Rhapsody's 50 Free Plays

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)....

2008 Digital Media/Music Predictions

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?!".

Industry Moves: Last.fm Swarms Musicmobs

Toby Padilla, creator of Musicmobs (one of the first "music 2.0" sites out there) has packed his bags, ideas and talent and moved to London to join Last.fm (nee CBS) as their VP of Client Software.

I heart Musicmobs: "In the end, I accepted Last.fm's offer to help create the social music dream team :) I'll be heading up the desktop and client software division and working with some really amazing people to take the Last.fm desktop player to the next level."

Congrats to Toby - and to Last.fm for getting him. Not only has he shown he is a visionary in the industry (and all-around good guy) but he has the unique distinction of getting me to join Facebook. Perhaps I can file charges against him for drug dealing?! :-)

Qloud & iLike Talk OpenSocial

Everyone is talking about OpenSocial, and the music 2.0 services are no exception.

Toby Murdock - CEO, Qloud


Ali Partovi - CEO, iLike


The thing that most immediately strikes me is that iLike, Qloud and MySpace all have their own versions of an "artist page" within the same network. So, now the consumer experience is fragmented. "Did you see my post on 50 Cent's wall?!". "Uh, no. Which wall? The MySpace artist page, the iLike artist page or the Qloud artist page?". The same problem already exists in Facebook.

How does this all shake out?! I don't know yet. Any thoughts?

TechCrunch covers some of the upcoming battle here.

UPDATE: It turns out that Tim O'Reily is a bit disappointed with OpenSocial in general...

OpenSocial: It's the data, stupid: "If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that's a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don't want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks."

Facebook: Over 15 Billion Served

It's supposedly official...

Microsoft acquires equity stake in Facebook; Facebook's valuation at 15 billion | The Social - CNET News.com: "It's official: Microsoft will take a $240 million equity stake in Facebook during its next round of financing, valuing the company at a whopping $15 billion."

Not a comment on whether they are worth it or not, but just to add some perspective... the entirety of AOL (portals, dial-up access business, Advertising.com, AIM & ICQ, Winamp, Mapquest, Netscape, Moviefone, etc.) was valued at $20 Billion a couple of years ago (when Google invested $1B for a 5% stake).

Me, Myself & iPhone

Yeah, I broke down and got an iPhone. There are a couple of minor things that are a bit annoying - but that is to be expected. And yes... as everyone else has already reported, I too, would love it if it used the 3G network and that it supported Flash content. But in short I think it's great. I wasn't going to get one - I was going to sit on the fence until the second generation then decide. I didn't want to be the Apple fanboy that thinks any/everything that comes out of Cupertino is the best thing ever created. I even posted that I hoped the iPhone would be a total piece of crap and that it would fail. But alas... it is not. When I went back and looked at my old posts about what I have always wanted in the ultimate phone (wifi, MP3, video, large storage capacity, *relatively* fast data network) - I realized that I was in denial that the iPhone met all of these criteria. The one it didn't meet was that It doesn't support subscription music services - but see my post from yesterday as to why this criteria no mattered for me. But in lieu of support for Windows Media DRM, it even threw a spectacular UI and a qwerty keyboard that works pretty well even though it is virtual. Not as good as my old Blackberry's hardware keyboard but it works good enough for me.

As *many* people have posted about the overall usability and UI - I will share a personal experience that I think is very illuminating. If you hand the iPhone to an adult (particularly someone from my parent's generation) - the initial response is "wow"! This is because they have been trained and beaten down over years that technology (particularly cutting-edge tech) shouldn't be this easy.

On the flipside, when I handed the iPhone to my 3 year old daughter for the first time I got *no* reaction. That's because she didn't know any better - to her it worked like it was supposed to... completely intuitive.

So, after a few weeks with it - I've compiled the list of apps and websites that I have found to be the most indispensable for you other iPhoney's.

1. Handbrake - rip a DVD then transfer it to your iPhone. Note: In Handbrake select the iPod settings but make sure that the output size is no larger than 640x480 (I had to go in and manually change this one parameter of the iPod setting). If you don't do that then the file won't sync.
2. iPhone Remote (aka Telekinesis) - Not only can you use your iPhone as a remote control for you Mac (opening applications, etc.) but you can also stream content off of your Mac to your iPhone (music, videos, snapshots from your webcam). Works great over my LAN, but not sure if/how it will work outside the house since I don't have a static IP address. Still playing with it, but has *lots* of potential. Another option is Signal, but it does less and costs more ($29 vs. free).
   
3. Facebook Mobile - If you love Facebook, then the iPhone optimized version of the site is a must-bookmark.
4. Seeqpod for iPhone - MP3 search engine optimized for iPhone. Search for a free range MP3, and stream directly to your phone. Obviously better to try when on WiFi. Another great option is Grabb.it's iPhone interface.
   
5. TinyBuddy IM - A web-based AIM application (built by folks at AOL) using the "standard" iPhone UI. The other option is Meebo which also works well.
6. Netvibes - I actually just went through the pain of migrating all of my feeds from Pageflakes to Netvibes just so I could get the same content on my iPhone. It takes a long time to load over EDGE, but when on WiFi it works very well.

What are you guys using?



----------------
Now playing: Weezer & Soul Coughing - American Girl
via FoxyTunes

How to Hack Together a Facebook Flash Widget

I don't read directions. Unfortunately, it appears to be a dominant gene trait that I have inherited from my father. So, with my limited ability to write any code (besides some basic markup) and my desire to hack together a Facebook widget - I wasn't too confident in my chances of success.

As it turns out, it's pretty damn easy now with the CodeBox Facebook application.

For my first foray into this, I started with the MyStrands Now Playing flash widget (imagine that). Here's all I did - if you're like me you'd much rather have a working example/walkthrough rather than reading the documentation:

• Configured the flash widget to my liking on the standard MyStrands tools page (http://www.mystrands.com/tools)

• Copied the code (which for me looked like):

• Pasted that code into the CodeBox FBML box in Facebook - this application only accepts valid "FBML (FaceBook Markup Language)" which is a slightly different than standard HTML. To make the standard HTML code into FBML, it just required a couple of tweaks.

• In this case, all I had to do was change the opening "embed src=" to "fb:swf swfsrc="

• Since FaceBook doesn't like you have a Flash movie that starts without a user action, they generally require most flash apps to have some sort of placeholder graphic - to make mine I simply took a screenshot of the MyStrands widget, dumped it into a graphic editor, smudged out the data (so it didn't look like a stale widget) and then added a "click to view" button on top. So it looks like this:

• I then posted this image to Flickr, copied the URL and made this the default image for the widget by simply adding the "imgsrc=(url of the posted photo)" to the code.

• So, when all was said and done, my CodeBox FBML looked like this:

• Save the final code (as above) in the CodeBox app and you are all done. You can check out the final product on my FaceBook profile. For those of you who have the mere thought of FaceBook cause you to "throw up a little in your mouth". Here is a harmless screenshot:

Enjoy and let me know if you guys make anything cool.

Facebook Dims Spotlight on Free-Range MP3s

Ah, the perils of being a "platform"...

VentureBeat » Facebook kills Audio for copyright violations

Facebook completely removed the Audio music-sharing application from its platform last night, saying it violated music copyrights.

Audio was developed by a third-party using Facebook’s platform for developers, and Facebook says Audio violates its newly updated developer terms of service.

Audio allowed users to upload audio files in the mp3 format, share them with each other and listen to them within Facebook. By the end of last week, it had nearly 750,000 users.

It seems like the hounds and lawyers are injecting some conservatism over at Facebook. Once you are a "platform" it is much harder to take a hands off approach to potential copyright infringement that is taking place on it. Check out my post from about 6 weeks ago called "Facebook Shining the Spotlight on Free-Range MP3s".

MySpace Getting Ready to Implode?

Interesting story below...

Deadline Hollywood Daily » MySpace Pair Looking To Loot News Corp: "Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson have made a very aggressive (some would term it rather fanciful) compensation proposal to owner News Corp for when their contract is up in October. They're asking Peter Chernin and Rupert Murdoch for a 2-year deal worth $50 million total. That comes out to $25 million each, or $12.5 million a year. Plus, the pair want a development fund of $15 million to invest in internet companies."

Is MySpace in trouble? It sounds to me that both DeWolfe and Anderson have one foot out the door. I think you have to not only be ready to, but expect to, walk out the door to make such a massive demand. I would imagine the thought process to be something like...

"I've had it with this place, let's get out of here before Facebook eats our lunch."

"Well, I'd stay as long as we get paid."

"Hmmm... yeah, for $25million in my pocket I'd be willing to go down with the ship."

"As long as they also pony up some money on top of that so we can find, and inflate, our life raft."

"Good point... let's get another $15 mil each that we can invest in the next thing - whatever that will be."

"Deal."

Don't get me wrong, I don't blame them for this approach... I just find it interesting. Who would run the place if DeWolfe and Anderson leave? I sure as hell hope it wouldn't be some old school TV exec. We are dealing with very fickle consumers where the switching costs from once service/network to another is relatively low - and lowering every day as more of these services expose open APIs. I've got to think someone is working on a simple "import all of my MySpace information" for Facebook as we speak.

Check out one of my earlier posts/predictions about MySpace.

me*dia*or shower

Between vacation last week, and some work I've been doing on on me*dia*or - I haven't posted much lately. But, I think me*dia*or is getting pretty good. Well, at least *I* find it useful for keeping up with the news and dialog around "music 2.0".

I've turned what was once just a simple feed splicer into a full blown "river of news" feed aggregation network. I'm pulling about six dozen feeds right now - and using Yahoo Pipes to filter some of the feeds to just give me the music/media related posts from some of the more broad sources (e.g. Fred Wilson, TechCrunch, Mashable, etc.).

I've added a custom Google search box (that will search all of me*dia*or's sources), digital music job postings culled from Indeed, an embedded Meebo chat room (with the hope it will spawn real-time dialog among readers) and a Streampad widget that pulls the day's most popular MP3s from The Hype Machine (so you can listen while you read).

There are forums for quick access to on going discussions on particular topics. A secondary flash audio player where users can upload and/or point to MP3s across the web. The photo widget allows members to pull their Flickr photos directly into the network. Ning (one of the platforms used for me*dia*or - with Tumblr being the other) enables direct integration of those players and slideshows back into Facebook.

On my personal me*dia*or profile page, I've pulled in the feed from this blog as well as my Facebook status and Last.fm quilt.

Now the real question... will anyone besides me actually use it?

Facebook Shining the Spotlight on Free Range MP3s

If you are on Facebook you know that music applications are by far some of the most popular 3rd party apps across the network. The poster child for this is iLike who have basically doubled their membership base within the span of about a week after they rolled out their FB app. Also, Numair Faraz's "Audio" application currently can be found on over a half million profiles. The application is little more than a flash player that you give an MP3 url. As more people find and add URLs to free-range MP3s, the larger the index becomes so that others don't have to forage so hard.... you can stumble across a song that someone else has already found and just add it to your profile. There has been no exchange of media assets, just a bookmark. In one recent conversation John Parres captured the issue very succinctly...

I'm not hosting it. Numair's not hosting it. And Facebook is not hosting it. Butgo ahead and click the play button. It will point you to the MP3 file right over.... THERE>

Am I breaking any laws by publishing a search result? Are Numair and the Facebookers breaking any laws collaborating to build an index of publicly knowable URLs?

I, of course, am no lawyer - and don't have a clue whether/how the recording industry will look to stem this tide. But what I do know is that there is a huge trend of new services going this route... Streampad, grabb.it, Project Playlist, Webjay (although Yahoo will shut down this month), MP3Realm. Hell, I can just as easily use Google to find "free-range MP3s", build a XSPF playlist and drop a flash player into my blog. Unlike imeem and others that host the files, these (to your point) are just a bunch of pointers to locations all over the web.

If this approach gets locked down, then others will pop up. It would be just as easy (if not easier) to create an audio experience out of the freely available (and often times licensed) music videos on YouTube and others. Personally, I am not a music video watcher, but I would gladly leverage the audio track from them to build a free, legal (?), personalized playlist (or is it a station?). Who is liable then?

The damn has more leaks than the industry has fingers. Time to stop wasting time trying to plug the holes - and instead spend that energy on developing ways to leverage the power of the current.

Music 2.0 Group - Now On Facebook

Thanks to Toby Padilla of Musicmobs, I have finally taken the dive into Facebook. He has also started a group (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2404035027) dedicated to the space. Come check it out....

Uber Embeddable Player: Now Featured in Facebook

I had never heard of Uber before I read this article.

Epicenter - Wired Blogs: "The Flash-based player, included with Uber's drag-and-drop assets management system, launches with an exclusive music track by hip hop subversive Gnarls Barkley. Uber CEO Scott Sassa told Underwire, 'We think that shared media is a vital part of the community and something that Facebook hadn't pursued on its own. What we're providing is an opportunity to very quickly access tons of media, so you immediately grab any kind of media, easily store it and easily share it.'"

Just taking a quick look around Uber, it appears to be a pretty standard social network with a slight bias towards photography. Their most notable differentiator is the ajax-y pages where you can drag assets off of other peoples pages to drop into your library.

I'm guessing there is more (I only spent about 2 minutes on their site), check it out for yourself...

UPDATE: I missed the forest for the trees... the big announcement was the debut of Facebook's open platform and positioning as the "anti-MySpace". Totally open to any/all widget makers. There is good coverage of the ones announced at Mashable: http://mashable.com/2007/05/24/facebook-platform-30-apps/.