This blog entry is work in progress on explaining Playdar. It’s not yet clear enough to be turned into an elevator pitch. In particular the third point needs to be broken out into separate points about convenience and quality.
Playdar is special because it is scalable, cheap, and uncoupled.
It is scalable because it is capable of supporting the entire internet.
No single music service can say the same, no matter how big. Every service has its own strengths and weaknesses, with the strengths of one counterbalancing the weaknesses of another.
Spotify is only in Europe, Rhapsody is only in the US. YouTube is the only place for a large pool of amateur content. File sharing networks are the only source for orphaned works that are out of print but still in copyright. Web search is the only way to locate recordings hosted solely by the creators on their own servers. Chinese pop is readily available in businesses that cater to Chinese customers, spanish-language pop is readily available from Latin American companies, and so on for every cultural group on earth, but no business serves all of these customers.
The internet is about federation, not balkanization. Playdar federates. It is a single API for many different sources of content.
It is cheap for web sites because they don’t owe royalties.
Webcasting and on-demand streams cost a lot of money. Web providers have a very hard time staying in business. Playing MP3s in iTunes or Winamp doesn’t cost anything. These companies have no trouble staying in business. Playdar allows web apps to use the same technique as software on your PC. This saves money.
Web sites can do music cheaply by ignoring the risk of lawsuit and hosting MP3s for themselves, but if they have bad luck it will cost them even more than webcasting or on-demand streams.
Playdar doesn’t evade payment and licensing, though! It reuses sources that are already paid for, which enhances their value. Playdar makes it possible for a user who buys an MP3 from Amazon to reuse their purchase on Pandora.
It uncouples MP3 sources from discovery and management.
With Playdar getting MP3s and other music media is distinct from using them, so that you use one tool for getting and another for playing or organizing.
This lets you use the best tool for the job. You should be able to have the best music player and the best source of music even if they aren’t from the same vendor.
It also makes it more convenient to share songs, because people can use the same link even if they have different ways of getting music.
In the end, the consumer pitch for this is going to have to be dead simple stupid (which you know)..
1) Download it
2) Connect to your favorite streaming service (optional)
3) Adjust your mix (between what you already own and new songs)
4) Listen anywhere
5) Cross-mix with friends
-Bruce
No doubt!
But the consumer pitch is a different thing. For consumers you need to lead with benefits that are very concrete. Being able to do that is still 6-12 months away.
It always blows my mind that consumers are so literal about software. It’s really hard for computer people to see things in that way.
So, assuming that what I have here is for tech bloggers, journalists, and computer professionals, do you think that all the points are accurate, that nothing important is missing, and that the language is effective? Suggestions welcome.
I even think it even has to be dumbed down for tech bloggers, journalists, and computer professionals.. You and I traffic in the intersection of music and tech.. Not sure of the top-bullets either? Try these variations:
It’s scalable because it’s leveraging the peer-serving capabilities of every computer that uses it.
It helps music-serving sites to dramatically reduce costs (see first bullet).
Not sure the third bullet is a proposition that matters? Perhaps it needs to be said differently..
I like pitching a new, sexy concepts that are easy to visualize in a logo.. It’s the first product that enables ‘cross-streaming’.. It’s a cross-streaming application that enables users to cross-mix streams of music they own with new streams of music from any source on earth…
This product (it seems to me) would be cooler than it already is if you added acoustic recommendation to it. You could crunch the songs on the client side and then send the ‘seeds’ to the server for recommendations.. Look up Queen Mary’s SoundBite technology.
Forget the pitch, do the screencast.
Having had to download, build, etc the version of Playdar to even see what it was, I could have sidestepped all of that by watching it on youtube.
Hey Daniel, yeah, the install is way too gnarly right now. It took me a ridiculously long time to get the Erlang version up and running.