The social Web space is abuzz with new developments and entrants these days. Facebook's IPO. The explosion of Pinterest. The rapid evolution of Google+ into a place where the President of the United States hangs out. One name you never hear is one that was all the rage just a few years ago.
MySpace has been losing traffic since 2008, when Facebook first surpassed it on Alexa. Last year, the company was sold for $35 million by News Corporation, who bought it for $580 million six years earlier. Its new owners, Specific Media, have tried to reposition the site as an online entertainment hub rather than a full-fledged social network. If early numbers are any indication, the refocus appears to be working.
You know how it goes. One way or another, you get introduced to a new song, it sticks in your head and you want to share it with your Internet buddies. There are a few ways to go about it. You could find the song on YouTube and post a link to it on Facebook. You could tweet it. If it's on Spotify or Rdio, you can share it directly with other users or add it to a public playlist.
As effective as these methods can be, they're not always perfect. With Twitter and Facebook, there's the risk of having your song get lost in a sea of other social noise. With direct-sharing on Spotify, you can get more granular, but the social experience more or less ends once your friend hits the play button. This new song you just discovered is so awesome, though.
For music fans, all-you-can-stream music services like Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG and Rdio are kind of dream come true. Signing up gives you instant access to a library of millions of songs from major label and indie acts from around the world. Most services are now free, with some limitations on usage. For paying users, as long as you keep your subscription, there's really no need to pay for most individual tracks or albums (unless you're an audiophile). In the case of Spotify, you can even merge your local music collection with the service's cloud-based selection of music. Awesome.
For artists, it's another story. The dirty little secret of services like Spotify and others is that they are not particularly lucrative for artists. At all. Each of them has managed to court record labels with attractive enough licensing deals, but that doesn't necessarily trickle down to the artists themselves. As a result, many artists have held back new releases from streaming services, or jumped ship all together.
Other than Spotify, there could hardly have been a more buzz-worthy music startup this summer than Turntable.fm. The group listening and virtual DJing app seemed to come out of nowhere and take the Web by storm, grabbing funding and users in huge quantities. The company, which rose from the pivot-generated ashes of mobile scannable sticker startup StickyBits, first went live in May of last year and became all the rage among the kids.
Turntable.fm was such a craze that it gave rise to a number of copycat services pretty quickly. Group listening in general became one of the biggest trends in online music last year. But many have wondered if this particular trend has long-term staying power, or if the whole thing was just a fad.
It seems like every advance in digital music brings with it a debate about whether the latest format degrades quality in exchange for convenience. This was true when CDs first came onto the scene, and it's probably even more true today with MP3s and their digital audio brethren. Heck, even the advent of the gramophone in 1889 sparked debates over whether its sound quality was worse than Thomas Edison's phonograph.
Last week, rock veteran Neil Young chimed in with his assertion that the digital music files we listen to today are of much lower quality than the original recordings. Speaking at the D: Dive Into Media conference, he said that the technology now exists to deliver much higher-quality audio to music fans, and that he had even talked to Steve Jobs about a possible solution.
iTunes Match, the cloud music-matching service that Apple launched last year, is a great way to sync one's music library across numerous devices. If your collection happens to contain songs with profane lyrics, however, you may be in for a surprise.
Apparently, iTunes Match has been inadvertently replacing certain tracks with the "clean" version of the same song, Cult of Mac reported.
Anyone with an abiding interest in American music will have heard of Alan Lomax. His travels around the U.S. and through other countries recording "folk music" was almost single-handedly responsible for how we think about Americana and world music both. But only a small amount of his recordings were available online, with few available for download. The Association for Cultural Equity is changing that.
His archives include "5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts," according to the New York Times. By the end of February, 17,000 tracks will be available for free download. But today, a collection of 16 field recordings is being released for free download to celebrate what would have been Lomax's 97th birthday.
When Spotify first launched in the U.S. over the summer, few doubted that the service would be popular among music fans. The real question has always been whether the company's freemium business model would manage to convert enough users to paying subscribers. It's still relatively early, but so far things look promising.
More than 3 million people are now paying to use Spotify, according to the Financial Times. That's a conversion rate of more than 20%, a figure that has reportedly increased by 5% since the service hit 1 million users last year. In other words, not only is Spotify itself growing, but the rate at which people sign up for a premium or unlimited account is also increasing.
SoundCloud, the up-and-coming social audio publishing platform, is endorsing HTML5's role in the future of the Web. Today, the Berlin-based startup is officially rolling out its HTML5 audio player as the service's default, knocking the original, Flash-based player from that esteemed position.
The new player first went into beta in November, giving those curious enough an opportunity to experiment with it. Now that the bugs have been ironed out and a few new features added, the widget is ready for prime time.
If you've spent more than a few tracks worth of time playing with Pandora, you know that you can't access every song or even every artist you may be into. You can find plenty of music by the Pixies, for example, but another favorite from my college days, Liz Phair, is nowhere to be found on the service.
Raditaz launched earlier this month with promises 14 million licensed tracks, compared to the "more than 900,000" currently offered by Pandora. But guess what?
Still no Liz Phair. And now, seemingly, no Pixies either.
