jameswharris

The Tree of Life (2011)–Grace versus Nature

Terrence Malick’s new film, The Tree of Life is quite polarizing for its audiences. NPR is even reporting that a small percentage of viewers walk out on the film and some of those ask for their money back. Now I’ve walked out on a number of films over the decades and I can understand many reasons for not wanting to finish a movie. There is no way to know why people leave before The Tree of Life is over, but I wonder if any do for philosophical reasons. This is a philosophical movie, but I also found it immensely entertaining, beautiful to watch, and never boring. This is one of the most ambitious films I’ve ever seen. It makes me think of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed. Another film about naturalism.

The Tree of Life attempts to answer one of the most difficult spiritual questions in philosophy: Why do bad things happen to good people. The film begins by telling us that life is a battle between grace and nature. Throughout the film we hear the character pray to God asking for guidance, forgiveness, understanding and meaning, and when a son and brother dies, his parents and siblings suffer greatly, partly at the loss, but mostly for not understanding why.

The film quotes The Book of Job, and has a scene where a pastor gives a excellent sermon on Job. Job is one of the most complex stories in the Bible. Many of the faithful have given up belief in God trying to understand “Why do the righteous suffer?”

I do not live by faith, but I like the word grace. Terrence Malick shows the history of the universe in this film, making a good case for evolution is part of reality. The faithful believe we are here by the grace of God, but I believe we are here by the grace of evolution. Our universe is immense in size and ancient in age, and our lives are a miracle of unintentional consequences. I think the word grace applies to that too. I also believe the most sophisticated of spiritual philosophers accept evolution and incorporate it into their philosophy.

The difference between the faithful and those who accept evolution is life after death. The faithful want to believe that no matter how much suffering we experience in this life, it will be soothed by the life we get after this one. And Malick shows that in The Tree of Life. I’ve wondered if some of the people who have walked out on this picture was because they thought Malick was selling evolution. If they did, they should have stayed. Malick sticks with faith all the way through, although it’s subtle, leaving room for some atheists to interpret the film differently. All great fiction is ambiguous, so it’s unfair to suggest my views as the only views of this story.

Here’s the thing, for most of the faithful, suffering can only be made sensible if there is life after death, either through rewards or punishment. To those who side with nature, suffering is just part of life. There is no philosophical problem for atheists, because we don’t believe God is making us suffer. The hardest thing for the faithful to endure is to believe that God is making them suffer. Thus the story of Job.

The evolution of liberal thought is one that fights suffering directly by trying to make living in this life better for all. Malick doesn’t go there at all. This is a deeply spiritual movie in the sense that it is totally metaphysical. Striving to do better is shown to cause suffering as illustrated by the role of the father played by Brad Pitt.

This movie is not for people who want escapism. I’m not sure this movie is even for young people. Terrence Malick was born in 1943, he’s not a baby boomer, but like Bob Dylan, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, he’s of the generation that speaks to the baby boomers. I’d say anyone who grew up in the 1950s America should watch this film if they have a philosophical bent, it’s a film about and for us.

This trailer will give a hint at what The Tree of Life is like, but only the slightest of one.

This rather enigmatic web site gives more scenes from the movie, but you need a lot of patience to try out all the rather short clips. Go see the film for the full cinematic rollercoaster ride.

JWH – 7/4/11

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

I am not a comic book reader but I found this history of the comic book industry on trial in the 1950s to be a fascinating story. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu covers the origins of the comic strip, the appearance of the comic book in the 1930s, and its creative heyday in the 1940s and early 1950s, and then focuses on how some Americans got scared and eventually brought about book burning, censorship and laws against publishing comic books. The mid 1950s was a long time ago, and I was just a kid, so I don’t remember these events. But the comic book scare coincided with the red scare, the Joe McCarthy witch hunts. Comic books lead to another kind of scare, not over communists, but the fear of juvenile delinquents and the corruption of the young.

Most of the focus of the 1950s comic book scare was on true crime comics and horror comics. Today when comic book conventions are covered on Entertainment Tonight, showing famous celebrities in attendance, and many of the top grossing movies are based on comic books, it’s hard to think about a time when comic books would scare Americans into having book burning rallies.

The irony here is everything that the censors hated about comics is standard fare on prime time TV today. The censors did not want children seeing stories about crime and criminals, or reading about vampires, ghouls, zombies, werewolves, and their undead kin. Nor did they like stories about young women running off with the bad boy types, or leaving their husbands to find exciting careers. Parents, congressmen and censors feared that comics were undermining the status quo. Comic books were outlawed just as rock and roll hit the scene, and then came the beatniks, hippies and all the other counter culture bellwethers.

If we could take our present day pop culture back to the 1940s and 1950s it would blow the minds of Andy Hardy/Leave it to Beaver America, and the fear mongers back then would think they had been absolutely right about censoring the comics. They censored comics and made kids read Casper the Friendly Ghost, but it didn’t stop the cultural upheaval they feared. Does censorship ever work?

To get some idea about the censorship of this time, watch David Hajdu talk about the last comic book EC Comics published:

The surprising element of this story for me was how much this era was loved by the comic readers of the time. They considered the advent of censorship as the destruction of a great art form. To be honest, I never really liked comics, but then I never read any from the golden age that the The Ten-Cent Plague chronicles. Comics to me always equaled stories about super heroes, but before the great censorship there were hundreds of titles about endless topics, that sold in the tens of millions each month. But this was also before the success of television. And Hajdu doesn’t mention that the pulp magazine was also dying at this same time even without censorship. Evidently the boob tube put the kibosh on pulp fiction, both written and graphic.

A lot of things changed in the 1950s. Radio stories died out, and so did Saturday afternoon serials. Culture went through tremendous change in the 1950s, as witnessed by Bill Bryson in The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, which I read about a month ago for the second time. I do have tremendous nostalgia for that time, and even though I dislike crime and horror stories in general, Hajdu makes me want to read those pre-Code comics. I guess I sympathize with that comic culture because I love pre-Code Hollywood movies from the early 1930s.

I listened to The Ten-Cent Plague, so I had no idea what these comics looked like. I’m not even sure if the hardcover book had photos. However, the comic book history is well documented on the web. Here is the cover used in a senate hearing described in the book. William Gaines, the publisher of EC Comics was asked by Senator Estes Kefauver if he thought this cover was in good taste, and Gaines shocked everyone by saying he did think it was in good taste. I do have to wonder about this being reading material for children though, but then people wonder the same thing about kids and video games. Gaines said this cover was in good taste because the artist didn’t show the severed neck on the head or body. Since they do show those parts now in movies, I guess our movies are in bad taste.

I found this cover and many others at Classic Crime & Horror Covers. That site linked me to Crimeboss, with an extensive collection of covers. I wanted to see what the interiors looked like and found The Horror of it All. I quickly discovered that the history of comics, and especially the pre-code era, is well documented on the internet. Comic books are a sub-culture I know little of, and would probably be satisfied with reading one good coffee table book about its history to catch up. The sub-culture is gigantic, and I wonder what Fredric Wertham, the author of Seduction of the Innocent, and his disciples would make of the huge success comics have in our society today.

I’m an outsider to the fandom of comics, and I have little interest in reading comics. I don’t mean to put them down, but they are like opera or ballet or polka music, I just never got into them. However, there was one story Hajdu told about that I might seek out – It Rhymes with Lust, a comic book that some consider the first graphic novel.

From what I can tell, the story is probably like a movie Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck would have been in the 1940s, so why all the fuss? Were ten year old kids really reading these film noir comic books? And if comics were so pervasive in society in the 1940s and 1950s, why don’t we see characters in the movies from those times reading them? From David Hajdu’s account, the history of the comics and their downfall was obviously more than a tempest in a teapot because many states and cities took the time to criminalize the sale of comics, and schools and PTA groups took the time to buy thousand and thousands of comics so they could burn them in PR events. Evidently millions of people were buying comics then, so why hasn’t literature or film from those times featured stories about the sub-culture? There were many films about early rock and roll fans, or jazz fans before that.

I found The Ten-Cent Plague a fascinating story, but I’d like to know more. I wonder if my father or his brothers read the pre-code comics? They never talked about them. Except for these rare histories of the era, I wouldn’t have known these types of comic books even existed. When the comics were banned many of the artists and writers had to hide their love of their art because they were treated like child molesters. Is that why this sub-culture was so thoroughly forgotten? Did America hate comics that much?

By the way, the 1988 documentary Comic Book Confidential makes a great visual supplement to The Ten-Cent Plague because they interview many of the people profiled in the book, and show some of the same court films that Hajdu described. Plus the documentary continues the history of comics after the code was enforced, which is where the book ends. This film is available at Netflix and segments from it are at YouTube.

JWH – 6/23/11

Fans Wanted!

We live in a world where fans are in high demand. There is so much neglected art that needs to be discovered, and your duty as a fan is to discover new work and share it. It’s how social networking works.

I was looking at the new album releases in Rdio and I noticed that many of the albums had not been listened to all all. They had 0 plays, and thus no fans. That made me feel sad for those artists. Lady Gaga has legions of fans, and I’m not saying she doesn’t deserve her fans, but I think some of her devoted following should spend some of their time listening to new artists who have none. Consider it a form of artistic charity. It takes so little to become a patron of the arts, just love and attention.

It’s amazing how many new albums come out every week. And if you subscribe to a subscription music service you can listen to them all for just $4.99 a month. So, it would cost you almost nothing to be generous and play a few albums that are going without listeners. We are all too addicted to success. We want to hear the top albums of the week – but what if some of those CDs that never make it even to the bottom of a chart have good tunes on them? Don’t they deserve to be heard?

And think about all those selfish baby boomers who play the same old hits from the sixties over and over again. Wouldn’t they benefit from hearing something new? So I say to you, become a fan of some up-and-coming band or singer. I’m listening to Costello Music by The Fratellis who’ve gotten 11,664 plays on Rdio. They really don’t seem all that different from a British Invasion band in the 60s. But eleven thousand plays means they have a lot of fans. There are 50+ pages of new CDs on Rdio and most of them have no plays at all.

It used to be you had to buy albums to become a fan, but that’s no longer true. For $4.99 a month you can listen to dozens of new albums every week from one of many subscription music services. And you might be surprised by the rewards of becoming a fan and discovering a new group. I’m listening to The Naked and Famous new album, Passive Me, Aggressive You, and it makes me feel young again. It has a wonderful 80s pop feel to it, so it’s both nostalgic and energetic. It’s more popular than the last album, with 132,155 plays. They are famous by Rdio standards, but they should become more famous.

I’m now listening to a very nice song now, “One Hand Loves the Other” by Bodies of Water off of Twist Again. It reminds me of Judy Collins. It’s only had 256 listeners. It deserves way more fans than that. As I page through the new releases I find albums with fewer and fewer listeners. Natalie Walker only has 113 for her album Spark. If you’re an old fart baby boomer and don’t like modern pop like Lady Gaga you might find Walker worthy of your fan attention.

With little effort I found three very enjoyable albums tonight by people I never heard before. In the old days of CDs that would have cost me $45-55, but it’s just part of my $4.99 monthly fee on Rdio. I figure if I’m going to get such a bargain I have to do my part and try several new CDs every week and help promote new artists. Because Rdio is built around social networking, playing an album encourages other people to play it too. Playing a song produces ripples. If I play an album enough other people in my network will see it and maybe give it a try too. And then people in their network will see them playing, and hopefully we help the artist find more fans.

I like myself better when I’m discovering new music. I still love my old favorites songs that I’ve been playing for almost fifty years, but I don’t want to be trapped in my past. Finding new music makes me feel younger. I know I’m not, but my mind feels younger as long as I’m still discover new art. There are rewards to be a new music fan.

JWH – 6/21/11

Can a New Science Fiction Inspire a New Space Program?

Many people firmly believe that science fiction was the original inspiration for sending men into space and going to the Moon. I don’t know if that could ever be proven, but there’s a certain logic in thinking dreams come even before the horse or the cart.

The space program has lost its way. The Shuttles are being mothballed, and we’ve never left LEO for four decades now. If we’re honest, we’ll admit it was the cold war politics that got us to spend billions on NASA, and I’m afraid real science has made space a far less appealing destination than the fanciful vistas of old pulp fiction. Robotic probes have toured the solar system and we have a very realistic view of off Earth real estate, and the sites are far from the exotic locales described by our cherished space opera.

Yet, I have to ask: Can a new kind of realistic science fiction, incorporating the latest scientific knowledge about space, make the final frontier sexy again? I remember talking many years ago with a young woman about space exploration. She said unless we had spaceships like the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation then it wasn’t worth traveling in space. I have a feeling most people think that too.

I told her it was unlikely we’d ever have spaceships like NCC-1701-D and she acted like I had told her there was no Santa Claus. She had assumed such luxury space travel would be available soon, or at least well within her lifetime. Her attitude was, if we can’t travel in comfort, why go into space at all.

And there’s the rub. The final frontier will be rougher than any frontier a pioneer has experienced in the history of our species. Science fiction originally sold space exploration as an colorful adventure vacation. Now we know it’s going to be more like years of reconstructive surgery and physical rehabilitation with little hope of full recovery.

There are only two destinations for people in our solar system: the Moon and Mars. Forget the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, they are much too cold and those systems have tremendous radiation levels. The Moon and Mars are far from habitable, but with determination we might colonize them. But we can’t oversell those two worlds like Kim Stanley Robinson did in his Red, Green, Blue Mars series. That trilogy was among the best “realistic” science fiction in recent decades, but it had way too much fantasy for the kind of science fiction I’m suggesting here.

Can a new generation of science fiction writers envision practical human life on the Moon and Mars in such a way as to sell the idea to the tax paying public? So far a majority of the public refuse to believe in evolution, so I find it hard to imagine such scientific science fiction selling, but it’s still a possibility.

JWH – 6/21/11

MOG v. Napster v. Rdio v. Rhapsody

Owning music is so 20th century.

Subscription music is renting music by the month. If you are a casual music listener subscription music isn’t for you. If you are addicted to music, subscription music lets you listen to most of the new albums that come out each week for a very low monthly fee. Every music friend that I’ve talked into subscribing to music has said, “This is fantastic, I wished I had discovered it sooner.” Most music fans don’t like the concept of renting music – but that’s how they feel before they try it. After they subscribe they worry that concept will fail and heaven forbid, they have to go back to the old way of buying music.

Imagine being given a whole music store for your birthday, and not some dinky music section like you see in Target, but a music store as big as a Macy’s, with hundreds of thousands of albums. What songs do you play first? That’s what it’s like to subscribe to a music streaming service. You’ve got millions of songs, so how to you live with so many? First, you have to pick which subscription music company you want to join.

Picking a Service

There’s at least six subscription music services now in the U.S., with more on the way. I’ve picked four to review. I’ve been a subscriber to Rhapsody for years, but I’ve joined MOG, Napster and Rdio to make comparisons for this review, and to consider which service I want to go with in the future. All these services offer free trials, but the subscription rates are so cheap it doesn’t hurt to try them out for a month or two.

Check out their web pages and look at these intro videos.

Price

Here’s the thing, if you’re a music lover you’ll want to share music with your friends, and you will more than likely want to subscribe to the same subscription music service as your buds because of the social functions. So the very first feature to consider is price – can everyone afford it.

There are two modes of listening, either at the computer, or on a mobile device. Bizarrely, these companies charge more if you listen on a carry around device with a tinny sound rather than a big computer you can connect to stereo speakers and blast away your songs in all their sonic glory.

Most people will want the iPhone/Android option, but if you’re poor or cheap, try the computer only option to just test the waters. And don’t think you have to listen at your computer. You can run a wire from your laptop to your stereo system, or you can get a digital media server that bypasses the computer and acts like another component in your stereo cabinet.

You listen to the same songs, so why do they charge more for hearing it on a phone? That’s just weird. I hope the price difference goes away.

Streaming to the computer can include hooking it up to stereo systems, and digital media centers like Roku and Sonos boxes. However, MOG and Napster lets you use a Roku/Sonos with the $4.99 plan, but Rdio requires subscribing to their $9.99 plan, as does Rhapsody for Sonos, but then it doesn’t offer a $4.99 plan.

$4.99/mo computer	$9.99/mo computer + 1 mobile	$14.99/mo computer + 3 mobile
MOG Rdio Napster	MOG Rdio Napster Rhapsody	Rhapsody

Napster does off deep discounts if pay by the year, which brings down the monthly cost to $4.17 for computers and $8.00 a month for computers and 1 mobile. I think a fairer pricing would be per login, no matter which device you used. Since I seldom listen on my iPod touch, I’m actually over-paying for Rhapsody, so I’m thinking of stepping down to a $4.99 plan at another service – except that the next consideration is number of songs in the library.

By the way, you can only be logged in from one location. If you’re married, Rhapsody’s family plan is worth considering.

Size of Library

The next big consideration is the size of the library. All these services say they have 10-11 million songs, but they don’t seem to have the same exact 10-11 million songs. Apple claims to have 18 million songs in its library of music for sale. No service streams The Beatles or Led Zeppelin, or a handful of other artists that refuse to make license deals, but for the most part, anything new you see on sale each week is available. I have found Rhapsody has the most, but that’s perceptual. I tend to think over time all the services end up signing agreements with all the same labels and music distributors, so as the concept of subscription music catches on this won’t be an issue. I don’t have trouble finding music to play, I have trouble organizing which of those millions of songs I do want to play. But for right now, Rhapsody get the A for having the most.

Playlists

I think MOG is the clear winner when it comes to creating play lists. Look at this:

Rdio comes in second for playlist creation ease of use. You can create a playlist right on the playlist page with a search box that allows you to click on the return list to add a song to the list, but the MOG way of creating playlists is just better. You can even play a song from the search results to verify you’ve got the right version.

Napster and Rhapsody creates playlists in a roundabout way. You find the song, and then click on a button to add it to a playlist. In other words, you have to be on the album page or on playlist to add the song. That requires a lot of paging around to build a new list. MOG gets the gold star here, and Rdio gets a silver.

Following Users and Social Networking

There’s one feature where Rdio shines – you can follow other users, seeing what they are playing, adding to their collection, syncing to their phones. You can play their playlists. This is great for meeting other music lovers, or even better if you can get your real life music friends to join Rdio. It’s like Facebook for music fans. This is a huge selling point for Rdio. Right now three of us at work are Rdio members.

Rdio further enhances this feature with your home page. It shows the most played albums from your collection, or from the friends you follow, or from all of Rdio. I can’t emphasis enough the importance of this feature. Ever since the development of the Sony Walkman the evolution of music has been towards private listening. I wrote a post years ago called, “Why Has Listening to Music Become as Solitary as Masturbation?” The following other users counters that trend making music social again. Sadly, only Rdio has it, and its this feature more than anything that will make me pick Rdio in the end.

I’m always looking for new music, and I love finding great songs. To me a great song is one that takes me two weeks of constant playing before I get tired of hearing it. I used to buy a lot of dud LPs and CDs trying to find those great songs. Now the most efficient method is to listen to other people’s playlists. People love to play disc jockey and create public playlists, so it’s just a matter of finding people with similar tastes, or finding playlists that already have a few songs you love and a bunch of songs you’ve never heard.

When it comes to social playlists I think Rdio is first, and MOG is second. Rhapsody and Napster aren’t in the running.

Virtual Collection

Having access to millions of songs sounds like music nirvana, but it has its drawbacks. Unless you have a photographic memory to remember groups, albums and songs you love it’s difficult to keep up. The solution is the Collection concept. You tag songs and albums you like and they get listed separately as your personal library of music. If you already have a library of music on your computer, Rdio will look at it and tag those albums for your Collection. That’s handy for some people, but I have 1,500 CDs and I didn’t want them all in my Rdio collection. I’ve chosen to rebuild my virtual collection by what I like now.

By combining your collection with playlists you build up a database of music you love.

Handling Music You Already Own

This is the weakest area for subscription music. Rhapsody has a client for Windows that competes with Windows Media Player for features. I can blend my MP3 library with Rhapsody collection in the desktop client, but this is a messy solution. So I keep my MP3s in Windows Media Player. My music and Rhapsody’s music. If I can’t find it on Rhapsody I have to switch to Windows Media Player and do another search. I don’t like this solution. This is why I had such high hopes for Apple. Mixing a subscription streaming music service with their Music Match cloud service could have solved this problem.

The absolute ideal would be if these services would rip your out-of-print CDs and add them to your virtual library so you never had to switch between two players to hear all your music.

So far none of the four services I’m reviewing have talked about creating a cloud library for personally owned music. If I put my OOP CDs in the Amazon or Google cloud I’ll have just about everything I want in two places that can stream to any device.

Music goes out of print, and when it does, it disappears from these music services. This might change in the future, but basically these services are licensing music that somebody is selling somewhere. If the music is not for sale online or in stores, it doesn’t get license and thus not available to stream. But not ever song for sale is licensed for use in a subscription music service. Surprisingly, more and more are. I think we’re evolving away from owning music. Owning makes sense when music is on a physical medium, but it doesn’t make sense when it’s digital.

I have lots of old CDs that aren’t available for sale or on subscription services. They are out of print, like rare books. My solution so far is just not to play them very often. Rhapsody is so easy to use that getting out a CD or even calling it up on Windows Media Player is a pain, so I think the cloud music storage concept is great for now.

Until all music is available for renting, some music needs to be owned. You’ll have two systems to maintain. Your rental library and your cloud library, or if you collect physical music, your collects of 78s, 45, LPs, CDs, cassettes, reel-to-reel tapes and 8-tracks. And I tend to think even the people who love physical media music will want to convert their collection to the cloud to make it easier to play.

Sound Quality

Right now MOG and Rdio stream at 256 – 320 kbps. This may or may not be higher bitrates than Rhapsody and Napster who reported 192 and 128 kbps in the past. Getting such details is hard, and all the services are evolving. Apple says it will use 256kbps for it’s Music Match service, so I tend to think that will become the minimum standard. Depending on how fancy your computer speakers are, or how good your stereo system is, this music sounds very good. It’s not as good as a CD played loud with deep concentrated listening, but it will do.

All the services downgrade the bitrate to 64-128kbps for mobile devices, but some of them allow users to request the full bitrate.

I think quality is pretty much a wash for comparing the four services. And I expect that music quality will improve over time too, but you won’t have to buy all your favorite albums again.

Mobile Device Use

Here’s another features that’s quickly becoming a wash as each service updates their apps for iOS and Android devices, and even Blackberry phones. You can stream or download albums to play offline. At first these companies provided a subset of features for their mobile users, but that’s changed. Now you can pretty much play what you want limited by the restrictions of your data plan. I find it better to download playlists to my device for songs I like to regularly play, and to stream albums I want to try out.

All these services have features in their apps that let you download while connected with WiFi, and play offline to avoid data plan expenses.

I find it damn annoying that these services charge double to listen on a smartphone. A smartphone is just another computer.

Rhapsody and Napster do support some MP3 players, so that’s a plus for them.

Streaming Media Player Support

Sonos, the Cadillac of household streaming digital media supports all four of these services. Roku, the Chevy of such services does offer MOG and Rdio, and I hope they offer the other two in the future. MOG has also made plans to integrated into TVs, Blu-ray players and cars. What this will mean is your HDTV, which people often connect to good sound systems, will become a streaming music player. This beats the crap out of Apple TV as a music player. Just imagine a TV with MOG and Netflix, what a combo that will be!

I have a DIY home theater PC hooked up to my HD TV and stereo, so I can stream music from all four services, but I’m tempted to get a Roku to simplify my movie and music streaming. Sony is setting up a streaming service for all its devices called Qriocity, so if you have a Sony TV, Playstation or PSP, they might be worth considering.

MOG lets you play through the Roku at the $4.99 subscription price, but Rdio requires the $9.99 sub. But when you think you get nearly all new music for $9.99 a month, that’s a fantastic deal.

Rhapsody made early deals with MP3 players and phone companies to integrate it’s services, but it’s obvious that the TV, smartphone, tablet and computer are the standard devices people use every day, so as streaming music/video becomes better and common, we’ll probably see DVD/Blu-Ray players disappear, as well as dedicated MP3 players, so streaming music services need to target TVs/Computers/Tablets/Smartphones. This might also signal the end of streaming boxes like Roku and Sonos. So when you buy your next TV make sure it’s Internet ready with lots of streaming services.

[Update: I’ve since tested MOG with a Roku, and a friend has tested Rdio with one too, and our consensus is the Roku is not a good music player. If you have a Roku and want to play a playlist or try out an album its okay, but we would never use a Roku for a primary interface to a subscription music service.]

Web Interface

As TVs and smartphone apps take over streaming video and music functions, people will probably play less music from the computer, but that’s a shame, because the web designers are getting better and better at presenting music graphically. Rdio and the new beta of Rhapsody have beautiful web interfaces for hunting finding, playing, sharing and studying music.

A good web interface also determines how easy it is to play music at work or home while you are sitting a computer, which is where I listen to 99% of my music.

The new Rhapsody beta interface and Rdio let you stay in one window, but Napster and MOG want to break out into a second player window. Rdio and Rhapsody have desktop clients, but Rdio’s desktop client is mainly a little breakout window like MOG and Napster uses.

But Rdio beats Rhapsody when it comes to social networking. Each have tabs on the album page, but Rhapsody only has Tracks and Similar Albums. Rdio has Album, Reviews, Collections, Listeners, Playlists. Those last three tabs let me find other people who also love the album, which will possibly lead to finding new songs to like.

Rdio also lets me know that Blonde on Blonde has been playing 11,431 times by other members. I love statistics, so that makes another reason to be partial to Rdio.

In terms of finding albums the trend seems to towards showing ever larger photos of the album covers, which is nice to look at, but if you’re looking at an artist with lots of albums, it makes it hard to find a particular one.

In terms of the web design I give Rhapsody the prize for finding albums, but Rdio the gold ring for social networking.

Time Travel

I love time lines. I’d love to be able to put in a month and year and hear the songs and albums that came out during that time. Or give a date range, or year, or year and season. Napster does not do that exactly, but it does offer Billboard Charts. For the Billboard 200 Albums you can go back to any season until 1966, for the Hot 100 Tracks to any season back to 1955. That’s pretty cool. Napster is my least favorite service, but this one feature makes me want to keep it.

Unfortunately, Napster does irritating things with these lists, like substituting re-recordings, live cuts, or Karaoke versions, for when they don’t have rights to a song. That sucks. I would prefer they just gray the song out and add OOP (out-of-print) by the title. That would be an interesting feature in itself because we’d know how many hit songs have gone out of print. I’d rather not hear Karaoke Beatles because the band has been buttholes about licensing their music.

Now I know this is a tremendous wish to ask for, but I wished the photos showed the covers of the original single sleeve or album sleeve. These streaming music services could be great resources for collecting music.

Everything In Print

There’s no technical reason for not offering every album ever published. It’s all about legal issues, copyright, marketing issues, etc. But as more people start listening to subscription music it will cause music not in the system to be forgotten, especially as older music fans die off. If streaming music services offered everything that’s ever been published then that would be the Paradise of Music, but I doubt that will happen any time soon.

Last Call for Albums Going Out of Print

Right now when an album goes out of print it just disappears and any reference to a song in a playlist gets grayed out. What I wished is for these services to give a last call notice before this happens and let us decide if we want to buy the CD or MP3 album, and move that to a cloud music site for lifetime storage. Again, another reason for music subscription services to offer cloud music storage – the synergy would be so great.

Artist Bibliography Listing

In addition to a album cover listing, I wished we had a bibliographic view that listed all the artist’s work in a list without photos in year order, with links to albums that the service has, and grayed out for out of print albums. I’d especially like to have original release date and product number. When an album is rerelease I’d want it relisted with a new product number and date. I’d want this feature to provide all the information that the most rabid music collector would use.

Original Reviews

Now this might be another pie-in-the-sky wish, but it would be fantastic if these services could provide reviews from periodicals of the time the music original came out. I have the complete Rolling Stone on DVD, so I don’t see why MOG, Napster, Rdio and Rhapsody couldn’t license rights to link to related material from all the music magazines of the times. Or at least replicate Wikipedia entries.

Other Reading

I have found several good articles comparing these various services.

Four Music Subscription Services (Macworld, 10/12/10)
More iTunes Alternatives (Ed Bott at Zdnet, 12/10/10)
Sound quality discussion at Sonos forum (3/15/11)
The Best Mobile Music (4/27/11)
CloudMusic – blog devoted to music streaming

JWH – 6/16/11