Music – Page 24 – Auxiliary Memory

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

Google Music Beta v. Amazon Cloud Drive

Problem #1 – Should I Spend $659 for a Proper Storage Rack for My CDs

Currently, my wife Susan and I have 1,500 music CDs we store on a built-in shelf behind the door of our spare room. This isn’t a good place for them because it’s not easy to get to, and it only has 9 shelves, and I need 15, so we have to go double high on some shelves, and even double deep on others, so finding and shelving a CD is very annoying. This whole system is so annoying that I don’t like playing my CDs. The solution would be to buy a nice CD rack from Boltz.com and put the CDs near where we play them.

Convert that to this

Problem #2 – We Hardly Ever Play CDs Anymore

Susan plays her music on her iPhone, and I play my music through my work computer, my home computer and my HTPC in the den that’s connected to the big stereo system. The only time I like playing the CDs is when I want to sit in the den and play them loud so I can enjoy the music’s full fidelity. That’s happening less and less often. And for 97% of the time I play music from my Rhapsody subscription. So why spend hundreds of dollars and hours of efforts to organize my CDs? Could we get rid of the CDs altogether? They are our proof that our digital copies are legal, so I suppose we could box them up and put them in the attic. But when I retire I’d like to move around and dragging 20 storage boxes of CDs will be like carrying a boat anchor everywhere I go.

Problem #3 – Making and Maintaining a Perfect Digital Copy of Our CD Collection

A couple years ago I spent weeks ripping our collection, but since then we’ve discovered the results had been imperfect. Here and there a cut will be missing, and on rare occasions a cut will be bad. And since then we’ve bought many CDs that we haven’t ripped, but we’re not sure which ones. And we have the worry of maintaining a backup. I have the whole library copied on external drives, some of which we keep off-site, but each copy has gotten out of sync and we’re not sure which one is the master anymore, and all of them are now incomplete. What a pain. I love Rhapsody, but I’m being forced to maintain my own digital collection of music because Rhapsody doesn’t have everything. For example, no Beatles. Or if the CD goes out of print, it’s removed from their collection. Basically Rhapsody provides most of what music is being sold at any given moment, with the exception of a few butthead bands that won’t sign with them.

Problem #4 – I Don’t Like Most of the Music in My Collection

Of our 1,500 CDs, or 18,000+ songs, I’d guess I really only like less than 6,000 songs. And that’s only a guess, it might be much less. Most albums have only 1-2 songs I really like, some CDs I never liked any of the songs, or have since turned against them. And Susan and I like different songs. What we’d really love is two digital collections: His and Hers. And we want each collection slimmed down to just the songs we love. But going through 18,000+ songs to find those gems would be months, if not years of work.

Solution #1 – Forget CDs Completely

I could probably live without my CDs because I have Rhapsody. Susan has most of everything she already wants in her iTunes library, and whenever she wants something new she buys a CD and rips it to iTunes. If we weren’t worried about proving our digital songs were legal, we could just get rid of the CDs completely. We could start buying MP3 songs instead of CDs. This is a very appealing solution because it would be the most hassle free. The downside is we’ve paid a lot of money for our CDs, and I don’t want to buy those songs again. Many of those albums we bought as LPs, and then bought again as CDs, and some of them I bought a third time as SACDs, and many CDs we bought a second time as a CD when the remastered version came out. I hate the idea of buying MP3 songs that we’ve already bought one more more times, and then getting a lower fidelity copy. Will MP3 be the last format? Is this the last time we have to buy our favorite songs?

Solution #2 – Move Our Collections to the Cloud

Google Music Beta is promising some lucky people storage for up to 20,000 songs for free. Right now if we moved our collection to Amazon Cloud Drive it would cost us $125 a year to maintain. And since Susan and I would like to have our own separate collections, if we both uploaded our collection to our Amazon accounts, it would be $250 a year. Of course, we’d both like to thin out our collections, so eventually that cost would be smaller, but it would take us months to get to that ideal music library. Google is promising free for awhile, and that might be enough time to reduce our collection to just the songs we love, but we don’t know what Google’s final cost will be. More than likely, we’d want our collections in both clouds as backups, or case one service is down, or one goes out of business. Is it possible that Google Music or Amazon Cloud Drive will survive for the rest of our lives?

The down side of this is I’d still be managing four collections: CDs, Rhapsody, Amazon and Google.

Solution #3 – Give Up Music Ownership

I could go with Rhapsody, Pandora and other streaming music sites and just forget about owning songs at all. This has a tremendous appeal to me, but it also has a scary downside. If I get in the mood to hear a certain song and it’s not on Rhapsody I’m shit out of luck. For $120 a year I get access to 11,000,000+ songs through Rhapsody. That’s almost perfect, except that once in awhile I want to hear a song that Rhapsody doesn’t have. Can I live with that? It’s not like I don’t have more music than would ever have time to hear.

Solution #4 – The Compromise Solution

The compromise solution for now is to put our all-time favorite music into our personal cloud storage sites, save out my all-time favorite CDs to play loud, continue to listen to Rhapsody, and put the rest of the CDs in the attic. This is still a big mess though.

Hope for the Future

If Rhapsody and other streaming music services could serve every song ever recorded then I’d give away my CDs and forget about owning music forever. I wouldn’t even mess with cloud drives.

Amazon Cloud Drive is very appealing because I can buy music from Amazon which they promise to store for free and hopefully they could manage my music collection for the rest of my life. If my music collection could be slimmed down, and their prices came down some, Amazon Cloud Drive might be a great long term solution for owning music. I buy all my books, CDs, and DVDs from them now anyway. The downside for Amazon is their lack of an app for iOS for Susan to use, and their player is rather primitive, but I’m sure that will improve. They should offer some kind of incentive like for every $10 spent on music they will add 1gb of lifetime storage to your cloud drive.

Google Music Beta is even more appealing because it’s free right now. I could put my whole collection online at no cost. Another big plus that Google Music has over Amazon Cloud Drive is its player, which I’ve only seen in demo videos. It looks far more sophisticated than Amazon’s player. The downside is Google doesn’t sell music. It would be weird to have to buy songs from Amazon and then copy them to Google.

Apple still hasn’t come out with their cloud drive yet. Susan is very tied to iTunes because of her iPhone, and depending on what Apple charges, it could be a great solution for her. I have an iPod touch, but portable music isn’t that important to me. I’ll probably get an Android pay-as-you-go phone, so it will work with Amazon or Google. If Apple came out with free unlimited for life music storage and offered a streaming service, I might be tempted to go with them, and then start buying my songs from iTunes. Their downside is iTunes isn’t very good for managing large music collections, but that could be improved too.

I have yet to see any rumors that Rhapsody will offer a cloud music drive for its users, but it could be the best of both worlds. Especially if Rhapsody could develop an app that looked at my collection and then upload only the albums they didn’t provide that were out of print. And they could warn users when an album was going out of print and offer their users a chance to buy songs before they disappeared from the streaming collection. In other words, Rhapsody could manage both of my collections.

Who knows what will happen, but these new cloud music services could be solutions to some of my problems.

And I can imagine another solution. Why have millions of copies of “Hey Jude” stored on drives all over the world? Why not have an international music registry, and when people buy a song they get a license to play it for life, and then music services would only have to cache one copy of a song wherever they stream music. There would be no need to have massive server farms storing everyone’s songs. That would save a lot of energy. You could buy and play songs from any service you like and they would register the license for you. All music services would be given rights to check the license registry.

Why make Amazon keep a million copies of “Hey Jude” on their servers for a million users when they could link to just one copy?

JWH – 5/15/11

Amazon Cloud versus iTunes versus Rhapsody Music

All my music loving friends are building their digital collection of tunes, but we’re all doing it differently. Many of us have bought the same music over and over again in different formats. I’ve bought LPs, CDs, SACDs and currently pay for streaming rights. I know some people that have done LP, CD, and are now back to buying LPs again. Younger people tend to have only acquired MP3/AAC files, but they have a hard time maintaining them. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever had a computer go dead or stolen, or have gone from an iPod to an Android smartphone, or any other platform or hardware shift.

When Amazon Cloud came out the other day I bought “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” by Bob Dylan in the fourth format I’ve owned in since 1967 (LP, CD, SACD, MP3), and that doesn’t count the monthly fees for streaming that I pay to hear it.

What me and my music friends want is a place to collect our music so that we can organize it once and for all and have it for the rest of our lives no matter what kind of gadgets we own to play our music. On the surface Amazon Cloud looks very promising, but if I put my 18,000+ (117gb) songs in their cloud I’ll be paying Amazon as much for cloud storage rent as I pay Rhapsody to have access to 11 million streaming songs.

Obviously I think anyone who is willing to spend at least $9.99 per month on music gets their best deal at Rhapsody, and all other choices depend on spending less per month.

I very seldom listen to my CDs any more, and I rarely buy them. When I discover an album I really love and I’m afraid it’s going to go out of print someday, or I’m anxious to hear it in its highest form of sound fidelity, I buy the CD. But I can almost see myself giving up CDs and living with Rhapsody music for the rest of my life. If I only knew that streaming music will catch on and will always be offered in the future, I’d sell my CDs.

There’s one huge downside to streaming music – services like Rhapsody can only offer music that’s for sale. If an album or song goes out of print then it’s removed from the service. Maybe in the future nothing will ever go out of print, but for now I can’t trust that. If I really love a song I have to buy a copy. I don’t want to be an old man crying, “I’d give anything to hear that song one more time.”

Now, if I was as unethical as kids and willing to steal my music things would be different, because everything seems to be available for free online. However, there is a cost for stealing music that I think is pretty high. Building a collection of stolen MP3s take a lot of work and time. Rhapsody is easy and convenient. Amazon Cloud is easy and convenient too, but I’d have to always buy MP3 versions of songs I wanted to keep, and that means I’d spend more money than I do now at Rhapsody. First would be the fees for storing my old ripped CD songs, and second the price of any new songs I added in the future.

Also, if I switched to Amazon Cloud service, I’d have to give up listening on my iPod touch, and would need to buy an equivalent Android device, like an Archos 43, or start spending a lot of money and get a smartphone. Rhapsody works wonderfully from my iPod touch, but Apple might screw things up for Rhapsody in the future. Amazon seems to have no plans to offer their cloud service to the iOS devices.

I could go with Apple, but that would mean listening to a tiny fraction of music that I do now for the same money. iTunes is absolutely the worse deal of the bunch. If Apple had kept everything about the Lala streaming music service they bought, I would have probably given up Rhapsody. Lala was a fantastic social service for music lovers. Apple seems to have no plans to provide a streaming music service despite years of rumors.

Rhapsody.com and Audible.com are two Internet companies that I spend money on. Not only are they a commercial success with me, but I’d hate to live without them. Both work well with my iPod touch. Both have great clients for my PC. Both support a wide range of devices and smartphones in case I want to use something new. And I don’t have to worry about backing up any of my files I get from them.

Sorry Amazon and Apple, your model of owning music just isn’t practical, efficient or cost effective. I don’t know why all my music friends don’t use Rhapsody or other streaming music services. I think most of them started with Apple and just don’t want to switch. I discussed this with a woman at work Friday. She has 32gb of music in iTunes. She’d like to get an Android phone because they have physical keyboards, but she doesn’t want to deal with porting that many AAC files to MP3.

Now that is one advantage to the Amazon Cloud for owning music – if Amazon stays in business, is always trustworthy, and protects its cloud data 100% – because the cloud takes over most of the hassle of managing the files. If there was no subscription music services I’d definitely be going with Amazon. But like my friends stuck in iTunes, what happens if something new comes out in the future that doesn’t work with Amazon’s cloud?

So what would be the ideal music delivery system? One that offers every song ever recorded with the most convenient interface to whatever device I’m listening with at the moment with nearly instant and perfect search tools. Whether that’s based on buying songs or renting them, it would make listening to music the easiest possible outside of telepathic transmission of music.

But it’s not the best way to collect music. I’m reading The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett, about a rare book thief. The book provides a great insight into compulsive collecting, and I think it’s also a clue as to why some people will always want to buy music in a physical format. It also explains why LPs are making a comeback. Those big 12” discs in beautiful jackets are an art form that some people love. But if you love to listen to music, streaming music is to great to resist.

It will be interesting if I live to 2020 or there about, because I bet this music problem will probably be completely resolved by then.

JWH – 4/9/11

Musical Barriers

The other night I watched a riveting documentary “Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould” on American Masters (PBS). Although I love music I’ve never been able to get into classical music. I had encountered Glenn Gould decades ago when I read gushing review of his 1955 performance of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” so I rushed out and bought a copy. Boy was I disappointed. I thought they were nasty little gnarled piano riffs that were cold and unfeeling. After watching the biography on Monday night, I went out and bought a new CD copy of Gould’s “Goldberg Variations” on Tuesday.

Guess what? I found them just as unpleasant as ever. How can compositions so admired, played by a performer deemed so astounding, be so unpleasant for me to hear? Has my mind programmed with 59 years of pop music unable to fathom the implied beauty of Bach?

To be honest, the piano is not an instrument that soothes my soul, and Gould plays it in a style that I find painful. Watching the films of Gould playing, it’s obvious he’s lost in a deep trance and I know he finds tremendous beauty in the sound he produces. I can admire his skill, even though I don’t have the training to even begin to understand what he is doing, but as a listener trying to find a way into the world of classical music, not enjoying it is a real barrier.

While researching the “Goldberg Variations” I came across an article in Slate, “The Goldberg Variations Made New: Move over Glenn Gould, here’s Simone Dinnerstein,” by Evan Eisenberg. Within the article are downloads to three Goldberg variations played by Gould and Dinnerstein. I find them as different as rock and rap. Please download and play #28 (labeled 29 on the files) of each performance (Dinnerstein-28 and Gould-28). Gould plays like a wild madman, while Dinnerstein makes her piece serene, which makes the piano seem warm and friendly to me. I’m not saying I’d put the Dinnerstein cuts in heavy rotation on my playlists, but she makes Bach more accessible to me.

This brings up a number of questions. Is there anyway I could train my mind to break through the musical barriers that keep me from enjoying classical music? Could I ever love the “Goldberg Variations” as much as even “Animal” by Ke$ha, the song I’m playing at the moment as I write. Is it a cultural barrier? Did I grow up with wrong long hairs, The Beatles instead of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms? If I played the “Goldberg Variations” enough would my brain grow new neural pathways and sooner or later I’d break through the classical musical barrier?

And why do so few people still listen to classical music? Does it take a fundamental knowledge of music and music history to appreciate classical music? Does classical music push the same buttons that rock and pop music push in my head? Or is like ducks, and I just imprinted on rock? If my Mom and Dad had played the “Goldberg Variations” in 1955 when I was four, would my musical tastes have formed differently?

And my music tastes do change. I’m listening to Nicki Minaj and Kanye West at the moment. Their rap and pop styles are light years away from the music I grew up on in the 1960s. I started off with rock, went to folk, country, jazz, big band – hell I even love Ravi Shankar’s Indian music – so what keeps me from enjoying classical music?

JWH – 12/29/10

Katy Perry vs. The Beatles

There is a kind of age prejudice in pop music that I’d like to explore. When I was growing I thought Perry Como and Dean Martin were for over the hill folks, like my parents. The Beatles and Bob Dylan defined my generation, even though older college kids looked down on us teens from their folk music purity. And let’s not forget the smugness of classical music fans or jazz aficionados who sneer at three chord rock and roll from their hipster highs.

But I have to admit, we baby boomers are terrible music snobs. Many of my generation stopped listening to music after 1975. For people coming of age in the 1960s, The Beatles are the yardstick that all other pop music is measured. To many of us the art of music has been in sharp decline since 1969’s Abbey Road. But has the music declined, or just our youthful enthusiasm?

I’m now a generation older than my parents were when we all first watched The Beatles on Ed Sullivan back in February of 1964. The Beatles, The Byrds and Bob Dylan have become my Perry Como, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.

When I tell friends my age that I’m listening to Katy Perry most of them do not have a clue to who she is, and if they do, they think of her as some kind of under-aged, under-dressed young woman who doesn’t really sing but flaunts her body to loud noise. “Oh those girls don’t sing they sell sex.” But what emotional response were all those screaming teenage girls buying when they heard:

Oh please say to me

You’ll let me be your man

And please say to me

You’ll let me hold your hand

Now, let me hold your hand

I want to hold your hand

Almost a half-century from when the Beatles sang to little girls, girl singers now dominate the pop charts, and sing songs like “Pearl,” that rebels against the tyranny of love and men,

Oh, she used to be a pearl, oh

Yeah, she used to rule the world, oh

Can’t believe she’s become a shell of herself

Cause she used to be a pearl

She was unstoppable

Moved fast as light, like an avalanche

But now she’s stuck deep in cement

Wishing that they’d never ever met

When we were young we were more than willing to accept the wisdom of Lennon and McCartney, who were no older than Katy Perry now. Why, when we’re two or three times older than Paul and John in 1964, do we cling to their music and reject the artistic expression of today’s youth? You’d think we’d be listening to something old and fuddy-duddy by now, like our version of Perry Como. Do The Beatles sound square to the modern listener?

Do we all get stuck in our own teenage dreams?

Pop music has never been that deep and I don’t think Katy Perry’s album Teenage Dream is that different any of the Fab Four’s early LPs. We are told Perry is involved with the writing of her songs, but that could be PR, but don’t the lyrics represent the young of 2010? Her hit song “Teenage Dream” does not show the poetical sophistication of “Eleanor Rigby” but it’s sentiments are far more sophisticated than the early Lennon-McCartney love songs when they were her age. Remember, in 1964, things were much more innocent than this video.

What does this say about this generation? And what if you heard your answer back when you were a teen – don’t you sound like our parents? My Mom and Dad hated The Beatles and thought they were vulgar, lacking in talent. My father claimed they played noise. But we thought The Beatles were cutting edge brilliant. They expressed our desires and dreams – but don’t those dreams and desires seem so innocent and unsophisticated now? Children under ten today love The Beatles. Older kids want Jack White, whose anger is hard to fathom to us, but obvious to them.

Of course, I wonder if today’s high school and college kids are really more mature than we were? The Beatles were living what we see in this Katy Perry video, we just didn’t see it. And we were no angels either.

And if we graying baby boomers, now over the hill by our earlier philosophy of not trusting people over thirty, stop listening to twenty-something art, doesn’t that put us out of touch like we thought our parents were back then?

Or maybe pop music encapsulates every emerging generation, and the normal mature thing to do is to hate the music of young?

I listen to music like it’s a drug. When all The Beatles albums were recently remastered I went out and bought most of them, but I only played them once. Their potency as a musical stimulant has worn off. But I’m playing the Katy Perry songs over and over again because they get me high with restless energy. To me its new music that thrills. As I’ve gotten older it’s gotten much harder to connect to the young, so I return to my old favorite albums, but it’s a nostalgic thrill, not a let’s go out and conquer the world defiant dance.

Just being current doesn’t make music powerful. There is something else. I think the powerful emotion I crave in music is the strong emotions of ambitious artists. I think we loved The Beatles music because of the passion of John, Paul, George and Ringo to succeed. And I think the reason Katy Perry is popular now is because of her passion to be on top of the world musically. She expresses that desire in her song “Firework.”

Do you ever feel already buried deep

Six feet under scream

But no one seems to hear a thing

Do you know that there’s still a chance for you

Cause there’s a spark in you

You just gotta ignite the light

And let it shine

Just own the night

Like the Forth of July

Cause baby you’re a firework

Come on show ‘em what your worth

Make ‘em go “oh, oh, oh!”

As you shoot across the sky-y-y

In the song she is singing these sentiments to someone else, but she’s talking about herself.

JWH – 10/7/10