More Thoughts on Jobs' Thoughts

So, I was trading emails with a very smart music-technologist/friend of mine on the topic of "what happens to Apple in a DRMless world", and he brought up some very interesting points. I'd love to share his whole email, but I'll leave that to him if he wants to post it (here or somewhere else).

To paraphrase, he thinks that by getting Apple to (help) convince the labels to go DRMless, the boys in Cupertino would benefit in a number of ways:

• it makes the pending European lawsuits around Apple's closed-system a moot point
• it also deflects much of the bad press that Apple has been getting recently about their closed system onto the labels who inflicted it upon them
• it shuts the labels up who are complaining that Apple has too much influence
• it completely undercuts the subscription music business model
• it could be a death blow to companies like eMusic - Apple could quickly turn on unprotected indie + major content, it may take eMusic longer to do so

I think these are some good points, although I'd argue the point about it killing subscription services. I agree that a move like this would force the subscription guys to re-tool their model slightly. For example, the $15/month "to-go" models would not be sustainable in a world where users can sync and burn any track they get as often as they want. But, it *may* enable some interesting moves around marketplaces that support variable pricing of tracks (for example, Amie Street prices tracks based on their popularity).

Ultimately, what I think it would do is create subscription and/or advertising play-on-demand streaming (only) services. All of a sudden, those services whose content and links are most widely syndicated (Rhapsody and Last.fm come to mind) can flip on a model where for a small fee ($5/month?) anyone that stumbles across one of their playlists, charts, widgets, etc. can stream all songs in their entirety. Obviously, you could go to their destinations as well and listen all day long. If you want to take a song "to-go", then you pay for them and download an unprotected track at $1/pop (or less). While this could also be done with some of the free streaming services like Streampad, Webjay and others, what you lose with those is Quality of Service.... I'm a fan of those services, but the fact that I often hit dead links has me wondering how long before consumers get fed up (like back in the Napster 1.0 days where half the files you downloaded were corrupt, sounded horrible or were not the track they pretended to be).

As with most of my posts, this opinion is a work in progress, but I'd be interested in what others think.

Steve Jobs - Thoughts on Music

Steve Jobs has just posted an open letter to the major labels telling them to free their content and sell unprotected MP3s.

Apple - Thoughts on Music:

"The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music."

The main points he makes are:

• You can't be succesful licensing DRM schemes since the more widely distributed they are, the easier they are to crack (since more people know how they work)
• In his estimation, less than 10% of all music sold is unprotected (read: CDs) and requiring the digital providers to enforce it while the physical media doesn't won't solve the music industry's problems

I think both are valid points. Where it gets a little more sticky is with subscription services.... totally unprotected all-you-can eat would undoubtedly require a different business model than $15/month. Basically, most would need to move to a model more closely aligned to a wireless carrier model where you purchase the right to use X minutes (or songs)/month. Some providers may choose to have these be use-it-or-lose it credits, while others may offer rollover credits.

I'm sure I'll be thinking about this more tonight, and may add some more thoughts later....

Radio.Blog.Club

So, I took a quick dip into Radio.Blog.Club. On the surface, it appears that Radio.Blog.Club is the flipside of The Hype Machine.

Where The Hype Machine finds and aggregates all of the MP3s that bloggers are talking about (and their readers are listening to), Radio.Blog.Club gives bloggers the ability to easily find, and embed, an MP3 into their blog (presumably with a bunch of their own editorial wrapped around it).



In honor of the a great half-time performance, here's one of my "guilty pleasures" from my youth (although I feel much less guilty about it now then I did then).

Social Music Overview: Techcrunch

Social Music Overview

For those of you that have been here before, you've read me talk about most of the half-dozen "social music" companies that Techcrunch covers. The only notalbe exception is RadioBlogClub, which I have tagged but have never really gotten into detail on.

Perhaps that will be my next post....

instructables : Convert DRMed WMA files to Usable MP3s

instructables : Convert DRMed WMA files to Usable MP3s

It looks like FairUse4WM is resurfacing again. Above is a link to an article that walks users through the process of stripping Windows Media DRM off of either subscription or purchased tracks, convert them to MP3s and add ID3 tags. I've never tried it (honestly!), but I know that some people have been asking how to do this... particularly those that are coming from a subscription service that is being absorbed (e.g. Music Now and Virgin).

I will continue to subscribe to one of these services once my Music Now account disappears, but I'm not excited by the proposition of having to redownload the thousands of tracks I currently have... let alone having to re-sync them to all of my different devices.

As I've said before, even if I could unlock all of my subscription tracks, I would *still* subscribe (as I believe most current subscribers would do). That is because the value to me is having easy access to everything that is NEW - as well as benefiting from the really solid programming and discovery mechanisms that most of these services have built.

When all is said and done, services are worth paying for, if they provide value and guarantee Quality of Service. Back in the day, I sold a first generation DirecTV box for a premium to a friend of mine because they were easy to find pirated smartcards that would unlock virtually every channel. My friend did this for a while, but after a while it just became a pain in the ass to reprogram it every few weeks to keep up with the latest changes. Guess what he does now.... he pays for the services he uses, becauses it's easier.

If you are looking to try this yourself, just google for "fairuse4wm.exe" and you can find version 1.3 pretty easily.

The Great MP3 Experiment

Rumor has it that one of the major labels is going to release some unprotected (yet watermarked) MP3s into the wild, and then are going to study what percentage of the illegally traded content was from digital downloads versus pure-and-simple CD ripping. What I would expect to see is that the vast majority of pirated material is actually coming off of the CD sources themselves - if the labels realize that as well, then this may be what starts the DRMless trials in earnest.

It will be fun to watch....

Music Video Widget

This is pretty cool. Using Truveo (now part of AOL), you can create a video search query (at www.searchvideo.com) then plug the query string into the widget on http://video.aol.com/snag/scrolling_thumbnail_strip to create a dynamically updated video widget on your page. It will pull content from all over the web, although in the example below I limited it to music videos from AOL Music, with a sort of "most popular today" and tagged "indie".

Internet brands leave music services to experts - Yahoo! News

Internet brands leave music services to experts - Yahoo! News: "...some analysts questioning whether the business is better left to smaller companies specializing solely on running a subscription service, rather than large Internet portals or consumer brands with many other irons in the fire."

This is an interesting story about the subscription music space. They highlight an apparent paradox of the current marketplace.... existing portals and online brands with lots of visitors are having a hell of a time succeeding as a consumer's preferred vendor of music service. Perhaps it is based on consumer perception that the smaller companies are specialists (compared to the big portals' generalist image)? I suppose it's possible... back when I bought CDs, I would go out of my way to go the local record store because I felt like they would better represent my tastes and be more knowledgeable than the 60 year old guy behind the counter at the superstores. I never bought a CD from Walmart or Target... it just didn't seem right to me. Is this the equivalent of what is happening in the online marketplace? Are the portals "not cool enough" for the hardcore music fans? Don't know... but something to think about.

Speaking of specialists vs. generalists, I heard this saying a while ago and it resonated with me:

"A specialist knows more and more about less and less until eventually they know everything about nothing. Conversely, a generalists knows less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything."


I'm sure that is somewhat butchered from it's original form, but I still like it.

Last.fm makes personal radio stations easily shareable [DJ Alchemi]

Last.fm makes personal radio stations easily shareable [DJ Alchemi]


I'm not a subscriber to Last.fm's paid/premium service, so I hadn't seen this (and can't yet implement it). But, David Jennings is showing of the beta of their new embeddable flash player. You, as the embedder (if that is a word), can set it up to default to any station you want (your personal station, recommendation station, neighbor station, tag-based station, etc.)



As the visitor to a site with this player, you can listen to the default station that the embedder set, or you can change the station yourself to virtually any "similar artist stations" by simply typing in an artist name.

MyStrands Makeover

So, when I wasn't looking MyStrands rolled out some new features, new UI and new integrations. High-level, the new stuff includes:

• More Mobile Support - Symbian client, Windows Mobile Client, mobile web interface
• New embeddable flash charts
• Indie radio - basically a Pandora knock-off (at least in terms of UI), but only featuring indie music
• Napster integration - giving users 2.5 million commercial full-length songs to listen to for free (based on Napster's three-play model - stream any song 3 times for free)
• New taskbar - this appears to replace the "sidecar" interface for WMP, Winamp and iTunes
• PartyStrands - send text messages and pictures, vote on songs and much more, all from your mobile phones. The partyStrands Host Display allows you to choose the music for your personal party, join your friends, add pictures to show to your friends and start music and custom votes to keep your friends interacting and entertained. You can also switch from Auto DJ, where your friends choose and influence the music, to Manual DJ, where partyStrands will play music from your playlists in your favorite music players.

I haven't been able to try all the new stuff out yet, but I think MyStrands does many things better than Last.fm. Where they fell behind (IMO) was in not offering an audio consumption experience (e.g. radio).... Last.fm built out a consumer destination that build an audience and created habitual usage. Conversely, MyStrands seems more focused on building out the technology, patent portfolio and capabilities and pursued a B2B licensing model.

As I recommend to anyone playing with MyStrands, check out their "Labs" stuff - this is where some of the real interesting stuff resides (including Rhapsody and Last.fm mashups and some very nice data visualizations).

Freeloader Free-for-All

There have been lots of developments the last week or so around ad-supported music services.

• Chinese search portal Baidu.com and EMI launch free all-you-can-eat streaming
• Ruckus opens up free downloads of their entire catalog to anyone with a .edu email address (including alums - if you just fib and say you are an active student)
• SpiralFrog in a death spiral - most of executive management departs

The question I have is... are startups like Streampad making this a moot point? You will notice that last week a Streampad widget showed up in my sidebar. I've just got it pulling what's hot on Hype Machine (which in turn is creating a playlist of MP3s from different locations all over the web). So, that playlist is dynamic and updates in real-time based on what people are blogging about and listening too. Or you can simply log into Streampad and search (a la SingingFish) - find a list of freely available MP3s and stream them to your heart's content via their embedded player. You could just as easily create your own playlist and embed that on your page - like this one:

Streampad also has some other cool features hidden in there. They (or is it just he - that being Dan Kantor, ex-Microsoft and De.licio.us developer) are working on remote-access to my own files (a la Orb). A small but potentially powerful music community. Integration with MP3tunes locker (find a song you like - copy it to your online locker). Also some other nice value-added mashups of listener maps and related information - as well as integrated reporting/scrobbling back to your Last.fm account.

Foxytunes Planet (Beta)

I like Foxytunes. It is basically a little universal player shell - it embeds controls for one of virtually any media player client of your choice (Winamp, WMP, iTunes, Rhapsody, Yahoo Music Engine, etc.) into your browser. It started off as a pure Firefox extension (hence the name), but the have recently introduced a version for IE too.

It's nice in that it gives you quick access to your controls from the application most people have open all day... their browser. The Foxytunes guys then started pulling together some cool mashups based on what you are listening too (one click to Lyrics Search, Amazon, and others).

Well, yesterday I got invited into the beta for Foxytunes Planet - which basically pulls all of this information into a single destination - and positions itself as a music search platform.

You search for an artist, and you get a page that surfaces:

• Photos from Flickr


• Videos from YouTube


• Artist Radio from Pandora


• Similar Artist and Fan Radio from Last.fm


• Related Artist info from Last.fm


• MP3s as aggregated by The Hype Machine


• Albums from Amazon


• Search Results from Google


• Catalog on Rhapsody.com

Optionally, you can add other widgets to each Artist page including

• iTunes Links


• Yahoo Image & Music Links


• eMusic Links

So, while you are listening to a song, you click the "Planet" icon in the Foxytunes browser tool bar and it will spawn a window with all of this info about the artist you are listening to.

In that way, it is similar to Sleevenotez, but unlike that application - it doesn't suffer the lag time introduced by waiting on a data roundtrip to/from Last.fm's servers. Give it a shot and let me know what you guys think.

Note to Foxytunes guys: Any way to create an AIM plug-in and provide the controls in my instant messaging client? Unlike my browser, my Buddy List is one of my few applications that are actually maximized all day long.

Why do the Record Labels Hate Us?

I, like most people, don't understand the major record labels. The latest thing that baffles me.... Universal and Sony's insistence that certain artist's songs be blocked from being shared via Zune's (already flacid) wi-fi sharing capabilities. We are talking about a three-play/three-day sharing model.... this is hardly the opening of Pandora's box. What are they worried about, that they are losing out on the gigantic market of people who will buy a song to only listen to it a couple of times - then never want to hear it again?

To me it appears like the labels have become the exact opposite of what they were founded to be. Back in the day, the biggest draw of a major label to an artist was the fact that they would promote them, get them radio airplay, get their music distributed. Now? Well, now they spend there time and effort making sure there artists *can't* be heard. How does that pitch go to an up-and-coming artist?? "If you sign with us, we'll make sure that everyone knows who you are, but no one has actually heard you!" Brilliant!

Yes, the amount I don't know about the inner working of a major label could fill the internet's "series of tubes". But, the labels have fallen prey to what many other companies have.... they have forgotten to look at the business from the consumer-perspective. Create a great consumer experience, then optimize for profit after that. So many today have it backwards.

I was just thinking about the newspaper business as an analogy to the music business. What helped them become so successful decades ago? They made it easy to consume their product. You could get it anywhere, easily. The delivered it to your door. Is it easy to steal newspapers? Absolutely, but most don't - because it is easier to NOT steal it. Guess what... if my Sunday newspaper wasn't legible half the time, or the newspaper box on the corner made me jump through hoops to validate I was who I said I was, then it would be easier for me to just swipe one from outside 7-11. Can I share my newspaper? Absolutely. Does that hurt the newspaper's bottom-line in any substantial way? Highly doubtful. Because people don't want to just read the same newspaper over and over again. If they do, then let them... they are not your real consumer base anyways.

The labels are suing the satellite radio guys for introducing devices that can record content. The Home Audio Act of 1992 established that recording something off of radio was covered under Fair Use. Why is this not? Well, the quote I saw from the suit was "it is manifestly apparent that the use of a radio-cassette player to record songs played over free radio does not threaten the market for copyrighted works as does the use of a recorder which stores songs from private radio broadcasts on a subscription fee basis.” That is a scary statement, and a slippery slope for consumer's rights. What's next, my TiVo won't be able to record movies off HBO?

Note to the major labels: Love your consumers, and they will love you back. Treat us like criminals and we will go elsewhere for our love.

Orb brings iTunes to Wii console

I've been a fan of Orb for a couple of years. Their remote access + transcoding/transrating engine has enabled me to stream music, tv and videos to my Smartphone while in my car, sitting in an airport, or just showing of to friends... "look I'm watching The Daily Show on my phone!". They also power the relatively new "Winamp Remote" feature of Winamp 5.3.

This relatively easy "hack" (if you can even call it that) now enable Wii owners to listen to their music over their stereo.

Orb brings iTunes to Wii console | Reg Hardware: "Demonstrating that you can do convergence on a budget, Orb claims that Nintendo Wii owners have downloaded 50,000 copies of its software that permits them to access their home music and photo collections on their games consoles."

Personally, I use a Media Center PC connected to a first generation "Media Center Extender" (from HP). I think I'm one of the few that actually own one of those things, but it gets the job done (with varying degrees of success - depending on whether I'm trying to stream audio or video over my 802.11g network). It's a nice step up from the Turtle Beach Audiotron that I used to use (or the 50 foot RCA cables connected to the mini-jack Y-adapter connected to my soundcard that I used before that). The question that I'm starting to ask myself, is what will I use next? Vista + Xbox360? AppleTV? Some other Set-Top Box? Not sure yet, but when I decide I will let you guys know...

Tech.co.uk | News | Apple to open up Fairplay DRM

Tech.co.uk News Apple to open up Fairplay DRM

The iPod maker is expected to make two announcements, possibly as early as this week - the first will be to allow streaming of protected AAC content via USB; the second will be to licence its Fairplay DRM to the company's Made For iPod licensees.

This is an interesting move that I hadn't been aware of. Apple is now opening up pieces of Fairplay so that others can benefit and the consumers aren't *completely* locked in. Interestingly, as the market is demanding (and even some of the major labels are moving towards) a DRM-less ecosystem, the company with arguably the biggest amount to lose in that scenario is Apple.

MP3s are the great equalizer. While it is certainly not the best audio compression scheme, it is obviously the most widely supported. Virtually every media device on the plant can play an MP3. So, if MP3s become the standard, then iTunes will have to start selling unprotected MP3s to compete. Then a song you bought on iTunes could play anywhere - which granted, will still most commonly be an iPod. But, the rest of the market would also be selling content that would play on an iPod (and an iPhone). At that point, do you care where you buy your content? It may be in the virtual check-out line, could be from a news story, or a review on Pitchfork. The backend provider is almost marginalized, and others will be building compelling applications on top of their catalogs - give they pennies to MusicNet, keep the dollars from the ad revenue. Just look at what companies like Yottamusic are already beginning to do.

It will be interesting to see how hard Apple fights to keep DRM part of the online music market - and to what extent it becomes a liability in consumers' eyes. Apple has done a great job convincing people that when they buy a song from iTunes they "own" it and can do with it whatever they please. Steve Jobs has a gift that way... he tells people what to believe, and when to believe it, and they do. Sign me up for that. That's magic.

Broadclip Results

Hmmm... so my test with Broadclip didn't go as well as I had hoped. I'm guessing some of it is a "cold start" problem, but here's what I got after running their agent all night.

• Birdmonster = no results
• The Thermals = no results
• U2 = 2 results (although both results were the same song)

I also got a bunch of songs that I would consider "crap" based on my selections. Artists such as "Ace of Base", "Hillary Duff", etc. It's not a stretch to understand that U2 could very well be played on the same station as those others (considering their popularity and widespread appeal), but I was hoping for a little more intelligence based on the context of my other selections (Birdmonster/The Thermals).

More disappointingly, once "clipped" the song was actually cropped in the middle and turned into two separate MP3s - one with the first half of the song, the other with the second half. Obviously a bug that I hope will be resolved soon.

The other (more) major issue is that there are no settings allowing you to specify a minimum bitrate for the songs that you wanted. Obviously, doing so would result in less matches, and a longer amount of time required to get what you are interested it, but my U2 song(s) were at 24kbps/MONO(!). This is a function of the station that is broadcasting it, but I would like to bea able to filter those out. Basically, songs at that low quality are not something I would ever want to sync to my portable and listen to repeatedly.

So, I'm going to give Broadclip more time to cook before I try them again. I still think it is interesting, but not yet ready for primetime.

Broadclip - TiVo for Internet Radio

One of the more interesting things I saw at CES just went into beta this week. Broadclip started off focused on TV (if your PC had a TV tuner), but have just added the music features. Here's how it basically works:

• You download a little agent to your PC (runs in the systray)
• You go to their website and tell them what bands you like. Search for an artist then "clip it".
• They search the SHOUTcast directory for stations that are likely to play those artists
• They trigger their app on your PC to record those stations in the background (stream rip) while they keep a time-synchronized record of what songs were played when. So, on your PC exists a big contiguous MP3 of dozens of songs.
• You go back to their website to see what songs you now have in that file. You can pick particular songs and then will then tell the agent on your PC to "clip" out the songs you want and/or throw away the ones you don't.
• It doesn't clip out just that one song (more like a block of 4 or 5 songs around it), but with a basic audio editor you could easily clip just the one song you want.

They are claiming protection under fair-use and that it is just "tivo for internet radio". But I have a feeling that the RIAA isn't going to see it that way. Also, I'm assuming that if the PERFORM act is passed (and radio stations have to be DRM'd) then that would break it as well.

Others that do similar things: Streamripper (windows) and RadioLover (mac).

I'm just now checking it out. I've selected 2 relatively obscure (Birdmonster, The Thermals) and 1 big artist (U2) and had it running for about an hour. So far it hasn't picked up any songs by either of them but I'll let it run all night and see what it turns up in the morning.

More Pandora Mashups & Hacks Then You Can Shake a Stick At

TimofSuburbia has a post of literally dozens of Pandora hacks and mashups. It also looks like he has created a cool Digg-like interface and station directory. I few weeks a ago a played around with the same idea for Shoutcast stations using Ning, but never got very far. I'd love to see someone (who knew what they were doing) pick up on this effort.

He has also got a separate wishlist for Pandora features that you can vote on. Great stuff, check it all out.

Sansa Connect: Zing not Zune (and others)

A few weeks ago I talked about how I thought Real should buy MusicGremlin and one-up Microsoft with their Zune. Well, it appears they are more than covered with the pending introduction of Sandisk's Sansa Connect (MSRP $249).

It is a Wi-Fi-pod based on Zing's media platform, and looks pretty slick. With Sandisk's relationship with Real, and there recent support for Real's DRM scheme (in addtion to PlaysForSure) - I'm sure there are lots of compelling download-to-device and sharing use cases in the works. Unfortunately, I missed this device at CES but I'm sure we will see a lot more about it in the coming weeks.

Also, AOL's Tegic division (who acquired WildSeed last year) showed off their wireless-enabled media platform and will be working with Chinese up-and-coming manufacturer, Haier, to bring that to market this year.

Finally, iRiver also announced a Wi-Fi player as well. I didn't see this one at the show either, but the renderings look pretty nice.

I should have had in my 2007 predictions.... "this will be the year where people besides Apple start to do devices right".

R.I.P. Music Now, I Will Miss You

Well, this day has been looming over my head for a few months, and unfortunately it has finally arrived. It's like watching your beloved pet slowly dying and you know you are going to have to put it to sleep. You have to keep positive, and enjoy your last days together, knowing that one day it will have to end.

AOL signs Napster as its sole music subscription service - Jan. 12, 2007: "Napster to replace AOL Music Now AOL tells Music Now's 350,000 customers that their accounts will be converted to Napster unless they opt out; transfer should be finished within 60 days."

Napster now has Virgin and AOL's music subscribers (and who knows... maybe more to come). Hopefully they are simultaneously working on a DRM alternative (or better yet, working on a major-label sanctioned DRM-less offering) so that Microsoft's PlaysforSure program's pending demise doesn't leave them out in the cold.

So, where does someone like myself (product lead on Music Now for the last 1 1/2 years) now go for my subscription music service provider? I'm not sure yet. I'm going to start my evaluations (as a consumer) all over again... Napster, Rhapsody, eMusic. iTunes? Nope. I'm sworn off of iTunes and basic a la carte offerings. I love subscription music services, and until Apple offers me one, then I'm going to pursue other providers.

UPDATED COVERAGE FROM NEW YORK TIMES