blip.fm – just a blip on the music world

With so many music sites taking off I wondered about some of the music sites that are struggling. I decided to take another look at blip.fm, which I had played with awhile back, and is rumored to be facing tough times.

So what is blip.fm?

Blip.fm is a music recommendation and streaming site. Similar to Twitter, users post short messages on what music they are listening to at the moment. But blip.fm does not just share the text of your message, it gives you a chance to locate and play the song you are blipping about. You don’t have to upload and music. You search for the song you have in mind and Blip will grab it from Seeqpod.com or Skreemr.com (and once upon a time from parent company Fuzz’s own database of music – but more on that later). Your blip followers (”listeners” in blip speak) can hear full versions of the songs you post using a Songza-like player. So Blip s essentially “Twitter for Music” as it allows you to suggest music and share your thoughts about it with a network of contacts.

So why is blip.fm at risk of website death?

Earlier this year the parent/sister (the relationship is a bit unclear) site fuzz.com entered the Internet deadpool. Their site has the official announcement and an insider’s perspective can be found on this blog from a former employee. You can also find some gossip column worthy column trash talk on at this blog Holy Bleep! Blip.fm is in Trouble.

What the real story on staffing and the future of blip.fm will only be seen over time. Some other signs, attempting to read the tea leaves, can be found on Blip’s own blog which shows that no new product announcements have occurred in recent months. In fact the only news coming out of Blip appears to be maintenance and outage reporting.

So how good is blip.fm?

I suspect some of the stories of blip’s demise are exaggerations – but getting down to the value of the blip product I can’t say that I have been wowed by blip. Based on what I am seeing – I think Blip will be left behind by music sites like Lala.com, Song.ly and Pandora.com. I know that is harsh – and I actually hope they get the chance to fix these issues – but given the music options out there today – I’m passing on Blip for the following reasons.

Music “Interuptus” – Back in college one of my roommates made cassette copies of all his albums but he used the entire 60 minutes of tape even if that meant a song was cut off in the middle. It’s almost 30 years later and to me the lyrics to the Doors LA Woman are still “Mr. Mojo risin..Will you flip the da** tape over, will somebody flip the tape over….Mr. Mojo risin…” Well, that is kind of what I get with blip.fm due to a variety of issues where songs stop suddenly (and unlike my roommate’s cassette, your only choice is to restart the song or playlist from the beginning).

There are some silly interface issues that cause this. If I am listening to a song and I look at my Blip Profile – it stops the song instead of keeping the song going and opening up a new browser tab for the profile. Also Blip does not play nice with lots of Firefox add-ons . We are not talking about some exotic add-ons, we’re talking heavily used add-ons like Skype, Adblock and a list of some others.

It’s hard to add your own songs – Blip has access to tons of songs, but not the whole universe and it is currently not very easy to add your own music into blip.

Some of the processes are pretty rough around the edges – You can tell a lot about a Web 2.0 web site by how much explaining they have to do. When you check out the Blip FAQ page you will see that unlike Twitter, Blip has to use their FAQ page to explain a bunch of things. You can see one FAQ entry to the right that talks about how to address the issue of Blip not having all songs and it’s not real simple.

A similar example is with the Blip to Twitter interface. If you turn it on, Blip sends every Blip (song) you play to Twitter. Now, to use Blip’s own words “Sometimes you don’t want to update your other accounts and it would be a pain to have to go to the settings and disable your accounts just for this one Blip. ” You can fix this “by simply starting your message with “! ” IMPORTANT! Notice that there is a space after the exclamation point. If you don’t place this space there, then your blip will still get sent to Twitter/FriendFeed etc..” I guess my definition of simple is a bit different than theirs. The ease and choice that goes with Song.ly is a much better approach.

I prefer the musical thought that goes into mixtape solutions like 8tracks and Songza. – One of the key elements of Blip is that you can hear what other DJs are playing right now – there is a real sense of immediacy and most Blip fans love that element. For me, it is cool, but I prefer listening to somebody’s planned out playlist – not just what they happen to be listening to. Likewise, Blip lets you add comments to each song. Blip fans love that personalization – but I’m usually doing enough things on my computer (like writing columns) that I want to hear the tunes not read the DJs commentary.

So for me Blip will not enter my suite of music tools, but that’s just the voice of one. Try it yourself and let us know what you think!

dagsmith
MusicPlayer.me Contributor

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