It’s not hard to see that we’ve come a long way with music applications. Now we can look to the next decade, and only guess what it will bring. One thing’s for sure, however; the realm of music apps will only continue to grow.

What We Have Today

Before we start looking towards the future, it’s important to take a look at what we already have now. After all, how can we see what is to come without knowing what is already out there?

As far as music applications go, most serve more than just the purpose of playing songs. Nowadays, the internet is used to make music a social experience. One of the most popular music services, Pandora, now has an app for Facebook users so that they can put their stations into their profiles. Another big name, Last.fm, is in itself a community based music site.

Right now, we can see music services and social services blending. Music has always been a pretty social activity. I’m sure most of us can remember going to concerts, sharing CDs, and listening to the radio with family and friends. Online music apps are striving to recreate the social scene that music has always provided. Nothing can really replace real human interaction, but in other ways, these applications are going above and beyond. Ten years ago, could any of us have so easily discussed music with someone anywhere in the world? That’s not to say that all users of these sites have anything particularly deep or interesting to say about the music. Regardless, it’s still a level of connection that music hasn’t ever seen before.

That’s where we are today. Next is a look ahead at what’s to come.

Blue Skies for Internet Radio

If the past few years are any indication, internet radio is only going to grow in years to come.  When they were new, only a few people seemed to be tuning in. Now, you’d be hard pressed to find someone online that had never used it. One can only assume that this is an industry that is going to grow. After all, everyone likes music, and everyone likes to be able to listen for free. It’s easy to think that this trend will only continue to grow.

There’s a bit of a dark shadow over the success of internet radio, however. As mentioned in an earlier blog, royalty problems were threatening companies for quite some time. This has more or less been resolved, though it came at a certain cost. Pandora’s forty hour per month rule is one such example. On a brighter note, this doesn’t seem to be deterring listeners. People hit the limit, sure. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to come back next month and use it again, and then again the month after that.

If there’s anything I can say about the future of radio on the internet, it’s that it seems to be looking up. We can only speculate about what tomorrow is going to bring, but the forecast looks to be sunny for internet radio apps.

Online Music Branching Out

I can’t think that places like Facebook could be classified as music sites by any stretch of the imagination, and Twitter is even less likely to be seen as one. Maybe MySpace, which has a section of the site dedicated to music, could fall under such a label. Still, it’s not in question that the main purpose of these sites is social networking. So how are they really going to have any impact online music?

One trend that seems to be continually growing is accessibility. Countless applications have popped up that allow you to easily post whatever it is you happen to be listening to.  It’s easy to tweet your favorite song, or update your Facebook status about that tune you just can’t get out of your head. Sharing playlists is just as simple, and on MySpace you can even add songs to your profile that MySpace musicians have uploaded. It’s never been such a cinch to see what your friends are listening to or to show off your tastes.

You might wonder how letting people see what you’re listening to is really going to affect that future of music. At first, I thought it seemed pretty unimportant. Then I thought about how many artists I came to like through a recommendation, or because someone else’s tastes grew on me. The future for music on social networking sites may progress unnoticed by many, but it’s definitely going to keep progressing.

Based on What You Like

Recommendations from our friends are great, but recommendations from a music player is a relatively new concept. It’s more or less what Pandora is built around. You give the name of an artist or song that you like, and it gives you songs that are similar. Last.fm’s scrobbler does the same thing. More recently, iTunes has added the Genius feature.

Genius works by looking at all of the songs in your library, then building playlists from other songs you own. It also makes playlists for genres, taking the styles you have most of and forming mixes from them. If you use iTunes and choose to use the Genius sidebar, you also get a list of songs similar to what you’re currently listening to that you don’t already own. It’s Apple’s not-so-subtle way of trying to sell you more, but it does let you find more to listen to.

Today, these programs are pretty good at making suggestions. It’s no surprise. Music is selected based on criteria as specific as having major key tonality or folk influences in common. Recommendations engines are becoming steadily more popular, and I daresay they’ll continue to. In the future, they’re going to keep getting better at finding music you’ll like.

Buying Your Tunes

The nice thing about internet radio is that you don’t have to pay a cent, but you’re eventually going to come across songs or albums that you like enough to buy. Purchasing music online isn’t really a big development. Before we could download mp3s from the comfort of our homes, we just bought CDs and thought nothing of it. Getting our music online isn’t that much of a change, except that we can do it in our pajamas.

It’s the little things that have been overlooked, though. Now, if there’s one spectacular song, you don’t have to buy the whole album only to find out the rest are subpar. If want to listen to something right away, then you can have it in minutes. And of course, there’s always the aforementioned pajama benefit.

Music can be bought online from a variety of places, from iTunes to Amazon to Walmart. Online stores are harder to predict the future of. It’s easy to see that they won’t run dry for business, unless people suddenly stop liking music. Surely scientific developments will change the way we listen to our music, just as they always have, and these stores will adapt to that. But above all, they’re going to keep growing. As long as music keeps being made, they will continue advancing.

What We’ll Have Tomorrow

It’s impossible to know exactly what’s going to happen or what the future holds, of course. However, music has been part of the human race for as long as we can remember, evolving all along the way. The internet is just the next step forward, and in the coming decade, we’ll surely be able to look towards new developments and growth.

However, the issue isn’t always availability of the service, but also some unfair practices.
For instance, in April of 2009, the music tracking and streaming service Last.fm started charging €3.00/month (roughly $4.43 USD) to make use of their audio streaming services, to all countries other than the US, the UK, and Germany. This (obviously) caused a lot of controversy to almost all users, whether it affected them directly or not.
And, while the decision may have been out of the hands of the site itself, it’s still unfair to see this happening.

Another prime example of one such site is Spotify. Spotify is a highly acclaimed music streaming service with a cross-platform (and even mobile) application and a lot of users.
The only problem? All of those users are in Europe. Many countries, including the United States, have yet to receive access to this service, and it has caused a lot of complaints to be thrown around the internet.
The website claims that this is due to licensing restrictions, and words it as being “not yet available” here, giving hope that some day we will all be able to access Spotify.

And, while not much controversy has been caused over this, rather than empty complaints, Spotify HAS still gotten their fair share of controversy for another issue — their iPhone application.
In order to use their iPhone application, which allows you to access music streaming from their service legally, conveniently, and on-the-go, you must be a Premium member of the site. This costs €9.99/month (or $14 USD). And, while the application itself is free, this restriction has left a bitter taste in the mouths of standard users all across Europe, and has also caused a lot of negative reviews to be posted about the application on iTunes.

Then we have Pandora. There are quite a few restrictions with Pandora, one being that you cannot even browse individual songs and build your own playlist. You create a “station” based on an an artist of song that you like, and Pandora finds similar music and streams it to you.
This is very nice and convenient in finding new artists that you like, but not quite right when you’re just in the mood to listen to music you’re already familiar with.
On top of that, a free user is restricted to forty hours of streaming music a month. Luckily, the fee to bypass this is a mere $0.99, but it would be nice for that fee to be nonexistent.

Boundaries in the legal music streaming business are actually pretty universal. I would be hard-pressed to find such a service with a complete lack of said boundaries…
The only service I can think of that has no absolutely debilitating boundaries is the ad-supported Grooveshark.
While you CAN opt to get a premium account (which is only $3/month, might I add), it’s certainly not necessary. It gives you the convenience of having no advertisements, early access to new features, and a nice “VIP” badge by your username, among other things.
The one downside (which is a bit unrelated, but is still good to know) is that there is currently a lack of any iPhone applications that support streaming from this service. (Pandora has a free one, we talked about Spotify’s, and there are several other music services with apps.) That would be a really nice thing to have.

I guess you can’t really complain… Free music is a wonderful thing to have (especially when it’s legal!), and restrictions are definitely understandable, to a degree. Forcing users to pay to even access it at all is too much, in my opinion.

On the other hand, nonintrusive banner ads, such as the ones on the Grooveshark website, are perfectly fine and actually easy to ignore.

Now, I’ve only touched the surface of the issue here… I didn’t want to drone on and on about specific restrictions, but there are more out there.
As of now, it seems as if Grooveshark is the best choice for anybody who wants to be able to listen to the music they want, free of charge, on their computers without obtrusive advertising or required payment (or even required membership at all).

Livekick

Livekick is a concert recommendation and tickets search engine that has just recently emerged from private beta. Livekick is designed to helps you discover live concerts in your area and find the cheapest available tickets. Livekick’s search engine includes more than 75,000 concerts in the U.S. from more than 20,000 artists at close to 40,000 venues.

Once you create an account Livekick gives you personalized concert recommendations for artists you like, and for similar artists. Adding artists is pretty easy as Livekick can import your preferences from iTunes, Last.fm, iLike, Pandora, MySpace Music, blip.fm or Rhapsody. Livekick will create a calendar based on your favorites and highlighting the extreme integration that Livekick brings, you can easily add any concert to your Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, or Yahoo Calendar.

In addition to the online calendar, Livekick can send you alerts via Twitter, email, an RSS feed or you can access Livekick.com from your iPhone. Livekick truly integrates with all the other sites and tools that you already use. Other features include “Your Artists” which tracks your favorite artists with tour listings, user-generated videos from their live concerts and links to the artists’ sites. Livekick also has a desktop widget that will do a daily scan of your computer for new music files and will add any new artist to your Livekick account.

Livekick has an API (application programming interface) that they are offering to developers at other sites that will allow these sites to add Livekick’s concert listings to their site. CBS Radio is one of the first to use this feature – but more are on the way.

Livekick has realized that most of us already have too many social networks. So instead of trying to get you to make Livekick the center of your universe, they are trying to make Livekick a part of your existing online experience. If they keep you coming back, they know they will make their money off the commissions from your ticket purchases. Livekick searches ticket web sites such as Ticketmaster, Livenation, Stubhub, Tickets.com and eBay as well as user-generated content sites such as MySpace Music.

BandsinTown

Bandsintown is essentially a search engine for performances by your favorite musical groups – or any groups for that matter. The site works almost completely by search, either by band, or by location. Creating an account is easy – the key is to list the city where you are so Bandsintown can do the searching. Also you can link to your Last.fm account, a very nice time saving integration, or list some musical acts that are your favorites.

Searching is also easy – You can choose a date range – including shortcuts like tonight or this weekend. You can choose how far away you’re willing to travel, how much you’re willing to pay, and whether you want name bands or indie bands. Bandsintown weeds it all down for you to show you only what you really want to see in a tag cloud like you see below.

As I was writing this I noticed that the first entry in the upper left of my search list was Abe Vigoda which led me wonder why I had been using this site. But one click on “Abe Vigoda” revealed that this was not the old guy from the Barney Miller Show but in fact “an experimental, tropical punk rock band based in Los Angeles, California.” See – you learn all sorts of new stuff about music with these sites!

While you can do some basic searching without an account, setting up an account gives you features like notifications when any of your favorites are coming to town. You can also get a weekly email digest off all the groups who are going to be nearby. You can also get all the usual social media site benefits like making friends and seeing your friend’s interests. So far, the social media side of the site looks pretty underutilized. I know I just use it for the band info and I think the same is true for many other folks.

We hope you enjoy trying out some of these sites. But don’t forget about MusicPlayer – we’ll give you lots of analysis and new sites and ideas. Are there other sites you count on? If so, write a comment and let us know about your favorite music sites.

Oodle BandTracker

Oodle’s BandTracker could best be described as a bare bones version of Bandsintown. At last count they had information on 751,785 bands performing in 235,666 shows. You can search the database online and sign up for a free weekly email with new shows. Once a week, you’ll get an email from BandTracker letting you know who’s coming, who’s canceling, and what’s going on near you. Clicking on any concert will take you to Oodle’s classifieds site where you can see what tickets are available for this show.

If you create an account you can create widgets to add to your MySpace page or Blog to promote your band with a Band Promoter Widget. Or, if you are just a fan, you can create a My BandTracker Widget to let your friends see your calendar of shows. While the simplest of the three sites we use, this one has the widgets and far more indie shows that any of the other sites.

Songkick

Songkick believes that “an amazing concert can change your life.” Songkick thrives in the past, but is pretty cool for new concerts too. They have built a database with tour dates from around the web to accumulate over 1 million concerts. Not every concert in existence, but the biggest list anywhere.

If you are like me and have a ticket stub from every show, then imagine Songkick as the online companion – a place for you to share your personal “gigography” of all the gigs you’ve ever been to. Before they started, there wasn’t a single place where you could see an artist’s entire tour history and see all the gigs a legendary venue has hosted. Social media kicks in because every concert and festival deserves a home online, where you can share your experience with posters, photos, videos, setlists, reviews, and more.

I love Songkick for the honest link on their home page (hopefully gone before you get there) which says: “Sorry it’s taking so long for stuff to show up. Our server is overloaded like a tired pack mule. We’re working on speeding things up.” With a database of over 1 million concerts I feel their pain with regards to handling the load.

Songkick also lives in the present and as they index 29 different ticket vendors across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. You can even add shows they are missing. Each concert or festival page aggregates all the ticket options, so you can compare prices, and buy the cheapest tickets.

More Concert Schedule Sites

• iConcertCal – is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city. It supports searches in the US, Canada, and the UK, includes direct links to purchase tickets, and is available for both Windows andMacintosh. Ideal for folks who primarily use iTunes.
• JamBase – This site has a compact – well organized interface with album and show reviews, articles about artists, a news ticker full of music headlines, and even a widget called “JamBaseTV” that’s full of podcasts and videos of live shows. If you are looking for a show today, there’s a “Show Finder” right on the home page to show you what’s playing nearby. I’m new to this site – but I can see this becoming part of my regular sites to visit.
• SonicLiving - Another concert discovery service that I did not discover till recently – although it has been around few years. It has integration, probably 2nd only to Livekick, through the SonicLiving Wishlist which integrates with iTunes, Pandora, Facebook, Last.fm, and Lala. If you are using the Pandora iPhone application then you are now receiving your concert updates via Pandora’s partnership with SonicLiving.

Never Miss a Concert

So if you are tired of being the last to hear about a show and having to buy expensive tickets 2nd hand, try out one of these sites. From the no-frills BandTracker to the full service LiveKick – any one of this trio will keep you in the loop on upcoming concert dates.

“Now for ten years we’ve been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rollin’ stone,
But that’s not how it used to be.
When the jester sang for the king and queen,
In a coat he borrowed from james dean
And a voice that came from you and me”

While people have spent 40 years analyzing those words, they can also be used to reflect upon the last ten years – ten years where Napster has been part of the musical landscape. In June 1999 Shawn Fanning wrote a computer program that turned the music industry on its head and created changes to the music industry that are still being felt today – a decade later.

Napster truly represented the “voice that came from you and me” as Napster was based on letting friends swap “a voice.” Napster allowed connected users to share the MP3 contents of their hard drives, using peer-to-peer technology to move the files from one machine to another. This simple process threatened and changed the music industry – “the king and queen” – with changes that are still being felt today.

The Napster Time Line

From college servers, to a service 85 million users around the world and a billion searches for music every day, to bankruptcy, through corporate owners to Best Buy.

• June 1999 – Napster Launches
• December 7, 1999 – The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) files a lawsuit against Napster
• March 5, 2001 – All legal appeals are exhausted and injunction is issued ordering Napster to prevent the trading of copyrighted music on its network
• July 2001 – Napster shuts down to comply with the court order
• On September 24, 2001, the case was partially settled. Napster agreed to pay music creators and copyright owners a $26 million settlement for past, unauthorized uses of music
• Spring 2002 Napster tries to re-invent itself as a subscription service – Napster 3.0
• On May 17, 2002, Napster announces it will be acquired by German media firm Bertelsmann.
• June 2, 2002 – Napster files for bankruptcy – expecting to erase debts and then to have the remaining assets bought by Bertelsmann
• September 3, 2002 – The bankruptcy judge blocked the sale to Bertelsmann and forced Napster to liquidate its asset
• Napster’s brand and logos were acquired at bankruptcy auction by the company Roxio, Inc. which used them to re-brand their Pressplay music service as Napster 2.0. Later Sony-BMG took over ownership.
• September 2008, Napster was purchased by US electronics retailer Best Buy

As a company, Napster had risen, fallen, tried to rise, fallen, stayed down, tried to rise – it’s hard to follow the entire history. It’s been like a professional wrestling match – except in the end Shawn “Hulk” Fanning dressed in his Napster adorned wrestling outfit is overwhelmingly defeated by the villain – the RIAA.

Napster Today

But just as in professional wrestling, just because you are defeated – it’s doesn’t really mean you are defeated. Best Buy is now doing its best to restore the Napster brand as the ” ultimate digital music package, offering unlimited on-demand music streaming as well as downloadable MP3s for one’s permanent collection playable on any MP3 compatible device,

Best Buy, in the guise of Napster, is offering streaming service from their 7-million-track library for a flat monthly fee of $5 per month. You also get to choose from over 60 commercial-free radio stations and more than 1,400 expertly programmed playlists. And each month you get to download keep 5 MP3s. Best Buy is hoping that by offering Napster cards at the cash register they can cash in on some of that money that is currently going to iTunes.

Napster is going up against a variety of services, most directly Microsoft Zune and their $15 per month fee which lets you keep 10 MP3s each month. But as noted above, the bigger competitor is iTunes which does not offer monthly subscriptions like Zune and Napster – but that’s because they don’t have too – they have all the customers they need. However, there is a job posting from Napster, asking for a software engineer with experience in “Mac/iPhone OS X Development. Five bucks a month for instant access to seven million songs (plus your five DRM-free downloads) is a decent deal but if they throw in an iPhone client Napster might come close to being a great deal again.

It should be noted that today all Napster downloads, 5 free a month and ones you buy, are all DRM-free. However, highlighting the irony of where Napster is today, Amazon and iTunes both released their catalogs in DRM-free mode before Napster. From wild and days crazy to the last major bastion of DRM music.

Napster’s offering is a good offer – but it leaves an unusual taste in your mouth. It’s kind of like finding out that the descendants of Bonnie and Clyde are bank security guards and they foiled a robbery at your bank – saving your money. While you are, of course, are happy – there is that little voice in the back of your head that kind of misses the wild antics of Bonnie and Clyde. You know the voice is wrong – Bonnie and Clyde were criminals as was Shawn Fanning – but still you miss those wild times.

There still is a “bit of the Napster” out there with free.napster.com but is is pretty limited these days. Just check out the restrictions:

Only US residents can play full length songs. You may play any particular song up to three (3) times, after which you will need to subscribe to Napster or purchase the song to play it in full again. In addition, you may only play an aggregate of twenty-five Streams in any given month. To buy a song or subscribe, you need to download our player software.

So you can still visit Napster for some free MP3s – but just a couple. Watch out for those rules.

Napster will forever live on

Right or wrong, making money or going bankrupt, legal or illegal – it has never really mattered. The name name Napster will forever bring memories to a generation who briefly enjoyed free MP3s. It will forever be known for starting a battle over copyright laws – a battle that is still being waged a decade later and one that will doubtless rage on for years to come.

Pandora

If this turns out to be true than Pandora will could be the first pure Internet music site to make some dough. Certainly iTunes is profitable – but that business has succeeded because of the iPod and iTouch as much as the Internet. But let’s focus on Pandora and the potential for a trifecta:

1. Pure Internet music site – not associated with a music studio or other offline music business
2. Profitable
3. 100% compliance with all music copyright rules and regulations

So how is this miracle occurring?

Pandora is an ad supported service and the registered user count has risen to 27 million registered users with an additional 50,000 to 60,000 members signing up each day! The mobile world has been very very good to Pandora! Their mobile applications have been home runs. Signups have been climbing since they released an iPhone app 10 months ago and one for the BlackBerry last month. The iPhone application has more than 5 million users and brings in 18,000 to 20,000 new ones daily!

Although the advertising market is very tight – even Google has seen an downturn – Pandora can deliver targeted ads thus making sure commercials aren’t wasted on the wrong demographic group. “We’re not delivering an ad for a women’s clothing store to men, or a bar or alcohol-related event to minors,” CEO Tim Westergren said. “Everything is delivered based on the information of the listener.”

Will more folks pay for higher quality?

Pandora has just rolled out Pandora One, a subscription-based upgrad which is a service upgrade from the standard free Pandora experience. The big question – will hardcore users shell out $36/year for some extra features? Compared to other subscription services, Pandora has identified some cool upgrades:

• High quality streaming – 192K bits per second audio. That’s the highest quality streaming experience on the Internet. More bits mean better sounding music.

• Extended interaction timeout – Listen for up to 5 hours in a row without Pandora stopping and asking “Are you still listening?”

• Pandora desktop application – You can play your Pandora stations right from your desktop – without opening a new browser window. Available for the Mac & Windows.
• Ad free experience

Pandora has had a subscription service for awhile at he same price, but it included very few incentives, other than an ad-free experience, that were worth paying for.

Smooth sailing?
Pandora’s primary barrier to reaching profitability rests in the outcome of a dispute over how much Internet radio providers should pay in music royalties. Pandora has paid all royalties – never ripping off any musician or studio. Pandora is in negotiations with recording companies, artists and copyright holders and those results could be considered the final hurdle for Pandora.

If they reach agreement with the music industry on affordable rates – they roll to victory. Without agreement – they may well join Napster, Seeqpod and the whole universe of Internet music sites that are now hosted on the Internet in the sky.

What’s the hope?

Pandora has played by all the music industry rules – no theft of digital assets here. If the recording industry is smart they will reach and agreement with Pandora and set the stage for digital music in the next century. But, the recording industry can be stubburn – let’s hope they wise up!

Mixcloud
Most internet radio sites allow you to choose the channels you want to listen to. Mixcloud wants to change that approach and makes the unit of value the radio show – not a channel.

Mixcloud’s business pitch is very simple – they want to be “The Youtube of radio”. Just like YouTube has created a universe of user generated video content and introduced the world to new performers, Mixcloud wants to do the same for audio programming. You can’t upload one song or one track – Mixcloud is committed to providing a full show or mix, with track list, that listeners can appreciate in totality.

The site itself is beautiful in its simplicity. You can get up and running – either listening or uploading in just a few minutes. Also, they rely on their music player so you don’t have to get caught up in having or configuring the right version of other music players. The site has all the “traditional” Web 2.0 social features with leave comments on track lists, follow shows that you like and see how popular a show is with the number of times it’s been listened to.

Mixcloud is just in beta so the number of listeners and the quantity of shows is pretty tiny. Just look at this visitor traffic report – yes those visitor counts are in the thousands.

I would love to be able to say I was one of YouTube’s first viewers – but that would be a big lie. But, if Mixcloud takes off I’ll get my story to tell other folks over a beer. If you have a radio voice or an indy band I would be making a dash to Mixcloud to get onboard.

EDIT - 05/09/08 The guys at mixcloud have offered MusicPlayer.me 50 signups for our readers. You can now go to their sign up page and register using the code: musicplayerme.

Tunesbag
TunesBag is a free online audio library where you can store your music, create playlists and share with friends and other users. It is similar to Lala and Echodio – check out the article Synchronization – Music Wherever and Whenever to learn more about those sites – which also help you to synchronize and store your music. The basic idea is to give you access to music that you own even when you are not at your own computer.

Tunesbag lets you upload files in four ways – via the browser from your PC, via a desktop uploader (software you download), by emailing the file to Tunesbag and by pointing to any MP3 file on the net. We’ll talk more about the legal issues but that last one is just asking for trouble. Tunesbag puts up a pathetic message “We respect the intellectual property of others, and we ask our users to do the same” that is sure to neither stop any users nor impress the “music police.” Getting back to the uploading it is easy – though you do have to wait a few minutes after the upload till you can access it – a pain in our real time world.

Once the files are uploaded you’ve accomplished something that most music users don’t have – safe backups. But then you can do more as n the Tunesbag library you can sort your music by genre, artist or album. Each song has options to play (using the built in Tunesbag player), add it to a playlist, add comments, get recommendations on other songs you might like and much more. Tunesbag has an easy to use interface that will be a breeze for any iTunes user. There is also integration with social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Bebo.

I haven’t switched from Lala yet – but I probably like Tunesbag a bit better. The Tunesbag ease of use and integration is nice. My holdup as you’ll see in a second is that Lala is in the clear on a digital rights while Tunesbag is in the grey territory.

You gotta ask these days – are they legal?
Just like YouTube and the music sites Seeqpod and Muxtape, Mixcloud is likely to run into trouble with Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) closely monitoring how they handle monitoring to ensure that all materials are fully licensed. And Mixcloud already discussed this issue in their blog Commoditising Music? – and that is spelled right since they are all Brits not us “z” loving Americans.

I think they will run into challenges, but Mixcloud is much more like YouTube than Seeqpod or Muxtape. Mixcloud wants original user generated content like indy bands that own their own material. Just like YouTube has attracted Disney/ABC to air some show on YouTube, Mixcloud has the potential to attract DJs from XM Radio or radio networks like National Public Radio shows that want to expand their reach in this age of new media. But as folks upload playlists full of commercial songs that are unlicensed – it’s going to be interesting to see happens. I hope they can succeed like YouTube where the user generated content takes off while the uploading of illegal software is the tiny issue.

Tunesbag FAQ claims that they are on legal grounds: “TtunesBag can only be used to manage music you already have. You can share your library with friends according to the law in Austria.” I am not a lawyer, but if that is true you would think that Napster, Seeqpod and all those sites would have been in a mad dash for Austria – where the hills would truly be alive with the sounds of music! I think they have the potential for issues with the file sharing – but I think they also have a lot of power in the basic application of allowing the user to store and listen to their own music.

Try them out yourself
Both of these products require an invite to join right now – but if you do a little searching on for “Mixcloud invite” or “Tunesbag invite” and you might get lucky and be able to get an immediate account. Otherwise, you can also sign up for an invite at their site and get in line. Maybe you’ll be able to say “I was there when it all began, I remember the early days of Mixcloud.”

Are you seeking Seeqpod?
On April 1st 2009 SeeqPod filed for bankruptcy protection and sometime on April 24th their servers went offline. There is still no official word but in light of the bankruptcy filing the most likely causes are either a decision to go offline or a technical supplier (web hosting, ISP) deciding to cut off service. Seeqpod joins with Songbeat and Steamzy as music sharing sites that went offline in ‘09.

SeeqPod developed technology that allowed ti to quickly search the Internet for playable media like MP3 song files and then allowed visitors to play those songs. So Seeqpod claimed that they never hosted any music files on its servers – it just played them from wherever they were. The challenge was that they made no attempt to determine if the music they were playing was legally licensed.

Their approach was quite simple – “Finder, Players.” The approach from the music industry was also quite simple as Warner Music, Capitol Records and EMI all filed massive lawsuits against Seeqpod. The suit from EMI garnered the most attention as they took the complaint to a new level by personally naming as co-defendants some of the Seeqpod executives and even a developer who was using the Seeqpod API.

Who knows what the courts would have ruled, but the “pay for music” forces clearly win this round.

Last.fm implements new pricing
For round two of this week’s fight we go to London where Last.fm is headquartered and we take a quick detour back in time. Back in the ancient days of Internet music, around 2002 to be exact, Last.fm was founded with the idea that they could provide radio like services over the Internet where the music culture was more democratic with “everyone listening to music how they want to, when they want to. Without a middle man making your decisions for you.” Essentially you or your friends became the DJs – you did not have to listen to musical preferences of the paid radio DJs. You can check out more details on their service in this review of Last.fm’s services.

Last.fm has always compensated artists for playing their music – one of the “good guys” from the music industry’s perspective. So much so that in 2007 CBS bought the company but kept the existing management team in place. The team received a $280 million (CBS is a public company so that number is made public) but probably have contracts that require they stay with Last.fm and/or meet certain specified financial goals before they can cash in all that money.

Now let’s look at recent history:

• March 24, 2009 – Last.fm announces that Last.fm Radio listeners outside of the US, the UK and Germany will soon be required to pay a monthly subscription fee of €3.00.
• March 30, 2009 – Last.fm announces that they are listening and will postpone the date on which radio will become a subscription service outside the USA, UK and Germany. They state that they will implement the charges after they make three additional improvements: Gift subscriptions,updating of the developers using the our Radio API and investigating alternative payment options.
• April 22, 2009 – Last.fm announces that they are implementing the subscription fees immediately.

So we will have to award round two to the “pay for music” forces. However, I am not sure they wanted this victory as Last.fm has managed to piss off millions by their mishandling of this process.

Why does last.fm need to charge?
Last.fm has deals with over 280,000 labels and artists and they pay royalty fees to all these companies and artists. So while the music from Last.fm is free to you the listener, it is not free to Last.fm. This is the major point that most Last.fm customers don’t realize – Last.fm pays for all the music they play.

Negotiating what they pay can be tough and just last year Last.fm could not come to terms with Warner Music Group and no longer plays their music. Last.fm also takes a hard line with small indie bands. They give these groups airplay – but no royalties and they define that right up front in the agreement all bands sign off on.

“By uploading Licensed Material, You grant to Last.FM a non-exclusive, royalty-free license (including the right to sub-license for all purposes related to the Last.FM service (for example, embedding the Last.FM player on third party websites (such as personal blogs)”

Up until now Last.fm has essentially been ad-driven with a little money from existing users who pay for a subscription in order to avoid seeing the ads (and the subscribers get a few extra perks). In the countries where Last.fm has staff and a large number of visitors they are able to command good advertising rates. In other countries they get lower quality advertisers and less money for the ads – think about the commercials you see on TV at 4am.

Take a peek at the traffic for Last.fm as it compares to Pandora and Seeqpod. You can see how why Seeqpod did not have the resources to challenge the lawsuits. Also realize that the increasing traffic for both Last.fm and Pandora is a mixed bag – more traffic is good if the ad revenue is exceeding the music royalty costs. More traffic is actually bad if you are losing money on each visitor!

So what happened when they announced the subscriptions?
While there was no rioting in the streets, you did have the online version of rioting. They actually had to post this message on their blog:

Please note: We’ve had to disable comments on this post to stop this page from growing too large. Please direct any further comments to our Feedback and Ideas forum.

And the forum is full of comments criticizing the decision and complaining about discrimination against smaller countries with comments like “I absolutely will never, ever pay any kind of penalty for not being British, American or German.”

While Last.fm did not back down from the decision, 6 days later they announced a delay and promised to work on a few things before implementing the new pricing model. However they did not take the time to get a good public relations person. Most folks don’t know what I just explained above. They don’t know about Last.fm paying for the music and they don’t know how the ads work. It is a fair story – one that has been told incredibly poorly.

Did they keep their promises?
Much to everybody’s surprise, those in favor of the change and those opposed, last week’s announcement was made with only 2 out of the 3 promises met. You can buy a gift subscription and developers are in the loop but the only payment option is still via PayPal or credit cards via PayPal processing. In the March 30 announcement they actually said, words they probably wish they could take back, “If PayPal sucks in your country, or you don’t have a credit card, don’t despair.” Well since they made no changes in the payment people are despairing and the 600+ comments on their blog are mostly critical and many are too vile to repeat here.

So while the forces for paid music won here, I’m surprised that none of them volunteered to send a professional public relations person over to Last.fm because the court of public opinion is pretty critical. Though, with the majority of their visitors still getting the free service – the public backlash probably won’t last all that long or be heard too loudly.

So why is this good?
To answer this you have to look at two audiences – those in the UK, the US and Germany and the rest of the world.

The rest of the world: Okay it is not great for you. Good might even be an exaggeration. But the reality is that Last.fm is a business and they were losing money on you. Every time you visited Last.fm you were costing Last.fm money – they were paying for you to get free music. The other option that Last.fm probably explored was cutting of all service in your country. Maybe, and this is a big maybe, smaller country specific or regional players will step up and fill the void left by Last.fm.

The US, UK and Germany – Last.fm is making money in your countries. They spend money to get you music for free and the ad revenue they get in return is exceeding their costs (or at least generating enough money that they want to keep trying to be profitable). Last.fm decided not to keep losing money around the world and to try and be profitable so they can avoid the bankrupt fate of a Seeqpod. You have to hope that the ad revenue picks up enough that they don’t decide to start charging in these countries too.

What will happen to free music on the Internet?
The musicians, the artists and especially the music industry (record and CD companies) like making money. With the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the lead they are going to keep on suing and harassing folks who enable the unauthorized sharing of music. So long as the law is on their side they are going to keep charging money for music and they are going to keep suing those who oppose them. The fans of music who don’t want to pay are going to keep trying to get music for free.

We’ve seen the Battle of Napster. We’ve seen the Seeqpod skirmish. We’ve seen Muxtape retreat to avoid the battle. It’s been a war for years and there is no end in sight.

Me, I’ll keep telling all my friends and readers like you to use sites like Last.fm. Because if enough eyeballs show up and see the ads – I can be legal and get my music for free. Or in the contorted words of Dire Straits “Money for nothin and your tunes for free!”

The key to synchronizing all your music is iTunes. Though it may seem hard to believe – iTunes is not even six years old having been launched as as the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003. However, in those six years iTunes has become the number one music vendor in America. Certainly iTunes is a great product to rise that far that quickly. However, it’s limitations are with synchronization. You can use other MP3 players with iTunes – but all the best synchronization features and ease of use are reserved for the other Apple products – the iPod and the iPhone.

The bigger synchronization issue is that iTunes is installed on one computer – so all the music that you add is stored on that computer. You probably synchronize most of your favorite music to your iPod or iPhone – but at the end of the day the computer with iTunes is the mother ship. Now if you have multiple PCs at home and multiple kids this can get to be a challenge – “But Dad, my iTunes songs are on that PC !” Then when you head off to work (to make some money and more importantly so you don’t have to listen to the kids screaming) you have the same trouble – you don’t have all your music on your PC at work. And, to further complicate issues, many companies prohibit installing personal software on a work PC.

Now you can make CDs and you can synchronize some of your songs to your portable device – but at the end of the day it’s a hassle. That’s where a service like Lala.com comes in. Lala has two truly unique features – the first of which is the ability to take ALL the digital music that you have and synchronize it to Lala.com and play it from any computer in the world that has speakers and an Internet connection to Lala.com.

Getting your music synchronized is easy. You create a free Lala.com account. You install the Music Mover software (available for Windows and the Mac) and it scans for and identifies all of the MP3s and paid iTunes songs on your hard drive and adds them to your collection on LaLa. You can then stream the music to any Internet-ready device. Those other devices, like your PC at work, don’t need the Music Mover software. You only need to put the software on any PC that has music files that you want to upload to Lala.com.

Technically, the uploading of the music doesn’t even take that long. If Lala.com already has a copy of the song, all it uploads is the note that says “you have rights to this song.” And it does not quiz the heritage of your music – it assumes if it is on your PC, you have the rights for the music. Only when you have a song that Lala.com does not have, like local bands or your own recordings, does Music Mover actually take the time to upload the music to Lala.com. In my case some foreign language songs were the only songs that Lala actually needed to upload.

The second killer feature is a business model that may work, it’s not just free music and the business model that says “pray that we make some money before the RIAA shuts us done.” All the services I already mentioned are free! But the reason why LaLa doesn’t get nearly as much publicity is probably because they actually charge users to listen to new music. But it’s a darn reasonable pricing model and it is advertising free! Lala lets you play millions of songs once without paying. After that you have to pay 10 cents to add it to your collection and stream it whenever you want. But you can get 50 songs free when you sign up, so you can try out the idea before having to pay anything. Then, if you choose to download a MP3 of the song you pay 89 cents (which is cheaper than most music sites) and you get that $.10 streaming fee back. All the MP3s you download are DRM-free, compatible with iTunes and Windows Media Player.

Rumor has a third killer feature on the horizon with an iPhone application that will allow users to stream any song from their music library whenever you want even without a PC:

Especially if you have an iPhone with limited storage space this could be killer – the music will be streamed over the Internet so you won’t need a copy of the songs on your limited iPhone storage space.

Of course, others are lining up behind with Echodio first in line – but just with a beta product for the Mac; the Windows and Linux versions are on the way. With Echodio you download an application which installs as a plugin to iTunes. You create a new Echodio playlist and put in all of the songs you want to upload to Echodio. Then you can stream it through Boxee (used in the beta) or soon Echodio’s own Web player, which will have two-way sync so that when you play a song via the Web it will count as a play in iTunes. Your ratings in iTunes and other tags get synced as well. As you add songs to iTunes – the synchronization is ongoing. Plus, you will have the added bonus of automatically backing up your digital music collection. Pricing is still in flux – but after the beta you will be paying on a per gigabyte basis.

I have to believe that somebody at Apple is thinking about how iTunes begins to synchronize with the Internet. However, till that “apple falls from the idea tree” Lala and Echodio are great products to make it easy to access your entire music library wherever and whenever you want.

We’ve long known that Big Brother was watching us. Big Brother, no matter what else you think of him, is no slacker. Therefore it should be no surprise that he’s listening to you too.

In a prior post we discussed last.fm, with its scrobbling ways. A gentle social butterfly of an outfit, yes? Promoting harmony, peace, and musical freedom world-wide, you say?

Not So Much

Maybe not. A look into the history of last.fm, recent and not so recent, shows us a bit of drama here and there. Of course you know, being of the music world cognoscenti, that last.fm was bought by US media monster CBS. There was a lot of flap about it at the time. The big question was, why? I mean they payed a reported $280 million. That’s a bunch, even in the olden golden days of 2007. Some said they wanted the young audience. Some said they wanted the Web-2.0-ness. But some said they wanted the scrobbler. Try to remember that. It’s important. We’ll come back to it. Here’s an anchor for your modern-day short attention span. Richard Jones, one of the last.fm founders, said on their blog, in reference to the buyout:

• The Last.fm team stays put in London, we’ll grow the company some more here.
• We will continue to execute our world domination plans – our focus is still music and the surrounding ecosystem.
• The founders (myself included) are still at the helm.
• We have more resources at our disposal now, and more clout when it comes to negotiating licensing deals etc.
• OH NOES UR SELLIN MY SCROBBLES!!1!! — Don’t panic. The openness of our platform and our approach to privacy won’t change.

Do please, if you retain nothing else, hold on to that list line.

Silent No More

Then there was the protest in wich last.fm did not join. Many players in internet radio, including MTV and Pandora joined the Day of Silence protesting Internet royalty rates. Last.fm was criticized. TechCrunch was vocal, but not the only voice. Word was the deep pockets of CBS allowed them to give no hoots about cost, and that the prospect of competition dying off saddened them not at all. But the said they did it for their listeners. Yes, self-sacrificing, noble, and loyal to their public, they decided to bear the cost and soldier bravely on. There was a last.fm blog post about it, in which the boldest print said:

• We do not want to punish our listeners for our problems, period.

Right. Do you remember about the importance of the scrobbler? Good. It will be needed a bit later on. Also try to retain the thought that TechCrunch and last.fm are not big fans each of the other.

In Which It Hits The Fan

Now we get to the fun part, at last. On Friday the 20th of February, TechCrunch released a salvo titled: Did last.fm just hand over user listening data to the riaa? Why would they do that, you ask? It seems there was a leak of an unreleased U2 album called No Line on the Horizon. This was no fault of last.fm, and no one says so. But the rumor says CBS-owned last.fm released the user data to the RIAA because of the mystic powers of the scrobbler to record listening activity. This power would be of great use to Brother. If the listener listened to unlawful-to-own-at-this-time music, and if they had the scrobbler going, they would be caught in the act. And last.fm says, well, they say several things.

Which leads us to the best part, in which last.fm defender R. Jones, writing on the last.fm blog, states:

• Techcrunch are full of shit

Yes! Let us savor the moment. It isn’t every day that something interesting happens in the social site world.

He said; She said; and the mean old RIAA said.

But are they? Full of shit, that is. TechCrunch, defending against the defense, says it never published the statement as anything but a rumor. (note supporting question mark in original TechCrunch post) But the reported responses from last.fm and others don’t quash the controversy. They say: (they is techcrunch)

• They got a “tip” that last.fm had handed over megamounts of user data to the RIAA.
• They contacted last.fm and waited for a response.
• After long waiting, they got: “To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA.”
• They asked the spokesperson if “she had any further comment she would like to make”.
• She didn’t.
• Soon after the techcruch post, there were angry denials from last.fm
• Erick Schonfeld, of TechCrunch, says the denials were followed by a “squishy disclaimer”
• (Try to add that “squishy” thought to your mental retention pond, ok?)

It took time for all this to happen, of course. Friday night the flap began. Monday morning the famous “full of shit” response took place. TechCrunch initially reported no response from the RIAA. Arstechnica reported that “RIAA spokesperson Cara Duckworth told Ars on Saturday ‘It’s not true’”. Of course it isn’t. Is it?

Consider Cthulhu, or, Not All That Is Squishy Is Good Clean Fun

Now it’s time for that memory dump I told you was on the way. That’s right. Just let it go. Actually, the concept that techcrunch and last.fm weren’t all that cordial was pretty well used up in the preceding exchange, so if you lost that it’s ok. But now we need to work with:

• OH NOES UR SELLIN MY SCROBBLES!!1!! — Don’t panic. (quote from R.Jones of last.fm)
• last.fm disclaimer described as “squishy” by techcrunch writer Erick Schonfeld

The last.fm privacy policy is plenty squishy. You should read it. For that matter, we all should read all those agreements that we digitally sign. And if you did read the last.fm one, you would find the following squishy parts:

• We have a pretty simple privacy policy. We are reasonably sure this won’t annoy anyone
• Please remember that any information you submit becomes public information that can be viewed by others
• Certain third parties may have access to your data
• Your pseudonymous listening habit data will be available to other Last.fm users for non-commercial useand to third parties via our API for their own commercial and/or non-commercial purposes
• “personally identifiable information” shall mean all information provided during your initial registrationon the Website and during your creation of a user profile, including, for example, your real name, e-mail address, postal address and other location information, your age, your gender and certain other demographic information or information that may enable online or offline contact with you
• Last.fm also maintains a central database of information collected by the Profile Navigation software(which may include your personal information). Last.fm makes some of this information available to third parties
• We collect data regarding the users of Last.fm, including: (i) The Internet Protocol (IP) address of the user’s computer.This may or may not be associated with a particular Internet Service Provider (ISP)

There’s lots more. Basically, last.fm says “We’re great guys; we would never let you down.” But they also say the above squishy things re third parties and such. It makes one wonder. And then there’s the obvious question. Would they hand over the info, if a legal authority requested it? Of course they would.

Legally-Compelled Disclosures: We believe in privacy and therefore will take all reasonable measures to ensure that your personally identifiable information remains private. However, in the event that we are required to disclose personally identifiable information by a court, the police or other law enforcement bodies for their investigations, regulation or other governmental authority we will make such a disclosure without being in violation of this Policy.

Wouldn’t you? You can bet that I would narc you out in a second if that’s what it took to save my considerable assets.

Lest We Forget

The scrobbler, remember? It’s all about the scrobbler. It knows what you listen to on your computer. Always. Whether you are online or not. Consider that, when people began deleting their last.fm accounts in panic, last.fm kindly didn’t allow them to. Staffer Jonty Wareing reports that in an effort to prevent people from losing their scrobbling history, the “job” (chron job?) that would remove them forever was “stopped”. Well, of course it was. Last.fm cares about its users. They told us so, back up there near the top of the page, in bold. They would never give up their personal information. Except, of course, as lined out in that squishy privacy policy of theirs. But I leave it up to you. Trust them if you wish. I myself rejoice that I never downloaded the scrobbler, not that I have any illegal tracks on my drive. The thought of those digital fingers feeling around my private data bits just offends me.

And I Quote

Here are some quotes from users offended, confused, or possibly inspired by the F.O.S incident. Many people added their pitiful cries to the babble. Here are several outstanding blurbs. I don’t care, really, what they think, but I like the sound.

On Digg user cmder said: “God I hate TechCrunch”

Also on Digg user d3sapar3cid said: “Why not just think before you download a U2 album…none of them have ever been good. Why would they start to be now?”

And one more digger, user damm said: “every time you scrobble an unreleased track … god kills a kitten.” (Nice reference to Cliché Kitty)

Now what would you expect last.fm users to say? Right, not much worth mentioning. Yeh, dat rite, blah. But then there was KatsuMooMooo (I swear). He, she, or whatever said: (note: You don’t have to read the blurb, if you are intimidated by large areas of plain text without pictures or shiny things. Just look at it and I will explain the marvelous achievement.)

“thank you very much for the public clarifications. the paranoia started to sink in for many people, including myself, of what might happen were this article true, but it seemed to go against the way you run your company, and against the quality of the work you’ve been doing (great) — given how personal some people feel about their music data, i’d say continuing to be vocal about your transparency is a good idea, and i imagine you are going to need to continuously prove to people somehow that you are beyond the grip of record label control (despite your parent company, etc) and would not succumb to such pressure, in a similar way to how facebook must prove (hopefully) that it defends its user’s data and rights. good luck and keep up the excellent work!”

Wow. I’m impressed. No wasting of the shift key to achieve caps, and a mighty one-hundred-and-twenty-word wandering sentence. That’s last.fm right there.

To give TechCrunch users a fair spin, some of them said stuff too.

Never Again said:

There actually IS NO BIG DEAL !

Just never use
- LastFM
- Facebook
- Google’s properties
- Lala
and any other of these monopolist data-collecting Websites again

Then Ryan said “Please last.fm say it is not so!”, to which Veve N. replied “they HAVE to say,that it is like you said (“, which leads me to say “Oh, God, no more, please”!

Ok, only a little more.

Joseph Stevens said:

‘ ”We’d never personally identify our users to a third party”

In Last.Fm we trust. ‘

So there you go. We have spoken.

At Last

Perhaps you get the idea that no one is very sure what last.fm did or didn’t do. Perhaps you believe them when they squish out loud. I think I’ll pass on the scrobbler. You may have a higher tolerance for intrusion. In which case, happy scrobbling to you.

Joe Brooks

/MusicPlayer.me Contributor

According to the Institute for Policy Innovation, the U.S. economy takes a $12.5 billion hit annually as a result of all forms of world wide music piracy. The music industry employs approximately 50,000 workers. Yet, with the US currently experiencing one of the highest unemployment rates in history, we can still look to the illegal piracy of sound recordings as being responsible for the loss of 71,060 U.S. jobs, $2.7 billion in lost wages, and $422 million in lost tax revenues.

According to IFPI, the value of copyright-based industries in the U.S is $430 billion dollars and Europe $360 billion Euros. With the world turning more and more towards electronic commerce, instant information and digital data, copyrighted material is destined to become one of the most valuable on-line commodities to be bought, sold, traded and bartered for.

A copyright, very simply put, is the legal means in which the holder to the rights of an artist’s work is given control over whether the work can be distributed, how it can be distributed, when it can be distributed, and who can do the distributing. Copyright has been recognized in international law for over 200-years and is born of the idea that those who “create, produce or invest in creative work should be the ones that decide how that work should be reproduced and made available to the public.”

Aside from the economic issues associated with music piracy, what about questions of ethical and moral boundaries; is it okay to steal, simply because you don’t see the victim?

Sure, downloading digital music isn’t like going out and mugging someone. It’s not that kind of theft. However, using Utorrent to download Beyonce’s hot new single, burn it to 10 CD’s and give them out to all of your friends is still stealing. You’re just not beating the woman in the head with a blackjack in order to steal her purse.

Downloading music from P2P networks such as Kaza and LimeWire threatens the livelihood of regular working class people just like you; people from songwriters, recording engineers and artists, to indie record stores and their staff, to the guy that shrink wraps the cellophane around the CD cases before they’re shipped off for sale.

The interface used by services such as Utorrent and Torrentz gives the user a feel good feeling, leaving a presumption that they’re not doing anything illegal. With an appearance of little more than a search engine, results for the music queried are returned in the users Web Browser and it’s a simple point and click to download the file. It is easy to understand how many people ascribe to a popular misconception and rationalize that if it’s found on the Internet then it is fair game and falls under the guidelines of Fair Use. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

In a culture that is becoming ever more “green” conscious, looking for a “clean” way to share your favorite music and avoid the legal pitfalls, such a jail time and being assessed fines that would take a normal person well past their date of death to ever pay off, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), provides a list of legal options for downloading your favorite songs that will keep you – and your college/parents/grandparents/etc – from getting sued.

However, if you’re one of those individuals who believes that if God didn’t want you to download free music he wouldn’t have had Al Gore create the Internet, then by all means have at it. Just keep in mind, if one day you open your door to find some little man in a brown polyester suit standing on your stoop with legal papers announcing an impending court action against you, “I found it on the Interwebs” probably isn’t going to work as a viable excuse.