a Chinese online music company to provide free music downloads, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday."

If this works in China, how long before they cut the same deals in the US? Last May I waxed poetic about what Google could/should do in the music space. Are they dipping their toes in the Chinese water?

Last.fm's Subscription Details (or just speculation?)

2008-02-05T10:08:00.000-05:00

Silicon Alley Insider says they have an inside tip on details of Last.fm's upcoming subscription tiers...

Last.fm's Subscription Service: Bite-sized And Super-Sized? - Silicon Alley Insider:
"A mini-subscription, priced at $4 a month. This would let users stream more music than they can for free -- Last.fm's current deal limits users to 3 plays per song, per month -- but would be capped at some number. We've heard 100 songs a month, but that seems too tiny to entice many users.
An all-you-can-eat, unlimited subscription, priced at $10 a month."

SAI closes saying they are skeptical of the validity of these rumors... what do you guys think?

To me it says Rhapsody better get going and (re)introduce some of the community features that they briefly showed up last year but have subsequently disappeared.

FoxyTunes/Yahoo Deal Consumated

2008-02-04T11:49:00.000-05:00

Congrats to Alex and the gang at FoxyTunes (and to Lucas et al at Yahoo)...

FoxyTunes Blog: "The FoxyTunes team will become a part of Yahoo! Music and will continue working on FoxyTunes, adding many great things to our products - you’ll see support for additional media players, integration with many additional music sites and services and much more! Our product roadmap and wishlist are quite long and very exciting, and being a part of Yahoo! will really allow us to make many of the things we’ve been planning a reality. Most importantly, Yahoo! are as committed as we are to preserving the Open spirit of FoxyTunes and embracing all the great music products and services out there."

Let's hope Microsoft doesn't screw the whole thing up....

Rhapsody Snags Yahoo Music Subscribers Before Microsoft

2008-02-04T08:17:00.000-05:00

Further consolidation in the music market....

Yahoo selling music service to Rhapsody America - USATODAY.com: "Yahoo is selling its digital music subscription service to Rhapsody America — a partnership of Real Networks and MTV Networks — as it revamps its music strategy.

Yahoo Music will continue to offer music videos, Internet radio and music downloads. But customers of its monthly Yahoo Music Unlimited service will be migrated to Rhapsody. No firm timetable has been set. Yahoo, which expects the deal to close by the middle of year, did not disclose terms."

Now all that is left if for Rhapsody to buy Napster, and the subscription market has been weened down to Rhapsody vs. The World (save Last.fm's upcoming streaming subscription service).

This story talks about Yahoo keeping their Music destination (music.yahoo.com) and ... I definitely believe the former, but I still think the latter could be up on the blocks at some point.

I think this is a good play for Rhapsody, and sooner or later people *will* understand the value of subscription. When the do, they'll be the only game in town...

MicroHoo - Part 2

2008-02-01T09:58:00.000-05:00

Yeah, this would be huge from the search and advertising perspective... but what about from the music angle?

MediaPost Publications - Microsoft/Yahoo Would Dominate Online Display, Rival Google In Search - 02/01/2008: "IN A DEAL THAT WOULD consolidate the Internet's No. 1 destination, Yahoo, and its fifth largest, MSN, Microsoft this morning made a bid to acquire Yahoo for a record-setting $44.6 billion. The deal, if completed, would mark the largest yet in the ongoing consolidation among the Internet's big bodied players, and would once again reset the playing field for online advertising industry. Regulatory considerations aside, the deal would seem to be a good 'take out' offer to Yahoo's shareholders. At $31 per share, Microsoft's bid represents a 62% premium over Yahoo's current stock value. Based on Thursday's closing price of $19.18 a share, Yahoo's market capitalization was $25.63 billion, according to Yahoo Finance."

I talked a bit about this last May when rumors first surfaced that a deal like this could be in the works. How would Yahoo's evolving music strategy fit with Microsoft's Zune/Xbox ~~tact~~ tactics?

Anywhere.FM Acquired by Imeem

2008-01-28T09:51:00.000-05:00

I just got this in my inbox this morning...

We are very excited to announce that Anywhere.FM has been acquired by imeem (http://www.imeem.com), the leading social media network.

Since our launch last August, Anywhere.FM has been dedicated to making it easy to upload, play, and share your music wherever you go. We have listened to our users and worked hard to provide them with the best music playback experience available on the Internet. The millions of tracks that our users have uploaded to Anywhere.FM over the last 6 months prove to us that we have been successful in achieving this goal.

Today's announcement broadens the scope of Anywhere.FM's ambitions, bringing us together with imeem, a social networking site with a media-centric approach to connecting consumers. With imeem, users can enjoy, recommend and discover not only music, but film, video, TV programming and art, and connect with people who share similar tastes.

Anywhere.FM will continue to exist as a standalone site for our users to enjoy. At the same time, we will bring many of the innovations of Anywhere.FM to the imeem community as well as the broader internet community in the near future. We'll also keep on innovating on the Anywhere.FM website. We have some interesting ideas on how to best leverage imeem's audience and media content to further enrich the Anywhere.FM experience.

We hope you are as excited as we are about this acquisition. We have lots in store for you - we'll be sure to keep you posted in the coming months as we unveil our exciting plans.

Feel free to share your ideas and feedback with us at feedback@anywhere.fm.

Sincerely,

Anson, Lux, and Sachin
The Anywhere.FM Team

http://www.anywhere.fm

I haven't thought much about this yet, but obviously Imeem is looking to simplify the process by which people upload and share their content.

Amazon's Kindle

2008-01-25T08:02:00.000-05:00

I've never paid much attention to the talk of Amazon's Kindle eBook device, but I came across it today on their site and finally learned more about it.

I'm not much of a book reader myself, so I don't envision getting one for myself (although it could be a good gift for my wife). Actually, the thing I find most interesting about it is Amazon's "Whispernet" delivery network. It's build on top of Sprint's EVDO network, but I'm not sure what is different about it from what Sprint already has.

Of course, my first question is.... I wonder if they are planning on utilizing it to deliver music and movies to another Kindle-like device they may have in the works?

Seeqpod Next Target for the Major's Legal Machine?

2008-01-24T07:59:00.000-05:00

Looks like WMG (or their legal department at least) is now targeting Seeqpod. Who wants to bet the next announcement we see is that Seeqpod is moving to an ad rev-share model with the major labels.

Warner Music Lawyers Roll Again, Seeqpod Latest Target — Digital Music News: "Warner Music Lawyers Roll Again, Seeqpod Latest Target

Warner Music Group is now directing its legal guns at Seeqpod (seeqpod.com), a media-focused search service. The Seeqpod engine resembles larger and more established players like Google, though it focuses on playable media results. That includes a heavy amount of music, and Seeqpod allows users to access and stream millions of songs on-demand through an integrated player.

That eventually grabbed the attention of Warner, which first filed against the engine last week. The label claims that Seeqpod is illegally allowing access to its music by accessing servers worldwide. But Seeqpod notes that it hosts none of the content in question, and therefore enjoys protection under Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Elsewhere, Google also indexes web-hosted MP3s, and search engines represent a growing method for music acquisition."

It was my understanding that search engines were protected (per the story above), but for a little company like Seeqpod it's probably a lot less painful to cut a deal than fight. Thoughts?

Last.fm Rolls Out Freeplays and Subscription

2008-01-23T11:33:00.000-05:00

And another shoe drops...

Last.fm – the Blog · Free the Music: "As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries. During this initial public beta period, each track can be played up to 3 times for free before a notice appears telling you about our upcoming subscription service. The soon-to-be announced subscription service will give you unlimited plays and some other useful things. We’re also working on bringing full-length tracks to the desktop client and beyond."

What's unclear is whether their subscription service will be streaming only or have some download component. My guess is the former - unlimited on-demand streaming - with continued affiliate relationships with Amazon for iPod compatible downloads.

Now the big question is, just how much advertising are they going to have to put in front of everyone to cover the costs of the on-demand licenses with the labels? I've done some modeling of this in the past, and it's most likely going to need to include some piece of video advertising (see prior post about Truveo/AOL deal). And just how much will consumer put up with before they move on to the next ad-free, business model-free, offering?

Radio Adios

2008-01-23T09:36:00.000-05:00

There is lots of talk about Yahoo's upcoming layoffs with many predicting that their Yahoo Music Unlimited subscription service going the way of the Dodo (perhaps selling off their subscriber base to Rhapsody). I agree with this speculation, particularly in light of their new strategy and their focus on "context" over "content". The other thing I think that may get hit in the downsizing is their radio product, LAUNCHcast.

Given the strategic shift taking place over there (particularly with their music products), as well as the ongoing SoundExchange negotiation debacle, I think they will cut-and-run on radio too. Radio is generally a loss-leader for the big portals and with the (unknown) future royalty rates the "loss" is going to get too much to stomach for most.

On a related note, look for AOL to dump their AOL Radio product as well (along with XM partnership) and replace it with a third party player/product. Probably from a larger terrestrial radio network... most likely related to the recent video advertising deal announced between CBS (owner of Last.fm) and Truveo (part of AOL). This would get AOL out of a money-losing content endeavor and more focused on being a cross-platform advertising network. Great for everyone. Well, except the consumers....

Off Topic: Funny Video - AOL's New Extra Senior Vice President for Special Excellence

2008-01-20T08:44:00.000-05:00

I'm a big fan of 30 Rock, and when some of my friends still at AOL mentioned that they got Alec Baldwin to be in a little promotional skit for the company I went to check it out.

I'm not sure it is as funny to people who haven't been part of that company's environment (or catch some of the people references), but I got a kick out of it. And my friend Ivy scored a speaking part with Alec... nice! :-)

It looks like (CEO) Randy Falco's NBC connections finally paid off for something...

Rhapsody's 50 Free Plays

2008-01-18T15:35:00.001-05:00

Rhapsody has had a long established trial model where you get 25 free plays (streaming only) a month just by registering at their site.

Well, Rhapsody also introduced a Facebook widget the extends that experience into the popular social network (with whom my love affair is starting to fade... but that's another story). What I noticed today, is that the two accounts have no knowledge of each other. I used up about 15 of my 25 free plays this month at Rhapsody.com today checking out the soon-to-be-released Cat Power album "Jukebox" and some tracks from the critically-acclaim Athens, GA band The Whigs.

I then got a song sent to me in Facebook from their application, clicked play and noticed it said that I had 24 free plays left. Nice, without doing any work I just doubled the number of free plays I get a month. ;-)

Now you can use up a couple of your 50 too.....

Like A Vibration - The Whigs

Metal Heart - Cat Power

By the way Rhapsody, your "RhapLink Generator" (used to generate the links above) is a bit of a mess. It spit out bad HTML that I had to tweak by hand to work (as well as manually adding the artist name to the link)....

Yahoo to Snare Foxytunes?

2008-01-18T07:34:00.000-05:00

Given what Yahoo has shown what they are up to with their new plans around music and their new web layer, this actually doesn't come as a surprise to me.

Yahoo May Be Looking To Buy Israel’s FoxyTunes: "Rumors popped up here in Silicon Valley that Yahoo is in negotiations to buy Israel-based FoxyTunes."

I mentioned in my previous post about Yahoo's new strategy reminded me a lot of Foxytunes' approach. Perhaps I was more right than I knew at the time...

For Those About To Rock Club, We Salute You

2008-01-15T10:43:00.000-05:00

Great story in the Washington Post this past Sunday about 4 guys (very much like me) that have sworn to re-invent the notion of the "book club" for those of us that would rather go check out a local concert...

For Those About To Rock Club, We Salute You - washingtonpost.com: "Getting four ultra-busy guys together every week doesn't happen easily. After his initial plea for regular rock-and-roll meet-ups was welcomed with open arms, Andelman fleshed out his plan, suggesting that each week, one member would research and select a band. But the concept that sounded great in an e-mail could very well have failed. (How often do people plan to get together regularly, only to meet sporadically, if at all?)"

The weeks rolled by and the guys went out, wrote reviews and went out again. Amazingly, the whole thing worked. The secret to Rock Club's success? 'We see a wide range of bands,' says Fintel, a consultant. 'And we've gone to all kinds of venues: the Black Cat, 9:30 club, Rock and Roll Hotel, Velvet Lounge, Verizon Center, DAR, Wonderland. And we even braved a snowstorm to see [New York band] the Mooney Suzuki.'"

Amusingly enough, it turns out that one of the guys (follow the link in the blockquote above to read the whole story) actually has a kid in the same class as one of my music-loving buddies. So, sure enough we are now trying to figure out how we get our asses off the couch and out to more shows. I'm not going to fool myself into thinking I'd be up for this once a week, but maybe once a quarter to start.... if it goes well (and as the kids get older) maybe we can crank it up to once a month.

Here are some tips for setting up your own Rock Club, and don't forget the "rules"...

"The Rules of Rock Club were drafted and ratified: Shows were to cost no more than $20; the person who picked a concert would write a review on the blog; no wives or girlfriends allowed."

Who's in?! :-)

Note to eMusic... Round Up

2008-01-11T22:20:00.000-05:00

I, like most eMusic "subscribers", anxiously await the date our monthly download credits refresh so we can scoop up the tracks and albums that we've bookmarked over the previous month. I actually never knew my exact date of refresh, although I knew it was sometime around the 2nd week of the month. Well, after I realized (or were told by a few people) that I had sort of slept on the Spoon and Of Montreal albums last year (made *lots* of people's top 10 lists, but for some reason I never got around to listening to them) - I decided I would scoop them both up on eMusic.

So, on January 9th I checked my refresh date and luckily it said my monthly refresh was scheduled to happen on on January 10th. Nice, so I went to bed with the intention that I'd grab them first thing in the morning. But, to my dismay, when I woke up it still said I had 0 credits. I checked back a couple hours later... 0 credits. Another couple of hours later.... 0 credits. Rechecked my refresh date... yep, it was the right day... Jan. 10. There should have been 30 credits in my account, but still 0.

By this time I was really annoyed. I contacted eMusic's customer service to be told that my credits would refresh "at some point throughout the day". Would it kill you to give me the benefit of a a half a day to give me a better experience? Hell, I'd even prefer to give up 12 hours and you can round up.... tell me my account refreshes on the 11th (instead of the 10th) and I would have been a much happier customer. Whatever happened to underpromise and overdeliver?

And while you are at it... can you add a "remember me" checkbox on the login so I don't have to re-enter my credentials every time I want to browse the catalog?

Or perhaps you are just getting back at me for my mention of you in my 2008 predictions?

Sony BMG + MP3 - DRM = Amazon

2008-01-10T19:49:00.000-05:00

Sony BMG has given us all a roller coaster ride over the last week and half or so. They announced they would offer DRMless MP3s, and we all cheered. Then they announced their ill-conceived MusicPass initiative and put the fear into us all that was all they were going to do. Some even went so far as to say they were *trying* to fail with DRMless MP3s... "hey, we tried it and no one bought them so now put the shackles back on!"

Now there is a collective sigh of relief that they have, in fact, signed with Amazon to make their catalog available sans DRM at everyone's favorite online retailer.

Sony BMG Will Allow Amazon to Sell Its Music Without DRM | Listening Post from Wired.com: "Sony BMG made history Thursday by becoming the fourth and final major label to allow its music to be sold without digital rights management, issuing a announcement that Amazon.com's MP3 store would start carrying music from the label by the end of this month."

Phew, disaster averted....

Yahoo's New Play(er)

2008-01-09T07:46:00.000-05:00

Yahoo just announced their new web player today and released it into the wild for us to play with.

Basically, it works as follows:

Here's what it does:
Link to MP3s in your web page. These can be anywhere on the web.
Add a line of code to insert our Javascript library. We host this, so you just have to point to our URL.
Working play buttons appear next to MP3s.

More information can be found here:

http://yahoomediaplayer.wikia.com
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/01/post.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/08/yahoo-releases-browser-based-mp3-player/

My first impressions are very positive. As a blogger it will make my life easier since I just embed the player code once into the body of my page, and then just drop the MP3 links anywhere on the page and they automagically get a play icon (and get playlisted).

It also is supporting some open standards (under the covers) in the form of XSPF playlists - I assume in a future release I will be able to hit a page that uses this player and download the XSPF playlist file to take with me - where I can then decide to either have it continue to resolve to the original source files or to a catalog of my choice (e.g. a subscription catalog, my local library, etc.). Check out the work going on at OpenMediaWeb that Yahoo is also heavily involved in and this previous conversation around playlist portability.

Yahoo gets their piece by linking off to a Yahoo Search based on the metadata keywords.

All-in-all, it strikes me as a web-based client version of Foxytunes. I've always been a fan of Foxytunes, and you can see my previous coverage of them here. In fact, I would not be surprised to see Yahoo Search evolve to have "artist pages" that suck in related content from the artist from all over the web - photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube, free-range MP3s (similar to the way AOL just starting doing), Wikipedia-based bios, etc. very much like FoxyTunes Planet.

The downside? Well, if you are "playing a page" you are basically tied to that page as long as you want to keep listening. The easy way around that is to open a new tab instead of refreshing the current page you are on. Not a huge deal, but you may often find yourself accidentally turning the music off if you follow another link on the page that you are playing (if that link doesn't target a new browser window/tab). The other downside that I noticed when I first implemented it, is that in a heavily widgetized page, you may have to wait a while for the javascript to load.

I speculated about 6 months ago that Yahoo was up to something based on the previous Webjay work of Lucas Gonze. It looks to have evolved a bit since then, but I think understand where the are going and I applaud it.

In honor of this new player, I've got a new Song of the Day to share too.
Thanks to Redboy I just discovered The Big Sleep. This song is off their soon-to-be-released album, and I'm diggin' it.

Pinkies - The Big Sleep

Also check out one of the instrumental tracks from their previous album.

You Can't Touch the Untouchable - The Big Sleep

2008 Digital Media/Music Predictions

2008-01-07T21:17:00.000-05:00

I have been remiss in making my 2008 Digital Media/Music Predictions this year. Instead of putting it off until I could formulate some well-thought predictions, I figured I'd take the more lax approach this year and go stream-of-consciousness (and slightly tongue-in-cheek).

As a reference, here are my 2007 Predictions. Now, on to 2008!

Apple launches a subscription music service (of one form or another). Dark Horse/Long Shot but I'm putting it out there.

Rhapsody & Napster... "there can be only one!". Napster continues to run out of cash and sells subscriber base off to Rhapsody.

Amazon siphons off all of eMusic's userbase - eMusic goes up for sale. Potentially to a major label - or a consortium of them?

The Beatles *finally* make their digital debut - on iTunes. Apple sells millions virtually overnight. That's my "lock of the week".

AmazonMP3's affiliate program takes off as their catalog of DRMless MP3's from all 4 major labels grow - virtually every site with music content moves to Amazon as primary affiliate partner (and away from iTunes) due to better terms from Amazon.

Open Standards for music and taste portability finally start to make inroads (see www.openmediaweb.org).

SoundExchange becomes successful in drastically increasing royalty rates for online radio (retroactively) - they put massive number of broadcasters our of business (and forcing companies like Pandora to change their product and/or business model or shut there doors), see a proliferation of "gray" services that don't pay royalties directly, and collect a fraction of royalty payments then they did before they raise the rates.

Slacker is acquired - by Microsoft or Motorola. Their hardware/satellite delivery platform is integrated into a more holistic product line.

The major labels (while tentatively supporting DRMless MP3s) will still screw around and not giving users what they want - by forcing users to jump through additional hoops to get the MP3 versions. I cheated on this one since Sony BMG just tipped their hand on this "plan".

While 2007 saw explosion of new "media & music 2.0" companies hit the market, 2008 will be the year of the great shakeout. Smaller existing "music 2.0" companies are acquired - funding gets tougher to come by for new ones.

AOL completes their "transformation" to become an ad network - they try to sell off their audience/portal business at bargain basement prices. There are no takers. On a related note, they sell off the AIM business to Facebook. What the hell, every once in a while you have to close your eyes and throw a dart.

I'm not going to make predictions on the work that I'm doing (it wouldn't be so much a prediction as a breach of confidentiality) but look for some very cool things out of MyStrands in 2008 too. :-)

What do you guys think? Anything to add? Anything that jumps out as you as "are you smoking crack?!".

MusicPass - Another Swing and Miss from Sony BMG

2008-01-07T10:38:00.000-05:00

Am I missing something? Is Sony BMG forcing consumers to go to the store to buy a card that then then bring back to their house to redeem online?? Can you not just go directly to the site to buy? Add why do the labels continue to think that consumers know (or care) what label an artist is on? I don't want to have to buy my milk at one store and my eggs at another.... I want one place where I can find everything.

All of you planning to get my a gift card this year... don't get me this one. :-)

Ugh.

Musicpass: "New York, NY - Monday, January 7, 2008 -- SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT today announced the launch of Platinum MusicPass, a series of digital album cards that enable consumers to download full-length albums, and in many cases special bonus content, in the form of high-quality MP3 files. The first 37 titles in the series, which represent musical genres ranging from Rock and Pop to R&B and Country, will debut on January 15th, 2008 and by the end of the month will be available at 4,500 retail outlets across the United States. In Canada, MusicPass will debut in late January of 2008.

UPDATE: So, ValleyWag *doesn't* think this idea is crazy (at least for the labels and artists). But the more I think about this the dumber it seems to me...

If I'm buying this for myself, when wouldn't I just buy the CD instead of the plastic "trading card"? Isn't the CD inherently more collectible then a plastic gift card? It comes with whatever bitrate MP3 (or other codec) I want to rip it in, and already has all of the "extra" like album art and liner notes. Besides, I can sell it when I'm done with it.

If I'm at Best Buy looking for a gift card for a friend, why wouldn't I just get them a Best Buy gift card that can be used for *any* CD not just one of the 37 albums they can redeem with this card? Or anything else in the store for that matter...

I sincerely hope I am missing something in this announcement, but I fear I am not.

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