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.
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".
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.
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.
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."
I was one of the 2 million people that bought and installed Apple's latest upgrade to OS X (commonly referred to as "Leopard") this week. While I don't really see it as consisting of any *major* enhancements, it comes with a couple hundred smaller improvements that make life a bit easier - my personal favorite being "Spaces".
But, that being said, I am running into a number of bugs and frequent crashes of what used to be a very stable machine. Judging by status messages and tweets from my friends, I'm not the only one.
FrontRow has been especially problematic, as has my AT&T 3G card - the 3rd party software that came with it no longer launches, and the OS-level connection software seems to not like my card.
But, the biggest issue for me (both as consumer and professional) are the incompatibilities with iTunes plug-ins. Leopard has broken most 3rd party iTunes plug-ins, including iLike, Qloud, MyStrands (at least temporarily - a fix posted quickly), and something is just not quite right with Last.fm either (UPDATE: a fix has just been posted).
The guys over at Qloud have been quite busy lately. They are currently in a closed beta of a totally revamped service and experience. What started of as "people powered search" - which combined scrobbling with 30 second samples - has morphed into "free/legal streaming music on demand". Yes, there are hundreds of sites where you can create playlists from uploaded/free-range MP3s (with the two most popular currently being imeem and Project Playlist), but these services operate in a bit of a legally "gray" area as the content these service run on are generally not licensed.
So, how do you create "free and legal" streaming music on demand? You leverage content that has been licensed and that the rights holders are being compensated for... specifically YouTube. Yes, there has been a bunch of swirl over the past few months on this topic too... but generally speaking the major labels have come to terms where the use of music videos on YouTube are being compensated. And by the nature of YouTube, these videos are freely distributable/embeddable. This is not the first time a company has done this, but Qloud's implementation may indeed be the most complete.
Basically, the service is comprised of:
iTunes Plug-In (for awareness of your media library and playlists)
A Web Player Destination
Community
By matching your local library and playlists to YouTube's available videos (and others like Revver), you now have an online representation of your content that you can play, build playlists out of and generally share among the entire community of Qloud users.
You can also browse Qloud's "cloud" and see what the most popular tracks are, navigate by tag, search or find other users and take a peek at their libraries.
The drawbacks? Well, you guys know YouTube.... some of the songs are crappy recordings of a live show taken with a cellphone. Qloud combats this by matching to other versions of the song (and other sources in addition to YouTube - including what appears to be pending support for Rhapsody). Over time, the most popular version of the song will rise to the top.... but right now they are suffering from a bit of a cold-start problem in this beta.
But, the good news is that you guys are now invited to join the beta. The guys have been nice enough to provide me with the ability to offer all my readers the ability to join. Check it out for yourself and let me know what you think.
Finally, the guys showed me a sneak peak at a couple new Facebook apps they are working on. I can't say too much about them, other than they are pretty sweet, and may be able to give the iLike guys a run for their money on that platform.
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.
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