We really like what Magnatune is doing and we think this business model is great, but we're concerned that the service is still too antiquated in its music delivery to get customers beyond the fact that it has a really obscure catalog.

The Problems With Magnatune

Unfortunately, Magnatune doesn't offer much in the way of discovery of the best music on the site. There's some playlists by genre and that's good. You can see a handful of the top sellers. In this era of recommendation technology, though, the company should really facilitate discovery better than it does. Millions of people are now used to visiting Last.fm, entering a known artist's name and then getting hours of high-quality related content. It's going to be hard to get too many of them to go back to a black box point and click catalog.

That's especially the case when you're looking through a catalog of items you've never seen or heard of before. Independent music stores are at a huge sales deficit because their products have no name recognition. Additionally, and no one likes it when I say this (but it's true), most of the music on sites like this isn't any good! If you've ever looked for Creative Commons music before you know that's the case. I dare you to post links to your favorite independent and CC music in comments.

None the less, you've got to admire what they're doing at Magnatune. For fans of classical music and new age piano, there may be a lot there for you. Otherwise, we're not so sure.

Additionally, it's going to be hard for even a business model this cool to top the all around awesome new music service that Lala just rolled out, for example.

Mufin.com, however, which launched today, uses a fully automated system that only takes the actual sounds of a song into consideration. In our tests, Mufin often returned good results, but the fact that it doesn't take genres or the quality of a song into account can make for a frustrating experience at times.

Eclectic Recommendations

There is something to be said for this completely algorithmic approach. While social recommendation services tend to return results that safely stay within the same genre as the original song, Mufin's choices are far more eclectic. The most closely related song to Rick Astley's seminal "Never Gonna Give You Up," for example, is a song in Bavarian by a German folk pop group. Mufin really seems to like German songs, by the way, as more than half of the songs it recommended as similar to Frank Zappa's "Muffin Man" were from a Sesame Street album in German. In Mufin's defense, though, all these songs were quite similar in style to the original song.

Social Recommendations vs. Algorithms

As MG Siegler points out, the real advantage of social recommendation engines is that they are very good at filtering out bad music (though one might also argue that this can lead to slightly boring recommendations at times). Mufin neither cares about the quality of the music nor its popularity or language; it only looks at characteristics like tempo, instruments, sound density, and harmony.

Limitations

Mufin has already built an extensive library of songs, but it only holds the right to a limited set of them, which means that you simply can't play a lot of the recommended songs. Those songs that can be played are limited to 30-second previews , which can make it hard to decide if a song is really good and similar enough to warrant buying it.

If Mufin had partnered with a service like Rhapsody, for example, users would at least have been able to stream a limited number of full songs every month. Every song on Mufin features a link to iTunes and the Amazon music store.

Overall, we think Mufin is an interesting experiment, but we are not convinced that its algorithms return better recommendations than the more social approach of its competitors or the classification system of the Music Genome Project that drives Pandora's recommendation engine.

Kid Rock

Kid Rock, ono of the last hold-outs with regards to digital music distribution (and especially iTunes), has signed an exclusive deal with music service Rhapsody to distribute his albums. In contrast to Weird Al, however, Kid Rock insists that consumers can only download full albums and not just choose specific songs.

Are Both Missing the Point?

In some ways, it seems both musicians are missing the point of digital distribution. Weird Al does an exclusive deal with iTunes, even though he has a big enough name to either give his songs away for free or to sell them himself, and Kid Rock is trying to go against his own fans' wishes by not allowing a la carte downloading. Then, of course, diamond-studded swimming pools don't grow on trees either...

Muxtape will effectively remain closed for the general public and will only return as a music hosting service for bands. Favtape, on the other hand, now looks like Muxtape on steroids, with embeddable playlists, album art, integrated YouTube search, a shuffle mode, and the ability to create tapes based on your last.fm and Pandora bookmarks.

While Favtape once started out as a simple Muxtape clone, this new release goes far beyond Muxtape's feature set. One of the most important differences with Muxtape is that you do not have to upload any songs to create a mixtape. Instead, Favtape lets you search for your music and add it to your playlists. To do this, Favtape makes use of SeeqPod's APIs.

Favtape does not host any of the songs itself, but solely relies on SeeqPod's index for its music. SeeqPod indexes MP3s anywhere on the Internet, which surely leaves some doors open for copyright infringement claims by the RIAA. As Ars Technica reports, SeeqPod has already been sued by the RIAA for exactly this business model of providing a 'playable search engine.' If SeeqPod shuts down, Favtape will be left without any music to play.

From a user's perspective, however, Favtape is everything one could wish for in a mixtape service, including a list of the top songs on iTunes and Last.fm, as well as iPhone support and the ability to share your tapes by email or as a Twitter message. Favtape also includes numerous social features and lets you vote for tapes you like.

While we are sad to see the Muxtape we once loved disappear, it is great to see other services jumping into the breach and building upon Muxtape's foundation. It's probably not the perfect streaming music service, but it comes pretty close. Now we just have to hope that it will not be shut down too soon.

Mixtape from http://favtape.com/frederic/RWW Test

This week, Fairtilizer has launched the first part of their new distribution platform: an embeddable player which allows indie artists to share their music anywhere on the net from web sites to blogs to social networks.

We told you about Fairitlizer over a year ago, when the company was still in private alpha. The easiest way to describe the site is to say that it combines the discovery aspects of Hype Machine with the distribution model of Tunecore. At the time of our initial writing, the company let artists upload tracks which visitors could browse through to find music they liked. Now Fairtilizer has opened its doors and is launching the next phase of their service: distribution.

Artists can now use one unified interface provided by Fairtilizer to distribute songs to blogs, web sites, social networks, and digital music stores...yes, even iTunes (The digital stores piece is coming soon, the others are available now). The distribution is aided by an embeddable player which can be added to any web site. The player comes in four different sizes and has shuffle and autoplay options as well as the ability to stream a customizable playlist. Once embedded, artists can then easily track analytics like downloads and plays per country.

The Fairtilzer Player:

Additionally, on the Fairtilizer web site itself, each track page comes with customizable URL, artwork, space for description and links (like to artist web sites, stores, and booking contacts, etc.), and a comment board for listeners. Tracks can be set to streaming only or made available for download, and soon artists will be able to mark them for sale, too, if they so desire. The tracks can also be set to public or private.

That private setting is designed to help artists in the initial phases before the launch of a new tune. Traditionally, launching a new track involves three steps: production, promotion, and distribution. With record companies today, leaks can occur in both the production and promotion phases as tracks are sent back and forth between artists, producers, DJs, journalists, and other taste makers who receive a first look before the track becomes publicly available. To combat those leaks, Fairtilizer provides these "private streams" instead. Artists will be able to send the track to specific people just as they did before, but the track will be protected from piracy and leaks.

The Future of Music

Although Fairtilizer will provide tools for artists wishing to sell their music, the focus isn't just on music sales. Instead, it focuses on providing all the tools an artist would need to get their music discovered, downloaded, shared, and distributed.

In the future, says Olivier Rosset, a former music exec and co-founder of Fairtilizer, it won't be about who owns the rights to a recording anymore. Music will instead center around the URL. And at Fairtilizer, they want to be the company that best helps an artist get that URL, that single track, onto the most sites across the internet.

Before delving into the company's business model designed to pay artists for their work, it's important to note that MixMatchMusic is also working to solve another problem musicians face: finding others to collaborate with. On the site, musicians can upload either whole songs or just stems. Other artists can search through those uploaded items to find the pieces of music that they need to complete their work.

Browsing for Music

At first, this sounds a lot like what sites like Rifflet and Kompoz both offer, but there is something that MixMatchMusic has that those sites don't: the MixMaker. The MixMaker is an online sequencer built right into the site, sort of like GarageBand in the cloud. Instead of having to download items and work with them in software-based mixing tools like GarageBand or ProTools, musicians can mix and remix the different tracks while still online. This makes it easier, faster, and more rewarding to experiment with the music the site contains.

The MixMaker

Getting Paid

Of course, the most notable difference between MixMatchMusic and other sites is that here, there's a big focus on artists getting paid for their work, whether it's an entire song or just a stem...or even a ringtone! When a musician utilizes another's music to make their own creation, that transaction is completely transparent. Musicians are able to monitor when their work is downloaded, in progress, or sold. And when a sale occurs, contributing musicians share $0.85 on every dollar that the site makes on sales.

Marketing Tools

Like both Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have done in the past, musicians can also invite their fans to remix their work. This is done by using something called the Remix Wizard, a completely customizable widget that can reside on either a musician's homepage or MySpace page.With the ReMix wizard, an artist can upload pieces of music like a guitar riff, drums, or vocals into the MixMatchMusic web site and the widget will allow fans to click on the widget to remix their own creations. The fans can then make their creations available for download on MixMatchMusic, too.

ReMix Wizard

Conclusion

MixMatchMusic stood out because it's taking the concept of an online community for musicians to a whole new level. The site's MixMaker tool is rather robust for a cloud-based app and the widgets they provide will also help draw more people to their site. However, it's their model for paying artists that deserves the most attention. Will people be willing to pay for downloading music? Well, that seems to work for iTunes. But for those who are truly immersed in the music community, iTunes alone with their commercially available selections of music can't satisfy their need to discover underground, indie tunes own their own.

Still, the concept of putting songs/stems online is not new, so we'll have to see if musicians explore deep enough into MixMatchMusic to see how it's different than the other sites they're already using today.

Local Content

Currently, Last.fm Japan features a catalog that is very similar to its offerings in the US and UK, but it doesn't feature a lot of local Japanese musicians. According to Last.fm, it is working on adding content from local Japanese labels in the "near future," but didn't specify any exact dates or names of labels it would like to include.

Streaming Complete Songs = Higher Click-Through Sales

One interesting piece of information in Last.fm's announcement is that it has increased its click-through sales in the US and UK by 119% since launching its free on-demand service in January. Not only does this provide a significant revenue stream for Last.fm, but it also shows that giving listeners access to the complete song instead of just the standard 30 second clips will actually make them more likely to buy the song. Currently, Last.fm allows its users to completely stream every song three times - after that, it also switched to the standard 30 second clips.

This year, we've seen Songbird add features and several new extensions to their product. In January, we told you about Songbird's 6-week campaign to build the 40 most-requested Firefox extensions for Songbird. Today, the majority of those extensions have been completed and are available for download from this page. You'll recognize some of your favorite extensions on that list like del.icio.us (SimpleDelicious), Chatzilla, DownloadThemAll, Faviconize Tab, FasterFox, Shareaholic, and StumbleUpon.

In March, Songbird released version 0.5 which included MTP Device Support for Windows users, a new Device API, and a feature called "Media Views," which let developers create alternate ways to display your music library via extensions. (example: Artist Detail List).

What's New in Songbird 0.7

This most recent release, Songbird 0.7, offers a brand-new UI with a more refined look-and-feel, a new setup assistant, smart playlists (like iTunes has), a concert calendar that lets you find upcoming shows in your area based on the artists in your library, and Last.fm support, which lets you scrobble the tracks you play and love them or ban them.

Additionally, they've added GStreamer support for all platforms, making GStreamer their new media core. By default it handles all FLAC playback on Windows/Mac and you can enable GStreamer to handle more codecs. They've also speed up media scanning and reduced memory usage on Windows/Linux.

So Far, So Good

When we last mentioned Songbird here on RWW, we were surprised by some of the comments. "Too little, too late," said one commenter. We hope those who have written Songbird off because of their slow development cycle will now take another look.

The new setup assistant, for example, makes getting Songbird up-and-running quickly. It offers to import your iTunes library for you and pre-checks recommended add-ons for you to try:

Songbird's new UI is also a major improvement - that's mainly because now it looks more like iTunes than ever before. However, in many ways it's better than iTunes - there's tabbed browsing across the top, favorite bookmarks like The Hype Machine on the left, and the Last.fm support adds a social element to your desktop player experience.

The Songbird team plans to have Songbird 1.0 ready by December of this year, and we're looking forward to all to checking out all the incremental improvements along the way. If you want to give Songbird a shot, you can download it from here.

UPDATE: To clarify, Songbird 0.7 is a RELEASE CANDIDATE, not the final version of 0.7.

In March, one of our commenters here argued that it was time for iTunes to become more social in the face of competition with Last.fm, Pandora, and the big social networks. While iTunes hasn't taken up this challenge, eMusic has and this redesign is the first step in this direction.

Better Album Pages

The new design for the album pages comes with a great number of usability improvements. It has now become a lot easier to bookmark an album or to add it to a list, for example. Both of these functions existed before, but they were relatively hidden.

Rating an album has become a lot easier too, as the ratings function, which also determines which albums eMusic recommends, is now immediately visible on the page, right under the cover art.

The new design also spotlights eMusic's own content more directly, by putting editorial reviews and interviews into the left sidebar.

EMusic is also in the process of updating all its cover art and will slowly make high-resolution images available for all of them. The highest resolution available will be 1400x1400, which almost seems like overkill, but it definitely looks good.

While the focus of the new design was clearly on pulling in information from the web, eMusic also added the ability to send out information to Twitter, or bookmark an album on Facebook, Digg, reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and a number of other social networks and bookmarking services.

Dig Deeper

The most important part of the redesign is the "Dig Deeper on the Net" section, which is collapsed by default. It contains links to entries in YouTube, Flickr, and Wikipedia, all of which display right on the site.

When we talked to eMusic yesterday, they stressed that they were trying to replicate what its users were already been doing anyway - going out to the web to gather more information on their favorite musicians. Given eMusic's focus on more obscure, independent bands, this makes perfect sense. Especially having the Wikipedia articles available gives users the option to dig a bit deeper into the history and background of an artist they might never have heard of before.

Verdict

EMusic's users have responded overwhelmingly positive to the changes so far. In my own experience, the new pages are a major step forward in usability. Just within the short time they were available, I rated and saved more albums that ever before, simply because it has become so easy to do. The new design puts a lot more emphasis on being visually pleasing, yet it is very usable at the same time.

There are still a few minor problems on the new site, as some albums didn't display user comments, some didn't display cover art, and the Flickr images sometimes refused to close, but that is to be expected with a major redesign like this.

One issue with the new design, though, is that the user reviews are now less of a focus of the album pages. Whereas before, they would take up the bottom of the page, they are now squished into the left sidebar and only up to four of them are displayed at any given time.

Coming Soon

For the future, eMusic promises to launch a new feature every month for the rest of the year, including a new recommendation engine, an updated homepage, and new search features. If they turn out to be as good as this re-design, then eMusic is definitely heading in the right direction, though its subscription model, while keeping the cost per track down, will continue to limit its appeal for a number of potential subscribers.

So far, Last.fm has been completely ad-supported, though a premium subscription service is currently in beta. Judging from the payout schedule, however, artists will need a lot of plays on Last.fm to make a reasonable amount from the program. On the other hand, though, MySpace pays out royalties to the major labels, but doesn't pay any royalties to unsigned bands on its site.

Not everybody seems to be happy about this announcement from Last.fm, though. Merlin, the "world's first global rights body for independent music," which represents close to 8% of the US music market, has issued a statement to its roughly 12,000 members, telling them that Last.fm has failed to address its concerns about copyright infringement on Last.fm. Merlin also argues that the license terms of the Royalties Program are too ambiguous.

Regardless of Merlin's objections, though, Last.fm's step to start paying out royalties should be applauded, as it gives musicians yet another way to make money outside of the mainstream music business. While the Royalty Program is limited only to Last.fm and doesn't collect royalties from various sources in the way SoundExchange would, Last.fm is giving musicians an alternative to the more traditional revenue models, which should prove to be especially appealing to smaller, still unknown bands.

The legalities of the material on the site are covered by the various CC licensing options that Rifflet has built into their UI. Although, as the Creative Commons blog points out, the license choices are only visible after you click a track's title. That could make it hard for someone looking for works of only one type of license, for example. Not only that, but the license is all the way down at the bottom of the page, too. However, that is a problem that could easily be corrected by adding a "license" option to their current "browse for audio" page, where you can already search by artist, genre, and title.

The rifflets themselves can be played, tagged, rated, commented on, and downloaded and each rifflet's page will show the artist, title, genre, length, description, and the format of the recording.

On your user profile page, you can enter the usual information, like username, web site, favorite artists, and your location, but you can also enter in your band's name and create a "stage name" for yourself, like "Hammer Smashface":

Rifflet User Profile

There is also a handy "recording guide" on Rifflet, which will help those new to using web tools with recording music and uploading their tunes.

The site still has a few kinks to work out - for example, although logged in, I still got the notification that I needed to register or log in in order to rate a track.

Rifflet isn't exactly the first of its kind in this genre - a site called Kompoz offers similar functionality. At Kompoz, musicians can also record tracks and invite others to collaborate on their songs. However, the difference between the two is that Kompoz's aim is really more focused on collaborative songwriting, where Rifflet users can simply browse and download, with no real need to interact that much with other community members. DJs, for example, could cull through the music clips on Rifflet for song pieces to use in their next remix. Besides user profiles, there aren't really any social networking features - you don't invite others to join, create a friends lists, upload profile photos, or maintain a list of favorite artists. Instead, Rifflet simply functions as an open place where music can be shared online.

Gerd Leonhard has written for our network blog last100 before, about music tax. I also recommend last100's Digital music: 2007 year in review article, written by our own Steve O'Hear, to get even more context about how music and web 2.0 are intersecting.