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Wednesday, September 30, 2009
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From TechCrunch. Your Guide to Music on the Web, Part II
Last month, I published Part 1 of my Guide To Music On The Web, which covered music recommendation sites, Web radio, independent music sites, playlists, and music visualizations. Today, in Part II we’ll take a tour of music search engines, Web players, ways to share music on Twitter, and music mixing apps.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading all of your comments and insights on my previous post and of course, took them under consideration while creating this second part. Please bear in mind that I can’t list ALL the music applications out there. I really tried to find the best and the most used applications that will probably still be here to serve you tomorrow too.
So readers’ main concern was the companies’ business model. You are right. A few of the services might make an exit, and most of them are probably not going to have one, and some are just for fun. I think music services can make money by being innovative enough to get it. Anyway, I don’t want to get into the business model stuff too much, but I will tell you this: The Internet is too competitive, you may be succeed by just being simple, but you may also need to be sophisticated. The era where creating an application first, then two years later thinking how to make money from it, is bygone now, and companies will need to think how to make money sooner than later if they aim for it – This is where innovation comes in and usually wins.
Music Search Engine:
Back in 2007, SkreemR
was truly my favorite MP3 search engine. SkreemR locates MP3 files on blogs and webpages, then indexes them on its site, allowing anyone to listen to their favorite music right on the spot. There is no registration required, all you need to do is to search for your desired song/artist, and browse the results. See something that you like? You can play it, rate it, buy it on Amazon, get the song lyrics, watch the video, find related photos on flickr, find concert tickets, download as a ringtone, and finally – yes – you can also share and tweet about it. Unfortunately, now SkreemR has jumping ads all over the site. I understand the need to make money, but did they have to choose the most annoying way to achieve that goal?
I remember the hype around Songza
when it first launched… it is a slick Ajax-designed service, which makes it easy to stream music on the web. Well, it still does. Songza became popular for its great usability and the fact that you can easily create playlists, and share music with your friends. At first Songza aggregated music from Seeqpod
, then switched to YouTube videos and imeem (where imeem
= 30 seconds of a song, and Youtube
= full video, low quality). Somewhere around October 2008, the service was acquired by Amie Street for its marketing potential.
Another acquired service is FoxyTunes, this time by Yahoo! in February 2008. FoxyTunes Firefox toolbar extension (launched in 2004) enables control of your favorite music player from the Firefox browser. It supports almost any media player and lets you also find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more – all from the comfort of your browser. Today, it has more than 50,000 weekly downloads, and a cumulative total of nearly 11,000,000 downloads! FoxyTunes also released an additional add-on called TwittyTunes, which allows you to post your currently playing songs to Twitter with a click. On their behalf I have to say, they where the first to offer that. Their search engine: FoxyTunes Planet
, is a mashup Netvibes-like page, that gathers music information from Rhapsody, Yahoo!, Flickr, Last.fm, Youtube, Pandora, Amazon, and more.
I sure noticed the difference when I tried Mufin
. Looks like they put an emphasis on the site’s usability and design. The interface is so clean and easy to use. Like other services, Mufin will search for your favorite music and will play it on the spot, via Youtube (what else?) It also lets you create playlists in a snap. But what makes it unique is its visualization tool (vision) that lets you discover more music, based on similar artists. Mufin also provides a player which can be downloaded to your desktop for free. The player will help you organize your music, create playlists, find similar music, share tracks with friends on Last.fm, Twitter or Facebook, and so much more.
search engine has no special feature really, it’s just built really well. The service has a simple look & feel, which allows you to listen to music that streams from Youtube, and create playlists if you are logged in. You can connect your Twitter, Friendfeed or Facebook accounts, and share with your friends’ music in realtime. There’s not much to say other than that.
has quite an impressive history since they launched way back in 2006; At first, it was just a plug-in
allowing you to organize your own library better, so you would be able to find the right song at the right time. Then Qloud released ‘My-Music’: A music app for social networks (Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Myspace, etc), which led them to 1M Facebook users! And finally today, it’s all of the above, plus a real-time music search engine, and a pretty good one. You can search and find music that you like, save and organize your favorites, share music with friends, or find new friends based on shared music taste. You can also import your iTunes or Windows Media Player library, and play your playlist directly from your browser. There’s a rumor that Qloud was acquired by Buzznet last year, but I couldn’t find any formal confirmation about this at either site (Qloud or Buznet).
And finally MySpace Music
: A massive hub of free music on the web. MySpace Music gathers all of its music accounts into one searchable page by genre. You can see the entire discography of your favorite artists from anywhere on the globe: view the artists’ music pages, listen to their music, track local concerts and much more. You can also search entire collections of free-to-watch video uploaded by artists or users. Read reviews by users, blog posts by both users and artists, and basically dive into an endless amount of content. Addictive.
Worth mentioning: Wearehunted
, which is a playable chart of the most popular songs on the Web..
Web Players:
From your Desktop to the Web, Moof
allows you to have a full back up of your own music. Export an xml file of your iTunes library, and listen to your favorite music from any computer. If you don’t want to do that, you can still browse through the Moof music library and play any song you like on-demand from the Web. Moof looks and behaves like a desktop player, with the additional ability to share and see music from friends. If your friends are on Moof, you can browse their entire collection of music, and add favorites to your own personal library. Overall, it’s a great way to find new music. Note that Moof has the coolest registration form ever
is so awesome, but fails to explain the service to its users. What you see when you enter the site is a Web Music Player that lets you find the music you want, then play it right away. What you don’t see is the powerful feature that allows you to see what your friends are listening to in real-time! How it works: Just sign up for the service, invite your friends to join in, and each time you play music on the site, your friends will be able to see what you’re listening to as you listen to it, and vice versa. The music streams from all kinds of free sources—not Youtube.
Like most of the Web Players, Grooveshark
allows users to find any song in the world and listen to it instantly. But there are several things that makes it different than the rest; first off, the application’s UI is stunning, and the experience using this site is absolutely a joy. Other than that, there’s so much that you can do: search, find, organize, favorite and add music that you like. Also interact with people in the community, and discover new music from others’ choices. With a team of 40 people they must have a business model (or a lot of VC cash). Grooveshark has a paid VIP version with some exclusive features, and a special interface for VIP users ($3/month or $30/year)
Youtube probably has the largest music database in the Internet, but finding music can be very frustrating since it’s not well organized. I’ve already recommended Jogli
as a service that gathers Youtube music into albums in the first part of this guide. JukeFly
does the same but also lets you listen to the music as if it was on your desktop music player, only it’s on the Web. JukeFly prepares everything for you, so you don’t really need to create playlists, you just need to choose from a variety of content already made for you. Additionally, JukeFly can stream music from your desktop, but you’ll have to download their plug-in to be able to do so. The player has more features and functionality, which you may or may not need, so don’t be surprised if eventually you find yourself using it as your new music center on the Web. JukeFly is working on a newer version, which will include an iPhone app, concert information, chat, fan-clubs, and Internet radio.
searches an entire database of songs in addition to the millions of songs indexed by MP3 search engine SkreemR
to bring you the best results possible. If you sign up for the service you will be able to save your favorite songs, create playlists by simply dragging & dropping tracks into a box, and share playlists with anyone. Users can upload custom album art to any playlist, then embed the playlist at their blog/site. All from a sexy web interface.
How disappointing is it to find out that Lala
works only in the U.S when everyone keeps telling me how great this service is… Anyway, I can give you a brief overview of the service from the information I picked up on the site. Windows users can move their entire music collection from the desktop to Lala on the web. Most of your music will be matched to Lala’s catalog and will be available online in minutes; The rest and unmatched music can be uploaded to Lala. If your personal music collection is not enough, you can play over 7 million songs once for free. If you’d like to add songs to your collection, it’ll cost 10 cents per song, and your first 25 songs are free.
plays music over a nicely done application with a great visual experience. The application was created by two students trying to change the stereotype that access to free music is an illegal activity while immersing the user in a unique visual experience. So what can you do at the site? You can listen to music you like, create online music collections & multiple playlists, and hopefully share favorite tracks with friends (it doesn’t say this anywhere, but I presume it does) – not much different from the rest of the services here, except for its nifty UI. BTW, even with their goal to show the world that music can be free and legal, they use Youtube like most services, so I’m not sure what’s unique about that.
Since Seeqpod.com’s
service is mostly dead, every service that used them switched to Youtube instead. The pros: Its video ability. The cons: The music quality (but hey, at least we have free music). Same applies to Streamzy
, an Ajax-based media player that lives on the web and allows users to create quick playlists from their favorite music. Streamzy says it merely provides search results for media being hosted elsewhere on the Internet – Well, I can’t argue with that. Anyhow, sign in if you want to save playlist, or use it as an alternative music player occasionally.
Post Music on Twitter:
is by far my favorite Twitter music service. It is also the first service that allowed people to send music to twitter in a very easy way, which is what made it what it is today. What makes it so great is that you can use it with or without a Twitter account. Some use it via the Twitter connection, other use it as their main music playlist and enjoy the community within the site only. Anyhow, you can discover new music, and new friends based on your collections. Once you sign up to the site, you can set Twitter to send notifications each time you suggest a new song to friends. It looks like Twitter, it behaves like Twitter, but angled around music only.
project Twisten.fm
, came out a bit later than Blip.fm and offers pretty much the same service. Sign-up with your Twitter credentials, and share music with your friends on Twitter. The site streams music from Grooveshark, allowing you to enjoy the quality of music played there (blip.fm streams music mostly from Youtube). Overall, it’s a cool place to save your music into playlists, and share directly with your Twitter friends. I wish that both Blip.fm & Twisten.fm would allow people to buy mixed CDs created from their playlist, instead of having to buy each song separately.
is the new kid on the block, basically the same as Blip.fm and Twisten.fm except with a killer tool—a nifty Bookmarklet! While you play songs on Youtube or Myspace, you can immediately add them to your playlist in Funnel. Another unparalleled feature is the ability to integrate your Twitter account or Tweet only the songs that you want. This way, you don’t feel bad about inundating your Twitter stream with too many of those annoying music updates. Also, you can easily comment on songs that you like.
If you wish to share MP3 links with your Twitter friends, you can do it with the help of Song.ly
. Enter an MP3 link, and Song.ly will generate a small player for easy listening over the web. I have to admit that the whole process is somewhat an unnecessary hassle. After all, who’s uploading songs these days when everything is searchable on the web already? On the other hand, you can enjoy a list of songs that’s already been uploaded by others, and are of very good quality, of course. I’d summarize it as a user generated MP3 search engine.
Another successful service, is Twt.fm
which finds music that you like and posts it to Twitter in a cool way. All you need to do is to log in via Twitter, type in an artist/track and click preview. Twt.fm then generates a track page using your Twitter page design. Post it on Twitter and your friends will be able to leave you comments on the same page – Example
.
Worth mentioning: Listento.fm
, and Twones
.
Mix & Share:
Not a pure mix service but it still falls into this category, 8tracks
allows you to create a Mix (playlist) with your favorite songs. It’s actually very similar to a service that already shut down, Mixwit
—so if you missed it, you might as well try 8tracks. Once you sign up to the service you can start searching for music, or uploading it from your computer to build your Mix. You can publish a Mix of no more than 8 tracks and only two of these can be from the same artist. Visitors at the site can listen to Mixes without signing into the service—but for creation and music uploads, you’ll have to become a member.
A fun service to close the list with, Jamglue
brings music and fans together. Any artist can sign up for a free Jamglue account and upload music in multi-track format for others to remix. There are several Creative Commons licenses to choose from. These licenses allow others to share and remix work, as long as they follow the artist’s restrictions. Fans can remix other folks’ stuff, and share the results.
Conclusion:
To summarize this whole guide, I have to admit that I’m somewhat concerned: Let’s say Youtube closes its doors tomorrow or decides to stop streaming music—there goes about 80% of what I’ve listed. Which brings me to my next point, the future of music on the Web doesn’t looks so bright right now. Not if every service depends on Youtube so heavily as its music source. For once, I wouldn’t mind paying a yearly fee if it meant listening to an unlimited source of any music that I like with good streaming & with awesome quality. And, I don’t even need to download the songs to my computer, all I really want is a place where I can play my favorite music based on monthly/year fee. Is it too much to ask? Oh wait, this is exactly what Rhapsody offers; Unfortunately, only in the U.S. . . .For now, I suggest you try the services above and enjoy them as long as they last. For some reason, music services don’t stay around very long but I guess that’s the way they roll.
Since I can’t list them all, please feel free to add services that I’ve missed in your comments and make them handy for everyone.
via techcrunch.com
From TechCrunch. Your Guide To Music On The Web – Part #1
I’m a Web fanatic, I admit. But you probably already knew that… My work environment has been completely web based for years now. The same applies to my music. Like many people, I used to download music from Kazaa
or eMule
(Yeah, I know some of you still do). Most of the time now, I listen to music on the web and don’t have any need to download it. My laptop benefits the most from this inclination since it’s not weighed down by music files, thus saving me tons of space and virus headaches (you eMule users know what I’m talking about). Anyhow, if I do choose to download music, I can always do it over at iTunes or my favorite place in the web: Jamendo
.
Music plays a large role in our lives. Since the web now plays an even bigger part, combining the two together has become unavoidable. The greatest thing about this powerful duo is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time searching for music you like — just use this nifty guide list and you’ll find just about everything you need to enjoy hours of good music. The sound quality changes from service to service, but overall, it’s good enough for regular web usage.
Please note that this is a list of services that you can use over the net without the need to download anything to your computer. This is why I’m not listing any P2P software: i.e., Spotify
, as well the fact that most of us can’t really test it or use it for all that matter. This is also only the first half of this guide; part two will include more web music players (including MySpace Music
, Streamzy, and others) as well as music search engines and services that make it easy to share songs on Twitter and other social sites.
Music Recommendations:
Pandora
is a service that can be used only in a specific locale, this one being within the U.S. Luckily, I had the chance to test the service when it was first released and became available to everyone. Launched way back in July 2005, the project had been in the initial testing phases for five years prior to launch date. Pandora recommends music to you by matching similar musical attributes. All you really need to do is choose an artist or a band you like, and Pandora will do the rest. Pandora delivers high quality 128Kbps audio streams, offering recommendations similar to the artists you have chosen. Pandora’s player looks like a radio, you can open up to 100 stations and navigate through them quickly. Registering for Pandora will provide you with a free account (advertising-supported). Free Pandora accounts will play up to 40 hours of music for free per month, you also have the option to pay 99 cents for unlimited listening hours for the rest of that month, or pay $36 to upgrade Pandora for one year. If you want to download music from Pandora, you can do it through iTunes or Amazon. You can see our past Pandora coverage here.
With almost 3 million unique visitors a day, Last.fm
is one of the most powerful social music communities on the Web today. Like Pandora, the service allows you to enjoy music that you like, but unlike Pandora, Last.fm analyses what you and your friends listen to and like, and then suggests more music based on that analysis. When you recommend music to a friend or you tag it, or you write about it, or simply just listen to it – you shift the song’s importance on the site, and will in turn get recommended to more people. Based on the music you’ve already listened to, Last.fm will recommend new music you might like, as well as suggest other users with a similar music taste to yours, which you might be interested in friending, and you can also easily communicate with them. If you live outside the U.S., U.K. or Germany, you can listen with a free 30-track trial or subscribe for a low price of $3/month for unlimited radio streaming. (Launched in 2002!)
is how BlogMusik, looked in 2006, and this
is how Deezer
(formerly BlogMusik) looks today – pretty impressive change, don’t you think? The French-based service is one of the largest and happens to also be a very successful music recommendation search engine. Once registered here, you can create your personal profile and reach the Deezer community. You can create playlists, send messages to your contacts, leave comments, add artists and albums to your favorites, and more. But here’s what I like the most – The SmartRadio, which is an intelligent radio that automatically generates 3 hours(!) of continuous listening based on one artist – completely free. Priceless! You can see our past coverage of Deezer here.
I think the first Adobe AIR application that I ever tried was Finetune
. Finetune provides you with the most interesting new playlists of related music from your choice of artists. Besides the site’s community where you can browse, listen to music, create a profile, connect with other users and more, Finefune also has some cool feautures to complete their suite, and each tool gives you an extraordinary music experience. Take for example the Finetune Wii project
(which can be played also over the web), it’s a great sight and sound for the eyes and ears. Just enter an artist’s name and Finetune will create a playlist with similar music that will play for hours. Best of all it’s free, and you also get an iPhone
, Facebook and a Desktop app that all sync with your music playlist, no matter where you play it from. You can see our past coverage of FineTune here.
Also worth mentioning in this same topic group are, of course: Ilike.com
(acquired by Myspace), and music.strands.tv
Independent Music:
Amie Street
is a home for musicians. The service allows music fans to discover new and independent music. Visitors at the site can search for new music based on genre, region, or recommendations. Fans can also search for music according to its price - Amie Street is actually the only marketplace where listeners determine the price of the music. How does it work? Every song is originally priced free or very inexpensive and increases in price, up to 98 cents, as more and more users purchase it. Musicians then get 70% of the revenue from each sale. Additionally, Amie Street matches you with music that you might like, for example: I couldn’t locate Coldplay on the site, but I got more than 70 results that sound similar to the band. Obviously, this exposes me to music that I’ve never heard before, which is always a welcomed experience. You can see our past coverage of Amie Street here.
Why is Jamendo
one of my favorite music services? It offers the largest catalog of music under Creative Commons licenses – worldwide. And, not only are all of the albums free to download, there’s also a large chance you won’t know any of the artists. If you already have an open mind about music, surely it won’t stop you from listening to some new albums, right? The best way to find music at this site is to search by the genre tags. Found something that you like? You can review, comment, rate, share and as I’ve said download it for free. The service is available in seven languages, and has an iPhone app
that you can download for free. Business model? Yes they have
one too.
is by far the best looking music application there is today. It offers a great interface, a great user-experience and above these all, great music! SoundCloud lets music professionals receive, send and distribute their music. The service allows professionals (and non-professionals) to exchange, and follow music and musicians at the site. It’s a full community where people can easily communicate with each other based on shared tastes, but it is also a place where musicians can store and showcase their music using high quality standards. With the free account, you can only upload 5 tracks maximum per month, but if you are an industry fanatic and you find this plan to be somewhat lacking, you can check the pro page
for packages that are more suitable to your needs. See our past coverage here.
allows artists to upload their songs and lets thousands of listeners decide whether they like it or not. The most popular songs hit the front page. Think about it as a Digg for music, the more people heart a song, the higher it goes. The site connects musicians and fans, giving them all the tools to communicate with each other. For artists, it’s good place to promote their work. For anyone else, it’s a wonderful place to discover and support new music.
Create & Listen to Playlist:
I’ve never been very much of a Project Playlist
fan, but I have to say it’s a good service. Ultimately, it’s a community based on playlists. You don’t have to register to be able to listen to the music, but once you do, you can start building your playlist and enjoy more features such as the Playlist IM, which is a chat system similar to Facebook where you can connect your ‘playlist’ friends or even friends from AIM, Facebook, Yahoo Messenger, etc. What else? You can write blog entries, upload photos, privately connect with other members, browse thousands of other music playlists, comment, share, and much more. My guess is that people use this site mostly to share their playlist on their blog/site or social network. Playlist allows you to grab a playlist code and embed it anywhere you want. One thing that bugs me though is that the member’s search feature is missing. Today, when everything is so connected to your identity, this is a must have feature. On the other hand, I was impressed to see they saved my playlist
from 2006…
allows you to create personalize playlist and share it in the Jiwa.fm community or with friends & family. As a member, you are able to share, exchange, and explore music. You can also expand your tastes with the SmartRadio tool. I found this service to be unique in a way because no matter what you are doing at the site, it won’t prevent you from listening to your playlist, it just plays in the background. Amazingly, when you click on an artist from within a mixed artists playlist, it will automatically create
an album playlist of that artist. You might find the site to be a bit cluttered at first time, but once you get it, it works like a charm – highly recommended.
At Jogli
, you don’t really need to create a playlist – they create it for you. Think about it as a giant web-based CD store where you can search for an artist, see all of his/her albums, and then listen to them exactly as listed in original CD Let’s take Michael Jackson for example: Here
you can find all his discography, and listen to his CDs one by one. Clicking on the button ‘Play Radio’ will open a radio station generated from music you might like from similar artists. As a registered member, you are able to save playlists, write reviews, and more. You can also import your playlists to Last.fm or iTunes to make it a video playlist. Check out our past coverage of Jogli here.
would have been better and easier if they allowed you to search for Youtube videos on their site to create a playlist. But no, you have to supply them with a Youtube URL, which means, you’ll have to go directly to Youtube, search for a song, then copy-paste that song URL back into MixTube. Thus, I found it to be frustrating. But looking at the bright side, you can always search for someone else’s playlist, and save yourself time and agony. One word about the Youtube music integration – lots of services use it, but unfortunately, it doesn’t offer you much control of your playlist, and what plays today, may not play tomorrow..
is another great music store/playlist maker that we’ve covered extensively since the site relaunched last year. It allows users to listen to any song they want one time. If you want to listen to a song more than that, you buy a 10 cent ‘web song’ that lets you stream the song from the cloud as many times as you want (you can also purchase a full download of the song as you would from iTunes or Amazon). The site has a great integrated music player and a variety of pre-made playlists built by other users.
Worth mentioning: Imeem
, and Maestro.fm
Music Visualization:
There’s no doubt in my mind that Musicovery
has a strong following of avid users. The site is an interactive and personalized webradio enabling its users to generate in a few clicks a musical program adapted to the various listening situations and their preferences. Their unique mood matrix proposes a relationship between music and mood in an ergonomic and attractive manner. I’ve submitted this item about the service to Digg
in 2006 and it’s good to see the site still works . But things have changed. You have limited navigation if you’re not a pro user ($15/3 months or $48/12 months), but once you are – the sky is the limit. In any case, this service will blow you away.
is perhaps just a mashup site, but it’s a good one! CitySounds.fm collects music from SoundCloud and pictures from Flickr to create a wonderful music experience from a single page. You can listen to the latest music from cities all around the world. At the top are the most active cities and the list is constantly changing as new music is being created.
Web-Radio:
Very similar to Last.fm in concept, Jango
allows you to create your own custom radio stations and share them with friends. Just type in what you want to hear – and your station will immediately play the music you want along with similar favorites of other Jango users who share your tastes. You can customize your stations further by adding more artists and rating songs. Each artist get a page, containing the web-radio, the music playlist, biographies, events list, comments from members at the site, and fan list for easy communication. The service claims to be legal and says it pays royalties due to all labels/artists every time a song is played. Moreover, Jango runs a program called Jango Airplay. This program gives emerging artists an unprecedented opportunity to be proactively exposed to the millions of visitors at the site. See our past coverage of Jango here.
is an efficient way to locate radio stations in your area or around the globe. You can search stations by geography, genre, band, language or tags. You can listen without signing up, or you can log in and create your personal dashboard with favorite stations that you can then listen to on a daily basis. We mostly hear radio on the go, but now you can easily track your favorite radio stations on the web. All the radio stations are public so you aren’t asked to pay anything to use the site.
OK, TheRadio
is also one of my favorites because of its simplicity. Entering an artist or a genre gets you custom channel, but if you go over the channel listing, you will find much more interesting suggestions. I don’t know about you but I actually like when someone else picks the music as long is it in the range of my request. Anyway, TheRadio does a great job on finding music that I like – it simply works.
fits in the Recommendation list as well as this category. The service lets you experience music in a fours different ways: by Stations, Artist, Mood, and Personal. The Stations area is pretty limited if you don’t have a pro account, but you can still get the feel of it. In the Artist zone, you enter your favorite name and choose from a variety stations suggested. The coolest way is the Mode area, which plays music based on your chosen mode. These stations are created by music experts, says Aupeo. The Personal station streams music based on your music behavior at the site. Overall, very intensive and powerful!
Worth mentioning: Tun3r
That’s it for Part 1 of this music guide. If you have any other suggestions related to these groups, you are more than welcome to add them in the comments. In the next part of this post, I’ll offer the best options for Music search engines, Music web-players, Twitter-Music craziness, and more. Stay tuned!
Image by RossinaBossioB
on Flickr.
Website: go2web20.net Birthplace: Israel Companies: Go2Web20 Orli Yakuel is a Web2.0 analyst and the editor of Go2web20 - A personal blog about Web2.0 technology.
She’s also a co-founder at Go2web20.net - which is a directory for Web2.0 applications. (in association with Eyal Shahar) Learn More
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via techcrunch.com
Fron GigaOm. Time for Digital Music to Get a Reality Check
Time for Digital Music to Get a Reality Check
By Paul Bonanos | Saturday, September 26, 2009 | 11:00 AM PT | 0 comments
It’s been a busy September for the digital music business. Steve Jobs reappeared onstage to introduce the iTunes LP format and a series of new iPods. Anticipation grew around European streaming music service Spotify, which is due to arrive on U.S. shores in the coming months. And a series of mobile music applications that compete indirectly with the iPod were approved by the very company that makes the device. So it seems like a good time to assess the chances these key music models that have received so much attention and investment have of surviving.
Selling music online: Apple still owns more than two-thirds of this market, with largest challenger Amazon.com still only accounting for single-digit market share. Interest in owning music could decline in some circles as streaming services improve, especially in the mobile sphere, but any erosion is likely to be slow, and physical media customers are still moving online, too. Selling MP3s is a low-margin business, but as part of a larger one — selling gadgets, as Apple does, or barbecue grills, as Amazon does — it’s worth staying in the game. Anyone else, though, would be crazy to enter this market and expect big returns. As for the price of music, expect increased flexibility, especially for developing artists. Prognosis: Stable, for now.
Free on-demand streaming: Thanks to a user interface that echoes Apple’s, much-hyped Spotify is the purported game-changer in what’s shaping up to be a three-horse race alongside Imeem and MySpace Music, with user interface emerging as the most significant factor in determining a winner. (Google’s YouTube is running a different race, but on the same track.) Major labels have stakes in all three providers, and have generally been disappointed with the returns thus far, in part due to the soft ad market. Some or all may reach profitability amid reduced expectations, but none is likely to produce a strong exit for stakeholders. Prognosis: It’ll pull through.
Paid subscriptions: The all-you-can-eat music rental service is getting a shot of adrenaline by going mobile. The two leaders, RealNetworks’ Rhapsody and Best Buy-owned Napster, have had difficulty reaching even a million customers despite several years of trying, and the price of music rental is falling, but the promise of any song, anytime, anywhere via mobile apps is leading to a make-or-break moment for these services, especially with Spotify entering the fray by applying the “freemium” model. If ubiquitous music access doesn’t revive the subscription service, nothing will. Apple, for one, has conspicuously stayed out of it so far. Prognosis: Requires experimental treatments.
Internet radio: A new royalty rate agreement this summer stabilized market leader Pandora and its ilk for the next few years. Pandora’s own service is beloved enough, but its stakeholders may never get the payoff they’ve been waiting for, and what happens after 2015 is anyone’s guess. By comparison, rival Last.fm’s exit strategy — getting acquired two years ago — was the best one. Prognosis: “I’m not dead…I’m getting better!“
Legacy businesses: Believe it or not, CD sales are still outpacing digital downloads, although the twain shall finally meet next year. The Beatles, for one, are doing all right selling physical product to diehards. The independent music business, in particular, is even enjoying an uptick of interest in vinyl. Prognosis: The old boy’s got some life in him yet.
Piracy: With a 95 percent market share for downloaded music, this is as close to a sure thing as I can imagine. Yeah, growth in free streaming might reduce piracy, and people are going to jail for leaking music early. But if anything, music piracy may be getting easier. Prognosis: Thriving, with a chance for eternal life.
via gigaom.com
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Held Hostage by CPM-Based Media Buying? A TechCrunc Post Proposes: Let’s Kill The CPM.
Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Shelby Bonnie
, the CEO of Whiskey Media
. He co-founded CNET in 1993 and was the Chairman and CEO from 2000 to 2006. He served as Chairman of the IAB from 2001 to 2003. Whiskey Media is a content platform with three sites, giantbomb.com
, and animevice.com
lots more to come.
OK, Advertising Week just ended
… does anyone else feel like the online advertising industry is the orchestra, playing on while the Titanic is sinking?
We have a problem, folks. And I, for one, think we should start to fix it by killing off the CPM
, once and for all.
I have been in the Internet media space for 16 years and will start by stating the obvious: The CPM has done more to stunt innovation and drag down quality products than any single thing on the Internet. Maybe it works in other mediums, but it sure as hell doesn’t work on the Internet. Having been both a small and big publisher (now small again), it’s been my experience that the collective focus on CPMs and counting eyeballs by marketers, agencies, and publishers has led to a whole mess of unintended consequences that have produced a series of “solutions” that work for none of those parties. And perhaps more importantly, it’s been terrible for users.
All campaigns start with the best of intentions: “let’s do something creative, engaging, and unique!” But unless someone really senior from the agency or client side intervenes, the road for a campaign always leads to the media buyer and the dreaded spreadsheet, where the two most important columns are impressions and cost. Ironically, there’s usually some good stuff in campaigns, but they are thrown in for free as “value adds.” At some point, publishers decide that if all clients care about is impressions, then OK, we’ll give them impressions. The output is an industry that overproduces shallow, superficial, commoditized impressions. Why do we have so many bad sites that republish the same junky content–content that’s often made by machines or $1-per-post contractors? Why do sites intentionally try to get us to turn lots of pages with tons of top 10 lists,
or single-paragraph summaries of someone else’s story
?
In 2002, my first full year as Chairman of the IAB, we made a decision as an industry to kill the original small banner (468×60). Though it was the only unit that many of our partners accepted, if we didn’t kill it, the industry would have had a very difficult time moving past it. We had to be bold and take some risk, but at that time we ushered in the move towards larger ad units, a move that all agree was a big improvement. We are at a similar point today. The focus on CPM is causing a bunch of behavior that is bad for publishers, marketers, and users. Only by killing it do we have the opportunity to invent our new future.
Why is the CPM such a problem?
- You always get what you pay for. I believe in basic economics. If you pay for impressions, you get impressions. Is that, in the end, what marketers really want? How about engagement? How about impact? How about actually selling product? A glut of impressions has helped no one.
- All impressions are not created equally. There’s a big difference between seeing an ad on a page of content that contains one uninteresting paragraph and twelve ads, and seeing a single ad on a page that is relevant to the ad and covers a topic for which the user is highly passionate and engaged. The differences between social network and content inventory is another example–how do you put those items on the same spreadsheet?
- There is no natural constraint . TV, print, and radio can only put so many ads within their product. But on the Internet, that is not the case. We can continually increase the number of ads per page or manipulate users’ behavior to goose our impression numbers. Can’t you see some publisher saying “if they just want impressions, why don’t we go from four ads on a page to eight” or “couldn’t we turn a new ad every time someone loaded up a new e-mail?”
- It doesn’t mean anything anymore. With such a glut of impressions from all media and the number of impressions with which people are bombarded with every day, it just doesn’t matter anymore. It’s an arcane notion that’s a holdover from a time when there wasn’t as much media. As I said, TV, radio, and print had natural constraints and there was a lot less of it. So just seeing an ad was, by definition, unique and impactful. Those days are no longer.
- Senior marketers get it, but there is a whole infrastructure built around the CPM. The process is built up around how ads are bought and sold, based around a media plan, and asked for in RFPs. All the good, creative thoughts get boiled down into spreadsheets, that are for the most part owned by folks that are not that far removed from their last college class. Even senior folks have to try to fight their own system to keep the ideas that they like.
- This is not a win for marketers. In a world of over-produced impressions, even great work by marketers is ignored at best and more commonly not even seen.
- The ultimate losers are the users. They get a lot of bad content and bad ads. They are literally overrun by ads all day.
What will a new solution need?
- Simple. In the end, I realize that to make the business of marketing work it can’t all be art. You have to have a way to create a streamlined process. Everyone wants and needs a way to compare campaigns and metrics to determine success. Simplicity can lead to scalability, which allows for more efficiency for publishers, agencies, and marketers. Having said that, the simplicity we now have has led to a model that doesn’t work.
- The metrics should be more closely aligned with what you want. Whatever you pay for is what publishers will start mass producing. If you want engagement, pay for engagement. It is unclear whether there is one metric or many. A starting point might be to start with uniques, actions (like sharing, contributing, and engaging), and time.
What about the CPA or CPC?
- CPA and CPC have their appropriate time and place, but let’s recognize that those situations are limited. Yes, they work great when people know exactly what they are looking for, but how do you convince them to buy something they don’t know they need? Pure click performance just emphasizes the status quo of what I already know and already buy. Yes, it’s an action… but so is a video view, a wiki contribution, a contest sign up, a tweet about a product, and so on. We also know that a singular focus on these items would create as crazy a set of unintended consequences as we’re currently dealing with today.
Where do we start?
- First, just stop using the CPM. Yes, it will break every model and process that the industry holds dear, but we need to get rid of the crutch. The ensuing turmoil will bring creative thinking, new ideas, and entrepreneurial passion.
- Let it be a movement, not a task force or sub-committee. Create room and dollars for entrepreneurs to experiment and try new things. They all might not work, but we will collectively learn. A bunch of task forces by industry associations will only make it worse.
- Think open source. This should not be proprietary or an individual company’s technology, it needs to be an effort on everyone’s part to do this together with the benefit accruing to us all.
- Realize that we all share a common need to fix this. The fight is with the system, not each other.
I certainly don’t have all the answers myself, but as a veteran of this space and someone who deeply cares about the medium, it is about time we all make a concerted effort to change our direction. I would love to hear your thoughts (shelbyb [at] whiskeymedia [dot] com).
Photo credit: Flickr/SuperFantastic
Website: whiskeymedia.com Companies: Whiskey Media, CNET Networks Shelby Bonnie is CEO of Whiskey Media, an online publisher that builds topical Websites, including giantbomb.com, comicvine.com and animevice.com.
Prior to Whiskey Media, he co-founded… Learn More
Website: whiskeymedia.com Location: Sausalito, California, United States Founded: October 1, 2007 Whiskey Media develops topical websites that are equal parts editorial and community. To date, they have built sites about video games,… Learn More
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