How Comprehensive is Rhapsody Music

The other day I wrote Music Lovers Nirvana, about the ready availability of online music, and how Rhapsody.com had 5 out of 5 albums reviewed in Entertainment Weekly.  I thought I test that further with the latest issue of Utne Reader (Sept/Oct 2008 ) and a slightly old issue of Rolling Stone (6/12/08).  The Utne Reader reviewed 6 albums and Rhapsody.com had 4, with one album not yet released but since they had the artist’s 7 other albums it’s pretty sure they will get it.  The one hold out even looks promising since they had the artist’s previous album.  For Rolling Stone, Rhapsody.com had 13 out of 13 albums reviewed.  I should go out and buy some obscure music journals to test further, but that’s for the future.

I really have to wonder why all true music fans don’t subscribe to Rhapsody.com.  Many say they don’t want to rent music,  At $12.99 a month, it could be considered a music preview service so you listen to Rhapsody first and then buy your favorites on CD later.

Here are the albums reviewed.  The number in () are the number of albums Rhapsody.com have by the artist.  I also checked Amazon.com to see what it would cost to buy the album.  The first price is for CD/the second for MP3 album if it’s available.  All were available on Rhapsody.com unless noted.

Utne Reader Sept/Oct 2008

  • Soul Sides, v 1 & v 2 Various Artists $13.98
  • Fair Ain’t Fair by Tim Fite (1) $15.98/$8.99 – not on Rhapsody
  • Seasons of Change by Brian Blade (3) $14.99/$9.49
  • Carried to Dust by Calexico (7) $13.99 not yet released
  • The Best of Lydia Mendoza (7) $16.98/$8.99

Rolling Stone 6/12/8

  • Evil Urges by My Morning Jacket (9) $8.99/$8.99
  • Weezer by Weezer (6) $9.99/$5.00
  • Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes (1) $10.49/$5.00
  • Seeing Sound by N.E.R.D. (3) $11.99/$9.49
  • Like a Fire by Solomon Burke (24) $14.99/$9.90
  • We Started Nothing by The Ting Tings (1) $6.99/$7.99
  • Perfectly Clear by Jewel (6) $9.99/$8.99
  • Flavor of Entanglement by Alanis Morrisette (9) $9.99/$8.99
  • All I Intended to Be by Emmylou Harris (31) $9.99/$8.99
  • Circus Monkey by Walter Becker (6) $9.99/$8.99
  • The Declaration by Ashanti (8 ) $9.99/$8.99
  • Here We Stand by The Fratellis (2) $12.99
  • Wanderlust by Gavin Rossdale (1) $9.99/$8.99

This is like being a music store owner and getting to play all the albums, or like being a music reviewer and getting all the new albums sent to you.  It’s hard to believe it’s legal.  It’s hard to believe that music companies would support this, but they do.

The only downside I can see to using Rhapsody.com is when an album goes out of print it gets removed from their server.  So if you love an album and want it for all time then you should buy it.  However, if the album is popular enough to always stay in print you don’t have to worry.

I wonder how much the artists make from their music being on subscription music services?  Anyone know?

Jim

Pandora and Internet Radio

On August 16, 2008, the Washington Post ran the news story, “Giant of Internet Radio Nears Its ‘Last Stand’,” referring to Pandora.com.  Pandora is a standout Internet site that allows users to create custom Internet radio stations based on their favorite songs and artists.  It’s a unique way to discover undiscovered music showcasing technology that gets about a million daily listeners.  The Post quotes Pandora’s founder Tim Westergren, “We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision.  This is like a last stand for webcasting.”

The problem is one of paying royalties.  Right now there are a number of technologies that broadcast music:  traditional radio, satellite radio, cable TV radio and Internet radio.  Oddly, they each pay different rates to play music, and it looks like the music industry wants Internet radio to pay the most.  If this happens many sites will shut down.  Pandora has yet to make money but anticipated to go into the black in 2009 if the rates were not increased.

There are many articles about the death knell of Internet radio showing up now, with the implication that if the rates these sites have to pay goes up they will close their doors.  I think other things might happen.  Why give up on a new business model so quickly?  Pandora is actually a superior way to listen to random music – it’s superior because it’s less random but still random.

There are two way to listen to music.  You think of a song you want to hear and you play it, or you turn on a broadcasting system to play music for you.  The first method usually involves owning the song, but subscription music is a variation of that.  The second method, random listening, involves finding a source that’s close to your musical mood.  In the old days, a city might have a dozen radio stations and you picked one to play, or if you were in your car, you programmed your five radio buttons and jumped between them.  Satellite music offers more variety by giving you more stations to choose from.  Internet radio ups the variety factor further.

Pandora let’s you pick a seed song and then Pandora plays songs their Music Genome Project software thinks will match your taste.  You can click thumbs up or thumbs down on their picks to help the software zero in on what you like.  It works exceedingly well, but it’s still random music, or broadcast music.

Now I want musicians and music producers to get all the money they can, but I don’t want them to unfairly charge one random music technology more than another, and that appears to be a key issue with Pandora and other Internet radio sites.  Another random site I like is Playa Cofi Jukebox, which allows you to seed your mood by picking a year and it broadcasts random songs that came out in that year.  That’s another triumph of technology in my book.  I want these sites to succeed.

Pandora is thinking of ways to improve its ad revenue and that’s good, but I think they should think of other ways to generate revenue.  I pay for cable TV and a DVR so I see less television ads.  I would be willing to pay a fee to Pandora to not hear ads.  They should run ads, but allow users who want to pay not to listen to them.  Another possibility is to merge with a subscription service like Rhapsody or Napster and be an extra selling point for those companies.  Rhapsody has random radio stations for when I don’t want to pick my songs, but it would be even better if they had the Music Genome Project technology.

I have come to see great value in random music because of shuffle play of my MP3s.  I can even add Music Genome Project like tech to my own MP3 library with MusicIP software.  But Pandora beats my collection of 17,081 songs by light years.  And I can play it on my iPod touch.  I really do not want to see Pandora and other Internet radio stations go out of business.

Another option, rather than increasing royalty rates, could require Pandora to provide links to songs that take users to sites selling the song.  Sites that would also provide a commission to Pandora.  Pandora could offer a variety of online music stores and users could check box their favorite when they register.  Increased sales should offer better revenue than broadcast royalties.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not wanting free music.  I believe free is bad.  I want the music industry to make their money and I want Pandora to make money and I’m willing to either listen to ads or pay a subscription to get what I want.  It will be a shame if the industry that collects royalties forces these new sources of random music out of business.  I don’t listen to traditional radio anymore.  I’m not interested in satellite radio.  I have cable TV radio but I don’t use it.  I’m an Internet person.  Why should random music businesses pay more per song for customers like me than the other businesses pay for their customers?

Jim

If you read the Slashdot thread listed below one reader posts the suggestion that Internet radio should just stop using songs that require royalties.  That’s an interesting idea, but I think ultimately it’s a bad idea.  Free is not good.  If this idea succeeded it would kill off a whole industry and destroy legions of jobs.  If the writer’s purpose is to promote new artists and bands, it would be better to use Pandora and help these new musicians gain an economic footing, rather than turn the music industry into all amateurs.  The Music Genome Project would work just as well with unknown artists.

The real virtue of Pandora is when it plays a song for you that you’ve never heard but you love it so much that you buy it.

Related stories

Music Lovers Nirvana

I don’t know why all my music loving friends aren’t subscribers to Rhapsody Music.  This morning I picked up the 8/8/8 edition of Entertainment Weekly and read the five reviews of new albums in their Music Review section.  I then logged into Rhapsody and played each of those albums.  Rhapsody had five for five.  I can listen to these albums anytime I want and it’s completely legal and all I pay is $119 a year for the service.  The albums were:

  • Conor Oberst by Conor Oberst
  • Fragile Future by Hawthorne Heights
  • Lessons in Love by Lloyd
  • Harps and Angels by Randy Newman
  • Scars on Broadway by Scars on Broadway

Just to see how good Rhapsody is I grabbed the latest issue, and found six more reviews.  Rhapsody had five of the six – missing out on Ra Ra Riot’s The Rhumb Line, but they had their EP, so that one might show up soon.

If I was paying by the song like most people, I would have already racked up $40 worth of songs this morning.  And these are five albums I never would have bought if I had been flipping through CDs at a record store.  And there have been tons of albums I’ve bought that I’ve liked much less than these albums.  So far I like Hawthorne Heights and Conor Oberst best.  I’m going through these online albums looking for standout songs – songs I will want to come back and listen to again.

That’s one of Rhapsody’s weaknesses – you have access to so much music that it’s overwhelming.  I wished they had some kind of system to help me remember all these new artists.  If they had a little scale that showed up while each song was playing I could rate them:  _Forgettable _Good _Great _Fantastic, it would be easy to track them down later.

Rhapsody is better at providing new music than it is old music.  I just got Rolling Stone: Cover to Cover 1967-2007 on DVD, complete digital editions of the magazines, over a thousand issues.  I started with the first issue looking for albums that I’ve never heard of and never remembered at all.  Rhapsody is not the place to find them.  Back then albums came out on LPs, and most of them never got reprinted as CDs, much less brought forward to the digital age.  However, if an old album is re-mastered on CD and sold today there’s a good chance it will show up on Rhapsody.

I show Rhapsody to my friends, and I write about it every so often, but I know damn few people who use the service.  It’s amazing that such a great deal is ignored.  I know young people prefer to steal their music, but Rhapsody is so cheap I can’t believe more kids don’t want to be legal.

The real drawback of Rhapsody is it doesn’t play on iPods.  And for some reason Steve Jobs doesn’t want Apple to get into the subscription music business.  I don’t put music on my iPod, but I do play music on my iPod touch through the Pandora app.  Pandora is free, but random.  I imagine that if I played Pandora long enough I’d eventually hear everything I can get on Rhapsody.  I can’t believe Pandora isn’t more famous too.  It’s a marvelous invention allowing Internet listeners build their own radio stations by starting each with a seed song and rating subsequent songs selected by Pandora.

Pandora’s Music Genome Project is technology designed to analyze what you like and give you more of it.  I have a jazz station started with “Blue Rondo A Lo Turk” and a Dylanesque station seeded with “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and a 60s San Francisco sound station seeded with Quicksilver Messenger Service and a new alternative station started with Broken Social Scene.  Pandora is a FANTASTIC system for discovering new tunes to love.  Right now it’s playing David Bromberg’s live “Mr. Bojangles” on my Bryds station – now that’s a wonderful blast from the past.

And then there’s Deezer.com – free on demand music.  I checked, and the David Bromberg song is there to play for free.  Also, I check and three of the five albums from Entertainment Weekly mentioned above are available to play for free (Fragile Future, Scars on Broadway and Harps and Angels).

How can the music industry offer all this free music?  Why does anyone buy songs?  I don’t know.  Over at Fantasy & Science Fiction, Gordon Van Gelder is asking the same questions about free short stories on the web.  Maybe I’m out of touch because I actually pay for Rhapsody music and buy magazines with short stories.  Will I be buying next year or the year after that?

There is no reason to buy music or short stories any more, not if you don’t want to, because there’s a wealth of great free material on the web.  How is that going to change things?  My wife and I paid $39 each to sit in the cheap seats at an outdoor Crosby, Stills and Nash concert a couple weeks ago.  That’s more money than I ever spent on their LPs.  We saw Jewel at the same place and prices, but that’s the two concerts I’ll go to this year.  Susie also went to Dave Matthews and plans to see a couple more concerts.  Can the music industry survive off of such sporadic support?

This is a great age for music lovers, but what kind of age is it for music creators?

Jim

iPod touch eReader eBook

I just bought an iPod touch 8gb for $199 refurbished at the Apple Store.  I’ve been wanting a carry around Internet device and the iPod touch is very elegant.  It took nothing to set up – just typed in my Wi-Fi code and I was connected.  I immediately upgraded it to the new 2.0 software so I could have the Exchange client.  That also worked smoothly.

And I’ve already gotten my first App, the eReader, which lets me read ebooks on the iPod touch.  The eReader allowed me to log into my Fictionwise.com account and access my Bookshelf there.  That’s the great thing about Fictionwise, it remembers your purchases and will let you download any book again, even in a new format.  I’ve had ebooks I bought from Fictionwise on a eBookwise 1150, Kindle and now the iPod touch.

The eReader on the iPod touch offers crystal clear type, but small, so it’s not as comfortable to read on as the Kindle.  However, after buying the Kindle I discovered I’m not much of a book reader any more, and that I’m really an audio bookworm instead.  It’s extremely easy from within the eReader program to jump to sites like Manybooks.net, to find free or commercial ebooks.  eReader has it’s own URL entry box to take you to places that provides PDB formatted books.

From inspiration to reading, it only took me about a minute to find and download “The House of Mirth” by Edith Wharton.  That’s the next audio book I plan to listen to, so I thought it might be fun to read it while I listen to it.

Even though I’m primarily an audio book person, it will still be nice to have visual books on the iPod touch for times when I’m at loose ends somewhere away from home and want to read, but that brings up the next issue.

Carrying Around the Internet

The advent of smart phones inspired me to want a way to carry around the Internet for 24×7 instant access to information, but I never could stomach the idea of paying their large monthly bills.  I’m currently on a  pay-as-you-go plan with T-Mobile and I add $50 worth of minutes about every 4-5 months.  It’s wonderful not having a cell phone bill.  When small mobile Wi-Fi Internet devices showed up on the market, I thought they were a good compromise – not perfect, but pretty good.  So I started researching.  I finally decided on the iPod touch when I saw it for $199 refurbished.  I like it, but I’ve got to learn how to carry it around.

I currently carry a 2nd generation iPod Nano in my shirt pocket.  The iPod touch might be too heavy to put there.  I carry my cell phone in my left front pants pocket, so the iPod touch could go on the right side, but I worry about it getting damaged, so I’m thinking about a small iPhone holster for my belt, but my pants are already overburdened with keys, wallet, phone, change, handkerchief, and sometimes voice recorder, so that I’m constantly hitching them up.  Carrying around another device is going to be annoying.  An iPhone would have been ideal because one device would replace two.

The obvious solution would be to start carrying a purse, but I think a bandolier would be better, although my wife already thinks seeing my white iPod headphones permanently hanging around my neck is nerdy enough.  I wouldn’t be bothered by any statement my carrying a purse would make, but so far I haven’t seen one I really liked.  I’d want something like a small sleek messenger bag made of leather, but if I’m going to start carrying a purse, why not plan to throw a few more items in, like a camera or a Eee PC, which means I’d want a bigger bag.

Also, I haven’t decided if the iPod touch is the perfect portable Internet device.  I can browse the net fairly easy with it, with some sites a lot more readable than others.  The iPod touch provides a convenient way to read and delete old emails, but it’s primary function would be to look up data, like movie times, weather info, or trivia, and listening to audio books.  I’ve wondered if I jumped up in size to the 7″ Eee PC if it wouldn’t make a substantially better carry around Internet device.

You don’t realize how important a keyboard is as a human-machine interface until you hunt and peck on the iPod touch.  The iPod touch certainly does a lot with it’s 3.5 inch 480 x 320 pixels screen.  I think it will take me weeks to truly explore the potential of this device.  Sooner or later I will want broadband access, because I figure in five years everyone will carry around the Internet.  I just don’t know what the device we will carry will look like.

Part 2:  Further Adventures of eReader on the iPod touch

Jim

Revealing Your Personality With Science Fiction

Rusty Keele over at BestScienceFictionStories.com has invited blogging friends over to write about their favorite SF short story, and I’m one of the contributors.  My post is queued up for tomorrow.  I picked “The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany from 1967.  Be sure and stop by and read all the posts this week.  Jason Sanford discusses his love of Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” from 1950 and John DeNardo picks “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin from 1954, after sneaking in a plea for “Diamond Dogs” by Alastair Reynolds from 2003.

It’s revealing to see what other fans like in the way of short stories, especially when you only get to pick one.  If had mentioned two, I might have included “The Menace From Earth” by Robert A. Heinlein from 1957.

To help refresh your memory of great short stories, look at these lists:

Are you a long time fan of science fiction?  If you study these lists, even in a casual way, they will bring back a flood of memories.  There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of great science fiction stories.  Our pitiful little minds just can’t hold them all our bio-RAM.  I wouldn’t have picked a different story if I had read these lists before I wrote my essay for Rusty, but reading them now makes me realize how hard it would be to pick story #2.

It’s too bad reprint rights are so expensive because it would be huge fun to create my own personal anthology of favorites and publish it at Lulu.com.  Imagine a fad of publishing personal anthologies of short stories, where you wrote forwards and afterwards for each story. Wouldn’t that make a unique way to communicate with new friends?  In the old days you’d introduce yourself to people and leave your calling card.  Imaging leaving your anthology.

Could you define your inner core personality with 12 short stories?  I think “The Star Pit” comes close to revealing a lot of my personal programming.  Picking the next 11 stories would be difficult, but I think I’ll start going through the above lists and make a try of it.  Certainly, it will make a nice blog entry.

Jim