I’ll tell you what I found; but first I’ll tell you what I think: Nothing is as good as do-it-yourself. You should really learn to make your own music. If you can’t sing, play. If you can’t play, learn. Yes you can learn. Play a didgeridoo, or a nose-flute, or learn to pat Juba and play yourself. But I guess we all need some time away from our intense efforts to improve ourselves. I can accept music related sites as not-the-worst way to spend your time off.

So here it is, on a sliding scale from zero to as good as it gets.

musicovery.com

If this site is a commercial effort by precocious grade-school children, I applaud them. If perpetrated on adults by adults, please stop.

The site offers nothing, as near as I can tell. You pick a “mood” button, and some sound comes forth. I picked “positive” and a raucous thumping sound resulted. It was not music, but rather a loosely organized noise of some kind. The sound was said to emanate from Cypress Hill, a location I’m not familiar with.

For free that’s what you get, whatever they give you. A “premium” account will cost you four usd per month. The price, along with the my-little-pony color scheme, supports the infant entrepreneur theory. I suppose it could be a third-world entry into the music marketplace. I understand a dollar stretches more in some countries other than the good ol’ USA. I wasn’t dedicated enough to find out if they want the four bucks through pay-pal or they require your bank account number to process through a trustworthy family-owned Nigerian financial institution.

I rate it zero of whatever units you choose. It isn’t worth the time of day you’d spend there.

emusic.com

I’ll never know what this site is like. They require registration to even try it. That means personal information including a credit card number. They say they won’t take your money if you aren’t happy. Right. Is anybody really going to fall for that? I hope not.

Another zero on my scale. It violates a fundamental principal of online business, and insults the intelligence to boot.

y! music

Now yahoo! music is a creepy place. See that CBS logo? You will if you look around. Remember last.fm? Scary stuff. And then there’s the association with Rhapsody, already described above as spooky. This site seems to be designed not by children but by disturbed adolescents. You can feel it in the video game look. But these kids have learned their economics, that’s clear. You can’t twitch your cursor without being given an opportunity to buy something. I tried to listen to their radio service. I reached my three commercial personal limit before ever hearing a note. I can’t recommend it to anyone, with the possible exception of compulsive spenders. If your day is made brighter by every chance to make a purchase, you might love yahoo! music. I bet they love you back, too.

I can’t rate it for music, for I never heard any. I’ll give them half-a-whatever for glossy content.

teenmusic.com

While I was peering about the web looking for music sites I saw this one. I thought it would be a good idea to go see what was being done to uplift the future. Nothing. Nothing at all. Featured track was Stanky Legg, by the G-Spot Boyz. The first word of that “song”, oft repeated, is “Bitch”. Is that what you want your little girl listening to? Most prominently glare the faces of various ganstas. There are divas with questionable values and behaviors displayed. I don’t know if you can hear music. I deplore ignorant vulgarity. I don’t enjoy being stared at rudely by criminal types. And I find attitude a poor substitute for intellect, so I left.

Zero whatevers for them. They have nothing of value to offer anyone.

mtv.com/music

Not for me. And I was one of those that wanted my mtv, back before they forgot about all the other genres of music. They have a radio thing, along with a lot of other stuff. I tried the radio and got, guess what? Rhapsody. We already talked about that. Keep it away from me, please. Everything else there is just, well, about what you’d expect. Nothing too offensive. Nothing great either. They have a link to a place where there is supposed to be breaking news. But it was a slow news day when I was there. There is an activist link. All kind of non-confrontational and let’s-just-all-get-along. It’s ok I guess. I won’t go back. But then I’ll never forgive them for letting me down when I wanted to see and hear music videos not listen to rude thumping noises combined with raucous vocalizations and ignorant profanity. Not that I have anything against profanity. I love profanity. I just don’t like ignorant profanity. But there’s nothing offensive up-front on their site.

So I’ll give them one-quarter of a whatever for showing up.

rhapsody.com

There’s something that creeps me out a little bit here too. I’m not sure what it is. Maybe the way their logo reminds you of Real Player. Spooky. But you can find stuff here. I usually search for Little Feat to test a site out. That will show if they are making an honest effort or not. Rhapsody is. I found lots of albums. They even had Down On The Farm, and that is uplifting music for sure. You could play or buy. They didn’t make you register or hand over your critical personal information up front. But there’s that back-of-the-neck hackle raising sense of something wrong. This just in, a developing flap over Real Player, Rhapsody, and Badware. Stay tuned to this site for news.

I’ll give Rhapsody.com one-and-one-half whatevers for having Little Feat. But I don’t trust them any further than my Delete button.

Radio Disney

But while I was at teenmusic.com I saw several prominent banners for Radio Disney. Well, though I, I’ll find something wholesome for the future generations there, likely. It’s Disney, you know, puppies and good fairies and talking animals of all kinds. But, oh my, the first thing they do is play video with sound without permission. That’s a big no-no. You know what kind of score they are going to get already. But I tried. If you can forgive them for sound up front, which I can’t, there’s nothing too terrible going on there. It’s a Jonas Brothers and Hanna Montana playground. You can seek events in your area. In the Valley Of Death, where I live, it’s Bike Month, according to them. I was presented a list of venues where I could bike and meet others of my kind. I’m too crotchety to ride a bike, and there aren’t any others of my kind. So I wont go. But that’s hardly Disney’s fault. In summary, you can listen to songs for free at Radio Disney. There are worse places for your kids to hang out. I’m trying hard to approve of them. So let’s see what I can do.

For playing out loud on page open, negative six. For having non-criminal content directed at children, eight whatevers. [( 8 + (-6)) = 2] So two whatevers for Radio Disney.

free.napster.com

Free napster has a nice earth-friendly, kinda bio-degradable look and feel to it. I like it. But then what’s not to like about Napster, eh? File sharing is surely one of the most beneficial and least harmful activities that we humans engage in. Pity the authorities and several whining over-payed “artists” lack this vision. Side note: I bought more cd’s during the uncontrolled napster era than I ever did before or have since. Why can’t they see that those who want to buy music, will, and those who want to skim it somehow, will find a way?

Moving on, free.napster is a simple site where you can listen to some songs and sign up for not-free napster if you want to. The only catch is the commercial, which was a single harmless white castle hamburger add when I was there. Not too bad.

I give them three whatevers for keeping it simple.

live music archive

This place is for real. I don’t know how modern they get. I didn’t check. I haven’t heard much worthwhile out of the new groups. Not lately, anyway. The last worthwhile thing I heard was Everlast, What It’s Like. And that wasn’t even in this century. I shout at the TV sometimes, at some pontificating, self-righteous son of a perverted preacher, asking, if a bunch of half-reformed hip-hoppers can understand reality, why can’t they, that claim to have seen the light? Sorry. I apologize for the long sentence, but not for the sentiment. Anyway, at live music archive, you may find something you want, unless you are an intellectually paralyzed modern pop seeker. But those probably won’t have made it this far, anyway. Too many words between the beginning and this point.

So for making real music available for those that may care, I give them five whatevers. And that’s a good score.

kcrw.com

I might have found something somewhat cool here. I’m not sure what to call the flavor of the focus. You tell me, if you have the time. I’m interested. You can listen or download mp3’s. The only snag is the commercial that runs when you open the player. But that’s to be expected and wasn’t terribly intrusive. One was for whole foods and the other a chance to win an ipod touch if you join up. I passed on both, but I’ve seen worse. Much worse. Under fringe benefits, you can save ten to twenty percent when you shop participating merchants in that locale and online. By and large I found myself mildly pleased with the site. I won’t spend time there, as I don’t have the time to spend, being busy with life. But if a person is determined to spend their time listening to music online, kcrw is not such a bad place to be. You might develop a new interest and possibly expand a horizon or something. I mean, they have The Blind Boys of Alabama right out there on the front page. You don’t see that every day. Or ever, really.

For having The Blind Boys of Alabama, I give them five whatevers. Adding an extra point for not offending me, which is quite an accomplishment for a website, they wind up with a rating of six whatevers, and that’s about as good as it gets.

Regards

You might want to stay tuned. Even if you do take my advice and develop your own musical talents, you can only practice the nose-flute so many hours a day without being afflicted with a condition, one would think. While poking about the web on this pursuit, I saw some stuff worthy of future attention. Next time you take a break from your didjeridoo, you might want to check back here for the latest squawk.

Joe Brooks

/MusicPlayer.me Contributor

Moof describes itself as “Search for and listen to any song you like, online, on-demand, for free, whenever you want. All the functionality of a full desktop media player, in your browser.” You can check out Moof’s own introduction in this YouTube video:

Moof’s Features

Moof’s player is simple and functional, though one of my initial concerns is that when you first login it is so basic that you are not sure what to do. However, if you explore for a minute or two you will see that Moof allows you to play music, create a music library, and build user playlists. I have enjoyed the uncluttered interface – no ads, no social media, no voting, no distractions. Just music – all the time!

And speaking of music, YouTune fuels Moof. The bottom-left of the Moof player has the corresponding video playing which is a nice feature. If you have not already realized this, after one of two searches on Moof you will be blown away by how much music is on YouTube! Moof has the additional ability to share and see music from friends. If you find friends on Moof you can browse their entire collection of music, and add favorites to your own personal library. But, as we’ll talk later, there are not may friends to pick from (yet).

The most unique feature that Moof offers is an option to import your existing xml music libraries which will allow you to upload your iTunes library. This worked for me – but I just uploaded a test instance of iTunes that is pretty small. Other users have reported trouble uploading large massive iTunes libraries. Now, if iTunes is your life you might be disappointed here as iTunes offers far more detailed information (ratings, view counts, track numbers, etc) and more playback features (fades, shuffle, etc.).

Again the word “basic” comes to mind. It does not have all the bells and whistles, but Moof has most everything you need to simply enjoy music. It is strong as a portable music library, accessible anywhere you have an Internet browser.

So who is visiting Moof?

The developers report that “In the short time the site has been live we’ve seen massive growth (over 1,500,000 songs added, over 10,000 new registered users).” You can see the full Google Analytics for the site to get a feel for their traffic.

Want to own Your Own Music Site?

If you really like Moof, but think you can do better than check out this freelance job posting where the person wants a clone of Moof, with some more features and all for 800 bucks.

Or, if you really really like Moof – it can be yours! The developers are trying to sell Moof so they can focus on another startup. Unlike the yokel above who thinks $800 will build a site like this, the developers are looking for $xx,xxx. They were planning on making money either by rolling out paid subscriptions models or being an iTunes or Amazon affiliate.

I don’t have the dough to run this site, though it would be cool. So try it out, give it a listen and maybe even buy what you hear!

Dazzboard is being developed by Linkotec, a Finnish startup. Finland (or as fans of Spamalot would call it – Finland, Finland, Finland) has long been the world leader in adoption of hand held devices. Finland was an early adopter of mobile phones and was the first country where mobile phone density exceeded the fixed landline phone density. More simply, in the average one mile square region of Finland you’ll find more cell phone owners than land line phone owners. Many of those mobile devices now have the ability to store and display multimedia content.

Dazzboard is touting a browser-based solution that it says has all the goodness of iTunes but without the disadvantages of Apple’s closed environment. Dazzboard is not the first startup to challenge Apple and based on a look at the beta they probably won’t be the last. That said, I am impressed with Dazzboard as a beta product – the challenge will be to see what they can unleash before they launch and if they will have the funding to keep the innovation going.

Dazzboard is currently available by invitation-only, but the rumor is that the public beta is almost ready to roll. Testing the beta immediately identifies some of the current limitations. The Dazzboard web application currently requires Windows, although a Macintosh compatible version is in the works.

Using Dazzboard you can connect your computer to a wide range of mobile devices and transfer multimedia content like photos, videos and music via the web-based interface. Once you move your files from your mobile device to Dazzboard, it will also help you organize your files and share them out to all the popular social networking services.

File transferring goes both ways as with the ‘Dazz me’ bookmarklet you can download content from the Web to the media manager and to your mobile device.

Dazzboard Digital Player Support

Dazzboard supports any portable device that can be used in mass storage or media transfer mode. This is their big differentiation from iTunes. Dazzboard splits the portable media players and mobile phones it supports into two groups. The first are fully supported devices that are supported and maintained in the Dazzboard database, meaning it’s really easy to setup the device for file transfer.

Then you have generic devices which are not fully supported by Dazzboard but most devices can be setup via their generic media hub. Supporting ‘thousands of devices’ is one of the key value ads for Dazzboard but I hope they know what they are getting into. Having managed call centers I know the risk of of getting overburdened by support calls for device-specific support questions that you can’t easily address in an online FAQ. Support is one of the key reasons why closed platforms sometimes win out.

The device manager plugin appears to be the component that has Dazzboard limited to certain browsers and even in a supported browser it’s not intuitive to get the plugin downloaded and installed. Once installed it appears to work great – but setup is the Achilles heel at the moment.

Dazzboard Music

The music selection skews European – but that’s largely based on the location of the company and the majority of the beta testers. When you are looking at a video, picture or song you can report explicit content (don’t click on it for a test – it’s a one click reporting process, no “are you sure” messages) and broken links. However, there is no reporting for “this is a stolen video, track or photo.”

Since these digital items appear to be on the Dazzboard servers, it looks like they will certainly be chatting with the Recording Industry or America Association (RIAA) and other bodies that support digital content rights. While Dazzboard includes links to sites that offer music, photos and videos with creative-commons or other free to use licenses – there does not appear to be any sort of effective controls in place. Though there privacy policy does note “Pursuant to section 22 of Laki tietoyhteiskunnan palvelujen tarjoamisesta, notifications of claimed copyright infringement should be sent to LinkoTec.”

Dazzboard Future

Dazzboard wants to lead the new era of media managing and distribution where you can manage your portable device, media within and discover new content to play with. They have a good start and it’s worth a trial – especially if you have a non-iPod device (the tutorial is well worth a viewing before you get started). It’s the first service I have seen that really is multimedia – not just music focused. But with device support and digital property rights on the horizon – I won’t be deleting iTunes off my computer just yet.

Most of these sites obtain their music by searching the web for legal copies of songs or songs/videos. None of these sites actually host any music or get involved in paying any music licensing fees. So even when they accidentally stumble on and list music that is not legal – that music is never stored on their servers – so they try and stay out of hot water from the Recording Industry (RIAA). That said, it appears that the RIAA is finally impacting innovation or perhaps it’s just the world economy – but you’ll find a ton of sites not worth your time or at best meeting only one specific need. You’ll also find sites cropping up everyday so we have not reviewed them all. But – we’ve dug through many sites to pick a few 3 heart ♥♥♥ winners.

Finetune ♥♥

Finetune has been around longer than most of the sites here and has features galore – but that power is also it’s limitation. Finetune has so many flavors and versions that it’s not that easy to use their website or setup the widgets. Folks who have “grown up” using Finetune since it’s early days just love it – but new folks find it hard to acclimate.

Since Finetune is built on the Flash Platform it has versions across many platforms. Finetune has a Flash Player for the web player and the Wii version and they are using Flex and Apollo to deploy a version of Finetune on the desktop. They also have a widget that allows you to embed your playlists on a blog or your MySpace profile. Finetune for the Wii pulls your stored profile data and gives you access to all of it from the your television. It’s the perfect example of how the Flash Platform allows you to extend your reach with very little changes to the code. Finetune in many ways is the ideal Rich Internet Application – far more advanced than many of the applications shown here.

Unlike most of these playlist services, Finetune has it’s own music library with almost 2 million tracks and growing including major labels and the biggest independents. It’s a fine choice – but the website interface is cluttered and it’s hard to get started – but if you spend the time, you will be rewarded by Finetune’s music library and features. They also have a new service, Tune-in, that we’ll give a full review to shortly.

Flash MP3 Player ♥♥♥

Flash MP3 Player is a free application that allows you to play music on your website easy and fast. You won’t need any programming skills to install or use it. Just embed it into your website and player will automatically scan a specified folder and form a playlist.

Now, while you won’t need any programming skills, you will need to feel comfortable uploading and downloading files and installing/configuring software. This is the easiest Mp3 player to install – but every software install takes a little work. If you want support with the setup, you will have to pay for the registered version. The paid version is exactly the same as the free version, except it doesn’t include the advertising logo.

iZaRia.us ♥

According to VEXiS, the maker or iZaRia, they “aim to unite the world’s music online, by utilising copyright-compliant API’s in order to bring the best of music to users. Through the support of advertising, VEXiS plans to attract great numbers with the lure of free and legal music; iZaRia the first legal incarnation of its kind.” A pretty aggressive goal, but even launching a site of this magnitude is an impressive feat for a one person company, especially when that one person is 16 year old Charles Allatt, who is the head of online enterprise company: VEXiS Media. That said the fact that the terms and conditions page starts off with “Our legal terms have been unfortunately misinterpreted by some websites and individuals. We have updated them more clearly at this location; iZaRia is NOT illegal.”

You can compare iZaRia to Pick Music (further down this article) and I actually like the interface better than Pick Music – but given the limited likelihood of this site getting traction and not getting sued I would suggest you veer away. I give Charles Allatt a lot of credit for building this – but without some clearer explanation of where the music is coming from this site is doomed.

MyFlashFetish also known as MixPod ♥♥♥

MyFlashFetish lets you create music or video playlist and cool widgets for your MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Windows Live Spaces, blogs, websites & more. The service is absolutely FREE! The MyFlashFetish site allows you to make playlist widgets as well as widgets that don’t involve music. The site now takes you to MixPod once you start working on a playlist and this site also includes a place to post your playlists. As you can see below, the widgets that go along with your playlist are among the best – and this is only a partial screen capture of all your options.

But MixPod is more than just eye candy with a great variety of styles to select from, including mini cassette tapes, iPods, and other various button style players – it is also easy to use. The range of available music is great – and you are not tied to videos as you are with other playlist sites. There are links to lyrics, to buy the music even to make ringtones.

But the best feature, which truly separates this from the rest is that you can upload songs you own and add them to your playlists. If you’ve done this before – it’s pretty easy. If you are new then it will take some time to setup your MP3 uploading.

My iTunes -♥

Since many iTunes fans are fooled by this option, we’ve included it here – but with a negative score. Apple offers My iTunes, a series of embeddable widgets to post your iTunes purchases, iTunes reviews and iTunes favorites to your blog or profile page. My iTunes gives you an effortless way to keep your friends up-to-date with your favorite music, TV shows, movies, and more. The drawback: the widgets don’t actually play any music, they simply list artists and songs with links back to iTunes. So My iTunes is not really a playlist – just a sales pitch to get your visitors to go to iTunes.

Pick Music ♥♥

This site is all about playlists – nothing more. Pick Music gives you the chance to create your own playlists of music from videos and the ability to share that playlist with another website.

You can register for free without a long registration form which is nice. You can search for songs from thousands of music videos to stream on your website. Once you create a playlist you can share it with 28 different social media sites inclusing sites like LiveJournal, MySpace, Friendster, Xanga and Facebook. However, Pick Music has no control over any of the videos it links to and when those videos go offline you playlist just shows video not found.

If you want to create your own playlists for free to host on your social media website or blog without having to use any complicated device or feature, then Pick Music will meet your needs.

Premiumbeat.com ♥

Royalty free music downloads are instantly available from premiumbeat.com’s music library. Music purchased from Premiumbeat.com’s production library is royalty free which means means that all you pay is a one-time fee for a user license. Once you have paid the one time fee, you can then use the royalty free music you’ve purchased as many times as you wish for as long as you like in accordance with the terms stated in the license agreement. You never have to pay any additional royalty fees based on usage and the music copyright police will never come after you.

Okay – so that’s the good news. However, the bad news is pretty bad. First, the prices are expensive – an average of 30 bucks a song which tells you why so many music sites have struggled to pay these fees based on ad revenues while giving the music away for free. Even if the price is not a killer for you – the music selection sucks unless you happen to dig elevator music.

So even if you got over the price and the song selection, now you have to install a music player on your website. Key there is your website or your blog, installing a flash music player is going to be forbidden on most of the social media sites. Installing the music player on your web site is going to require some technical skill or the patience to follow directions. And, to top it all off, the music player you install will carry the premiumbeat logo unless you are willing to anotehr 20 or even 30 dollars depending upon which flash player you choose.

Bottom line – using premiumbeat.com should be left to a small or midsized company that has a programmer and wants some background music for their website. For a fun social media website – the premiumbeat is not your beat.

Which Playlist to use for your site?

• If you want to share songs you’ve found with cool widgets, then MyFlashFetish is best.
• If you want to share songs and you’re okay with a widget that is basic and really easy to use, then Pick Music is a great choice.
• If you are comfortable installing software, then Flash MP3 Player is the way to go.

dagsmith
MusicPlayer.me Contributor

blueTunes process:

Upload your songs – Sign up for a free account and easily upload all of your music to blueTunes in a matter of seconds. You’ll never have to worry about backing up your music again! Very similar to how Lala works, blueTunes scans your hard drive for music files and uploads them to the site’s servers. This process would take a long time and quite a bit of bandwidth were it not for a shortcut. While the site uses a Java app to check through your music folders to make sure you own the music, the site only makes you upload songs that aren’t already in its database. Unless you’ve got a really unusual collection you’ll be able to transfer your library to the blueTunes very quickly.

Login to blueTunes and play your music from work, home, school, or wherever you are. Your music now follows you wherever you go. Never “sync” your music library across multiple platforms again.

Share your music on Facebook, your blog, or your website with the blueTunes sharing features. Create playlists that you can share with a single friend or the Internet world.

The benefits of a desktop client for this kind of music service are nice. If you try using a site like MySpace Music, you generally have to keep a browser tab open at all times, and it’s easy to close the wrong tab and turn off your music – not to mention the occasional browser lockup. Using blueTunes through a desktop app, you don’t have to deal with any of these problems.

Clean Interface

Forgot words – just take a look – its clean, its simple, its iTunes like and its just easy to use.

Oh, and did we mention that blueTunes works on Windows, Linux and Macintosh. Since it is java based it is built to work with all operating systems and web browsers.

Business Model

You can upload your first 100 songs to blueTunes for absolutely nothing. After that, it’s just 1 cent per song. There are no recurring monthly fees. There are no charges for fixed amount of storage space regardless of how much you are actually using. With blueTunes there is a simple no-hassle approach where you pay for only what you need. It’s not one size fits all – it’s what size fits you!

blueTunes Features

blueTunes does it all – from playing your music on any PC, to the secure feeling of backing up your music using the industry’s most reliable redundant storage methods for protecting your music and onto posting your playlists on your blog or website.

While LaLa and Echodio are good services – I think that blueTunes has put together the full package that will make it one of the leading services for managing your music.

Smaller services (those with less than $1.25M in sales) will pay 12-14 percent of revenue in royalties which might provide room for fledgling startups to make their way in the Internet world. However, according to Johnie Floater, General Manager for Live365, an aggregator of over 6,000 web radio stations manned by human DJs, there is also a minimum $25,000 fee imposed on all webcasters. That fee might not discourage startups that hope to gain a large audience, but niche services, like those targeting small ethnic groups, are going to have trouble.

At issue is the minimum $25,000 fee imposed on all webcasters, large and small. Floater said there’s simply no way Live365’s stable of niche Internet station operators can each pay that kind of money.

This deal represents a significant compromise from the $0.19 per song that rates were set to increase to next year – which is why the Internet radio business was troubled. However, it will still require some changes. For example Pandora posted this note on the Pandora blog:

“The revised royalties are quite high – higher in fact than any other form of radio. As a consequence, we will have to make an adjustment that will affect about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners. Specifically, we are going to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the free version of Pandora. In any given month, a listener who hits this limit can then opt for unlimited listening for the remainder of that month for just $0.99. In essence, we’re asking our heaviest users to put a dollar (well, almost a dollar) in the tip jar in any month in which they listen over 40 hours.”

So people who listen for more than 40 hours a month will have to pay $0.99 or upgrade to the $36-a-year Pandora One service. Although it’s only been a few weeks, a few heavy users, like those who listen to Pandora all day are starting to run into the 40 hour cap. Most of the responses indicate that most of the listeners are clueless about companies having to pay license fees – but so far subscriptions are climbing.

Internet Radio Pays the Highest Royalty Rates

There is a fight to get passage of the Performance Rights Act, a bill that would make all radio providers, regardless of medium (Internet, satellite, or AM/FM radio) pay the same royalties. Currently, satellite pays significantly lower rates that Internet and AM/FM stations pay nothing. While there will be a hearing in the Senate on August 4th to discuss the bill – hopes of passage do not look high at this moment.

Internet Radio Overseas

Though even with these changes, many of these services remain either inaccessible or only available for-pay in many countries outside of the US because the cost of paying royalties simply exceeds the money that is being brought in through advertising.the outlook overseas. Pandora is not operating outside the US and Westergren, the CEO, has stated that there is still no feasible royalty structure abroad and, unlike the path taken by Last.fm, Pandora isn’t seriously considering any type of subscription program at the International level.

Expect more Internet Radio Widgets

Due to the uncertainty or royalties, there has been limited software development around Internet Radio. One software company, Wowza Media, has already started seeing a jump in interest in its Flash-based streaming solution for Internet radio.

Wowza, which has over 25,000 licenses, notes that a lot of online radio is still being served through the likes of software like Winamp but sees a clear trend towards doing everything with Flash, as the installed base is something like 98% just through the web browser. And it says it can easily convert stations that were going through solutions like WinAmp to be done in Flash. The hope is obviously that there will be more successful web radio services like Pandora — which is, of course, easier said than done.

But getting Internet radio streaming companies to star using Flash streaming solution is just the first step that Wowza envisions. The Wowza service has also been extended to provide solutions for Quicktime, Silverlight, and a host of other formats. This means opportunities to reach other kinds of devices like the iPhone.

Free online radio players

While Wowza and other are hoping to bring new online radio players to the market, there are many excellent and free programs on the market today.

RadioSure focuses on giving you you the smoothest radio listening experience. Their goal is that it should be simple, reliable and should just work – and that’s what they’ve done! The range of features is awesome – more than 1,200 stations in the package; supports most of the internet radio formats – mp3, wma, ogg vorbis, aac+ and there is a quick and reliable search for your favorite radio stations. The interface is pretty basic because 3rd party developers can add their own skins. RadioSure is a great example of the international flavor to Internet radio with the application available in Russian and English.

Screamer Radio is simple, Windows only, CPU-light which means it does not hog your computer’s memory and slow down your other program and it’s unconditionally free. It can handle just about any streaming format, your machine will hardly feel it’s running, and you can minimize it in the system tray. However, the fact that it has been limited to a release/update in 2006 and 2008 highlights how development has lagged in this marketplace.

Originally inspired by Apple’s iTunes, Rhythmbox is a free application that is for Linux users only – which is quite a shame as it has one of the best designed interfaces. Rhythmbox allows you to view your Play Queue, Library, Podcasts, Radio preferences and Last.fm streams. So, you actually get a lot more than radio streaming. If you a Linux user, this is a must have application.

Musicovery runs on Windows and Macs. It is highly interactive and customizable (or customisable – depending on where you are in the world). Musicovery is great for discovering new music because of the many ways you can define your tastes, do searches and get recommendations – it’s even mood-searchable. What you do is define the mood you want ranging from energetic, to dark, to positive, to calm – and anyway in between.

The most recent innovations to Musicovery have focused on iTunes instead of Internet radio. In early 2009, Musicovery released an Itunes plug-in that allows you to listen to your own music library according to the mood your are looking for. The plug-in displays on the right of the Itunes application window with Musicovery’s mood/dance matrix.

iRadeo is a free open source MP3 player and online radio streaming platform. If you are looking for a way to stream music or other audio from your website or blog than iRadeo could be for you. Essentially you can make your own Internet Radio Station.

You need to have a website, the ability to FTP files and edit files using Notepad or a similar ascii editor. You download the iRadeo files, open the config.php file to update your settings and preferences, then upload all the files and folders to your own web server. Then, you simply insert the iRadeo player code into any webpage and visitors can stream your playlist. The amount of maximum listeners is only limited by your web hosting limitations. While iRadeo is not for the casual user – it is a great tool for those with their own site.

Future of Internet Radio

For the first time in several years the future of Internet radio is looking up. All the financial issues are not solved – but there has been progress. iRadeo, which was just released in 2009, is a positive example of the things to come.

We’ve talked about Last.fm several times on MusicPlayer and news keeps following this social music site. We’ve talked about their scrobbling technology and their change in pricing models in the article Last.fm charges and Seeqpod dies. Continuing that story controversy and change continue to follow Last.fm and Seeqpod’s slow death march continues.

Awhile ago we also wrote about the controversy surrounding the chance that Last.fm shared “private” user data with the RIAA. Last.fm denied these charges but they resurfaced a few weeks ago in a report that it was actually CBS, Last.fm’s corporate owner, that turned over the data to the RIAA. Last.fm and CBS both deny these rumors – though the data presented in the report was pretty compelling and was based on what appeared to be reliable insider information.

This week it was announced in a blog Message from the Last.fm founders, Felix, RJ and Martin that the original founders were moving on. Conspiracy theorists will probably wonder if this points to insider battles over the pricing and RIAA issues between the founders and the corporate giant. However, it is far more likely that the founders contracts ran out. Most buy-out deals of a startup like the CBS-Last.fm deal require that the founders stay on for a given period of time to ensure continuity (and they don’t get the big cash pay out unless they stay). The $280 million deal occurred about 2 years ago – so the timing matches an appropriate buy out time period.

Whatever the real reason, this clearly is a transition for Last.fm from the Web 2.0 site started in the living room of a London flat to the Last.fm that represents the corporate media world.

Internet life has been even more interesting for Seeqpod. When last we wrote about them, Last.fm charges and Seeqpod dies, it certainly seemed like their days were numbered. Their website was restored since then, though all it has was a home page and the odd link to a song.

Rumors are that Seeqpod is getting ready to sell their technology. Actually it is possible that they have already been acquired by Microsoft, though the deal still has yet to be confirmed. However, if you visit www.seeqpod.com and click on the Seeqpod logo on the top of the page it will take you to Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine.

While Microsoft or a similar suitor would be interested in Seeqpod’s search technology that allows for the finding of music file across the Internet, it is unlikely that a corporate or software company would be interested in the seeeqpod domain – especially given the tainted past of the domain name.

Seeqpod CEO Kasian Franks has refused to confirm the rumors, saying only that a deal has “not officially closed.” At the same time it appears that the domain name is up for sale. The deal may not be finalized but the Bing link and the fact that the company is searching for buyers for the domain seem to confirm that Seeqpod’s future is not as a stand alone music site.

Overall – it looks like the corporate world – CBS and most likely Microsoft – are stepping in to help transition web 2.0 music startups into part of the media monster. Folks at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) must be popping the corks on the champagne!

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!

Jeff notes

Many of you have been asking why we have had to make some of these changes. I’ll be direct with you: I can’t tell you – at least not right now.

While Jeff can’t say anything, when you see the changes it is pretty obvious that a four letter word has caught up with them. RIAA – The Recording Industry Association of America is waging an open war against any site that is not paying royalties and it looks like blip.fm is the next site to meet their wrath. Whether you love the RIAA or hate them – you have to agree that they are focused on their mission!

So what are these changes at blip.fm?

Most of their music is now sourced from imeem.com. That’s no big surprise as one of their other primary suppliers, SeeqPod is “cocooned for metamorphosis…” which is a nice way of saying the site is dead as we reported in the recent post Last.fm charges and Seeqpod dies. They also eliminated content from MP3 search engine Skreemr which is another troubled site. This limits the number of songs that can be streamed and pretty much leaves non-US visitors with access to very limited music.

Unfortunately, as the data to shows, non-US visitors have been making up more than 80% of blip.fm’s traffic. The non-US traffic is pretty much limited to the 30 second previews from imeem. Whenever you find a song on imeem that is a 30-second preview, it means that the artist or record label that has registered the song in our database has not approved full-length streaming for our users. Consistent with copyright fair use principles, the song will be streamed to you as a 30-second preview.

And the rest of the news doesn’t get any better:

• Adding URLs to public mp3s will be limited to legitimate bands and labels approved in our systems – adding your own songs wasn’t super easy before and this makes it even harder…
• The embeddable blip widget will still show blip messages, but won’t play the music in most cases. That’s kind of like my iPod not playing music….
• Where applicable, old blips will be replaced with content from the imeem catalog, but anything that doesn’t match will temporarily cease to function. Essentially most of your playlists are now no-play lists…..
• We plan to add a preference to skip 30 second clips. As noted above, many of imeem’s songs are just 30 second previews. When the best news is that there will soon be a feature to skip music…..

There is some light in the blip.fm tunnel as they added YouTube videos to its music feed. While this provides a visual alongside Blip.fm’s audio stream, the main motivation has to be to beef up the music availability YouTube, is still smarting from the loss of Warner Music Group songs last year, but features music from the other three major labels as well as countless indies. YouTube also provides some backup in case imeem hits another roadblock.

What’s the future for blip.fm?

Recent traffic for blip.fm was picking up – but in comparison to last.fm and Pandora.com, blip.fm was pretty small. Take away the international visitors who will be discouraged by the imeem limitations and the picture is not a pretty one.

The comments on the blip.fm blog tell it all:

It’s a sad day for blip when 80% of its users are suddenly stuck with an inferior version. I know that this probably was the only way to make blip 100% legit, but still it’s sad.

What can I say? I ran away from Last.FM and I’ve been so enthusiast about Blip.fm I also promoted and suggested it on my blog. Now there’s a bitter taste in my mouth.

As Jeff notes, they are just “4 guys in a basement” and with that in mind they have come pretty darn far. Many of the comments on their blog praised and honored Jeff for his honesty – something lacking with many other web businesses. Unfortunately, most of that praise was followed with but I live in <fill in country name> and blip is history for me.

With sites like Pandora starting to get traction we suspect that blip.fm may not make it out of the basement. As one of the comments on their blog said:

And since when did 4 guys in a basement need a CEO? Sorry for being bitter, have really loved every second of Blip since I joined, have heard new music, bought new music and made new friends. Just seems like it’s over now.

dagsmith
MusicPlayer.me Contributor

Here at Musicplayer we consider ourselves “A little bit music, and a little bit Internet.” However, we are stepping away from our usual focus to talk about a product that is a “a lot of Internet, and just a little bit music. But we think that Blerp will have some success in aiding music discovery on down the line.

What is Blerp?
So before you blerp – we probably should tell you what the heck it really means. Blerp.com is based on the concept that lots of discussions are taking place about websites. However, you have to search the web and find those discussions. Take Digg.com for example, it’s focused on specific stories – but without much focus that, for example, nine of those stories are all about the same website.

Blerp allows you to start discussions right on top of your favorite websites. Unlike typical web comments, you are in full control. You can post on any webpage you choose, regardless of whether they permit user feedback. Blerp transforms the entire Web into one giant forum where everyone can participate. Getting started is as easy as adding a comment, video or photo to a webpage. You can also share your blerps with your friends. In this way, blerping becomes a social experience, where you can track what your friends are saying all across the web, and they can follow your conversations and join in at any time.

Blerp in action!
Okay – so enough with the summary from the official press releases – let’s look at Blerp in action. Below you can see the primary Blerp screen. Once you login to Blerp you can enter in the URL for a website, we choose this really cool site called musciplayer.me, and that sight we been shown surrounded on the left and on the top by Blerp.

So let’s leave some feedback for MusicPlayer. Don’t be discouraged by the fact that MusicPlayer does not have a formal feedback forum – Blerp will take care of that for us. I am going to hit the blerp button on the middle of the left column and the left column will transform to show me all my blerping options.

You can see that I can the options are comprehensive – leave text notes, attach videos, link to maps, setup quizzes, rate the site, make a crystal ball prediction about the site. A blerp comment is not limited to text – it’s really only limited by your imagination. Key to Blerp.com is that your comments are not private comments – this is a social media site so all other Blerp users can see and add to your comments. They can add their own comments. They can vote on your quiz.

You can see my blerp about Musicplayer and if you sign up for Blerp.com you can really go and see it for yourself!

One way to describe Blerp is as a mult-dimensional Digg. Digg lets you leave text comments – Blerp adds it in the visual with photos and videos, the interactive with quizzes while still keeping the text as a key element. (And you should be able to add a song too! Hey Blerp – did you hear that! I think the web would be awesome if every site had a theme song!)

Blerp is owned by RocketOn and their motto is “layer the web!” which you can now see in action with Blerp. RocketOn wanst to and give everyone a voice on every website – adding a whole new dimension to the Internet. Layers are created by users on top of existing websites, and users control these layers, determining their content, context and placement.

To highlight the social media and community aspect, while I was doing my screen capturing somebody else on Blerp noticed the activity – probably from the Blerp Activity module on the home page. They followed me – read the last blog on MusicPlayer.me and created their own blerp! And since Blerp has all the tools you would expect – I sent a message to the user name Steve thanking him for helping me to write this story.

Where does the music play?
Well besides my idea about Blerp letting users attach songs or even just recorded comments to a webpage, I think the value is in how a tool like Blerp can can aid you in music discovery. Digg has encouraged sharing of news stories – but I think that the creative elements of Blerp will attract a wider audience. An audience that will add Blerps on music sites, on indy band sites, on concert sites.

Imagine blerps on tunesbag.com or mixcloud.com (check out What’s next in Online Music – Tunesbag and Mixcloud) or blerps about a performer’s new song right on their web page. Or using the search and other tools on Blerp.com to find some comments that lead you to a new artist. Like any new tool – not even the developers realize all the uses that people, dare I say blerpers, will think of.

Join the conversation
It’s pretty fun to be in the alpha as new software launches – your ideas often get heard and you help shape the development. I hope you’ll sign up and test it out. Remember Alpha means you will find bugs and surprises – I have found a few myself. Some will say that Digg and Reddit and others are too far ahead – but I hope that the creative aspect of Blerp catches on and adds a new layer to the Internet.