An Open Notebook
What’s interesting about the new premium version of Pandora version is that it’s only $3 a month. That price is so low that they seem to be going for scale rather than profitability.
But is there really that much elasticity to the price? Are there really a lot of people willing to pay $3 but not $5?
Music Data Exchange Format (MDEF):
The Music Data Exchange Format (MDEF) is a free, open and portable XML based format being developed by Band Metrics for the purpose of sharing data relative to musicians and bands, because presently, there does not exist such a format. This music data exchanged can range from the number of song plays a band has on MySpace to the number of fans they have on Imeem, or the number of comments they have on PureVolume, or the number of subscribers they have to their YouTube Channel.
Yeah, this does need to exist.
The RDFolics have Music Ontology. The Microformatestants have hAudio and hCard. But this is a contribution from the perspective of music coders with running code — where angle brackets are a tool rather than apostasy — and that POV has been underrepresented.
Continuous play is a tough one when embedding into another site. Other than pop-out, there really isn’t a good solution.
For music sites, it makes sense to use AJAX to not do a page refresh, but then you are just fighting the way browsers are meant to work and Google. Of course it can be done, but it is a lot of extra work to make sure the back button works on all browsers and make sure your content is still indexable and to make sure your url structure doesn’t get completely ridiculous for people passing around links.
It looks like HTML5 will solve some of the back button issues. Google is committed to indexing Flash but I haven’t heard anything about AJAX.
Making sure your content is indexable is an interesting issue to bring up. In-page navigation is hell on SEO, and for good reason: when a site uses Ajax to do in-page navigation it conceals its own structure from spiders.
The back button isn’t as hard to deal with. A standard library like Really Simple History should be able to handle the mess, though I realize that this is hand-waving…
BTW, Streampad has pushed the state of the art so far past Yahoo Media Player that I’m tempted to change players in my blog here. I’d miss a couple features, though:
Seeing Yahoo Media Player get stale bums me out, but it was inevitable. A bittersweet thing about engineering is that all products are superceded by newer and better ones. If you succeed then the products that follow will build on yours, and that’s the most you can ever hope for. The only lasting accomplishment is to insert ideas into the memepool.
On the topic of 100% in-page navigation for music sites, Steve Gravell surveyed the territory.
The methodology behind playing music on web pages changes depending on your needs and the design of the site, but what is pretty much a requirement is a Flash player somewhere on the site that does the actual playing part. The problem then becomes where to put it, because wherever you do put it, someone’s hopefully going to be navigating away from there to another page on the same site causing the swf to be destroyed and then reloaded on the new page leading to an interruption in playback.
The Hype Machine and Streampad implementations are the slickest for my money.
Something subtle and great about Streampad is that they hit the Tumblr API to play tracks on Tumblr, meaning that they take advantage of what Javascript can really do.
With Yahoo Media Player aka “goose” we handled the need for continous playback we did a button to pop out a player window. It was something people asked for a lot, or at least something that came up in conversation a lot. But I don’t think people really use it much.
An original feature of our pop-out window is that it’s not in kiosk mode: it has menu bars and a URL line, and it’s bookmarkable like any web page. I know it’s ugly and weird looking, but the reason is that the pop-out page has imporant features that comparable software doesn’t.
This link is to the pop-out/continuous-play page for a song. This link is the source from which I popped out that page.
But the lesson is that a pop-out player is just a familiar stimulus to help users feel comfortable, and it doesn’t solve any real user problems. Steve documents this way of doing things under the header Player in a popup
:
We’re saving layout space and we’ve got continuous playback, you’d think that popup’s tick all the boxes, but the fact that it’s a popup just causes me to cringe. Granted they do add 1 feature that all other methods don’t have, that being the ability for the visitor to actually leave our site entirely and still have that playback going. But the downside of that is we’re more than likely going to have to put a lot of meta-data in that popup’s layout as well, making it into a mini-site mashup of crap that ends up just getting bigger and bigger. Worse than that is that we will probably have some ad requirements too that are going to have to be shoved into that popup. I don’t want to write about popups any longer.
The impetus to change you whole site allow seamless playing as the user clicks around is that popping out a window is a crappy user experience. Having separate but related windows on the same site makes no sense.
I hope this stream of thought writing style is readable. I wanted to comment on Steve’s doc, but I didn’t have much time for writing, and I figured if I let it go I might not come back to it.
Interview with founders of Pause netlabel:
E: I see Pause as a band / demoscene group or whatever you’d like to call it, as much as I see it as a label. I’m not sure about other labels, but we’re just a small group of musicians/friends who decided to create one collective outlet for our creativity. I guess there’s no point in pinpointing exactly what it is. … The idea was that we’d get more exposure if we made one website instead of as individuals.
What strikes me is how fluid the idea of a label is. Is it a scene, like the Elephant 6 collective of bands? Is it a band? Is it a zine?
To pick a nit, these guys only host music as “albums” in zip format, as collections of files, and never host individual MP3s. You can’t sample easily and you can’t stream without rehosting. You have to download 40-50 MB, then unpack the file, then point your player at the directory before you can hear even the first note. They have an embedded Flash player, but then there’s nothing to click through to. It’s a non starter for most potential listeners, who would be limited enough without this problem.
In the time it took me to write this, I didn’t hear a sound until I was almost completely done. I did find some cool stuff that I’d like to recommend, but I can’t make a usable link without spending time digging up the structure of their web site.
If the packaging was more sophisticated, how much bigger would the audience be? Or: *when* the packaging develops into something great, as I think it probably will, how will it affect the listenership?
One last thing that I notice is how cool a bunch of dudes these people feel like. I love the esthetic, the art, and people. You’d have a good time checking this out at a bar or gallery. You wouldn’t even think in those terms for a classic record label like EMI or Warner.
I was browsing Masterbeat and noticed that all navigation is in-page, using either Flash or Ajax. There is only one page for the entire site.
The reason as always with music sites is to allow the user to browse without interrupting playback. Not interrupting the music is such a pressing need that I can imagine virtually all music-oriented sites moving to this development paradigm.
Other music sites doing it: Hype Machine, Bandzoogle, Critical Metrics.
Masterbeat bridges the electronic music gap:
Masterbeat's goals are noble: they hope to bridge the gap between the underground and mainstream dance music audiences by offering accessible electronic music that a large audience can enjoy. Their hope is that if enough mainstream music listeners are introduced to good dance music via Masterbeat's techno remixes of their favorite artists, perhaps they can be brought into the “fold” and learn to get down with the more esoteric electronica music that deserves widespread support. Electronica purists might balk at the prospect of an influx of fans, but we think it can only be good for the music.
(RT @artistshouse)
Jay Fienberg on what to do about it:
It is, I think, a similar formula as what needs to apply to other “homegrown” industries. For example, organic health foods, green building materials, hand-made goods (e.g., Etsy). All of those areas have been undermined and/or currently are undermined by regulations designed around past industries.
Altogether, it’s interesting to recognize that the music business is heavily regulated through copyright laws, technology laws like the DMCA, the sanctioning of performance royalty organizations and FCC regulations on broadcasters.
Assume that the internet has music in a mess. What can be done about it?
Step one: identify musicians who are finding ways to thrive in the new conditions.
For example, DJs make recordings to promote their live performances. They earn a living on performances, not recordings, and so are usually at ease with gratis distribution and redistribution of their recordings.
Another example is Jonathan Coulton, who says:
I’m an artist who’s making a very good living, and maybe this will surprise people, but the largest chunk of my income is from selling mp3s (about 40%). Everything is CC licensed and a lot of it is freely available, but people still choose to buy music from me. Touring would be a bigger part of it but I keep the schedule light to spend more time with my family.
In my experience the benefits of the new landscape easily offset whatever devaluation trend is happening, at least in terms of independent artists. I compete with free and come out ahead, and I can’t imagine I’m the only one seeing this kind of result.
Step two: help these musicians grow until gains in their businesses offset losses for other musicians. For example, identify legislation which benefits singing stars at the expense of DJs and nix it.
Step three: there is no step three.
Anyway, if the internet really does have music in a mess then this process is already happening naturally.
Music like water is a flying car.
While I was writing this I was listening to a good song on Jonathan Coulton’s web site: Re: Your Brains (mp3)
With Shelf Space Receding, EMI Eyes Grocery Stores
EMI has announced a couple ventures that will get their artists into your neighborhood grocery and convenient stores, places where few musicians have set up shop before.
No, we’re not looking at more artist-branded Fritos in the snack aisle or small music selections at the check-out as labels have done in the U.K.; EMI is integrating its artists into branded impulse buys like pre-paid debit cards and lotto tickets.
…
Who knows how much these partnerships will really be worth to EMI, but they’re notable attempts to find revenue streams that are independent of traditional retail spaces, and they seem like relatively straightforward ways to maximize assets that EMI has already invested in. And, of course, they’re yet more examples of recorded music as a new “value-added” item for other, more profitable products.