Weekly Top Songs MP3 Playlist

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...

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Content (Resolution) is King!

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 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.

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Active Publishing of meP3s (in addition to Passive)

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.

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More meP3s

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.

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Playlist Reanimator

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)....

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Hey, who tripped over that cord?

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.

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AOL Music Gets Bold

aolmusic
Originally uploaded by jherskowitz

AOL Music launched their new Song pages this week (part of a rolling relaunch of the site), and I applaud the direction they are going lately (disregarding the overzealous ads I talked about a couple of weeks ago).

The legal mucketymucks over there have been slowly loosening their collars a bit and letting the product folks actually compete with the smaller players who don't ask permission, but rather forgiveness. First was the AIMtunes plug-in earlier this fall - which, to be honest, I was shocked that Legal let them launch. Now comes the new AOL Music song pages/player which includes a stay of execution for the once great - now on respiratory - AOL search property of SingingFish.

Basically, when you search for a song at AOL Music they first try to fulfill that request with a licensed/promotional copy of the song that they have secured from the labels. The new piece of the puzzle is that if they don't have it, they will present you a list of free-range MP3 search results. Those results are presented with a white play icon (versus blue icon of the AOL catalog songs)... click on it and it presents a list of possible matches that you can select and play.

They also do a nice job of merging the two sources.

Both official content and free-range MP3s are played back in the same pop-up player, and the assets can be mixed in the queue.




Next they need to be able to let users create a mixed playlist that they can embed and share... but I'm sure that is coming.

Shoutouts to Georgina, Grant and Dan.


The downside? The SingingFish fish ship basically has no captain. It used to be great but there is no one steering the ship anymore. AOL should reinvest in this (or similar) platform because right now too many songs are presented as being "found" but the links are dead. Let's hope they do... otherwise there is always Skreemr, Seeqpod and MP3Realm.

What's Up with Amazon's Music Recommendations?!

So I'm just diving into Amazon's new MP3 offering and I came across something strange. When I am at their regular CD store I get different music recommendations than I get at their new Amazon MP3 beta. Supposedly, they are both based on "items I own" (or more specifically, have purchased from Amazon). But, if that were the case shouldn't they be recommending the same things?


Amazon Music Recommendations:
* Lots of Fiona Apple and Peter Gabriel - not really representative of what I like

Amazon MP3 Recommendations:
* Arcade Fire, Ryan Adams, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Hold Steady - these are on the money (although I already own all of the things they are recommending)


These are apparently being calculated off of different data? Why the huge discrepancy?

UPDATE:
Someone suggested that this may be due to the fact that the MP3 library is a subset of their CD inventory and therefore so are the MP3 Recommendations. That was my only real theory as well. I'm not sure what labels Peter Gabriel and Fiona are on, but I can look.

But, what I'm actually more surprised by are the good MP3 recommendations. I haven't bought a CD from Amazon in ages yet they seemed to have some insight into my current listening behavior - it's almost like they are scraping data from some of my social networks, taste APIs (like MyStrands or Last.fm), pulling library info off of my machine, or some how getting more current data of my behavior. Amazon shouldn't know that much about my listening habits, and I highly doubt they could gather such information based on my last purchases of computer accessories and baby toys.


UPDATE #2:
Another suggestion was that the MP3 recommendations were being based on my page viewing history on Amazon. The pages I've viewed at Amazon are only for TVs, ink jet cartridges and toys - I don't browse music there. But, I wonder if any of the album artwork fetchers I use (that pull from Amazon) end up inadvertently sharing my library data back with them (does it appear like I have "viewed" those pages?). If that was true and it didn't have any MP3 purchase behavior to base my MP3 recommendations (and only page views), that could explain it....

iPhone - Stream Your Media

My biggest question about the iPhone has been "can it stream MP3s over WiFi and/or EDGE?". Until this morning, that question still remained unanswered. To be honest, I have been a bit shocked that every first review didn't go about answering this most basic and compelling (given the nature of the device) question.

It appears that they answer is... "yeah, kind of". Insight was gathered from application details on one of the applications ("telekinisis" aka "iPhone Remote") created at iPhoneDevCamp.

MediaStreaming - telekinesis - Google Code: "Streaming video and audio

If you store movie or music files on your computer, you can watch and listen to them on your iPhone using telekinesis after enabling the feature in the preference pane. This feature is off by default for security reasons, please see below.

The files you play have to be supported by the iPhone:

* H.264 Baseline Profile Level 3.0 video, up to 640 x 480 at 30 fps.
* MPEG-4 Part 2 video (Simple Profile)
* AAC-LC audio, up to 48 kHz
* .mov, .mp4, .m4v, .3gp file formats
* Any movies or audio files that can play on an iPod.

Over EDGE you stream media in real time up to 160kbits (in practice 80-100 however.)

To play a media file, simply touch it in the file browser mode. The CoreMedia (Quicktime plugin) player will launch and start to buffer the media. You can use other applications (Mail, Phone, etc) while the media is playing but you cannot navigate to other MobileSafari pages.

As of now there is no way to stream playlists or queue multiple files.

Caveats of media streaming

The iPhone doesn't appear to accept media encrypted with a self signed certificate. To enable streaming, iPhone Remote needs to send it insecurely.

If you choose to enable this feature, anyone can connect to your machine to access m4b, m4v, m4a, mov, and mp3 files if they can access your computer and know the full path to the file

Do not enable this unless you are sure your network is secure.

You can enable this feature in the preference pane. Hit "Restart Server" after checking the box.

This application (still alpha) sounds very promising to me although I will certaily wait until it is at least Beta (and I actually have an iPhone). Any of you out there that already have one want to give it a try and let me know how it works?

MP3 Search

I've been thinking about search lately and wondering where the various mashups get their MP3s. A couple of days ago, I mentioned a hack to Google that will return MP3s from the index. Some sites use freely available music videos as their source, some search archive.org, some index hundreds of music blogs, and others are trying many other things I'm sure.

One of the best sources had been SingingFish (now known as AOL Audio Search). It is hard to find, but the latest AOL Toolbar still surfaces it:




But, what are the alternatives? Well, I found this article that highlights 10 other options that you may want to check out.

11 Best Places to Search Free Music- liquid parallax's Blog: "I wrote earlier about the death of Singingfish media search, an amazing resource of online music. Since then I’ve been seeking alternatives to singingfish.com and I’ve got 10 solutions that will help you find that free mp3 that got lost in the interweb. Starting in order from average to best (1 is average, 10 is best). I tested the searches using the technique I dub the “Paul Westerberg method” (the standard of not using today’s most well-known band, but not being too obscure either).

My personal preference is MP3Realm - and with the pending death of Webjay, people may want to check it out. Basically, it works this way:

• search for a song/artist (or lyrics)

• find the MP3 you are looking for and "add to playlist" (or listen or download)
• build a playlist
• once you have done that you can download the playlist as a whole (as .m3u or .asx file)
• or, you can just choose to listen right from the site - this will launch a new browser window that leverages the flash-Winamp clone, Wimpy Player

I'm not sure where they are getting/creating their index, but they claim to have more that 2 million tracks and 700,000 lyrics cataloged. Check it out...

EMI, Apple & Free Range MP3s

Thud. That's the sound of the first shoe dropping....

EMI Music Launches DRM-Free Superior Sound Quality Downloads Across Its Entire Digital Repertoire

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)----EMI Music today announced that it is launching new premium downloads for retail on a global basis, making all of its digital repertoire available at a much higher sound quality than existing downloads and free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions.

The new higher quality DRM-free music will complement EMI's existing range of standard DRM-protected downloads already available. From today, EMI's retailers will be offered downloads of tracks and albums in the DRM-free audio format of their choice in a variety of bit rates up to CD quality. EMI is releasing the premium downloads in response to consumer demand for high fidelity digital music for use on home music systems, mobile phones and digital music players. EMI's new DRM-free products will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms.

I've seen other stories saying that The Beatles catalog is *not* included in this intial release, but I'm sure as the story continues to develop today we will learn more.

I made a prediction a couple of months ago about "The Perfect Storm" involving Apple, EMI and The Beatles. I originally predicted this to all happen in February, but know I have a sneaking suspicion that the June 11th iPhone release date would make a great day to announce The Beatles catalog availability...

Brett Dennen

I just stumbled across Brett Dennen on Streampad.... this is my song du jour. If a song can actually grab my attention while I'm working, then I know it's got something special.

Take a listen...

Artist Capital and the User Generated Record Label

I scribble down ideas. It used to be a lot of ideas, now it is far fewer. But one idea that I was always fond of was one from several years ago around the notion of "artist capital" - or more accurately, establishing a virtual stock makret where fans can invest in up-and-coming artists.

Most of the ideas I jot down are really high-level, usually just a few bullet points and a sketch, and this particular one said little more than:

• Network of entertainment/music financieers and music distribution infrastructure
• Songs are posted/distributed, people can "invest" in the band
• Established bands can raise money for tour and merchandise without using their own money
• Investment can be used for studio time/production, video production and/or marketing promotion
• Investors share in the profit of band's earnings (tours, downloads, merchandise, etc.)
• Eliminates traditional record label infrastructure

So, I was very excited to see that somone (obviously far more motivated than I) got a very similar model and service built for indie artists. It is called SellaBand, they are run by some ex-major label guys in Europe, and I just discovered them yesterday. I think they have done some very interesting things, and obviously have a nicely flushed out model with some interesting angles that I had never thought of.

Here's how it works...

Sellers (the artist), post their content (generally demos) to www.sellaband.com where investors (the fans) can find them and listen. If the fan is a "believer" they can then invest $10 in the artist. Once the artist has 5000 believers (aka $50K raised), SellaBand will then finance a recording studio, producer, A&R consultant and physical CD production. They take the resulting content and make it available for free to the public (presumably as unprotected MP3s) for download. They also send each investor a physical CD (there's their $10 back right there).

Where's the money? Well, SellaBand does a 3 way advertising revenue share between themselves, the artists, and the investors. The split between groups of sellers/believers is based on the popularity of the artist's content on the site. Additionally, they will provide CDs for the artists to sell at their shows (or online).... the revenue from each CD is sold is split 50/50 between the artist and the investor. It looks like they are getting ready to launch a webshop soon for artist merchandise, and I'm guessing a similar revenue share model will be instituted there.

I'm biased, but I love this concept. The artists have a vested interest, the fans have a vested interest to promote their artist, and the consumers win with free MP3s. The only thing I'm leary of is the advertising revenue (how much is there to split), and the fact that to generate the ad-revenue Sellaband needs to bring everyone to their front-door (limiting syndication/viral distribution opportunities). I think there are solutions to both, and it will be interesting to see if (and how) the model is tweaked in the future.

Amazon to Sell Unprotected MP3s

Hypebot broke a story about how Amazon has decided (again) to enter the digital music sales arena. What's different? They are going the eMusic route and said to be focused exclusively on unprotected MP3s. For what it's worth, I applaud this approach. As a conspiracy theorist, I'm now wondering whether the rumors that eMusic may be for sale is related to this story. It would be a great way for Amazon to jump start their entrance into this market. And, by focusing on DRM-less MP3s, they can bundle/subsidize virtually any portable device (including iPod) that they want with this....