Technologizer

Over at All Things Digital, Peter Kafka is saying that Amazon.com’s DRM-free MP3 download store is a “miserable failure” as an iTunes Store rival at the end of its first year of operation. Judged in terms of market share, dollars, and cents, it’s hard to argue that it’s anything else: Kafka says that Amazon appears to have around seven or eight percent of the music download business, compared to Apple’s seventy-plus. If it’s possible to put a serious dent in Apple’s supremacy, Amazon hasn’t figured out how to do it…and neither have other DRM-free music merchants such as eMusic, Rhapsody, Wal-Mart, and Lala. iTunes is to digital music what Windows was for years to operating systems: A player so utterly dominant that it’s hard to figure out a scenario in which its share shrinks, let alone make it happen.

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Way back in February of 2006, I wrote about an early version of Songbird, a music-playing app that aspired to be an open-source rival to iTunes. I was guardedly positive. It took way longer than I would have guessed, but the Songbird folks finally unveiled an official version 1.0 of the application today. This final release bears surprisingly little resemblance to that first version. And while I’m still digging into it, I’m impressed.

Songbird’s interface still has some iTunes-like aspects, but it’s no longer the iTunes doppelganger that it seemed to be shaping up to be when I first looked at it. For one thing, it’s both a music player and a full-blown, Mozilla-based, tabbed browser–you can be listening to music in one tab and browsing the Web in another. A feature called mashTape automatically shows info, photos, and videos relating to the musicians whose stuff you listen to; it can also find local concerts by performers in your library. (I just discovered that Freda Payne will be here next April–maybe I’ll go see her.) It’s also got an add-in architecture so folks can extend its capabilities; several add-ons are already available.

In my 2006 post, I fretted about the fact that so much digital music was locked up with DRM that Songbird might not be able to deal with. Turns out I didn’t need to worry so much. For one thing, there’s far more DRM-free stuff out there today, thanks to no-DRM music stores from Amazon, Rhapsody, Lala, and others, as well as the iTunes Plus songs from Apple’s store. For another, Songbird can play songs protected with Apple’s FairPlay–something which I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t know a non-Apple music player could do. (I think this feature only works on Macs, though.)

Songbird also imports iTunes libraries automatically. (It went reasonably well in my test, although Songbird imported videos which it then couldn’t play–and now it keeps telling me that it doesn’t know what to do with them.) It can also connect to iPods, but not, apparently, to iPhones as of yet.

This application isn’t perfect, but it’s inventive, fast, and surprisingly polished in most respects. It’s obvious that the Songbird folks have been busy over the past two years and nine months. If you love music and/or interesting free software, it’s very much worth checking out.

This is kind of clever: A bunch of music merchants in the UK have created a logo to tout the virtues of music in MP3 format:

MP3 is so pervasive that it’s easy to take it for granted–this campaign intends to promote it in the same way that big companies promote their proprietary formats, and therefore get consumers thinking about it and asking for it.

It’s a worthy experiment, and it got me thinking: What if other venerable file formats that are everywhere got their own promotional campaigns and logos? Here, I’ll get the ball rolling…

The iPhone is many things, and holds the promise of becoming even more of them. And one of its emerging applications is to serve as the world’s ultimate programmable remote control–one with an infinitely customizable screen, a cool touch interface, and a direct connection to the Internet. I think the day may come when using iPhones and iPhone-like phones as remotes is every much a core purpose of these gizmos as making phone calls on them.

Case in point: Today, Sonos, manufacturer of the cool multi-room wireless music system, has released an application that lets you control its players from an iPhone or iPod Touch. It replicates the functionality of the company’s $400 remote control for free, and did so very well in a quick demo I got from the Sonos folks–you can wander around your house and use the iPhone to select the music that plays on Sonos’s little streaming music boxes. More on it after I’ve had a chance to try it for myself….

On Monday evening, when Harry published a review of the newest incarnation of the Lala music service, I opened a new Firefox tab and headed there to see if his praise was justified. After over 72 hours of using Lala, I can say that I’ve found the music store I have been looking for since the Internet began.

Lala looks like it’ll meet success just the way it is. But it still lacks some features that could take it from a valuable Web 2.0 newcomer to a household name in digital music distribution–one that could be just as powerful and popular as Pandora or Last.FM. It is in that spirit that I offer these ideas for an even better Lala.

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For a couple of months now, I’ve been using a music service that’s been in a quiet (but open) beta period. It’s been kind of amazing. That service is the all-new version of Lala, and it’s officially throwing its doors open to the public today.

Among other things, Lala is:

–a service that sells MP3s (DRM-free, natch) for 89 cents apiece and streaming-only versions of songs (“Web songs”) for a dime (which can be applied later to the purchase of an MP3). Entire streaming “Web albums” are typically eighty cents. And most downloadable MP3 albums are aggressively priced–ones that go for $9.99 on iTunes are typically $7.49 on Lala, less than even the price-slashing Amazon.com download store charges. (Any download you buy includes a streaming version at no extra cost.)

–a service that will let you listen to scads of new music without paying even that one thin dime per streaming track, since you can stream any song that Lala has–and it has millions, from the four major labels and 170,000 independents–for free the first time you listen. (New members also get their first fifty Web songs for free, period.)

–a service which scans the music on your computer’s hard drive, identifies the songs, and puts them into your online library at Lala for free, so you can listen to them in any browser on any computer. Yes, this is a modern version of My.MP3.com, the nifty service that was killed by the music industry back in 2000. But this time around, Lala is paying the music companies so it’s all kosher. (I’ve wanted MyMP3 back since the day it went away, so I got kind of emotional when I saw that Lala had essentially replicated it for the moden era of digital music.)

–a social network that lets you discover new music by seeing what other folks are listening to, then listening yourself–again, for free if you’ve never heard a track before, and for a dime if you’ve listened once and haven’t already bought the Web version.

–an iPhone application that lets you stream your entire music to your phone; as long as you’ve got an Internet connection, the effect is a little like having an iPod with infinite capacity. (The iPhone app isn’t available yet, but I saw a preview and liked it; the company says it’ll arrive soon.)

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There’s good news–sort of!–from Bentonville: Walmart.com, which had told folks who bought copy-protected music that it was shutting down the DRM servers that let them move their tunes from device to device, has relented. At least for the moment. Ars Technica has details, along with some good background on previous instances of big companies who gave up on DRM. In almost every case, they only made an effort to make their customers happy in the wake of a consumer backlash against their original plans.

It seems to be pretty clear that this cycle will end eventually, since DRM is rapidly disappearing. At least from music, since Wal-Mart and nearly every other purveyor of music downloads except Apple, Microsoft, and subscription services such as Napster and Rhapsody have gone completely DRM-free. (Video downloads are still almost always shackled with copy protection.)

I put “buyers” in quotes in the headline for this post because every time an entertainment merchant decides that maintaining DRM servers isn’t worth the hassle, it’s new evidence of an important point: When you buy anything that can be disabled or hobbled remotely, you didn’t really buy it. You’re just leasing it for an unspecified period. Wal-Mart’s change of heart means that period isn’t ending immediately for its customers, but it will end, apparently…and when it does, I think the right thing would still be for the company to give its customers their money back.

It’s DRM deja vu all over again. Yet another major purveyor of copy-protected media has alerted the customers that purchased downloads from it that it’s shutting down its DRM servers, thereby crippling the stuff those customers bought. This time it’s Walmart.com and it joins Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo in what’s becoming a really predictable tradition of handling the situation poorly.

Wal-Mart, which has shifted its site’s music store to DRM-free MP3s (good), sent a e-mail to purchasers of its earlier downloads wrapped in Microsoft DRM advising them that it will shut down the DRM server as of October 9th. Once it’s done that, the tunes can no longer be transferred to new computers or devices; Wal-Mart suggests that customers burn CDs to prevent the music from becoming unusable, long-term.

What it apparently isn’t planning to do is give those “buyers” their money back for the songs they “purchased.” Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all ended up having to do better by their customers than they originally intended; I hope that Wal-Mart, too, will issue refunds or credits. (Actually, I woulda hoped they would have learned from the other companies’ mistake and not replicated it in the first place.)

Remember, Wal-Mart’s music was promoted with Microsoft’s PlaysForSure tagline, one of the hollowest promises ever made in the history of personal technology. I don’t know how much it would have cost Wal-Mart to keep its DRM servers chugging, but I suspect it could have come up with the dough if it had considered PlaysForSure to be an obligation rather than hollow marketing copy.

It’s beyond debate: Any time you pay for music, movies, or other content that’s locked up with DRM that talks to a remote server somewhere, you’re not really buying anything. It can be taken away from you at the whim of the merchant, without you being able to do a thing about it–and the way things have gone so far, there’s every reason to think that most such content will eventually be taken away from the people who thought they bought it,

slotMusic is an innovative new format format for music distribution. The tried-and-true Compact Disc is a quarter-century old. I compared ‘em point by point and found that the CD stacks up surprisingly well for an invention that predates memory cards, MP3s, iPods, iTunes, and music phones. Is it going too far to say that if the CD were introduced today, folks would hail it as a breakthrough. Maybe. But I know that if it went away right now, I’d miss it–and that I think it beats slotMusic hands down. Chart after the jump…

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Music is about to get microscopic. Flash storage kingpin SanDisk is launching slotMusic, which it calls an “innovative, new physical music format.” Actually, what it is is DRM-free albums sold on MicroSD cards, along with a USB adapter. According to the New York Times, the albums may cost $7-$10 apiece; according to GigaOm, the format will launch with 29 (count ‘em!) albums. SlotMusic has the support of major labels EMI, Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner, as well as physical music behemoths Best Buy and Wal-Mart.

SanDisk presumably sees slotMusic (whose site, incidentally, barely mentions SanDisk) as an opportunity to sell millions more flash cards a year. For consumers, though, I’m not sure if the format passes the “why?” test. Here’s SanDisk’s pitch:

“slotMusic cards enable consumers to instantly and easily enjoy music from their favorite artists without being dependent on a PC or internet connection. Users simply insert the slotMusic card into their microSD-enabled mobile phone or MP3 player to hear the music – without passwords, downloading or digital-rights-management interfering with their personal use.”

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Okay, now this is cool: When you search for a musical artist or group using Yahoo Search, you may get a box at the top of the results that lets you listen to songs–full songs, not samples, and without leaving the search results. It’s done through a partnership with Rhapsody, and you can listen to up to 25 free songs a month, no registration or other heavy lifting required.

Here, for instance, is what I got when I searched for The Doors:

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Here’s a weird thing about Internet radio: For the most part it’s been among the least portable forms of digital entertainment. Most people who listen to nifty, personalized services such as Pandora and Last.FM do so via desktop and laptop PCs with a live Internet connection. Which makes ‘em very different from plain old radio, a medium that folks are used to taking with them in the car, on the subway, and while jogging.

And then there’s Slacker, a service which, like Pandora and Last.fm, lets you conjure up custom radio stations which riff on what you tell it about your favorite artists by creating playlists with both faves and other performers you’ll probably like. Slacker is available in free and fee-based Web versions, but it was built from the ground up to work with portable players. Earlier this year, the company released a Slacker handheld that had plenty of promise but was also kind of bulky and clunky. And then it moved quickly to replace that first version with an improved model: the Slacker G2, which is available from Slacker’s site and Best Buy. I’ve been playing with it and really enjoying having personalized radio I can stick in my pocket. But while the Slacker service is a kick and this second-generation hardware is more polished than its predecessor, the device still feels like it’s a good fit for dedicated radio fans more than for music aficionados of all types.

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We all know the drill. A new music service comes out, the press or the company itself proclaims it a “iTunes killer,” the company gets its fifteen minutes of fame, and then it either flames out or is relegated to also-ran status just like the rest of them. But could there finally be a viable alternative to Apple’s juggernaut?

Enter MySpace Music. Monday brought news that the company has secured three new major advertisers for the service: McDonald’s, Toyota, and State Farm Insurance. Advertising is expected to be a major component of the service, allowing it to offer services that other competitors can’t at no charge.

Like Rhapsody, the service will allow for free streaming of the full song, much like it does already in many cases. (Fortune says the service would pay a penny to the labels each time a song is streamed.) Users will then have the option to purchase the song free of digital rights management, as well as purchase ringtones and merchandise.

While some may accurately point out that this is not much different from what the site already is doing, MySpace Music appears to be an attempt to more prominently promote its music offerings — and position it as one of the go-to places on the Web for such content.
There are some differences however. For example, the site would now allow for users to post playlists to their site — which would allow for multiple songs to appear on a profile as opposed to a single track. When a user wishes to purchase a song, it would be sold through Amazon’s MP3 store.

Three out of the four major labels are already on board: EMI is the lone holdout, although it is reported that MySpace is currently in discussions to bring them on board.

So how does this truly compete with iTunes? What makes it different from other attempts is the fact that it already has several things going for it. First off, take MySpace’s massive user base: about 115 million unique visitors per month frequent its pages.

At the snap of a finger, any launched service by the social networking giant is going to have a tremendous reach. It can be argued quite convincingly that no one else started in such a favorable position.

Sony suffered from its unwillingness to part from proprietary formats, and Microsoft shuttered its own music store after its own PlaysForSure basically flopped in the market as people opted for Apple players. Even Yahoo, which boasts a similar reach to MySpace, was unable to break into the market — also bowing out.

MySpace Music would start with a huge advantage, considering a large portion of its users already frequent its artist pages. I’m probably out of the target demographic here for MySpace by a bit, but I will even admit I’m frequently on the music side of the site.

If just a portion of these users begin to use the site to download music, it could seriously pose a threat to Apple as social networking has proven to be a way to spread word quickly about just about anything.

Users love convenience, and if it is easy enough for a friend to send a friend a link to a certain song, and it’s competitively priced with iTunes, and on top of that it’s compatible with the iPod (and they stress this in the marketing), and MySpace is able to automatically import the songs into a users iTunes library as it is being reported, what reason does a user have to go to the iTunes Music Store?

Of course, MySpace is not going to challenge Apple overnight. But the power of social networking should be enough for those in Cupertino to take MySpace as a serious threat to their considerable dominance in digital music.

[A note from Harry: This is the first post on Technologizer by someone other than me. But it won't be the last--as the the site grows, a variety of contributors will pop up. Ed Oswald is senior writer for BetaNews, a site I've long enjoyed; I'm pleased to welcome him to Technologizer's...er, pages.]

Here’s a good computing rule of thumb: If you discover a mysterious link in your Clipboard for a piece of security software you’ve never heard of, DON’T CLICK ON THE LINK AND BUY THE SOFTWARE!
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