adamyntium

Category: arts and entertainment

  • Questioning desires and assumptions about music

    Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve posted, and no, I won’t apologize. I’ve been busy… not (just) picking my nose, but picking things to write about.

    Additionally, dear reader, I’ve been spending much of the last few weeks delving even deeper into online music services, evaluating my own music habits and interests, and planning a rather major undertaking of a site about online music services. Yes, you heard it here first ;-).

    Much of this has come about during the seemingly mundane process of ripping my 350+ CDs to digital files on my computer. Allow me to explain…

    My vast CD collection, probably like many of yours, has been sitting in the corner of my room, collecting dust and — were it to speak — would probably moan, “Adam, why hast thou forsaken me?” Indeed, until recently, I don’t think I had listened to one of my CDs in literally years, what with the proliferation of song availability via legal and :cough: questionable online music services.

    Upon ripping my CDs, I realized that I had well over 5,000 tracks, just waiting to be heard… some for the first time ever. I boggled my mind with the geeky calculation that, yes, I could listen to an album’s-worth every day, and it’d still take me more than a year to go through my existing collection.

    “What am I doing paying for two different online services,” I asked myself, “when I haven’t even listened to a fraction of the music I already own?” The fact that I now had every single one of my songs, originally on CD, now available for instant-listening on my PC intensified this soul-searching and budget-questioning.

    “Psst!” whispered the ConsumptionDevil, perched playfully on my left shoulder, “It’s just $14 or so a month for the two services, ya cheapskate. Isn’t that a small price to pay for SUCH a FABULOUS collection of music at your fingertips? Do you really want to be stuck with those musty old relics from the 80’s? And besides, you pay more for one lousy night out at the movies!”

    “But it’s not just about the money,” I argued, probably prompting my roommate to wonder why I was mumbling to myself yet again, “It’s a matter of time. Why should I spend my limited free time browsing Napster and MusicMatch, searching for tunes, making my own custom radio stations, and so on… when I can just click a few buttons and be listening to fine music I already have?”

    —

    Ah ha! I thought. Now I have him, that seemingly sly devil of consumerist greed. Always wanting more, always wanting the latest. Well, I showed him! I’m taking my life back and…

    “Not so fast, smarty!” he retorted, dismissing my arguments with a cynical glance, “If you have hopes of holding yourself out as an expert in the Digital Music arena, don’t you need to actually experience and test what you write about? Your credibility and future employment is at stake. And besides, from a pure enjoyment standpoint, aren’t you always just itching to hear what everyone’s talking about? That new record, that promising artist, the new musical you’ve read critical raves about… your old CDs tie you to the past, whereas the new music services allow you to explore the present and the future. Don’t be a luddite, Adam, for goodness sake!”

    {sigh} He had me. But I’m an exceptional case (or, as my parents would say, patting my head, “special”). What about the rest of the world?

    —

    To the normal music enthusiast, the Napsters and iTunes and all may prove initially tempting, especially as the KaZaAs of the world become increasingly risky and inconvenient. But will there come a point where these folks, too, stop and ask themselves… what *AM* I doing with 10,000 music files on my hard drive? Sure, my shiny new iPod can now hold all 10K of ’em, but so what?

    People will eventually question, I think, not whether they need to regularly acquire and own track after track, but whether the attendant hassles are really worth it. Storing, organizing, and — this is the scary part — backing up or moving to a new computer — gigs upon gigs of music… is this really any fun? With CDs, you simply boxed ’em up and took them with you. Barring scratches or theft, there wasn’t much of a worry. Your CDs would work everywhere, never expire, and always be correctly labeled.

    In contrast, your iTunes files won’t work on most Windows programs and they won’t work on any portable player except an iPod. Your Napster files will work on most (but not all) Windows programs, but won’t be playable on a Mac or on an iPod. And unless you authorize additional computers (and, if needed, de-authorize previously-used computers), you won’t be able to play ANY of your online-music-service acquired files on your friend’s laptop or your new computer at work.

    —

    When I ask my friends about music, they almost unanimously scoff at server-based solutions (such as streaming), and insist that they want “a personal copy” of any music they like. I wonder if they will always think this way. For me, at least, the thought of having someone else (whether it’s Napster, Microsoft, Apple, or another party) store ALL my music and allow me to listen to it anywhere remotely (with my choice of software, however) is increasingly tempting, especially as broadband connections become more commonplace.

    Will consumers eventually opt for convenience over ownership? Or is ownership, in fact, synonymous with overall convenience? And more philosophically, will people soon realize that what they wish for may be more than they want to handle? When “I want every song by the Beatles and ABBA and Linkin Park and… and… and…!” dovetails with free or cheap availability of music, particularly in high-bitrate-encoding, translating into a few hundred gigabytes of personal storage requirements… will people still be so keen on ‘having it all’? Or will the clutter finally catch up to them?

    I honestly can’t say.

    Then again, knowing the increasingly insatiable consumer demands to own more, newer, better… those musty CDs may indeed prove to be no match for innovation and the celestial downloadable jukebox.

    —

    What are your thoughts? And in particular, if money were no object, how would you have your music?

  • The evolution of Music: From Thing… to Experience

    [ On the Napster message boards, a fellow community member posted a note about the concept of music ownership and — knowing I have strong feelings about this issue — invited me to reply. Below is my response. – Adam]

    I think the concept of ownership in the Digital Age is both fascinating and frustrating. The real problem facing the RIAA, artists, and consumers isn’t copying; that’s just a symptom. Instead, what concerns me is the public’s current inability to recognize art as EXPERIENCES, not THINGS.

    What this means is that, in an optimum world (economically and artistically), music is *NOT* viewed or treated as couches or jelly beans or flashlights or cars.

    While physical objects (especially, well, cars), may occasionally elicit strong emotions, they are in and of themselves valuable and functional in their presence. Music (as, I’d suggest, any other form of art as well), is contrastingly interesting / useful / in-mind even when not present.

    CDs, as a physical manifestation, evoke and symbolize the traits of art, but (with, again, few exceptions) are not art themselves.

    —

    What does all this really MEAN? Well, the sooner corporations, artists and consumers can understand and embrace their relation to Art as experiences and — economically speaking — services, the sooner we’ll reach an equillibrium which respects and supports all parties involved.

    Specifically, there will come a day when we value and are willing to pay for music, for instance, based upon how it makes us feel, not what particular form it comes in. In a rudimentary sense, this will still involve paying more for a live concert (understandably) over pre-recorded music, but also pay more for collections of songs customized to OUR personal mood at any given moment (“Napster Mood AutoPlaylists”) and generally for music which touches us in ways it does not affect others due to timing, selection, scope, and other personalized factors. The companies which will be ultimately successful will be those which best facilitate EXPERIENCE with Music — and I don’t just mean the sounds themselves. Exchanges of info and opinions between artists and consumers, insights into the ongoing musical creation process, even the faciliated procurement of physical manifestations of music (signed playlists, old guitars, etc.)… all part of the grand idea of Music.

    Music may become the ultimate of in-demand, though ideally not at the expense of serendipetous discovery. And through this — helping people to maximize the EMOTIONAL benefits through music — music and other forms of art will be transformed from things… bits… possessions… something owned… to somethings provided, experienced, felt.

    This is why music subscriptions — though still rudimentary today — are the way of the future. And as the transformation progresses, worries about the “intellectual property rights” will become moot, as labels and artists and others serve as creators, providers, connectors, and not merely distributors.

    Fat bandwidth pipes are not significant barriers to entry. Licenses to actual music will soon no longer a significant barrier to entry. Nicer GUIs and techie doodads and lower prices — still eventually not significant barriers to entry.

    But creating and maintaining trust not only with consumers, but also with artists and their agents… this is built over time, and is not easily or quickly duplicated.

    From this trust, the idea of “stealing” art will become foreign, for feelings and experiences are personal and cannot be duplicated en masse.

    And when that day comes, the now-oft-separate trajectories of musicians, their facilitators, and consumers will have pointed towards and reached a common goal and common point. And we will all win.

  • A comprehensive review of the new Napster 2.0 service – Part THREE of three

    [ This is the final and third part of my Napster 2.0 music service review. If you haven’t read the other parts, I encourage you to start at part one of my Napster review — Adam ]

    In this final section of my Napster review, I’ll be covering these remaining topics:
    – Radio
    – Music info
    – Non-music offerings
    – Overall user interface
    – Pricing and value

    If you’re not already a Napster user, I encourage you to download and try out the software for free as you read along here 🙂

    In contrast with my earlier entries, I’ve decided to stop assigning ‘grades’ to various components of Napster’s service. There are just too many variables involving user interests, connection speed, and so on, to make such subjective judgements applicable for all readers.

    —

    RADIO FEATURES AND FUNCTIONALITY
    Napster radio is both fabulous and infuriating.

    Fabulous:
    – Unlike ANY other legal service, Napster allows you to not only skip to previous and upcoming tracks with ease, but even enables you to scan to any point within any song. So, for instance, you can look on “your” radio station and see the tune “Brand New Day” by Sting coming up in three songs… and decide to fast forward to the middle section of the song with just two mouse clicks!
    – You can do anything with “radio” programmed songs that you can do with searched-for or browsed-for tracks! Every single song you get on a radio station can be added to your own custom playlists, and — depending on the permissions of any particular track — downloaded and (for an extra fee) burned as well.
    – The “Radio” system on Napster is basically equivalent to the Playlist feature (discussed earlier in my blog), meaning that the learning curve is minimal. You can even load up a Napster-provided “radio station,” remove a few un-favorite tracks, save it as a custom playlist, and share it with other Napster users.

    Infuriating:
    – Someone’s not minding the quality control very well over at Napster. While, as a swing dancer and jazz aficianado, I was grateful to see Napster featuring a “Lindy Hop” radio station, I was hugely annoyed to discover that some of the tracks on the station were repeated as many as four times in just a few hours of listening. Given the thousands of swing songs that are available, even in Napster’s library alone, this sort of repetition is inexcusable.
    – Further diminishing the excitement of the Napster radio stations is the fact that at least several I’ve tried don’t seem to be grabbing music from a very large pool. Listening to the 80’s pop station over three days, I heard pretty much the same tunes each day, just in a different order.
    – In contrast with Rhapsody, Napster only streams songs that it has on-demand licenses for. On one hand, Rhapsody’s contrasting practice can get annoying (“Gee, I love that song… but ack, I can’t replay it or bookmark it!”). But on the other hand, Napster’s practice may be considered by some to be limiting, since streamable but not-on-demand artists like the Beatles and Metallica will currently not appear on Napster’s radio stations.

    On the whole, Napster’s radio system FEELS like a sophisticated playlist offering, and as noted from my opinions above, this can be either a great or a not-so-great thing. In a bit of a generalization, those wishing to sit back and be entertained with a broad assortment of carefully picked tunes would be better off with Rhapsody or MusicMatch for their radio needs. But those wishing to engage in a more interactive experience would absolutely come out ahead with Napster.

    —

    MUSIC INFORMATION
    Napster thoughtfully offers a handful of well-written and useful reviews for a variety of albums and albums, and — in common with other music services — uses AllMusic Guide notes for the bulk of its reviews.

    While Napster’s additional in-house reviews occasionally push the service ahead of its competitors in this context, on the whole, Napster’s music-info offerings fall flat. Here’s why:

    – Napster has unwisely decided to favor anti-copying over user convenience, and IMHO, that’s a loser of a decision every time. Specifically, even though the music information text is contained on what amounts to an HTML page, Napster hijacks right and left mouse capabilities, rendering users unable to copy and paste any of the review text or album track listings… even in Fair Use contexts! In fact, it’s not even possible to print specific info screens. 🙁

    – Unlike with both Rhapsody and MusicMatch, when Napster doesn’t have rights to feature an artist, an album, or a track, it simply pretends that the person or material doesn’t exist. This can be absolutely maddening, both because it hampers searching and it also leaves gaping holes when someone is just trying to see, for instance, how many albums an artist has recorded, or how many tracks he actually recorded on a given album. On Rhapsody, this info is somewhat hidden, but easily available. On MM, not only is the info listed, but users can use unavailable-artist lookups to find similar-but-available music from other artists!

    – Lastly, Napster has a really hard time looking up info on even some tracks it DOES have, when those tracks are part of a compilation or co-authored musical. For instance, right-clicking on a track and selecting “BROWSE ARTIST” in the Buffy the Vampire musical recording, Once More, With Feeling generally results in Napster ignoring the request, instead of it looking for other similar music from the “artist” (in this case, the composers of that particular musical). I’ve had similar problems with jazz compilations, especially when more than one artist is listed for a given song. Ideally, Napster should either pick one, or ask which one I want to read about.

    —

    NON-MUSIC OFFERINGS
    I’m sorry to admit that I haven’t spent much time exploring Napster’s videos or magazine. At a cursory glance, the magazine seems detailed and engaging, with quite a bit of diverse information. The videos, on the other hand, while a nice touch, are a bit too “lo-res” for my taste.

    —

    OVERALL USER INTERFACE
    I’ll note up front that I should cut Napster some slack on this. While Napster 2.0 is a bit of an ‘upgrade’ from the earlier PressPlay service, it’s still obviously a major rewrite, and definitely not based upon the more long-lived (and almost-too-simple) original Napster interface. So basically, this is Napster 1.1, and given this, they’re doing quite decently 🙂

    The thumbs up:
    – Most everything is pretty intuitive with the current interface. Clicking, right-clicking, dragging, and double-clicking all seem to do what one’d reasonably expect, and while that might seem like faint praise, in comparison with many other Windows programs, it’s not.
    – The HISTORY window, allowing you to see every track played and purchased, is a very helpful and also interesting feature. And it’s not just for show; right-click functionality on this page is superb, allowing one to add tracks to playlists, download tunes, and more.
    – In fact, with few exceptions, the interface is generally consistent; when you right-click on a track, you’re likely to see the same (allowed) features and options no matter where you are in the service… your library, the NOW PLAYING screen, results from a search or a browse, etc.
    – Napster smartly and politely presents a plethora of confirmation and warning screens, and better yet, it gives you the choice of disabling most of them via option settings. In fact, speaking of option settings, Napster offers more settable preferences than many other competing music services, and that’s much appreciated!

    The thumbs down:
    – Very few keyboard shortcuts
    – Spotty status/info communication in some respects; for instance, there are no icons next to the NOW PLAYING tunes to tell you if those tracks are downloaded or streaming… the only way to find out is to right-click on each individually. Also, in general, mouseovers could be used more frequently and more effectively, both to convey status and other information.
    – The minimized player mode (with, alas, a near-invisible button to trigger it) is a neat idea, but it’s barely functional, with no right-click options available whatsoever (e.g., you can’t download or buy/burn a song, nor is there even any extended mouseover info on the track currently playing. Bummer!)
    – Finding artist and album info can occasionally be quirky or difficult.
    – Checking for a track in someone else’s collection is common-sensically available by right-clicking on a track in a browse/search results screen, but is oddly not possible by right-clicking on the same track in the NOW PLAYING screen. Oops!
    – Status/option info throughout the service isn’t as contextually intelligent as it could be. When you select multiple tracks, it should say “tracks” not “track(s)”, and when you don’t select any non-napster tracks, it shouldn’t present you with a checkbox asking you if you want to delete non-napster tracks. Context, context, context ;-).
    – And there are the little touches that are missing; unlike with MusicMatch, the Napster taskbar entry doesn’t tell you what’s currently playing. And unlike with Rhapsody and (sometimes, though quirkily) with MM, Napster doesn’t support the nifty Microsoft Internet keyboard’s previous/next/play/stop buttons, nor the MS Mice’ forward-back buttons for browsing.

    —

    PRICING AND VALUE
    Here’s the bottom line: At $9.95 a month for the Premium service, Napster is an outstanding value if you spend any appreciable time in front of a Windows XP/2000 computer and can listen to music while you do so. You’ll be amazed and perhaps a bit alarmed at just how many hours you can joyously spend “surfing” music… both listening to current favorites and exploring new tunes and even new genres. You’re likely to even get silly and see how many songs on Napster have the word “chicken” in them (157 at last count) or just how many songs you can find performed by Count Basie, or what the Alternative CCM subgenre is (hint: Jesus would approve)… and so on. Or you might just spend all night skimming through Billboard Chartbusters by decade.

    Indeed, if I might be so bold — even when taking into considerations all my criticisms in my composite review — you might find Napster Premium to be like Tivo: not that interesting or critical until you play with it and are faced with living without it. It’s one of those things you have to experience for yourself (and, in case I haven’t mentioned it earlier, Napster marketing execs are nuts for not offering a free trial!)

    But what if you’re not a geek-tethered-to-a-computer, or you just don’t like listening to music very much via your tinny computer speakers (and don’t feel like forking out dough and time to hook up your computer to a nearby stereo system)? Well, then, Napster Premium may not be such a hot deal for you.

    That’s because, even with a Premium membership, as stated earlier, you’ll still have to pony up 99 cents per track or $9.95 for (most) albums for the privilege of copying tracks to a portable music player or burning them to a CD. And you can do that even without being a Premium member.

    Indeed, this is one area in which I think Napster marketing and accounting wonks seriously need to go back to the boardroom and do some significant rethinking.

    Pricing tracks the same for both Premium (even long-term Premium) members and regular “uncommitted” members is both bad PR and bad business. Even a modest “Buy nine, get your tenth track free!” program or something similar would highlight Napster’s commitment to really offering its Premium members MORE.

    Right now, Premium members get:
    – Unlimited streaming / tethered downloading (either great or not-so-great as detailed above)
    – Access to Napster Radio (a mixed value)
    – Ability to read and post on the Napster Message boards (currently lagging seriously behind free music-related boards on the Web, both in terms of content and usability)

    But Napster could and SHOULD offer so much more for its Premium members, such as:
    – The aforementioned ‘loyalty’ discount on purchased tracks
    – Access to videos, music clips and info before anyone else
    – Special contests (for backstage passes, musician memorabilia, etc.)
    – discounts or additional free tracks with purchase of a Samsung/Napster player (how about “Pay for or commit to a (non-cancelable) two-year Napster membership, and get the Samsung Napster player for $49.95.” Hey, it works for the wireless phone companies, right? 😉
    – Priority customer service
    – Live chats with musicians, DJs, directors, etc.

    After all, let’s face it — folks can still easily get nearly any track they’d find on Napster via :cough: services like KaZaA (and can escape legal wrath pretty easily with just a click or two on particular options). Also, Napster is facing stiff competition from services like iTunes, Rhapsody, and MusicMatch… and no doubt soon from Amazon and Microsoft.

    Napster’s saving grace is in Community and Loyalty. Indeed, due to the stranglehold of the recording industry, Napster can probaly ill-afford to compete on price alone, so it must focus on adding value in ways that are not easy to duplicate by competing services.

    —

    I sincerely hope that Napster will be a success, in addition to, not just instead of the many other current and future services. The arena of online music is one that should and hopefully will exponentially expand in the coming years, and I am optimistic that both artists and consumers will be the winners.

    In the meantime, I’ll once again urge you to download and try out the Napster software for free, and I heartily welcome your feedback below!

  • A comprehensive review of the new Napster 2.0 service – Part TWO

    [ This is the second part of my Napster review. You may read the first part here. ]

    This part of my Napster review will cover the following topics:
    – The Now Playing functionality
    – Library and playlist functionality
    – Community features

    You can try out Napster for yourself and follow along here if you like 🙂

    THE “NOW PLAYING” FUNCTIONALITY – Grade: B-
    The “Now Playing” section of Napster is the area to the left of the main Napster screen which shows the track currently playing, and the other tracks queued (prior to and following the currently playing track).

    On the whole, Napster handles this section of its player better than all other music services. In particular, this is because most operations on Napster add to, but do not mess up the Now Playing window. Whereas on other systems, selecting an album to play or a specific track will often REPLACE the contents of a Now Playing window, on Napster, the newly selected tracks are merely inserted at the point of the currently playing track; after they’re done playing, the user is returned to his “regularly scheduled program” so to speak, and this is as it should be.

    Napster’s Now Playing Window (henceforth referred to as “NPW”) also offers some other goodies as well:
    – Nice right-click functionality, allowing the user to download, buy, or burn any (available) track, or bring up an artist-info page. “Build a radio station” is also available when 3 or more tracks are highlighted (more on radio features later). Lastly, users can add any track or group of tracks in the NPW directly to an existing or new playlist. Very handy!
    – Reordering and deleting tracks is super-easy, too, involving a simple drag-and-drop or hitting of the delete key.

    Of course, the NPW could be improved in several ways:
    – It’s nice to see the album art and the artist, track, and album names below, but alas, these info-bits are not clickable. Ideally, one should be able to click on that artist name, for instance, and have the artist page brought up.
    – Unlike Napster’s “Pressplay” predecessor, there are no visual (icon) indicators next to each track which show whether they are streams or previously-downloaded or purchased files. This is a major bummer :-(.
    – Information is not always very clear, especially when listening to songs by more than one artist, or songs from soundtracks. Often times, you’ll see “Original Broadway Cast” but no musical name. Ack!
    – when the NPW is minimized to a small toolbar (which in itself is a quite cool feature), one cannot right click to add track or download or anything :-(. This is a major oversight, IMHO.

    LIBRARY AND PLAYLIST FUNCTIONALITY – Grade: C
    Napster’s Library and Playlist features are wonderfully intuitive in some manners, but horribly UNintuitive in others, and currently a bit on the buggy side. This feature set really deserves a split-personality A- and D, but to keep things simpler, I’ll simply give it an overall “average” grade.

    What’s to like?
    – You can create an unlimited number of playlists, even with long names! Each playlist is limited to 260 songs, but that’s still pretty generous. And you can have any given track in more than one playlist simultaneously.
    – Your playlists are (optionally) available to all members (see the COMMUNITY section of this review for details).
    – One’s library is viewable in quite a few different manners… by artist, by album, by track, and more.
    – The service thoughtfully breaks up one’s library into alphabetical artist chunks (Artists A-E, etc.) as one’s library gets bigger.
    – You can import your existing WMAs and MP3s, integrating them into your Napster playlists and even CD burns!
    – You can jump to any song or artist within the relevant section of your library just by typing the first few letters. It’s one of those very-obvious but still quite-useful and sometimes overlooked features in programs like this 🙂

    What’s really annoying?
    – Artists are sorted by FIRST name, and there’s no way around this!
    – If your library is larger than 260 tracks (and this will happen, trust me, after about 1 day of use, or after 1 minute of importing your existing tracks), you can’t play a random sampling of your music.
    – You can’t import OGG or WAV files or anything other than MP3s and WMAs.
    – You can’t easily delete an album with a single click; you have to delete all the tracks associated with that album first.
    – Here’s a frustrating doozy: You can’t do any searches for songs within your library!
    – There’s little quantification. You can’t see how many artists your library has, how many tracks you have (napster or imported or total), or even how many tracks you’ve selected for a playlist. This is something that’d be insanely easy to implement (“You’ve selected 147 tracks…”) and very useful/interesting.
    – There’s an absolute lack of any DJ-type features in Napster. You can’t tag songs with mood or sub-genre, or even retag secured Napster tracks at all! You can’t set up a playlist that’s 60 minutes long for burning, either. In this context, WMP, MusicMatch, and iTunes are lightyears ahead of Napster.
    – You can sort by any column in your Library (which is good, but basic), but you cannot filter, and you cannot move, add, or change the order of columns.

    COMMUNITY FEATURES – Grade: C
    You’ll notice I’m giving a lot of Cs here. That’s not to suggest, as you’ve hopefully guessed, that I think Napster isn’t an excellent value, or even a laggard in its field. But rather — at least in its legal version one (“2.0” is a bit of a misnomer) — it’s got a LOT of room to grow and improve.

    Anyway, Community Features is another area in which Napster deserves a schizophrenic grade set of B and D, perhaps, and here’s why…

    The good:
    – It’s wonderfully fun to share playlists with other members, and also peer into their accounts (with their permission, which is ‘on’ by default) to see and stream from their playlists and even their entire Library! I’ve discovered some super-fun music this way.
    – As part of this, it’s also possible to right click on any track and see which other members have this track in THEIR library. This really enhances the discovery process, and like the aspects described above, is just sheer giddy fun seeing how many other folks share a love for an obscure track that you happen to enjoy.
    – Napsters boards already boast a decent set of genre topics. Perhaps more impressively, Napster has seen it fit to allow both harshly critical opinions AND even circumvention info to be expressed on the boards without censorship.
    – Napster offers the ability to send short messages (mails) to other members, and even share playlists with people off of the Napster network (though they need to use Napster to LISTEN to your playlists).

    The ugly:
    – Napster’s boards are running on horribly, disgustingly outdated “Ultimate Bulletin Board” (UBB) software… from 1998-2000! This is really unforgiveable. The boards allow for no editing, no notifications, no post previews, no signatures, pretty much nothing, frankly, other than very very basic posting with a few niceties like boldface type and hyperlinks. What WAS Napster thinking, especially when there are fabulous (and often free!) options abounding in the message forum space (phpBB, InvisionBoard, etc.).
    – Napster’s mail system is similarly unpleasant. New-mail notifications are so subtle as to be practically unnoticeable (one’s small inbox logo glows slightly and changes color). Each mail is limited to 512 characters… barely a full paragraph! There are no read-receipt options, or, frankly, any options other than reply / send / delete available. I don’t expect a full-blown mail system in my music software, but a few additional features and a larger per-message allowance would be nice.
    – Community browsing is also a bit limited, though not as severely. For instance, I’d love to know which other members have tunes by the somewhat-obscure a cappella band “The Bobs,” but I’m only able to look up matches by individual tracks, not by artist, so I have to check each of the Bobs’ tunes individually to see if any of my Napster colleagues have those specific songs. Bummer :|.
    – And while this isn’t a huge problem for me, I’m a bit disappointed that there are no instant messaging or real-time chat capabilities within Napster currently.

    In speaking with a customer service representative, I was told that community features are not a particularly high priority for Napster right now. “We’re really working the hardest on improving the music component, and getting more songs online” he noted, and quite understandably at that. I do think, however, that if Napster wants to compete against Free (e.g., KaZaA), they need to pay more attention to the differentiation aspect of community. After all, people can get songs themselves still pretty easily on free networks nowadays, but many may be willing to pony up money for a better EXPERIENCE… which, IMHO, includes Community.

    —

    Well, I have now decided to end this part of the review here, and continue in the next few days with the following topics:
    – Radio
    – Music information and non-music offerings
    – Overall user interface
    and
    – Pricing

    In the meantime, I think it bears repeating. Go out and try Napster now! I really don’t think you’ll be sorry 🙂

    Edited to add:
    The third and final part of my Napster review is now posted here.

  • Comprehensive review of the new Napster 2.0 service — PART ONE

    [ Napster is free to download, and they offer a free trial on their premium service ]

    I’ve now had a chance to play with the new Napster 2.0 service for quite a few hours, and I thought I’d share with you my detailed thoughts on the service.

    If you’re not already familiar with the basics of the new (legal) Napster, I encourage you to skim my earlier intro-to-Napster-2.0 entry, or even read the surprisingly informative Napster info page.

    I can tell you now, however, that you absolutely, positively…

    …should sign up to try out Napster 2.0 (henceforth, “Napster”). By reserving a username now (even without entering your credit card data!), you’ll be promised free five burns when the system is out of beta.

    Okay, on with my review 😀

    * * *

    MUSIC AVAILABILITY – Grade: B-
    Napster laudably offers over half-a-million tracks. That’s a heck of a lot! Unfortunately, many of them are only available for purchase, not for Premium member streaming. In both various broad and narrow searches, I found easily as much as 20% of the listed tracks were “Buy only.” As with many of Napster’s shortcomings, this is undeniably not the fault of Roxio (Napster’s owner), but rather a challenge associated with negotiating the byzantine layers of artist and publisher song permissions. However, to the end consumer, this doesn’t (and shouldn’t) matter. It’d be like a restaurant noting that several key dishes are unavailable from its menu, or only available at an extra price due to supplier problems. Not our problem.

    Some of the noticeable holes, at least for me, were in music from smaller / independent labels and albums which contain music from a group of artists, such as movie or musical soundtracks.

    It would be both thoughtful and good marketing, therefore, for Napster to have a “Click here to be notified via e-mail when this [artist | album | song] is available.”

    This is not to say, however, that even the most picky listener could possibly ever become bored with Napster. Even if only 300,000 tracks are streamable (and I’m betting that that’s a conservative guess), there is still an unbelievably vast number of tracks, artists, and genres to explore and enjoy. Therefore, I do sometimes have to remind myself to appreciate that the glass is not only more than half full, but also delightfully large. Even when comparing Napster to KaZaA, for instance, it should be fairly noted that often KaZaA did not and still does not always have the most obscure tracks one might wish to procure.

    SOUND QUALITY – Grade: A-
    Indeed, one of the great blessings of Napster as compared to KaZaA is that listeners are guranteed a consistent and quite impressive sound quality. While some purists and/or Microsoft-haters have railed against Napster’s use of secure Windows Media Audio files (which, actually, are problematic from other standpoints), Napster’s 128-rate WMA files sound impressively clean and crisp to my musician ears, and certainly FAR better than the typical 128-rate MP3s most commonly found on peer-to-peer services. Furthermore, I’ve heard not a single skip or recording blemish in any of the hundreds of tracks I’ve listened to.

    PORTABLE AND NON-PORTABLE MUSIC FILE DRM – Grade: B-
    Compared to the simply awful buymusic.com service, Napster’s Digital Rights Management (“DRM”) system is both consistent and generous, allowing use of the files on three different computers for both non-portable and (99 cent) portable downloads. Furthermore, portable downloads may be burned to CD on any unique playlist up to five times, seemingly reasonable for personal use. And of course, once a track has been burned to CD, it can be ripped and handled without any restrictions whatsoever.

    However, even the minimal DRM on the portable (paid-for) downloads is unduly restrictive and frustrating in some ways. When I buy a CD, it’s pretty clear from a legal standpoint that I can’t make 400 copies for my entire neighborhood. But no one blinks an eye if I let a friend borrow it for a week. In contrast, though, with Napster I learned that even after “buying” a track, I was merely procuring a license to use it personally; I could not share the track even with my parents via e-mail.

    Of course, I COULD just burn a CD, then rip the CD, but why make me go through all that effort? Why can’t the recording industry actually trust its users to do the Right Thing? After all, it’s clear that the tracks will end up on KaZaA regardless of any DRM, so why punish those who wish to use their purchased tracks within reason?

    SEARCHING AND BROWSING – Grade: C
    I’ll get the bad out of the way. Searching on Napster is really awful. Let me count the ways:
    – No power search: You can’t search by a combination, say, of artist AND album.
    – Very UNintelligent AI: “Housejacks” turns up 0 hits. “House Jacks” nicely turns up 18 hits. A search for the (just slightly incorrectly spelled) “piazolla” offers Astor Piazzolla tracks far down on the list, after such odd matches as “Brad Paisley” and “Isabelle Granet Pascale.” Uh, yeah, they all have names that start with “P,” but… 😀

    Browsing also suffers from at least a few maddening problems. There’s absolutely no way to easily look for musicals or movie soundtracks other than by name. And if you just want to scroll through available artists or albums alphabetically, well, sorry, you can’t.

    In contrast, iTunes is leaps and bounds ahead of Napster in these areas. iTunes, offering the best of ‘both worlds’ of search, allows users to do “anything” searches easily and quickly, for instance, letting folks type in “queen” and having the service intelligently list artist, album, and track matches in order of descending relevance. But iTunes keeps power users happy, too, offering a screen that lets folks search for narrow artist + track combinations and more.

    Luckily, Napster’s searching and browsing options aren’t all bad, however. Users can quickly access a menu of genres (pop, dance, jazz, classical, etc.), and from there, be presented immediately with a corresponding sub-genre list (e.g., for dance: trance, experimental techno, funky beats, etc.). From there, a list of artists is presented, with their albums listed hierarchically underneath. A single click shows any tracks on an album, and a double click instantly plays an entire album. Now that’s handy!

    * * *

    Okay this is already getting pretty long, so I’m going to stop here for now, and present an additional review section in the next day or three. 🙂

    Still to come… thoughts on Napster’s:
    – Overall user interface
    – The Now Playing functionality
    – Library and playlist functionality
    – Non-music offerings
    – Community features
    – Radio
    and
    – Pricing

    * * *

    Feel free to give feedback on my review so far, and let me know if there are areas you’d like to know more about, or areas in which you disagree with me.

    [ Now read PART TWO 🙂 ]

    [ Napster is free to download, and they offer a free trial on their premium service ]

  • iTunes — a review of the music service and music player

    After checking out the following music services — Rhapsody, MusicNow, PressPlay, MusicMatch and Napster 2.0 — I have now spent some time playing with iTunes.

    As with MusicMatch (“MM”), iTunes must be looked at from the perspective of a player and a service.

    The iTunes Player
    Let’s get the player out of the way first. It dramatically pales in comparison to other players out there, including WinAmp, MM, and even Windows Media Player. It substitutes simplicity for flexibility and power, and that’s not even good for non-power users, IMHO.

    NOTE: I’ve tempered my negative opinion of the player a bit. See the addendum at the end of this review for details.

    Installation
    Pleasantly straightforward and acceptably speedy on a broadband connection. My only gripe is that iTunes forced a QuickTime thingy into my systray (without giving me an initial option to refuse), and this IMHO is simply unacceptable. I was, however, able to disable this by right-clicking the qt icon, selecting PREFERENCES, then unchecking the ‘load at startup’ option.

    Selection
    Seems to be about on par with MM and Rhapsody, and a bit behind Napster overall. However, iTunes did seem to have some newer releases (the “Avenue Q” soundtrack) that were missing on the other services, and, like Napster, it does offer some ‘exclusives.’

    Ease of downloading
    This is an absolute tie. Each of the services offers both one-click and one-click-with-confirm download options. Each service allowed me to download a tune quickly, easily, and for just under a buck.

    Burning, moving to a portable player
    I have not yet tried burning an iTunes track to a CD, but like with the other services, the process appears to be intuitive and painless.

    Unfortunately, unlike the other services, iTunes portable music player support is severely limited. Specifically, iTunes lets you move your music to any player… as long as it’s an iPod. I wonder if this will change over time?

    Searching for specific music
    iTunes wins, and by a mile. First of all, it defaults to “search all” mode… meaning you can type in an artist or a song or an album, so you can just search for whatever comes to mind without having to mess with options. That rocks! Even better yet, iTunes has a power-search mode, which IMHO is so damn obvious and so necessary that it’s completely baffling why no other service has implemented this yet.

    Discovering new music
    In contrast with searching, iTunes falls in dead last when it comes to discovering music. While Napster offers amazingly cool tools to see who else is streaming or has downloaded tracks or albums you like and also lets you check out others’ complete music collections, iTunes offers nothing of the sort.

    iTunes also does not offer any options to pay a flat monthly fee to listen to hundreds of thousands of songs in their entirety.

    One saving “discovery” grace of iTunes is that its 30-second clips start almost the instant you click a link… much better than most of the other services, and even a hair faster than the already-laudable Listen.com service. It’s a shame that any music preview gets canceled if you happen to click on any other iTunes link while it’s playing (e.g., if you check out info on another artist, the preview you’re playing will halt).

    Music sound quality and compatibility
    I can’t really tell the difference, frankly, between the purchased and downloaded clips from MM, Napster, and iTunes, but this may be due to the fact that I don’t have an excellent sound system, and I haven’t downloaded songs that’d really test the range of music out there. I will note that others (rightly or wrongly) have suggested that AAC (which iTunes uses) is a superior format, soundwise, to WMA (which all the other services use).

    Unfortunately, AAC is not nearly as well-supported on Windows. I tried playing my downloaded iTunes clip on the default Windows Media Player 9, and it didn’t work. The newest MM player wouldn’t play it. And my friend’s 2.91 WinAmp choked on it, too (though apparently the next version in that series — 2.92 — will play these files, and I’m betting WinAmp 3.0 can manage the files, too).

    Radio
    iTunes piggy-backs onto some unspecified Internet radio source. There’s no original iTunes programming, and many of the Internet radio sources linked to are of very, very poor sound quality (low bandwidth streaming). Luckily, iTunes does not bill itself as a great place to listen to Internet radio; it’s merely an extra. MM has the best radio service by far, followed by Rhapsody, and then Napster; Napster has the most FLEXIBLE Radio implementation, but it’s hobbled by oft-repeated tunes and less-than-stellar music choices.

    —

    CONCLUSION:
    iTunes for Windows is definitely for you if…
    – you have an iPod or plan on getting one
    – you have a strong preference for AAC over WMA
    – you already know and like the Mac iTunes (the Win version is almost identical, I’ve been told)
    – you want to take advantage of iTunes’ exclusive tracks
    – you often are trying to search for specific, hard-to-find tracks

    Otherwise, I’d recommend that you check out…
    – Rhapsody, for the cleanest and most intuitive interface
    – MusicMatch, for the best radio and most powerful player / music service combo
    – Napster, for the biggest selection, best portable player compatibility, and most robust community features

    Best yet, check out all the services for yourself! Like me, you may find that you wish to keep one or more on hand, depending on your interests and needs on any given day. Overall, I think Napster is the strongest offering at this time, but I actually plan to keep MM and iTunes around, too 🙂

    —

    NOTE:
    I will post a comprehensive Napster review (perhaps broken up into several parts, because it’s already so long!), beginning within the next three days, so make sure to stop back here 🙂

    —

    Related entries:
    – BuyMusic… run away, run away!
    – Mini-review of Listen.com’s Rhapsody
    – Review of MusicMatch’s download service
    – My concept of an ideal music service

    —

    Edited to add:
    The more I play with the iTunes player, the more it grows on me. While I’m still hugely frustrated by the lack of right-click functionality, the drag and drop is much better than most Windows programs, and iTunes also offers considerably more keyboard shortcuts than many other players.

    Additionally, it IS just the first Windows version of the client, so I should cut it some slack.

    So my earlier total-pan of iTunes should be tempered a bit 😉

  • Napster’s (sort of) back — and it’s not half-bad

    As a former paying subscriber of Roxio’s PressPlay (which has transitioned into Napster), I’ve been invited to beta test the new Napster 2.0. To my knowledge, there are no prohibitions on me talking about it at all to others, so here goes a few thoughts of mine 🙂

    First of all, if you’ve used PressPlay, Napster 2.0 (henceforth Napster) will look and feel VERY familiar, albeit with much more polish and a tad more functionality.

    Here are the basics:

    – Right now, it’s for Windows users only 🙁

    – Any Windows users can download the special Napster client software, or use Napster via Windows Media Player 9 (though with a bit less functionality)

    – It costs nothing to download the software, and you can also get unlimited 30 second song previews for free, plus lots of really good artist info.

    – Like with iTunes and Musicmatch, you can pay 99 cents for a ‘portable’ download, and from there, you can burn the track to a CD or send it to a secure-WMA-supporting portable device.

    – If you opt to pay $9.95 per month and become a premium member, then you can stream most (not all) of the tracks available in their entirety at 96kbps WMA or download NON-portable versions in 128kbps secure WMA at no additional charge. These portable downloads can be played within nearly any Windows application that supports secure WMA (e.g., musicmatch, WMP, etc.), but they’ll become unplayable if you quit your $9.95 per month Napster Premium subscription.

    – Unfortunately, there appear to be no (portable) download discounts for existing premium members, though if you sign up now for a free trial (which’ll begin on October 29), you’ll get five free download credits.

    – You can integrate your existing MP3s and WMAs into the Napster application, but you have to do this again anytime you get new MP3s or WMAs that aren’t downloaded from Napster; it doesn’t auto-update :(.

    – You can easily share playlists, songs, and albums with friends, but they must also have the Napster software (or the WMP plugin), and I’m guessing that if they’re not a Premium subscriber, they’ll only get 30 second song previews.

    And some of my thoughts…

    – The NapsterBits on the Napster site are pretty funky and funny. Check them out!

    – The radio stations are both awesome and lame. Awesome in that you can zip forwards and backwards within songs, reorder songs, remove them from your playlist, find out more info about any playing artist, etc. But they’re lame in that they’re not nearly as numerous as many other services’ radio stations, and they repeat tracks within the same session! That’s inexcusable, IMHO.

    If there’s interest, I’m willing to share many of the other notes I’ve taken about my Napster experience so far. In particular, feel free to leave comments here with any specific questions you have about the Napster 2.0 beta.

  • A music solution to make everyone happy

    I touched upon this idea briefly in my earlier note about Musicmatch’s new download service, but I’d like to go into more detail about what I see as the solution towards universal Music Happiness.

    Without further ado, here is Adam’s (hypothetical) Online Music Service, or “AOMS” for short.

    There are three critical aspects of AOMS… Flexible Fidelity and DRM combinations, Open Architecture, and Incented Sharing.

    —

    Flexible Fidelity and DRM combinations
    First of all, while AOMS would be available in a more fancy client (special software) version for Mac, PC, and Unix systems, it’d also work more simply but just as well via standards-compliant Web browsers.

    Every music clip within AOMS would be available as both a stream AND a download in three formats:
    1) LOW FIDELITY: Available in their entirety for everyone, with no restrictions.
    2) HIGH FIDELITY – 30 second preview: No restrictions.
    3) HIGH FIDELITY – full:
    3a) Available free with Loose DRM (iTunes-style) on an unlimited basis for AOMS Premium Subscribers (who pay $20-$25 per month, or are part of a Premium Affinity Group, such as a university or ISP that’s paying a block fee to AOMS).
    3b) Available with Loose DRM for 75 cents per download to non-subscribers.
    3c) Available free in Shared (stricter) DRM format. This DRM implementation would limit song files with expiration dates and/or maximum play times (e.g., 15 days or 10 plays)

    These different fidelity and DRM levels are key to the viral success of AOMS. Now-industry-standard 30-second song samples are often insufficient foundations for purchasing decisions, whereas full-length low fidelity clips are likely to both increase awareness of and interest in new music (expanding music demand) and increase the frequency of purchases. Shared (stricter) DRM files would be the foundation of successful Incented Sharing (discussed later)

    —

    Open Architecture
    Just as Amazon.com makes its entire catalog available for free via XML feeds today, AOMS would make information on every clip available to Webmasters as well. Via automated feeds, gospel aficianados could highlight a list of tunes for their gospel Web sites, enabling their visitors to stream or download clips according to the visitors’ AOMS membership status. That is, AOMS Premium members, once authenticated, would be able to download or stream a hi-fi copy of any listed and linked gospel tune on the site straight from their browser. In contrast, those without Premium memberships would be able to either stream or download a lo-fi clip or 30-second hi-fi clip, or download a Shared DRM full-length clip.

    The beauty of the open architecture of this system is that it would empower Webmasters to extend the reach, scope, and sophistication of the AOMS catalog via creative categorizing and selection. For instance, AOMS may not have a separate specified category for female collegiate a cappella music, but an ardent fan of this sub-genre could create his or her own AOMS-based list, catering to a narrow but still-valuable demographic. Similarly, AOMS may not have detailed info on every artist, album, or track, but enthusiastic fans could and undoubtedly would author this, using the freely available AOMS clips as a springboard and reference.

    —

    Incented Sharing
    As suggested above, everyone would not only have the opportunity to be a critic and a DJ of sorts, but indeed, also a salesperson, and a profitable one at that. With 5 cents of every 75 cent sale going to the referrer of the sale, Webmasters — in a fashion similar to the Amazon.com model — would be encouraged to share and recommend music via both artistic and economic incentives.

    Of perhaps even greater interest to the Recording Industry, droves of music lovers and mercenaries alike would certainly flood the peer-to-peer services with Shared DRM tracks, knowing that they’d reap 5 cents for every time someone downloaded their copy and purchased a Loose DRM version for 75 cents. Not only would Premium subscribers be eligible to unlimitedly share their copies (which would become Shared DRM files outside the subscribers’ network of three included computers), but so, too, would those who paid 75 cents for each of their tunes.

    Not only would gobs of folks be interested in uploading full-length protected songs to Web sites and P2P services, but many Web surfers and P2P users would be equally interested in downloading them. They’d know that they’d be getting files of very high sound quality and accurate tagging, in contrast with the oft-sloppily-recorded, mislabeled, and 128-or-lower bit rate files typically available online.

    —

    For most of this article, I’ve highlighted how AOMS would serve the purposes of both the Recording Industry and general consumers. However, the value of AOMS goes far beyond that…

    A boon to lesser-known bands and musicians in general
    With free lo-fi clips and Shared DRM clips freely available to all users on all platforms, artists of all means would be able to easily facilitate and encourage the sharing of their music. With the increasing levels of broadband penetration, artists could even e-mail Shared DRM clips to opt-in subscribers or friends.

    A boon to music culture in general
    How often have enthusiasts of more ecclectic music wanted to easily share their awesome finds with others, sadly finding that the only way of doing so was to run afoul of the law? Quite often, I’d say! For instance, I paid for and downloaded the Overture from an wonderful musical, and I wanted to share it with a friend in Germany who hadn’t even heard of the musical before. Thinking that I would have the technical, if not strictly-legal authority to do so by purchasing the track with PressPlay, I was shocked and angry when my friend was unable to listen to the track. Bullied and beaten after trying to do the right thing, I simply went on KaZaA, downloaded the (unfettered) equivalent track and forwarded her this file.

    In our society… when we have a wonderful poem we want to share with a friend, we can easily scan or type it in or even read it to them. When there’s a funny or poignant picture we find, we can mail a pointer to it or even the file itself. But when we want to share the love of music — even when this passion is quite likely to lead to additional sales — we are currently unable to easily and legally do so, because we are all treated as thieves.

    This is horribly wrong. It’s wrong for musicians, it’s wrong for consumers, and it’s wrong for society. Music deserves to be Free… not as in wholly free of charge, but rather, unfettered from its existing onerous boundaries and restrictions. With greater fluidity and access, everyone will benefit.

    —

    I greatly welcome your feedback on my hypothetical service, both with regards to envisioned specifics and broader goals.

    Please take a moment to contribute to the discussion here (registration recommended but definitely not required!)

  • Musicmatch Downloads – An Early review

    I just had the pleasure of trying out Musicmatch’s new Music Download service, and though I eventually plan to more neatly organize my thoughts about this and other online music services like PressPlay and Rhapsody, I thought some folks might be interested in my ‘rough review’ and notes at this stage in the game.

    About my system that I used for trying out Musicmatch’s new service
    I have a Dell 2.4ghz Pentium system with one gb of RAM, a 200gb hard drive (with plenty of free space), a 52x CDRW drive and a CD/DVD drive, running Win XP Home SP1.

    Updating to the new Musicmatch (“MM”) 8.1 version
    I already had MM+ (paid version) version 7.5 on my site, and apparently the software had automatically downloaded the 8.0 version a while back. So when I ran the MM program this afternoon, it asked me if I wanted to update my software. I clicked on ‘yes,’ and within about 2 minutes, I had version 8.0. However, I figured I needed the most recent 8.1 version to effectively use the new download service, so I trudged over to the MM Web site to fully update my MM software. That was annoying. I then had to reboot my system, which didn’t make me any happier. But I think that this is more of a reflection on Windows’ eccentricities than any fault of MM’s.

    Registering my account with the Download service
    I already had an account with MM (for their paid radio service), but I was asked to reconfirm my billing info and retype in my credit card number and expiration date. This was straightforward and went pretty quickly; I was able to do all this from within the MM application (no separate browser windows popped up). Note that my card was NOT billed, since the MM download service charges per song downloaded (a la carte), with no monthly fees, just like iTunes.

    Searching for tunes by artist, title, etc.
    Like all the other current online music services, MM has a single search box where you type in a query, and a small pulldown menu in which you indicate “Artist, Album, or Track.” IMHO, this is ridiculously limiting. Where’s the “powersearch” option?! Why can’t I search for “Time Out” by Count Basie? How come I can’t find all Duran Duran hits from 1986? If MM and the other services want to win the loyalty of true music lovers, they shouldn’t treat us like such simple-minded folks. Defaulting to a simple search is reasonable and appropriate, but give us some more options, please!

    It’s especially frustrating when the search engine isn’t very smart. Searching for “Bobs” fails to bring up ANY songs of “The Bobs.” And in fact, when a Bobs song is saved to one’s library, it’s saved under “The…” Ack 😐

    Of equal annoyance, typing in an unambiguous name for an artist, such as “Sting,” sometimes yields either multiple entries (Sting, Sting (138), and Sting (composer)) and other times results in a useless list of one item which you still must click on, instead of just bringing up the actual artist page.

    There are two redeeming aspects of MM’s search implementation. First, it does occasionally offer helpful suggestions when one’s search term is unclear or is correlating with one or more artists/titles/etc. Also, MM thoughtfully provides info — often including short bios, discographies, and so on — even for artists it has no available downloads for. Though Rhapsody is similarly sharp on this point, PressPlay, in contrast, simply pretends the artist or album doesn’t exist.

    Browsing for tunes
    Unfortunately MM doesn’t offer a very nice experience for generally browsing tunes, either. Some genres — like Soundtracks — are entirely missing. And with genre-based searching in general, MM offers a sample artist on the front page, but no real info or description on the genre. MM deserves at least some credit for offering expanded sub-genres, however. Whereas other services may have two or three classical divisions, MM offers six. However, MM doesn’t do such a great job explaining some of its sub-genres. CCM? I’m guessing Christian Contemporary Music, but who knows! In the area of informing users, Rhapsody is by far the best of all the major services.

    Also, it’s a shame that MM fails to offer any ability to browse by artist or album alphabetically :(. Sometimes one can catch the most serendipitous finds via this sort of browsing, instead of just focused searches.

    On the flip side, MM does offer some interesting browsing twists. Unique amongst all the services, MM lets you browse for songs by their recording date, so you can, for instance, see top songs from 1963, or any year between 1960 and 2002. Additionally, while outside the scope of this blog entry, MM’s radio offerings are actually quite good and one can select an entire station just of 19xx year music! I had fun selecting music from my high school graduation year, and no, I’m not going to specify what year that was 😉

    MM does offer the ability to see top artists, tracks, and albums, but its offering here is anemic compared to PressPlay’s detailed Billboard chart features, which let users check out the most popular songs and artists by specific genre according to Billboard.

    The overall user interface
    It’s not bad. Most artist, track, and album names are hyperlinked (although unwisely not underlined), letting you get more details quickly. Sort order is typically editable with just a click, and that’s nice. The entire app is pleasantly resizeable, as are its individual parts. And when the app is minimized, you can still see any the track and album name of any track playing specified in the taskbar, and my MS keyboard’s Next and Previous track buttons work (unlike with PressPlay). Unfortunately, drag-and-drop functionality is quite limited; for instance, I tried to drag the listing of a song currently playing to my Favorites section, and nothing happened. That’s a shame. In fact, I could find no easy and consistent way to bookmark my favorite artists, albums, or tunes 🙁

    Library integration
    This is a key selling point of MM, and one way in which it vaults FAR ahead of all the other online music services. When you download a track, it is immediately integrated into your MM library, complete with name, track time, and all other relevant info. You can drag and drop a combination of your previously-existing MP3s along with your new MM Download tracks to the MM burner and burn a CD seamlessly (more on that later). You don’t realize how valuable this integration is until you experience it firsthand.

    Track listings
    This is a bit frustrating. First of all, sometimes the track listings include the track running times, sometimes they don’t. Also, there are separate listings for downloadable tracks and each artist’s discography. It would have been much nicer to simply have these two integrated, so you could check out an artist’s discography, noting which tracks had download symbols next to them. Also, MM’s notation of “Popular” tracks is a bit confusing. What is the measurement here? Popularity offline? Popularity amongst MM users? And if the latter, based upon sampling or downloads or…?

    Sampling music
    MM offers the now-industry-standard 30 second song samples, and at 64kbps WMA. The sound quality is extremely good, but the buffering takes longer than I’d like… typically 4-5 seconds even on my hefty system with broadband. I know that Microsoft brags that WMP9 (Windows Media Player 9) offers instantaneous playback with no buffering, so I’m wondering why that’s not implemented here.

    Music pricing
    All individual tracks that I saw were 99 cents, and though 99% of the albums were priced at $9.99, I did see a couple priced at $11.99. Overall, though, I was impressed that even larger albums (like “Urinetown,” at 18 tracks) were still typically priced at $9.99.

    Downloading tunes
    This is where MM truly shines… and provides an experience worthy of iTunes comparison. After registering once, downloading either an individual track or an album requires a mere two clicks: Buy, then Confirm. The track is added to your download queue and starts downloading immediately if there are no other tracks being already downloaded. Once it’s downloaded, it starts playing, and it’s added to your library. Easy and hassle-free! Better yet, the sound quality of the downloaded tracks is simply divine; 160 VBR (variable bitrate) WMA (Windows Media Audio). This consistent high-end quality is better than any other download service I’ve ever experienced, legal or otherwise (most MP3s on KaZaA are 128).

    DRM (Digital Rights Management)
    The DRM isn’t terribly onerous, though I’d certainly like to see the labels wise up and loosen DRM dramatically or even entirely (yes, I’m serious). But that’s fodder for another entry ;-). Anyway, the MM DRM is at least consistent (unlike the horrid BuyMusic service), allowing you to listen to any downloaded track on up to three computers, and burn it to a CD an unlimited number of times (albeit only 10 times in any single playlist set). Sending downloads to secure portable devices is also supported, though it’s important to note that not all portable music players support the secure WMA format yet.

    Regrettably, however, the “three computers” allowance is a bit misleading. As a test, I took a song I downloaded with MM and copied it to a friend’s computer. I was unable to play it unless I installed MM (even though the track is in Windows Media format and should be playable by WMP). And I’m guessing that even if I had downloaded and installed MM, the track still wouldn’t have played unless I registered the copy of MM on that computer in my name. That’s not very helpful if, say, a college student wants to listen to a track on his college computer and at his parents’ house over Christmas break. Frankly, I think “three computers” should mean any three computers, but, yeah, the recording industry still has a Stupid Stick up their posterior. One day they’ll learn that sharing can lead to smart viral marketing; for instance, allowing any user to share any legal download with an unlimited number of friends, who can then play that track ten times over thirty days for free, and unlock it for 99 cents. Free publicity from passionate music listeners. But no, the recording industry prefers to still use dumbly-crippling DRM, preventing enthusiastic souls from sharing ANYTHING with other people. Idiots . But okay, okay, I digress again, sorry 😉

    Burning downloaded tracks to CD
    I have to admit that this was a bit problematic for me. Even after three separate burning attempts (including once after a full reboot), I had repeatedly mixed results each time as follows:
    – Playing the CD back on my CD burner results in the first ten seconds of the track being horribly garbled, and the rest of the song being fine.
    – The CD sounds flawless in my computer’s DVD player
    – When popping the CD in my roommate’s CD-boombox, the first half-second of the song is cut off, but the rest sounds perfect.

    This is using relatively new 700mb hi-speed Sony CDRs and my 52x burner set to 4x via MM. In fact, one can ONLY burn MM tracks on MM, not on Nero or Windows Media Player as I found out, to my frustration. But I guess that’s not really so much of a problem, since you have to have the MM player anyway to even use the service, so it makes sense to burn tracks in the integrated player.

    Unsurprisingly (but to the recording industry, perhaps ominously), I was easily able to insert the newly burned CD and rip a high quality MP3 or WMA file off of it… with the new file being completely DRM-free. In other words, if I wanted to be a twit, I could simply pay for and download an entire album off of MM and burn it to CD, then rip it and upload the unrestricted (but nicely labeled) tracks to KaZaA. This is why, briefly touching back upon one of my earlier arguments, that it’d make a lot more sense for MM and the recording industry to support much more friendly DRM implementations at the get-go, allowing people to share downloaded tracks with friends or even posting them to p2p services… with those tracks simply timing out after a while. Actually, I am definitely going to expand upon this in a later entry 🙂

    Availability of music
    With regards to the scope of popular music, I’ve found MM to be about on par with Rhapsody and PressPlay, though each has its own significant gaps. Unfortunately, it appears as though MM currently offers ZERO classical downloads, since searches on popular classical artists like Bach, Telemann, and Monteverdi turned up no actual downloadable tracks :-(. Adding insult to injury, on lists featuring the various composers, MM suggests that it has dozens of downloads available, and it’s only after you click on a composer name that you realize it’s all a mirage, at least classically speaking. [NOTE: See 10/10/03 edit at the bottom of this note]

    For folks who aren’t primarily classical aficianados, though, MM certainly offers quite enough tunes to fill up a lot of iPods, and it IS indeed fun checking out the depth and breadth of available artists and songs.

    Ay caramba!
    Though only available in the U.S. right now (due to licensing restrictions), polyglots and similarly cultured souls will be displeased to see MM’s butchering of foreign language characters, such as the ? in se?orita. MM omits the special diacritical marks in some cases, or substitutes weird-looking characters or character combinations in other cases.

    In summary
    Despite some frustrating restrictions (imposed by the recording industry) and occasional UI flakiness, Musicmatch shines where it really counts: enabling the masses to download tunes from a large library quickly and affordably. Since the software is free and registering an account is also free and pretty painless, I highly recommend that every PC user (at least those with broadband) give MM a try.

    Useful and interesting URLs
    – Musicmatch: http://www.musicmatch.com/
    – * This entry: http://www.bladam.com/archives/0309292010.htm
    – MM Discussion (no registration required): http://www.smilezone.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=319
    – The ideal music service – http://www.bladam.com/archives/0309300101.htm
    – RIAA Amnesty — A Parody: http://www.riaaAmnesty.com/
    – My earlier brief look at Listen.com’s Rhapsody: http://www.bladam.com/archives/0302141717.htm
    – My rant about the horrid buymusic.com service: http://www.bladam.com/archives/0307251009.htm

    —

    * Please do share this article with friends, but kindly offer the URL above (http://www.bladam.com/archives/0309292010.htm) rather than cutting and pasting large sections of my commentary. I want to make sure that any corrections or other updates I add here are not missed by those interested in this area! Thanks for your consideration :-).

    —

    EDITED TO ADD:

    10/10/03 – Mick Orlowski noted in the Conversation Corner the following:

    Just a note on Classical in MM… Musicmatch has a very powerful Classical component of the streaming “MX” service. If you were seing track totals after composer names, it is likely you were seeing how many works were available in their Artist on Demand feature. No you can’t download Bach… but you can listen to a Bach-only CD-quality station on demand… or create a station that plays only your 5 favorite composers. MM definitely does not ignore classical… it’s just not downloadable yet.

    Thanks for the info, Mick!

  • Amnesty FOR the RIAA

    After unveiling a much ballyhooed “Clean Slate” amnesty program, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) hasn’t been quick to defend itself.

    However, even large, monopolistic, and evil entities deserve a chance to reform, to start over. That’s why I’m offering a special “Clean Plate Amnesty Program” for the RIAA. I hope the RIAA will take me up on my generous offer, and I humbly invite you to share your comments and suggestions on that site as well 🙂