There's been a lot of discussion lately over Facebook's so-called "frictionless sharing" and whether it's manipulative and somewhat bad for the social Web or simply a redefinition of how things get shared online. As our own Scott M. Fulton III points out, it's easy enough to simply opt out of the feature altogether.
An early and central component to this new type of all-or-nothing sharing is Facebook's integration with Spotify and similar music streaming services. In theory, it adds a useful new social layer to the experience of listening to music online. In practice, however, it's not well-executed enough for me to keep it activated.
Europe's hottest music-streaming service may have launched to much fanfare in the U.S. over the summer, but not everybody is enamored. Spotify's royalty payments, it turns out, bring significantly lower revenue to artists than digital and physical music sales. For a growing number of smaller artists, this has quite literally become a deal killer, as many of them have opted to keep their music off of Spotify and similar services.
ST Holdings, a music distributor that represents over 200 labels, recently asked those labels if they would like to keep their catalogues on services like Spotify and Rdio. Four of them said yes. So, citing a recent survey showing that streaming services hurt music sales, ST Holdings pulled its music from Spotify, Rdio, Napster and Simfy.
Despite all of the great innovation happening in online music, there are 3 frustrating things for consumers that need to be addressed by Apple, Google, Facebook and others.
It's been an eventful week for online music, with the launch of Apple's iTunes Match and the public unveiling of Google Music (along with a new MP3 store in the Android Market). This follows on from continued innovation in the music streaming market, in particular the integration of Spotify and similar services into Facebook. It's great to see so much action in the online music space. But... there are some major problems with these services. Here are the top three issues, in my opinion.
The world's biggest search engine company turned its music initiative up a notch today. Google Music now includes an MP3 store, in addition to the cloud-based music storage that launched into beta in May. At the company's event in Los Angeles today, they removed the "beta" label from Google Music and made it available to all U.S. users. For the cloud storage part they launched originally, they're keeping the "free" price tag firmly applied.
Rather than charging for storage, as Apple and Amazon do, Google is allowing users to store up to 20,000 tracks for free. So how will they make money? They've partnered with three of the four major music labels (Warner Music didn't sign on) and several independent ones to sell high-quality, 328 kbps MP3 files to users. Google will take a 30% revenue share on each track sold.
Google Music went live for U.S. users today, leaving the invite-only beta announced this summer. It's free, and it lets you host up to 20,000 of your songs and stream them to your devices. You can also "pin" songs from the player, which will cache them on your device for playing offline.
You can also now purchase music from the Android Market. It's available in high-quality, 320kbps MP3 format, and you get a 90-second preview before you buy in the store. But to drive more sharing and purchases, the service is integrated with Google+. Music that's shared to Google+ can be played back in its entirety by anyone in your circles.
Yesterday we looked at the three leading "cloud locker" services for music: iTunes Match, Amazon Cloud Drive and Google Music. As a preface to that post, I mentioned that there are two main battles going on in the online music market. One is between the three cloud lockers, which are competing to be the online archive for your digital music collection. The second battle is between music streaming services like Spotify, Rdio and MOG.
But while we currently think of cloud lockers as being different from streaming services, the two types will merge over time. This has begun to happen already.
Continuing our series about the Consumer Cloud, today we compare the three leading music cloud services: Apple's iTunes Match (just launched today), Amazon's Cloud Drive and Google Music. With these three highly competitive services, online music fans have never had it so good.
There are two main battles going on in the online music market, each of which is benefiting consumers greatly. One is between the three so-called cloud lockers mentioned above, which are competing to be the online archive for your digital music collection. The second battle is about whether you even need an online archive at all.
Music streaming service Grooveshark recently launched a visual refresh for its website, giving it a more social focus. Much like other freemium music services such as Rdio and Spotify, the new Grooveshark includes a news feed of recent activity and the ability to comment on other user's listening activity.
The update seems like a logical next step, given the social features already baked into competing services, not to mention the the deep Facebook integration enjoyed by Spotify, MOG and others. The new changes also aim to connect fans with artists and provide new revenue streams, the company told GigaOm recently. It's a worthwhile refresh, but to remain viable, Grooveshark may have much bigger mountains to climb.
More than a month after the release of iOS 5, Apple has finally made its cloud music service iTunes Match available to the public. With the release of iTunes 10.5.1 (available here), Apple now offers iTunes users the ability to sync their music library across devices by "matching" each song with a high quality version stored on Apple's servers. Any other songs can be uploaded.
The service is an extension of iCloud, the cross-device content syncing feature rolled out in iOS 5. That feature lets users sync contacts, calendars, mail, apps and other data between iPads, iPhones, iPods and Mac computers. For an additional $25 per year, they can now include their entire music collection in Apple's cloud.
The travel geeks at Thomson have created a data visualization you can dance to. They tracked the top-level dance genres over the past century, and expressed the data as an animated map that moves from parent genre to descendant, proliferating over time.
The mapmakers used data from the books Bass Culture, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life and The All Music Guide to Electronica, as well as Wikipedia. They marked the birth of each genre in five year periods. As well researched as it might be, the exercise wasn't without controversy, however.
