jameswharris

Hey, Rdio, Rhapsody, Google, Spotify–Add These New Features, Please

I’ve been a streaming music subscriber for years. First with Rhapsody, now with Rdio, but I’ve also subscribed to Lala, MOG and Spotify. Each service takes a different approach to the best way of listening to music from a gigantic online library. All provide the basics, search on artist, album and song, play album in order, random, repeat and repeat one, and create playlists.

New reports claim that music publishers now feel they are making more money per user from subscription services than by selling songs. This implies that subscription services are succeeding – let’s hope. I think there are many features that subscription services could add to their product that would make them stand out from each other, and maybe completely kill off the idea of owning music.

However, there’s far more potential benefits from subscription music than just playing music from a rented library. One recent article claims that most artists will make more money in the long run from subscription music than from selling hit records, but it involves a new paradigm of promoting songs. The old paradigm was to promote a hit, get as many people to buy it as possible, and then move on to creating the next hit. The new paradigm is to create a portfolio of songs that are played forever by lifelong fans. The old paradigm is based on selling the song once, and the new one is based on getting it played the most over time, year after year, decade after decade.

This makes techniques used to find songs and albums from almost a century of music, and adding tunes to personal playlists, the most important marketing tool for bands. Theoretically, songs from the 1940s could becoming bigger hits than songs from the 2010s, if the right discovery tools were created.

It would be great if Rdio/Spotify/Rhapsody had an AI (artificial intelligent) program that could look at a person’s playlist and then guarantee them a list of songs from the past will be much loved. Unfortunately, such computer magic doesn’t exist yet. If there’s a Miles Davis track out there that you’ll play for hours on end in Repeat 1 mode, you’re going to have to find it yourself.

Some recording artists might be protesting streaming music for low royalty rates, and that might be true too, but streaming music is probably the best long term solution for helping new artists be discovered. Digital Music News reported that 90.7 percent of all artists are essentially undiscovered.

With both Spotify and Rdio now offering completely free ad-supported subscriptions there is no reason not to try them.

So what features could the subscription music services offer to help fans find more songs to love? Here what I want.

Top 100 Songs/Album/Artists By Year

Streaming music services need to quickly add Year to their search feature. Having the New Releases, Current Hit Album/Song pages is just too damn limiting. I need to be able to saying, “Show me what you got 1957!” What would be even more fun would be to ask Rdio to play me the hit songs from the week I was born. Or if I felt like returning to the summer when I was 14, tell Spotify to play music from the summer of 1965.

Who were the hit artists for 1938? What labels were big in 1947?

I would also like to be able to play songs by release dates, and all songs from specific hit charts from a particularly week.

We might also need a composed year field, so I can ask for the music of the 1850s.

Far More Record Charts

Right now it’s possible to know which songs and albums are popular by everyone using the service, but that’s so limiting. What I like to see is a chart of top songs being played by 62 year old guys who were computer programmers and who love science fiction. Or if I wanted to sample another demographic, what songs are being played by college freshmen at the moment, what classical music symphonies are being made hits at the moment from Julliard graduates playing them, or what country tunes are being played the most in Nashville versus Austin or Denver, or what songs are loved by retired DJs who worked in the 1960s, or what songs are played the most by people over 90. See what I mean?

Search by Catalog Number and Label

Now that subscription music services are vast libraries of songs that span decades, and record collectors have probably squirreled away all the great platters, it would be fun to play music historian on the cheap, and listen to music by label, especially all those rare labels put out by extreme music aficionados.

Years ago when I bought LPs, record companies would advertise other LPs on the inner sleeves of albums. I especially loved the ones by ATCO and Warner Music. For example, I’d love to be able to call up ATCO albums from 1970s, and just see what Rdio has.

Here’s a screenshot from MusicMatch for a search of Verve, showing a portion of the results near Janis Ian. As subscription services grow, they will become closer to complete libraries of music history, and searching by label and catalog number will be more important. Instead of collecting music from the past, it will be all about playing the music of the past.

Browse by Genres and Subgenres

Sometimes I want to play music by genre, especially genres I’m not familiar with, but most streaming services have very limited ways of doing this. Rdio is pretty nice for genre browsing. I can browse by “Stations” and pick Jazz, and then have the choice of 10 sub-genre stations, and then a 5 position control that ranges from Popular to Adventurous. But what if I wanted smooth piano jazz from the late 1950s? Or to hear the musical heirs of Charlie Parker? Right now this kind of feature is one of the best ways to discover new old music on Rdio, but it could be infinitely refined.

Better Playlists and Collections

Right now I can have playlists and a collection to organize my musical favorites on Rdio. Playlists are just lists of songs. I’d love to have Album Playlists, to group albums I’d like to play together. I’d also like to have multiple collections, so I can keep my jazz albums separate from my rock albums. I was keeping my Collection on Rdio limited to albums I liked a lot, but when I downloaded the local client, it looked at the albums I owned on my computer, and added all of them to my collection, which is now one big mess.

Playlists and the Collection is how I get to remember what I liked on Rdio. Without them I’d forget tons of music. When using a subscription music library it’s very hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of music I can play. 20 million songs, which is probably a million albums. I’m lucky if I could sit down and write a list of my 100 favorite albums from memory.

When playing subscription music I mainly listen to what I already love. But I, and new artists, want me to try new stuff. Often I go through the weekly releases of new albums and try as many of them as I can. There’s always more than I can try. And if I find a song I like I can at it to a playlist, or add the album to a collection. What I’d like to have is a personal library, which has unlimited collections. Now some collections I want to name myself, but others I want Rdio to auto-generate. So if I add Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen to my Rock Collection, it would automatically add it to a 1975 Collection, and a Columbia Record Collection, because there will be times when I’d love just to play my favorite albums from 1975, or even December, 1975.

Collections and Playlists are the way I distinguish my music from the background library of everything. I want more tools for organizing my music, and even browsing it visually.

Higher Fidelity

Over time, as technology changes, I want streaming music to offer better fidelity. It’s wonderful now, but I don’t want to be tempted by any new technology to come along that would make me want to start buying individual songs and albums again, either as digital files or on physical medium. I’m over owning music. Renting is so much more convenient. I’m happy to let Rdio do all the library scut work. Nor do I want to hop from one service to the next, as new companies promise features old ones don’t. I’m currently thinking of subscribing to another service, adding Rhapsody or Spotify, for a while, just to see if they offer more. But I’d rather they didn’t. I invested a lot of love into Lala, only to have Apple ruin it. Now that I’ve spent so much time with Rdio I want it to both succeed and keep competitive.

Export and List Features

A lot of work goes into discovering new music and creating playlists and collections, so if Rdio went out of business I’d loose a lot of knowledge I’ve put into their system. I want to be able to export that knowledge to another streaming service. Or if I subscribed to two streaming services, I’d like to sync that knowledge. I’d also love some database tools to just study big data views of my music, or make printouts, like for putting on this blog.

Conclusion

The phrase “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” is an apt one for music streaming technology. I’ve lived through so much technological change in my life, even just in the music industry, that I know nothing stays the same. If I live another ten or twenty years I expect amazing things, and since I’m running out of time, I’d rather have them now.

Music Technology News

If you’re interested in reading more about subscription music, try these sites.

JWH – 1/19/14

Aren’t Television Shows Just Short Stories for People Who Don’t Want to Read?

Many of my bookworm friends tell me they dislike reading short stories. They claim short stories are too slight, not enough plot and character, to waste their reading time on. Okay, I can buy that. But isn’t a 22 minute episode of The Big Bang Theory just a short story? Isn’t a 47 minute episode of Nashville, merely a novelette? I’m currently listening to The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James that runs 24 hours. Most current TV shows have a season of 24 episodes. So if they were collected as an audiobook, the entire season of 30 and 60 minute shows would still be shorter than one literary novel. Doesn’t that sound like an anthology of stories?

In other words, don’t people still really love the short story? Some people like to read, others to listen, but most love to watch! Don’t most of us crave two or three stories a day?

At one time the short story was very popular in America. There were hundreds of short story only magazines for sale at newsstands, and some writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald were paid big bucks for a single story. Even when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, most women’s and men’s magazines would contain at least couple short stories.

Why did people stop reading short stories? Why did they fall out of favor? The obvious answer is they haven’t. Pulp magazines just mutated into television shows.

How long have humans needed a daily diet of fiction? Aren’t short stories just oral story telling in mass production?

It seems pretty logical to think folks just switched from reading a thirty minute story to watching one. It’s also easy to assume that the half hour show is the short story, the hour show the novelette, and the movie is the novella. But if we look deeper, I think there are some other concepts to consider, most notably the continuing character, the series, and the genre subject focus.

At the beginning of the 20th century most magazines, even pulp magazines, were general purpose magazines for readers of all ages of both sexes. But as the century progressed publishers created specialty subject magazines, some devoted to single characters, that catered to particularly reading tastes, and demographics.

If you read the latest volume of Best American Short Stories 2013, the annual anthology that collects the best of literary short fiction, you don’t see stories involving a continuing character, a series, or can easily be pigeon-holed into a micro-genre. Now there are plenty of genre magazines devoted to the short story that do regularly publish this type of story, but their content seldom gets picked for the annual Best American Short Story collection. For the last 50-75 years, publishers seem to be zeroing in on the continuing character novel, so that most mystery novels, and many science fiction and fantasy books, are now about popular characters involved in a series of adventures. Doesn’t that sound like television?

Television supplanted the pulp magazine, and is now inspiring how many writers write their books. What happened to the slice of life short story, and the great American novel? Writers prefer to develop a character and setting they stick to, like those in television shows. It’s easier to sell, and sells better.

The best literary short stories are tiny slices of life, unique views of humanity. Most novels from the early history of book publishing were always stand-alone tales, just longer slices of life, with highly detailed unique views. In the early days of television there were many drama shows that featured a different story and cast of characters each week, the most famous at the time was Playhouse 90, but probably the most famous still somewhat seen via streaming, is The Twilight Zone.

The unique slice of life story was quickly supplanted by the continuing character show. But that had already started in pulp magazines before the age of television. I’m curious who the first continuing character was? Sir John Falstaff appeared in three plays by Shakespeare. And how many stories did Sherlock Holmes appear in? Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer appeared in several books, and readers wouldn’t let Louisa May Alcott stop writing about Jo March. If Louisa was alive and writing today, the March sisters would be a television series.

It seems most people love short stories, about favorite characters, in a setting and subject of particular interest to them. Other people like stories stretched into novels. While I love continuing character stories on TV, I avoid them in novels. But I still love short, unique, slice-of-life stories, either written or dramatized. I wonder why most people don’t. I’ve been re-watching old episodes of The Twilight Zone, and some of them are very powerful.

However, my brain quickly forgets them, or most of them. In over fifty years I’ve never forgotten Henry Bemis, or the pig nose people. If I had only seen one episode of The Big Bang Theory in my life, would I still remember it? Maybe it’s memorable because I’ve stuck with it for seven years. Apparently we crave long term relationships with our fictional friends.

Memorable novels are like short intense love affairs we never forget. By that standard, it seems most people would rather have long term friendships.

JWH – 1/17/14

2014–The Year of the Short Story

Now that I’m retired, I have time to do everything I dreamed of doing, like writing a novel. Well, novel writing hasn’t worked out like I fantasized. I keep cranking out thousands of words that go nowhere. My problem, is I’m building a crappy home before acquiring the skills to even build a good dog house.

I need to become talented at constructing 1,000 word stories before engineering a 100,000 word story.

The trouble is short stories are a dying art. Few people read them. If it wasn’t for would-be writers, I doubt if they’d exist at all. That’s a shame because short stories are a wonderful art form.

My Zen Habits guru recommends focusing on one goal, and learning how to jettison all the extra weight that keeps my rocket from gaining orbital velocity. Writing short stories will become my Walden Pond of fiction.

This morning, waking before dawn, I grabbed my Nexus 7 and read “The Ghosts of Christmas” by Paul Cornell, from Year’s Best SF 18, edited by David Hartwell, and was inspired by this science fictional retelling of Dickens’ classic tale. In ancient days, mystical monks were known for finding revelation in the wee hours studying sacred scrolls. Reading in the dark by the glow of my Android tablet, I realized I wanted to immerse myself into short stories, and put my mind into a 10,000 word reality.

Goal for 2014: Develop the habit of reading and writing short stories every day.

JWH – 1/16/14

The Mathematics of Book Buying

Can you resist a great bargain? Especially when buying something you particularly love? Every day Amazon emails me the Kindle Daily Deals, of which they have five ebooks on sale, usually for $1.99. Sometimes it’s $2.99, and sometimes it’s even .99 cents, but usually it’s $1.99. And I’ve gotten some amazing books for $2 – fantastic bargains! At Audible.com, also owned by Amazon, they often have audiobooks on sale for $4.95. Plus, I love going to my Friends of the Library Bookstore, where it’s not uncommon to find great hardback books for just $3.

If I read one book for every ten I buy though, the real price of that Kindle ebook is $20, or $50 for the audiobook, and $30 for the used hardback. That isn’t a bargain, is it? If I think of myself building a library, then getting as many books as cheap as possible is a book shopping thrill. But if I think of myself as buying books to read, then buying books I don’t read is wasting money.

Since I’ve recently retired, how much I spend each month is very important. Every dollar I spend now is one less dollar I’ll have in the future. My real goal should be to spend little, and read more. Now I have time to read all those unread books in my library, but not the money to keep building the library.

Another way to rationalize the numbers is to think of myself as enjoying book buying. That shopping for books is the pleasure I’m actually budgeting, and ignore whether or not I read the books. By that measure if I spend a $100 a month and get 25 books, rather than 3-7 at new prices, then yes, I’ve been having a great time bargain hunting for books.

To be honest, owning books is not my goal, so I have to face the fact that I am wasting money. That’s sad. Maybe what I shouldn’t completely give up something I love, but just lower the budget. I wonder how many great books I can get for $25 a month? Save money, start a challenge!

JWH – 1/16/14

John’s Background Switcher 4.8

I love photos. I also love making my computer desktop into a photo gallery. I hate icons on my desktop – I want all the space for photos. Over the years I’ve tried various desktop background switchers, but the one I’ve stuck to because I love it best is John’s Background Switcher. Last month John Conners released version 4.8 which added two nifty features, Dropbox support and collages.

If you want to see photos from your collection on a regular basis, then I highly recommend John’s Background Switcher.

This is what my desktop looks like as I write this – my blog editor and the photos around it.

Normally I have John’s Background Switcher pick just one photo at the time, but I’m enchanted by the new collage feature and will stick with it for a while. By the way, it’s teaching me I need to edit my collection better, and make sure all photos are turned properly. And it mixes in family photos, with photos I collect and use for this blog. That makes for some odd combinations. And it also shows that some photos should be culled from the collection because they’re bad photos. I have a nasty habit of keeping all shots because I think of them as history, but I need to think of photos as art instead.

This constant bombardment of the senses can be distracting, so sometimes I hide the photos by opening browser windows. Or it’s easy to turn off JBS. But usually I love being surprised and reminded by scenes of the past. It’s like having floating memories on my desktop. And I have it set to change every minute. It’s amazing how many faces I recognize, and from any age in people’s lives.

What’s even more fun is setting this up with two monitors. Sometimes I run the second monitor just for the photos. The surprise of seeing certain photos can inspire my writing, or remind me I need to reconnect with people, and since I collect historical photos, it reminds me of other times and places.

One of my many retirement projects is organizing my photo collection. Susan and I inherited her family photos and my family photos when our parents died years ago. Plus I love to collect photos. When I see a cool pic on the net, I snag it, and add it to a file called “Wallpapers” – which has sub-folders for many types of images. I also like to collect images of book and album covers, and I’ve started collecting art pictures too, especially from Colossal. I’ll be writing more about my photo organization project in the near future. I just wanted to promote the new version of John’s Background Switcher for now.

The program is only for Windows – although John has promised a Mac version, and I’d actually like to see it on Linux too. The advantage of John’s Background Switcher, besides it’s many configuration features, is it lets you link to many popular photo sites to get random images from other people. These include Flickr, 500px, Instagram, Facebook, Vladstudio, SmugMug, Picasa, etc. This is great because there are so many amazing amateur photographers out there. However, I must warn you, if you use this feature at work, sometimes photos will pop up that might be embarrassing – like some beach babe when the boss is in your office to give you a new task. People often came to my office would stare at my monitor, and not look at me when they were talking.

JWH – 1/13/14