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?
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?
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.
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:
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 ."
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 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 searchableiTunes 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.fmAPI, 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.
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.
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...
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.
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 grandiose 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. Grandiose? 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.
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.
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 Twitterhashtags (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 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?
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.
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).
(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)
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...
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...
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:
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.
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:
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".
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.
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):
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.
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.
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.
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