Pandora's on the ropes, Imeem is taking off, Grooveshark relaunched today with recommendations and a long list of cool features, Blip.fm threatens to make Muxtape look like old news - the streaming music market online is expanding and contracting faster than a stadium rocker's pupils.
What if the perfect service rose from the noise and gave you exactly the user experience you wanted? What would such a service look like?
Let's call out our dreams, in hopes that they might become real. Here's a list of things we'd really like to see come from these kinds of services.
Note: it's not clear how viable any of this is going to be if small players aren't able to compete with innovative features. If you haven't yet, read the bad news about Pandora. Justin Dorfman has a good little blog post about things you can do to save Pandora.
Assuming that the pace of innovation online in music streaming can continue, here's what we're looking for in our dream service.
The music business fights a constant battle against homogenization and in favor of the long tail, or at least some people in it do. It's hard to judge the quantity and breadth of music on a given service, it's a "I know it when I see it" kind of phenomenon.
Obviously many people want to make sure all the big hits are included, but we'd love to see the crowd pleasers be followed up with high quality music just being discovered. The infinite distribution of the web should make this a fundamentally different content experience than commercial radio has been.
Services that allow users to upload MP3 files offer a powerful opportunity to engage the long tail of musical tastes. That's becoming an increasingly common feature.
We'd be doing our friends in the rest of the world a real disservice if we said any music service was perfect if it didn't make itself available to listeners anywhere on the planet. For all the love it gets, Pandora is limited to US users. Copyright in music rears its ugly head again.
Services like Seeqpod and Imeem require too much intervention. It's preferable to at least have the option to click play and leave your music player alone for hours. Hey Muxtape, how about letting me turn on a mode that automatically follows all the fans and "fan of" connections from any collection I start with?
We love Amazon MP3 for its DRM free downloads and highlighting DRM free links to buy is one of the many things we love about MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine. Sometimes streaming just isn't enough and you want to buy tunes. There are any number of ways to get music files for free, but when you find an artist you really respect - it's nice to send them some money.
We like the GrooveShark model of P2P downloads with revenue distribution to artists. The revenue sharing among listeners seems a little silly and we'd probably prefer lower prices, but whatever.
Music recommendation is something many, many people have aimed for. Few have nailed it like Pandora and Last.fm. Grooveshark rolled out a new recommendation feature today, but after just a little bit of use we found it unsatisfactory. The service generally has too much down time and it wasn't clear what recommendations were based on.
It might sound silly, but there are two reasons that Last.fm really rocks and the social features are one of them. It's easy to discover other users and to listen to what they listen to. We've had a lot of fun going through our FriendFeed connections and seeing what different people we know online like to listen to.
Compare this to Pandora, where social features are buried in the back of the feature set and the gestures that result in populating your social profile (bookmarking songs or bands) aren't at all the most common gestures that users make (thumbs up or down). Even though there are millions of users, Pandora feels like a solitary place.
RIght: Sometimes we like to listen to what Chris Pirillo likes to listen to, just to see what makes him tick.
Pandora makes it easy to like or unlike songs, even if you haven't created an account. It's UI is more attractive than Last.fm's and these two services are among the only ones to really make the feedback UI simple and powerful.
In addition to the social features, the second thing that makes Last.fm awesome is the additional information about artists. It's nice to be able to browse bio and background info, to see photos, etc.
It's nice to be able to view the lyrics of the song you're listening to sometime. LyricWiki is ok for this. Favtape pulls in lyrics from LyricWiki when they are available. The service plays your favorites from Pandora or Last.fm, using the Seeqpod API. It also links out to ringtone download sites. It's pretty cool.
We want to love IdioMag more than anyone for this. This little service grabs your publicly available musical taste data from other services, like Last.fm and Pandora, and then builds a "personalized music magazine" for you. For whatever genre you like, IdioMag identifies new and interesting bands, then plays them through an interface that supplements the music with photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube and text from syndicated blog posts. It even uses the dominant colors from the photos to determine the color scheme for the associated "pages." It's totally hot, in theory. In practice the writing tends to be unbearably bad and layout ends up being sloppy. We hope the service will improve because it's a great idea that we honestly tell people about weekly. Idiomag and Grooveshark are doing some cross-promotion for each other; we're happy to see that.
Everyone likes to share good music with anyone who will listen. It's one way we win cool points and express ourselves. From the austere Muxtape to the super cute if unscalable casset tapes of MixWit, there's a world of interface options.
There's no reason for a service like Seeqpod, who are already being sued anyway, to offer such an awful playlist publishing widget. We're guessing that almost no one ever uses that part of the service.
When a band we're listening to on a service is going to be in our town any time soon, we'd love to know. It's a real lost opportunity whenever a service doesn't provide this kind of information - there are any number of ways to get it.
How about a service that scans my iTunes library and my online listening history, determines my genres of interest and then never plays music from artists I've already listened to. Or makes sure to play some that I haven't.
You know how good online IM programs will sound a tone and show a message in your browser tab when a new message comes in? That way you can be using other applications but still know what's going on with your IM. Music apps should do something like that. Growl notification of artist and song title would be awesome.
Have you seen the Hype Machine? It's an MP3 blog aggregator and it's fantastic. Any music discovery system should include links to recent blog posts about the song you're listening to. It's a great way to learn about an artist and discover related music.
Friends of RWW have also told us they would like good mobile access and a clear path to revenue sharing with artists. What would your dream service for music streaming look like? Let us know in comments - maybe someone else will read this discussion and build it.
Photo at top "I Love My Music" by Flickr user shankar, shiv.
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For finding new music, I like Hype Machine, Elbows (http://elbo.ws) and Last.FM, though I've noticed that Last.FM no longer lets you take widget radio stations for music that sounds like your favorite artist.
I also like Oodle Band Tracker for email alerts for bands being in town.
Posted by: Alex | August 18, 2008 11:26 AM
I kind of agree with the approach mog.com takes: You're best music recommendations come from your good friends and not some music analysis algorithm. In other words, trusted sources.
Posted by: J.J. Toothman | August 18, 2008 11:53 AM
Good points, how about some API or whatever for integration with external players through plugins?
Posted by: CheStyle | August 18, 2008 12:00 PM
Pandora is the perfect service for me. I honestly dont know how I existed before it. It makes me sad I dropped all this money purchasing legal music from iTunes (okay not really, I feel like it is penance for my Napster indulgence in high school). I would gladly pay a fee for Pandora (heck I still might) but their free service is wonderful--maybe too wonderful.
I just spent the weekend working outside the house streaming Pandora to my 4Gb iPhone, laughing at the fact that I am using basically 0Mb to store music and getting access to a terrific stream over wifi all over my yard.
Sorry, not really on topic, I just am so bummed about the pressure Pandora is getting, and I'm so happy with it, that I can't believe we're already preparing to jump ship.
Posted by: Justin | August 18, 2008 12:09 PM
We've recently launched Highnote which we feel is the future of streaming music services and long tail monetization. It operates on wisdom-of-the-crowds recommendations, has no setup overhead for the listener, and encourages artists to upload/promote music via the service. The music is a mix of correlated short-head and long tail content (for the latter we recently signed an agreement with Indie911).
We consciously choose not to sell music on the site and let artists / labels direct traffic and sell merchandise wherever they choose -- every song we play has a URL that the artist can customize. In that sense we're more of a discovery hub than an all-things-to-all-people destination.
Posted by: Ryan | August 18, 2008 12:09 PM
sorry, left out the Highnote URL: it's highnoteradio.com
Posted by: Ryan | August 18, 2008 12:11 PM
Like Pandora but with instant updates of music into the catalog and higher quality.
Posted by: Alex Scoble
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August 18, 2008 12:19 PM
I'm a big fan of www.lala.com. It's been moving away from its CD trading roots and has become a slick music streaming/discovery site. Trading is still there, but is not the focus any longer.
If they add the promised iPhone streaming app and Last.FM scrobbling it will pretty much do everything I need: online music locker, free full-length streams, 89-cent DRM-free downloads, social networking/recommendation, CD purchases, CD trading, etc..
Posted by: Record Store Geek | August 18, 2008 12:30 PM
Great overview of the techtonic shifts happening in whatever you want to call it in one post: Music 2.0, Music Technologies online, mp3 tech online, piracy vs. creative commons "sharing". It is good to see how the tech developers think of music through your writing for those of us who spend their lives on learning, composing, recording music. Tech or sink, it seems now. Thank you!
Posted by: Liz Hamill
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August 18, 2008 1:08 PM
imeem for the win here, sure it's overflowing with teens and tweens, but because the music is uploaded by the users the selection is unparallelled. (there are plenty of ways to get continuous playback on imeem, you should try using the site a little more)
muxtape and mixwit were irrelevant before they launched, the only other playlist site which managed to emulate imeem with any success has been playlist.com and they're currently getting sued.
Posted by: Nucleated Soundz | August 18, 2008 2:02 PM
JJ - Personally, I prefer an algorithm for discovery, or seeing collections created by someone I don't know who happens to assemble a good one. I don't know that my friends have musical taste like mine. I should probably spend more time on Mog, though.
CheStyle - an API is a great addition to the list.
Ryan, I'll check out Highnote, thanks for commenting.
Nucleated - thanks for the well informed comment. I will go spend more time on Imeem right now on your recommendation.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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August 18, 2008 2:30 PM
Compatibility/Ubiquity across various platforms. This was what eventually lead to me canceling my Rhapsody subscription. I had Vista 64-bit at work, while at home I had a Mac, Ubuntu, and Windows Media Center, none of which worked with Rhapsody. Rhapsody's web interface was buggy to the point of irrelevance. And I'm just talking about desktop machines here; ubiquity needs to extend to mobile/offline devices.
Posted by: monsur | August 18, 2008 3:14 PM
The perfect streaming service is one that lets me download the music instead of streaming. In fact let's get rid of the service and just do p2p. More middle men is not what music needs.
Streaming is an anachronism back to when broadcast was the only way, when control of music was held by those with the broadcast licenses and capital for broadcast infrastructure.
Posted by: njharman | August 18, 2008 4:46 PM
The perfect music service would be available to international listeners, not just to those in the United States.
Posted by: Cecily | August 18, 2008 5:16 PM
SeeqPod just added continuous playback of sorts in the form of podlists... i think you guys posted something about it a few weeks back. unfortunately some of the lists you search for can be a bit buggy (way too long of a playlist, duplicate results, etc.), but the custom ones on the front page always work great. i typed in the local indie station here in LA, (103.1) and got a few lists.. not sure if these are by an algorithm or created by user though, maybe a mix?
Posted by: jase8282 | August 18, 2008 5:44 PM
Pandora has always served me best for finding new music... Last.fm hardly ever presents me with decent new music, and I've tried most of those other services to poor results.
I tend to agree that I like the analytics to come up with my suggestions, my friends have terrible taste in music!
I've been trying to get idiomag working since I read this article... And after using 4 different browsers in two virtual machines, I'm not having any luck.
Posted by: Gideon Addington
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August 18, 2008 7:18 PM
How about this : http://qbox.com
Posted by: ejang | August 18, 2008 8:05 PM
FYA: http://favtape.com can also be used to find music by artist (i.e. http://favtape.com/artist/the+hold+steady )
Posted by: martin english | August 18, 2008 9:20 PM
Be nice to see some online services which are not entirely based on the pop/rock 'band, recording, gig' model; that might cater for community music, amateur music, chamber music, score-based composition. Treating all 'music' in terms of 'artists' and 'tracks' seems confining and limiting.
Posted by: J. Simon van der Walt | August 18, 2008 10:42 PM
would be nice also to feature websites that have credibility and respect from music folks like pitchfork, fairtilizer, soundcloud, topspin and hypem ! its not all about the geeks ;)
Posted by: Bmxer | August 18, 2008 10:50 PM
The perfect streaming service should work a lot like Amarok music player for Linux. Amarok plugs into Last.fm, Wikipedia and lyric services to give you information on the current track you are listening to, and even recommends similar artists from your own library. Now if only I could get playlists online and let it automatically create sub-playlists from music I own. So for instance one would select the "best of hard rock" playlist from the streaming/social service and its API would talk to my music player making a playlist of on my music player of all the songs in "best of hard rock" that I own. It would then also provide a stream of the songs on the playlist that I don't own so that I can see if I like them or not.
Posted by: Andre Malan | August 19, 2008 12:17 AM
Hi Marshall! As Always, in depth and appropriate. As for someone building it (shhh..very quietly) one of our past highlighted services here on RWW is doing the job now.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/fairtilizer_new_online_music_service.php
As with all things development, it is as much about the people behind the innovation as it is the technology. These guys have all the right ideas and patience (a rare commodity)..slightly under the big radar if you know what I mean Marshall.
A great post, great read.
Always,
Phil Butler
Posted by: Phil Butler | August 19, 2008 1:17 AM
I'm beta testing the perfect streaming music service right now. It's called Spotify (www.spotify.com) and it's a small application with an interface similar to iTunes. It's lightning fast, you can't imagine that all these millions of songs are streamed and not hosted on you computer.
It's by far the best music service I have ever tried. Though it lacks more advanced social functions but it will probably be added later.
Posted by: Daniel | August 19, 2008 3:13 AM
@ Gideon - sorry you are having issues. I have dropped you an email to help sort it out.
Thanks Marshall for the note. Agreed re the content. Working on it. And should have some decent announcements about it soon.
Posted by: Ed Barrow | August 19, 2008 4:15 AM
www.jango.com
Posted by: josh2.0 | August 19, 2008 11:08 AM
http://www.nutsie.com has a good amount of the features discussed here (continuous playback, recommendations, social features, itunes library sync'ing, mobile service). I know they have a lot of improvements planned as well.
Posted by: christian Anderson | August 19, 2008 12:50 PM
Easy. I'm assuming a radio format here.
1) Content, content, content. Access to the full catalogs of all 3 major labels is obviously a requirement. Cut you deals and start ripping and encoding and in a year you'll be ready. If you're planning on launching with 1000 songs, don't bother. You project WILL FAIL.
2) Quality encoding facilities. I want to see photographs of techs sitting at workstations with $1000 Sennheiser headphones and $1000 Plextor CD-ROM drives running Exact Audio Copy ripping to FLAC (which will be used as the master for other formats). Apple's encoding facilties are considerably worse than what I have at home, which is one of the reasons I won't buy off iTunes.
3) The format(s) will be streaming 32 kbps MP3, 64kbps MP3, and streaming 192kbps encrypted WMA. Real and Quicktime are horrible. The specified formats will allow playback on ALL platforms, and high-quality playback on Windows and Mac. Sorry Linux guys, is there as DRM format that works on Linux? And yes, DRM is necessary for a 192 kbps stream otherwise people will resell the stream.
4) At least 20 genre-specific channels.
5) Two levels of service:
L1: Access to all channels FOR FREE, with a 30 second advertisment after every 3 songs.
L2: Access to the exact same content, without ads, for $10 per month.
6) A customized downloadable player that will alow me to 1-click permanently purchase any track currently playing for $0.99 or less. A whole album should be $5.99 or less regardless of the # of tracks.
7) Downloaded tracks will be made available in 192 kbps MP3, 192 kbps AAC, and FLAC. FLAC is essential. No DRM on any of these formats.
8) A record of ever track downloaded will be saved in an "account". Users will be able to download purchased tracks and UNLIMITED number of times. This is essential for me to even CONSIDER using an online music store.
Bad assumptions in thie article:
1) International Support
Most non-US nations are long past the point of paying for music. There will be no uptake as most foreing nations have better free services available. Maybe the UK and France MIGHT be markets, but dealing with French business is horrible.
2) Continuous Playback
This has to be mentioned? A radio service that doesn't play continuously isn't a radio service, it's stupid.
The other suggestions are good, but really quite petty. Features aren't goign to make up for a lack of music. Apple figured this out. They spent at least a solid year just encoding content for iTunes before it launched. At launch they had over 100,000 songs. Any player with any hope of beating iTunes has to, at launch, have AT LEAST AS MUCH CONTENT AS ITUNES. Anything else is a non-starter.
Posted by: rtechie | August 19, 2008 1:23 PM
Marshall - I understand what you are saying by "don't know that my friends have musical taste like mine"
But one thing Mog will help you do is find those friends with those similar musical tastes (I'm using the term friend in the online sense as well as the offline). Their tagline captures it perfectly: "Discover people through music and music through people"
When you get on there, look me up: http://mog.com/Truth
Posted by: J.J. | August 19, 2008 2:27 PM
I'm not sure about the best interface to allow recommendations between friends, but what about something like this for an underlying network to share media p2p (legally?).
http://www.slideshare.net/joostuser/possible-legal-alternative-to-pirating-pandora-presentation
This is essentially the same as a large number of people bring the CDs/tracks that they have already purchased to a meeting area and then trading them in a very efficient manner based upon who wants what at the moment. I don't know the technical specifications for how this might work but conceptually it seems to work.
Posted by: joostuser | August 19, 2008 3:16 PM
I'll whatever music is free.
Posted by: Free Xbox 360 | August 20, 2008 12:51 AM
I really like things like Pandora or last.fm - they are a great resource for finding new music and bands, but I also prefer personal recommendations from either friends, Radio DJs or blogs whose opinion I trust.
I don't think an algorithm can always produce the recommendations I really want - sometimes I want to hear something that I never would have even got close to hearing, and Padora et al don't seem to throw things up from the leftfield so much, in my experience. But they are still great services to supplement however you currently find new music.
joe - www.anewbandaday.com
Posted by: Joe | A New Band A Day | August 20, 2008 4:13 AM
Not to "nit pick" but you didn't talk about slacker.com. They have a pretty nice site and offer a mobile player. I personally love Pandora's site the best though and am PISSSEDDD they might have to close shop!!!
If only the RIAA would stop pursuing a battle they can't win and embrace what their users really want.....good music and an easy way to get it.....yes we are willing to pay just give us the music in the form we want *cough NO DRM *cough
Posted by: Mikey | August 20, 2008 7:21 AM
Personally, there is way too much noise in the music space. Why would I choose a service, and then only choose between available songs. I want one interface, a single sign on. Then all the services can bid on fulfilling my request to listen, store, explore a song. Then, all the other features fit within my devices whether they be my expensive home stereo system, the in-ceiling speakers in the kitchen, outside on the deck, in my car, at the office, on my ipod touch, cellphone, hotel room, wherever.
Posted by: ishak | August 20, 2008 8:42 AM
Quantity is not a problem. Quality is. We want to listen high quality music online. Not the worsts of all times.
Posted by: SEO Blog | August 22, 2008 2:20 AM
You should take a look at MyBloop.com aswell
Allows users to upload UNLIMITED music, and other types of files for free. Users can copy songs from each other accounts, and make playlists.
Here's a cool example of one of the best playlists
http://mybloop.com/go/qk5Ofo
Posted by: Guabtron | August 22, 2008 9:34 PM
Has anyon eused yahoo media player on their blog? Are there any sites that actually tell you the full URL of the song they are playing?
Posted by: gavin steele | August 23, 2008 3:46 AM
Another Spotify user here. It'll change your life.
Posted by: Iain | August 29, 2008 7:34 AM
last.fm has always been the clear favorite for me. spotify looks super neat though. anybody want to hook me up with a beta invite?!? =)
Posted by: Eric | September 5, 2008 6:43 PM