Weezer released its latest album today, with a Snuggie. See the video below.

Fans interested in the music alone can purchase the album sans blanket-with-arms for a mere $9 on Amazon. (Update: $4 today - sale!)

It's pretty funny, really. People do seem more willing to buy these ridiculous blankets with arms than they are to pay for music these days. I think that's the point.

Thanks to Yahoo's Christian Heilmann for bringing this to our attention.

Greenwood's biggest complaint about MP3s was not quality or sound compression, but rather abundance. He suggests that MP3s make it far too easy for fans to hoard music without "giving it their full attention". In a recent Pitchfork article Eric Harvey suggests the opposite. Says Harvey, "The mp3 may have atomized music into millions of little pieces, but each piece, it seems, found a publicist. The average music fan now has the built-in capacity to double as promoter and distributor in an ever-expanding arena that's making and eliminating rules every minute."

Whether you see them as hoarders or promoters, one thing is certain, the iPod generation is changing how music is consumed. But if they can't depend on tiered pricing for audio quality, how can companies monetize the new music fan? While a Stanford study suggests that the iPod generation prefers the flat sound of an MP3, it doesn't mean today's listeners aren't willing to pay for their music. According to an NPD Group report purchasers of digital music downloads increased by 29% last year with iTunes controlling a quarter of all music sold. Some of the ways fans still generate revenue for bands include streaming music subscriptions, track and album purchases, concerts tickets, merchandise and paid application downloads.

Update, Ed: there can be a big difference in audio quality of MP3s promoted on the Web. For example the quality varied greatly between Radiohead's In Rainbows album and Saul Williams' album (promoted by Trent Reznor). See Kim Gaskins' post on the new Latitude Research blog Life Connected for further analysis.

Photos taken from Dead Air Space

And in a way that process is a very conducive way to listen to music that you haven't heard before. Just tune in and get on with your life. Soon you will hear a track you really like and think, I have to have this! On a site like Pandora or Last.FM, usually that means going out and buying the track. But since everything on Fresh Hot Radio is born on the Internet, free to download, you simply click on the link provided and get it. Mission accomplished.

We think Fresh Hot Radio hits its design goals perfectly. We've been listening to it for over an hour and the music has been great. If we want to keep a copy of the music, it's just a click away, and the site even has a URL and embed code for each track. We'd say it's the perfect accompaniment to our work day.

• After submitting our registration, the page refreshed to a new, blank registration form. Nowhere did it mention that our information had been submitted, and as far as we could tell, we weren't automatically logged in.
• The getting started page recommends either adding an MP3 URL (no uploading directly to the service allowed) or dragging the ffffoundtape bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar. We didn't have a bunch of MP3 URLs sitting around so it was off to the Obscure Sound indie music blog to find some tracks.
• Invoking the bookmarklet on any page that has links to MP3 files exposes a little arrow that can be clicked to listen to the MP3. After that, another click is necessary to actually bookmark the MP3.
• The bookmark page is identical to the page to submit an MP3 URL, and no information is auto-populated.
• Once back on the ffffoundtape page, we were able to view the songs we bookmarked, and optionally remove them. That's it.
• We could create a playlist using a separate page. Once created, we were still unable to add bookmarks to that playlist.
• Eventually we went back to our profile page, and found the songs we had bookmarked. Only on profile and public all-tracks pages could we add music to a playlist. If we remembered to create a playlist first.
• Finally, we were able to view, enjoy, and share our playlist page.

Unless this service really takes a hard look at streamlining this process, it is probably not worth investing too much time in it. Besides the multiple steps required to bookmark and organize tracks, it appears the service may not even store the MP3s, preferring to play them from the original source web pages. We understand this may be an issue of liability, but it also means that ffffoundtape may eventually be rife with broken links. Also, there's no way of exposing the source page of the tracks unless you remember to cut and paste the page URL when creating the bookmark. Finally, there's no export option, hence no way of storing your carefully found list of tracks offline.

The upside is, if you just want to browse and add other ffffoundtape bookmarks to your own playlists, it's relatively simple. Even there, though, once a track is added you get redirected to your playlist page and must navigate back to where you were. However, you can add a cover art image to each playlist.

Our recommendation? Stick with last.fm, iMeem, blip.fm, song.ly, or even Tumblr. If you want a second opinion, check out SheGeek's post on ffffoundtape.

There are more than 650 stores currently, with over 250,000 songs in the catalogue - most appear to be available at $0.99 per song or $8.99 per album. The site claims to be "working with" 4,500 labels, including 4AD, XL, Rough Trade, Matador, Dominio, and Ged Day's own Warp.

Other than the lack of major label music, there is another minor annoyance for those of us who don't live in the U.S. - international users will frequently run into a "we're sorry, but this release is not available in your country" message. However on the plus side, all the music available for download is DRM-free and at high quality 320Kbps.

Founder Ged Day set up People's Music Store because he felt that no one company, including his own Bleep.com, can manage music expertise at a large scale. People's Music Store is hoping to tap into the Long Tail and enable music fans to create thousands of unique music stores. In a way it's like 'MySpace meets Etsy'.

On some of the more popular stores, for example one called walpod, we can see plenty of evidence of social media:

• Profiles
• Storekeeper comments - basically a form of blog post
• Shoutbox - like Facebook's Wall
• RSS feeds
• Favoriting stores (kind of like the 'friending' concept in social networks)
• Ability to add items from other peoples stores to your own, with one click
  

However there's work to be done with the social elements on the service - for example it's not intuitive where and how to add content such as 'news' and other multimedia into one's storefront.

Overall I found the concept of setting up my own online record store to be a compelling one, despite the limited range of music currently available and the relatively minor quibbles with social media elements. And in terms of music discovery, People's Music Store does a great job of enabling music fans to find new music. In the 'alternative' music stores I browsed, I discovered several interesting new acts I hadn't heard before. So if you're a music fan, People's Music Store is worth checking out. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Your Music on Lala

You do not have to upload your complete music collection to Lala to be able to play it online. Instead, you download a small desktop client that goes out and looks for music on your computer that Lala already knows, which it then simply puts into your playlist. If Lala doesn't know the song, or if the song hasn't been licensed by Lala, the desktop client will upload it to the service.

Once your music has been uploaded, you will be greeted with a standard music player interface, where you can drag and drop songs into playlists, search your collection (which is very fast and easy), shuffle through your songs, and pretty much do anything you expect to be able to do with a desktop jukebox as well.

The only major restriction of the online music player is that it only displays 50 songs per page. The quick and easy search function and the iTunes like browser at the top of the page make up for this is some ways, but if you are used to just browsing through your collection, Lala will take some getting used to.

Music Store

The music store itself is interesting in its own right, though it is also derivative of its competitors. However, it comes with a number of interesting social features and, unlike in iTunes, you get one full play of every song before you are restricted to a 30 second sample. You can also buy the rights to play the song over the web for 10 cents.

Competition

There are, of course, already a fair number of stores that sell DRM-free MP3s, including Amazon and Rhapsody, while services like Imeem already allow you to play songs in full on the net with fewer restrictions than Lala.

Lala has also announced that it will release an iPhone application in the near future. With that, it will also take on Pandora and services like Simplify Media.

Lala's real advantage over its online competitors is that it is a one-stop shop that already holds all your music. The pricing model is interesting and Lala will surely get a lot of 10 cent impulse buys, but the real power behind Lala is in its ability to bring all your music together in one place on the net, just like iTunes did for the desktop.

It's All About Mobile

Best Buy must think that it can push Napster to be a profitable part of its company, but over the last few years, the company never turned a profit. Best Buy, of course, does have a considerable amount of marketing power both in its ubiquitous big-box stores, as well as through TV and print advertising. Judging from the wording of the press release, it seems Best Buy is mostly interested in Napster's mobile business. In the mobile business, Apple doesn't have the dominant market position it has in the regular MP3 player market, so by positioning Napster there, Best Buy might be able to carve out a lucrative niche for the service.

Bundles

Chances are that Best Buy will start bundling Napster with anything from toaster ovens to overpriced Monster cables in the coming months. The holiday season, after all, is right around the corner and if Best Buy still wants to get some value out of the acquisition this year, they will have to act fast.

How it Works

To get Tumbltape to work, all you have to do is upload an MP3 file to Tumblr and then enter your Tumblr username into Tumbltape. If all goes well, that's all you need to do. Tumbltape should recognize the ID3 tags from your music files, but if it doesn't, you can tag your Tumblr post with 'tt:artist name - track name.'

After a very short delay, your files will appear in your Tumbltape. Starting and stopping files works by clicking on the name of the file, just like in any other Muxtape clone.

Tumbltape will display the last 12 files you uploaded to Tumblr. As you upload more, Tumbltape automatically rotates the older files out.

Limitations

One major limitation for Tumbltape is the fact that Tumblr itself only allows its users to upload one MP3 file per day. You can get around this by linking to a file that you host on your own server, or, if you have permission to do so, on any other server. Obviously, this is a far greater hassle than just uploading files to Tumblr. As Tumbltape's co-developer Adam Gotterer told us, Tumbltape is looking into ways of allowing its users to mash up playlists that are hosted on different services.

One other limitation of Tumbltape is that Tumblr's Terms of Service forbid any uploads of copyrighted material, so Tumblr itself might just cut you off if they get a take-down notice.

Verdict

Tumbltape is a nice Muxtape clone and the fact that it displays a number of random mixtapes as well as the newest uploads on its front page turns it into a more social experience than the self-hosted OpenTape we wrote about last week. The limitations put upon it, however, are severe and will deter quite a few users from really getting to use it.

If you are not a Tumblr user, 8tracks currently represents a better alternative if you just want to create a simple mixtape.

However, as Adam Gotterer explained to us, the idea behind Tumbltape was not for people to create Tumblr account just for the sake of creating mixtapes, but to aggregate the music people had already posted to Tumblr.

Real Networks' Rhapsody music service, which had only been a subscription service so far, is joining into the every expanding fray of music services selling DRM-free MP3 files. Real has signed deals with Universal, Sony BMG, Warner, and EMI to sell songs at $.99 cents a song and $9.99 per album.

By embracing DRM-free MP3s as its format of choice, Rhapsody is driving yet another nail in the coffin of DRM'd music.

While Rhapsody's subscription service will remain DRM'd for the foreseeable future, opening up an MP3 based store makes sense for Real if it wants to expand its market to owners of Apple's popular iPod, which is incompatible with Real's DRM scheme for its subscription service. Also, selling single MP3s has turned out to be a very popular way for many users to buy their music, while subscription based services always lagged behind in popular appeal.

Rhapsody will face competition from a host of similar services, most prominently Apple's iTunes, and Amazon's MP3 store. While Apple is still the dominant player in the market, Amazon's offering has found a loyal following lately by offering a slightly cheaper product at an often higher quality than Apple's DRM-free iTunes Plus. Walmart and Napster also just started offering DRM-free music earlier this year, but haven't really made a ditch into Amazon's or Apple's market share yet.

Given that most online music stores sell more or less the same songs (with maybe the exception of eMusic), price and convenience are pretty much the only ways for them to differentiate themselves from the competition. Rhapsody is hoping to set itself apart by offering users the ability to listen to 25 full-length previews a month instead of the standard 30 second clips other services offer. If this will be enough for users to start embracing yet another music service remains to be seen.

There is nothing particularly revolutionary about Rhapsody's offering, but, if anything, the fact that they are offering DRM-free MP3s now is a good sign for where the music market is heading. And with having both Verizon's and MTV's marketing behind it, Rhapsody might very well succeed where others have failed so far.

As a Hype Machine user, you have a "Dashboard," where you can keep tabs on your favorite songs, friends, blogs, and more. Last month, Hype Machine integrated with Last.FM, so tracks you played on Hype Machine would scrobble to your Last.FM profile. But now, they will scrobble to your Hype Machine profile, too.

The scrobbled tracks show up under your brand-new "Listening History" drop-down section. You can also spy on your Friends' History and Obsessions, and they can spy on yours.  And if you want to spy on what people in other countries are listening to, you can hit up the Spy page, which now includes filters for states/provinces and countries, whereas before, it only focused on the U.S.

New Dashboard

If you haven't checked out Hype Machine lately (or ever), now is a good time to try. The new scrobbling features, spy filters, and not to mention the Last.FM sync make Hype Machine a nice add to your social music playlist.]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hype_machine_adds_new_features.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hype_machine_adds_new_features.php Products Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:47:57 -0800 Sarah Perez Are you into multimedia? Do you stream music over the web, share photos on Flickr and Picassa, watch videos at YouTube, share links with friends, and hang out in social networks? A new startup from Ubuket wants to help make access to your content from anywhere even easier. The service they provide will let you access all your media from your desktop, social network, blog, or even your mobile device.

Within your ubuket, you can create playlists of your media. To include media from the online services, you first enter in your credentials and then look for the "Action" button next to your files. With one click, you can add the file to a list or send the file to your friends.

The Ubuket Player

What's nice about the ubuket service is that it's accessible (or soon to be accessible) in so many different ways. There is an Adobe AIR app (download link) for running it on your desktop, Songbird users will soon be able to utilize a plugin to upload music from their library, iPhone and iPod Touch users can access ubuket from iphone.ubuket.com, and the app is available as an application on Facebook and Bebo. Your ubuket can also be embedded on any web site or blog. Sometime in April an iTunes plugin will arrive, as will apps for Hi5 and MySpace. By May, an Orkut app will be available and you'll be able to access ubuket from other, non-Apple mobile devices.

That being said, I had some issues when I tried ubuket this morning - initially my photos didn't upload, giving me a red circle - the sign of a failed upload, but on a second try the upload succeeded. Also, clicking on the "Home" button didn't seem to do anything in some cases, an accidental click on "Login" required logging in again (it didn't remember me), and overall, the Flash-based widget seemed a little clunky. However, the service is new and still being developed, so it may be worth waiting and seeing what comes of it. I like the idea of a centralized place for online media - especially one that would be accessible from my mobile phone and from facebook. But whether ubuket becomes anything more than a glorified widget is yet to be seen.

That's very much like the advice that Marshall Kirkpatrick gave to Reznor writing on this blog in January after Reznor complained about the download-to-pay ratio the pay-if-you-want Saul Williams album that Reznor produced received late last year. "Times are changing and if you can, it's better to work on innovating along with them than it is to make dragging your feet and suing people your business model," advised Kirkpatrick.

At the time, Reznor wrote that he was "disheartened" that just 28,322 of the 154,449 people who downloaded Williams' album chose to pay the $5 for a higher quality copy. At the same time, though, that's nearly as many as who bought Williams' previous traditional CD release in 2004 (which sold 33,897 copies) and far more who are hearing his music -- which could theoretically translate to increased concert ticket and merchandise sales. Further, because by not dealing with a label the artist is likely taking a much larger cut of the download revenue than they would receive of CD sales revenue, Williams probably made more money on fewer transactions this time around.

Clearly, Reznor was not disheartened enough to forgo trying a similar type of release for his own new album. Ghosts I-IV part I is available as a free download on the NIN site, as well as on BitTorrent. The entire album is available as a $5 download, a $10 double CD, a $75 "deluxe" package with CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray copies, and a $300 "ultra-deluxe" edition that also includes vinyl copies and signed giclee art prints. The $5 download can also be had via Amazon -- where the album has quickly shot up to the #1 spot on the sales charts.

The 9-track free edition of the album is licensed under a Creative Commons license and is free for non-commercial use. "We encourage you to share the music of Ghosts I with your friends, post it on your website, play it on your podcast, use it for video projects, etc." said the band in release notes.

Conclusions

While it is impossible to predict how this release will fare compared with previous traditional NIN releases, that may not be a fair question. The dynamics of the music industry have changed and artists like Reznor and Radiohead are blazing new trails as they attempt to figure out how to best release music under these changing market conditions. If 18.3% of downloaders pay -- as they did for Williams -- then that's probably not a bad number for NIN, who can bet that they'll get far more downloads than Williams (Ghosts is already the most downloaded torrent at The Pirate Bay) and will presumably be pocketing most of the revenue.

What do you think? Is Reznor's release a harbinger of the future of the music industry? Let us know your thoughts on the issue in the comments.

This is just one of a number of "powered by SeeqPod" announcements you'll likely be seeing if you are interested in music search. Josh Lowensohn reported on yet another, called Songerize, today. Enjoy the music and the API action while you can, because SeeqPod is too good to be true and is headed for court.

Maybe it's just too beautiful to live. Warner Music Group is suing Seeqpod, the finest music site I've seen on the internet, because it allows people to scour the net for music, put it in a playlist and play it for free. Naturally, not all the music files it finds has dotted all its copyright i's or crossed many legal t's.

For now, if you're looking for a good web page mobilizer - much less an mobile MP3 search engine, check out Mowser. If you're unfamiliar with SeeqPod - here's a taste below.

According to a recent study by Jupiter Research, for each song sold, 100 more were stolen. The study also reported that 94% of online music consumers were unwilling to pay for music. The record labels finally got the hint: the Napster Generation thinks music should be free, and they will find a way to get it for free, despite laws or lawsuits. When the record companies realized all their attempts to make up for lost revenue from CD sales had failed, they knew that they now had no alternative but to offer free music to the online masses.

Enter Qtrax

The Qtrax catalog currently boasts 5,000,000 songs, but has plans to eventually offer over 25 million. This makes Qtrax poised to become the most complete online catalog of no-cost legal downloads anywhere in the world. The site, which will launch in Cannes, France with support from stars like James Blunt and LL Cool J is being heralded as the "death knell for CDs" as well as "a massive challenge to iTunes."

The Good

• Songbird-Like Player: Qtrax users download the Qtrax Player, a program built upon the popular Songbird platform. The player functions as the search engine and player for the tunes but it also provides access to a website filled with artist content, including videos, ringtones, lyrics, album art, and up-to-the-minute artist news.
• You Can Upload Your Music: Qtrax says that its users can upload their own music, including songs bought on iTunes or other services.
• May Include "Grey" Music: Since the service will let users upload their own collections, it's possible that Qtrax will allow the tunes like live recordings or demos. Although details are fuzzy on this, if these rare gems were included, Qtrax would have another big selling point.
• Artists are Compensated: Qtrax works with record labels and publishers, licensing their content for distribution online. when you download and play music, the support of advertisers allows Qtrax to compensate artists for their work, something that doesn't happen when you use illegal P2P networks.
• Safe & Free: They is no cost to download the software, there are no hidden charges, no membership fees, and no per song costs. There's also no adware, spyware, or spoofing.

The Bad

• Songbird-Like Player: It may be cool, but it's also mandatory to use the player. Since the player is where the service displays the ads, you must use it, no getting around it.
• DRM: Despite the recent wave of DRM-free music, Qtrax songs will be wrapped in DRM.
• No Beatles here, either: Some music is still  not cleared by labels for digital distribution, so even though this has industry support, you're not going to find those missing tunes here.
• PC-Only (for now): And by PC, they mean Vista and XP only. The Mac version won't be out until March 18th.
  

The Worst

• QTrax songs can't be played on iPods. They say this may change at a later date, but until then, this will kill the service's potential in a big way.

What it Means

What's most important about Qtrax's launch is the changed mentality of the record labels' vision for the online music marketplace. Having them realize that they must offer free music in order to compete with industry behemoths like iTunes, is a promising step in the right direction.

And free music doesn't have to be the disaster labels have always thought. Says Qtrax chief Allan Klepfisz, "the idea of free music is not so radical. Commercial radio and free-to-air television is paid for by advertisers and available for free to consumers."

Exactly.

In my testing, westream worked perfectly with nary a hiccup. I was able to quickly stream any track, start to finish (I picked a torrent with an ample amount of seeders from Legit Torrents for my tests). Of course, the quality of audio and level of gaplessness you experience will be totally dependent on the health of the torrent you're trying to stream.

The volume control seemed a bit wonky (going from very soft to very, very loud without much in between) and it would be nice to have the option to download the torrent straight away if you like what you're hearing. But in general, westream performs very well.

Westream is a useful BitTorrent innovation that lets users essentially "try before they buy." Presumably, the same idea can be applied to video -- imagine: streaming video distribution over BitTorrent. Very cool.