Rdio – Auxiliary Memory

Why We Can’t Trust Subscription Music Services Like Rdio, Rhapsody, Spotify, MOG, etc.

In the post-CD world of music, the challenge is to keep our favorite songs forever even though we have nothing physical to hold and protect. If your computer crashes or you lose your smart phone, can you recover all your favorite songs you’ve bought over the years? (Or stolen.)

Digital music is in a total state of chaos. I have songs in Windows Media Play, iTunes, Google Music, Amazon Cloud Player, iTunes Music Match and I have rights to listen to albums in Rdio, Rhapsody and Spotify, plus I own about 1500+ CDs. No one site can play all the songs.

My favorite way to listen to music is via Rdio. Rdio plays on all my computers at home and work. It plays on my iPod touch, iPad 2, and it plays on my TV/stereo through a Roku box. However, it doesn’t play all the albums I own, nor out-of-print albums, but it does play millions and millions of songs, so for 90% of what I want it’s excellent. However, for those favorite songs it doesn’t have, it ruins the whole concept of subscription music.

For example, one of my favorite albums is No Guru No Method No Teacher by Van Morrison. It’s now out-of-print, and I recently discovered that when the song “Thanks for the Information” disappeared from my Songs Rated 10 playlist. I thought I had it on CD, but evidently not. I did have it on LP, but I got rid of my LPs years ago.

I probably didn’t get it on CD because it was on Rhapsody and Rdio and I got used to it being there, and thought it would always be there. I was wrong, it’s been pulled. I just ordered a used copy on Amazon for $10.25 + $2.98 shipping. I’m sure I could have gone and found a stolen copy, but I’m not into that. Once I get it I can rip it and put the songs on Amazon and Google. I’m not renewing iTunes Music Match.

The problem is my favorite way to play my favorite songs is via playlists on Rdio. Over time some songs disappear from subscription music services because the album goes out-of-print. I HATE THAT! I’ve been trusting subscription music services for years, and slowly it’s becoming obvious that if you really love a song and want to play it for the rest of your life you have to buy it.

But buying digital songs is iffy. I’m trusting Amazon to always preserve the songs I buy from them – but what if Amazon goes out of business or gives up on Amazon Cloud Player? How long will Amazon, iTunes and Google back up music if you buy it from them? And what if they don’t sell the songs you want?

I should consider the CD as my master copy for life, but the CD format might not last that much longer. Is the MP3 any kind of real archival medium?

Because music goes out-of-print and gets removed from Rdio and Rhapsody I’m going to have to change the way I listen to music. I might need to move my playlists to Amazon Cloud Player (and maybe Google Music) and then use Rdio and Rhapsody as tools to discover music. When I find a great song I want to listen to the rest of my life, I’m going to have to buy it and put it on Amazon Cloud Player. I’m paying Amazon $20 a year to store the 20,000 songs I own so I can play them from all my computers and mobile devices.

Or I could stick with Rdio and just let out-of-print songs become forgotten songs. I wish there was a way to upload out-of-print songs I own to Rdio so I could keep all my songs in one library. Rdio is far superior to Amazon Cloud Player for managing playlists. I can’t even find a way to delete a playlist on Amazon Cloud Player.

Why can’t I have all my music in one place where I can play it from all my devices? Life was so much simpler when I had LPs and all the music I owned was on one bookshelf. But back in those nostalgic times, I could only play that music in one place. Now I can play my music anywhere, if I can keep up with all my song files.

JWH – 10/28/12

How To Pay for Music?

David Lowery, of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker wrote “Letter to Emily White at NPR All Thing Songs Consider” last week that got a lot of attention on the net. The post currently has 533 comments, many of which try to justify stealing music with various self-serving excuses, even after Lowry carefully explained why stealing music is hurting musicians. Emily White had written “I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With” at NPR Music, confessing how she has 11,000 songs on her iPod but never bought more than 15 CDs in her life. Emily loves music and wants to work in the music business, but confesses she doesn’t pay for music. There are some fascinating comments for this blog post that’s well worth reading, but basically it comes down to telling hundreds of stories about why people don’t pay for music.

If all these people had their weekly paychecks stolen I wonder if they’d be so willing to admit to stealing other people’s pay?

Is there a solution to this problem?

In another post Lowery shows how it’s quicker to find music at iTunes and Amazon than to find copies to steal, disproving that people steal because it’s convenient. People steal music because they don’t want to pay. Lowery also showed that more music is available for sale than to steal, but that doesn’t seem to sway people either. Most folks just flat out just don’t want to buy music anymore.

Is there anything the record companies can do? Is there such a thing as music that can’t be stolen? Before the Internet LPs and cassettes could be copied, but not easily. The net lets people distribute stolen music easily. Unless we do away with the Internet it’s doubtful the music industry can stop piracy, even with DRM. So is this the end of the music industry?

I’ve bought 4 CDs this past month, but that’s a fluke, and one CD, Our Version of Events by Emeli Sandé, I bought two copies, one to give as a gift. But I primarily listen to Emeli via Rdio ($9.99/month). I could also listen to her by Rhapsody ($9.99/month) which is my backup streaming music service. So I’ve paid 4 times for the rights to listen to this one album. I could also listen to Spotify on my free account. And if I wanted to take the trouble, I’m sure I could track down a stolen copy. My point is Rdio is the absolute easiest way to listen to music. The only reason I bought the CD is because sometimes I want to hear the music played very loud on my big stereo at it’s best sonic version. But it’s a pain to keep up with CD and to play it. So I just use Rdio 99% of the time.

People can pay as little as $4.99 a month to legally listen to most music via Rdio, Rhapsody, Spotify, MOG and other streaming music services on a computer. So why do people choose to be thieves instead? I don’t know. Like Lowery points out, paid for music is far more convenient to use. They aren’t too cheap to pay $80 a month for a smartphone, but they won’t pay $10 a month to play the music they love on it.

I own two copies of all the Beatles CDs, the old ones and the new re-mastered ones, but I don’t play them because they aren’t on Rdio, and Rdio is too convenient. People who work so hard to steal music have no idea how easy it is to use legal music.

But there’s a problem with streaming subscription music – some artists don’t feel they pay enough. And that might be true. In the comments to Lowery’s post, one person wrote in they were paid $.0091 per stream from Rhapsody and $.0008 from Spotify. In other words, Rhapsody pays just under a cent per play and Spotify under one tenth of a cent per play.

For Our Version of Events I paid $8.99 for the CD. That’s just 64.21 cents for my favorite song, “River.” But that’s the whole cost which includes Amazon’s cut, the record company’s take and Emeli’s royalty. I don’t know how accurate these streaming play figures are, but it’s enough to give us an idea.

“River” by Emeli Sandé	Cost to Buy/Play
Amazon CD	65 cents (whole cost)
Amazon MP3	99 cents (whole cost)
iTunes	129 cents (whole cost)
Rhapsody	.91 cents (royalty)
Spotify	.08 cents (royalty)

For Emeli to make as much money as whole cost of the CD song, I’d have to play the “River” 71.43 times on Rhapsody or 812.5 times on Spotify. No wonder artists think Spotify is a rip-off. If anyone can document the actual payment schemes please post a reply.

I have no idea what Rdio pays per stream, but I’ve been playing the hell out of this song. I’m sure I’m coming close to the 71.43 figure, meaning for people who love a song it can pay as much or more than buying a CD.

The problem with pay per stream method is songs that don’t get played don’t earn money, whereas CDs buyers do pay for them, even if they don’t listen to them. Pay per stream is actually more fair, but it’s a big cut in pay to artists used to the CD sales method. I’ve bought hundreds of CDs I’ve only played once or twice.

I wish all the streaming services would post their stream rates so us music fans could use that knowledge in deciding on which streaming service to use. I’m about to settle on Rdio and abandon Rhapsody, but if I learned Rdio paid so little as Spotify I’d change my mind.

I don’t know how to make everyone pay for music, but I’m more than willing to pay for subscription streaming music. $9.99 a month is little enough to be an honest music fan. I’d be willing to pay more if I knew the artists were getting a better deal. Even though I still buy CDs, they are very inconvenient to use and I prefer the emerging subscription streaming services.

Other sources about earnings:

How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online (4/13/10) (fantastic graphic!!!)
Spotiwhy? (10/6/11) – interesting number crunching
Why artists and indies shouldn’t write Spotify off – at least not yet
The New Economics of the Music Industry – Rolling Stone 10/25/11
Spotify, Rdio, and Mog on Artist Payments: Don’t Blame Us (11/22/11)

JWH – 6/24/12

Sharing Music

Yesterday WordPress informed their bloggers we could add links to Spotify and Rdio to our blog posts and they would be converted into music players. Great! I’ve always wanted to review music and let people play it while they read the review. It’s very hard to describe music in words. Last night I posted a couple test posts and discovered there’s some real limitations to the endeavor.

I’ve also started a new blog site, Streaming Music, where I will branch off my writing about music. To give you some idea what I can do there I’ve created some tests of embedded music players.

Rdio only played 30 second clips to the people I got to try it, none of which were subscribers to Rdio. I’m going to try again here and see if I can find some subscribers and see if they hear more than 30 second clips.

You can join Rdio for free and get limited access to their music. You can also join Spotify for free and get quite a bit of free music, but you’ll need to install their software client. Rdio works with a web client.

Spotify won’t play at all unless you have the Spotify client installed. This is free, but requires people to go off and install the client. However, Spotify has millions of subscribers, and millions more free users. And they have users in Europe.

The next downside to the project is people outside of U.S. and Europe can’t use either service. All the legalities of online borders is a pain to deal with on the Internet where we’re really just one big world.

People have been sharing music on the Internet right from the beginning, but illegally. For $5 a month you can have legal access to gigantic libraries of music, so subscription music is a new kind of sharing that’s spreading fast. By WordPress offering linked music players should push this movement further, and hopefully one day I can put a song up to play on my blog and anyone in the world can hear it while they read my post.

If you don’t mind, leave a message and tell me if you can play music from Rdio or Spotify. Tell me if you only hear 30 second clips or the whole songs. Tell me if you are a subscriber of either service. And let me know what country are browsing from.

Spotify

Rdio

http://rd.io/x/QJhDPldi7w

Rdio on Roku

I got a Roku 2 XS for Christmas and the first channel I configured after Netflix was Rdio. Roku is a tiny box that connects to your TV and home network allowing you to watch various “Internet channels” on your TV. Programmers create apps for the Roku that act like TV channels – some are free, others cost money, like Netflix and Rdio.

Rdio is a streaming music service with several price levels to use, starting with free, $4.99, $9.99 and $17.99. You need to be on the $9.99 Rdio Unlimited plan to use it with the Roku. I love Rdio for streaming music because it has the best web page for managing music, and it has fantastic social networking features for sharing and discovering music.

Rdio is also available on mobile phones and tablets if you have the Unlimited plan, so you might think, why listen to music on your television? Well, if your television is hooked up to a surround sound system to support your home theater it can play music far better than what you can hear through computer speakers or through earbuds. Most people have no idea how rich music sounds if they’ve always listened to it on earbuds. Music on a home theater system is like listening to music in the car with a good car stereo system.

Now while the web interface to Rdio is rich and powerful on the computer screen, the Rdio interface on mobile devices and the Roku is severely limited. You can play your music collection, playlists, and search for songs and albums, or go to the New Releases and listen to new albums.

BUT RDIO ON THE ROKU IS VERY LIMITED IN HOW YOU PLAY SONGS!

First off there’s no random play. Basically you see album covers and call them up to play. You do not even see a list of songs on the album, or even told how many songs are on the album. All Rdio does is show the first song and gives you three options: play/pause, next song, previous song. Now this is fine if you want to put on an album and listen to it, but that’s skips most of Rdio’s wonderful features.

I assume this is Rdio’s first effort and more features will show up on the Roku and mobile devices soon, but here’s a list of critical features I’d like to see much sooner than later:

Random play for playlists and albums
Show song list for albums with up and down arrows for selecting
Show song list for playlists with up and down arrows for selecting
Allow us to add album to collection
Allow us to add album to queue
Allow us to add song to playlists
Allow us to create a new playlist
Show large photo of album when playing (hey, we’re using 1080p TVs here)

After those very basic requirements are met I’d like to see:

All the current social networking features of the web version
Wikipedia like info about songs, albums and artists
Lyrics to songs (again, we’re combining music with a big screen. I have a 1080p TV and computer monitor – make the most of it)
Allow us to create multiple collections on all devices (this isn’t even on the web version)

Many of these features are missing on my iOS version of Rdio too. I’m hoping they will also be fixed there too.

Amarok, a music player from the Linux world and KDE, also available for the PC and Mac, has a central window for showing song lyrics and album, artist and song information. Sitting in front of a TV listening to music sort of demands making use of the large screen don’t you think? Of course, when I really get into a song I close my eyes.

I know we’re at the beginning of a new era for playing and distributing music. Right now only MOG and Rdio are available for the Roku, which is the working man’s streaming device. Rhapsody is on the Sonos, but I can’t afford that system, and besides, it doesn’t have the wonderful melding of music and TV that Rdio and MOG have with the Roku. (Rhapsody, are you listening?)

I don’t know how many people have Rokus or other streaming music boxes. Is Rdio available on the Apple TV box? And I know these services are starting to be built right into TVs and Blu-ray players, but until millions of people see how cool it is to combine TV and streaming music they will not see the amazing potential.

I kid you not, this could be as big as MP3 music players. Plopping down in front of the big screen and using the clicker to control a music library is brilliant. I can lay my fat ass body on the couch and with one hand holding the tiny Roku remote and using just one finger, I can call up songs so easily that I went through a dozen new albums in the New Releases section in about 30 minutes. Of course I didn’t play the whole albums but I play enough to get the feel for them, and if I had had a button to add them to my queue I would have saved three to play later, to give them my full attention.

Rdio has an amazing New Releases page. Most other subscription services put up a screen or two of new releases each week, usually giving well known artists the promotion. Rdio just shows what’s coming out from everybody and they have page after page of new releases. Some of them are pretty crappy, but I often find stuff I like from groups I’ve never heard of, and that’s what its all about for me – discovering new music. Playing subscription music on TV could be a huge way to promote new groups.

With the current software on the Roku if I want to remember a new album I need to have a pen and paper handy to write down the info so I can go to my computer and process it there. That’s a drag.

I want Rdio to let us create multiple collections. I also wish the Queue was a collection too. Right now if you play an album in the queue it disappears when Rdio goes to the next album in the queue. I’d rather the finished album stay there until I manually delete it from the queue. I put stuff in the queue to study. I’m trying to determine if the songs and albums are worthy of adding to my permanent collection or playlists.

And that brings up another problem. As my permanent collection grows it gets harder to find albums. I want to organize my collection – so I want multiple collections and even sub-collections. That way I could create a collection called Jazz, and then within it create sub-collections for Bebop, Cool, Big Band, Fusion, etc.

Rdio has tremendous potential, far more than I can even imagine now. Listening to music ten years from now we’ll all look back and think how primitive these times are. Politics might be a mess, and the economy is going down the drain, but the future of music looks very bright.

JWH – 12/27/11

Best Revenue Model for Musicians: Sell or Stream?

I’ve bought thousands of LPs and CDs in my life, and a surprising number of them I only played once. Now I rent music from Rhapsody and Rdio – total cost $15 a month. In my heyday of buying CDs, I’d usually spend 10x that or more per month. I never got into stealing music. I want the artists and record producers to make their money like they deserve. However, it’s doubtful I’ll ever go back to buying CDs, and since I’ve acquired the streaming music habit, I have no desire to go back to buying music at all.

The question I’d like to know is: Can the artists and producers make as much money by streaming as they do by selling? Finding out about revenue from various music distribution sources is difficult, but there are some clues.

Problem #1 – Artists Used To Make a Lot of Money Off of Crappy Songs?

If I buy a CD for $15 and whether I play it once or a million times, the musicians and producers earn the same amount of money. If I go to iTunes and sample an album and buy one song I like for $1.29, again it doesn’t matter how many times I play the song, they’ve gotten their money.

Now if I go to Rhapsody and play an album or song, the artist and their record company will get a tiny payment, I assume. Now if I find one song that I love so much I play it 20 times a day for the entire month, that song should theoretically pay the creators of that song more money for my extra love. But does it pay the music people enough? Evidently not, according to The Black Keys, who have pulled their new album from streaming services.

I’m pretty sure selling CDs was the best way of making the most money. Music lovers had to buy everything pretty much on faith. The money was up front. Money from streaming comes after fans play the songs.

Problem #2 – Can Streaming Succeed if Too Many Groups Pull Their Catalogs?

Artists and record producers want to sell albums. But let’s be honest, how many albums in your collection are ones you like to play straight through and love all the songs? Or even half the songs? Or even one song? Music lovers want to find songs push their music loving brain cells into ecstasy. But we don’t know which songs do that until we play the album. In the old days you bought a CD and rushed home hoping to find at least one, and hopefully several great songs on an album. I’m through with that. Those days are over. I’ve been burned too many times. Streaming music lets me try out all the albums I want, and the songs I love get added to playlists. Life is easy, but will it last?

If music producers start pulling out of deals with the streaming music services it won’t. Now we could see a tiered delivery service like we see for movies and DVDs. Netflix is a cheap all you can eat service, but content comes there last. This might work for streaming music, where albums go on sale for a period of time before they go to streaming. I can dig that, but then I’m old and patient.

To get some idea what streaming music does offer, read “Spotify vs. Rdio: Who Has The Exclusives?” over at Wired. I wished Rhapsody had an API to let it be compared too because I feel from just daily use Rhapsody has the best catalog. What Wired did was look up 5,000 albums at both services to see which had the most. Rdio was the winner to me, but Spotify had some much loved exclusives.

It also revealed the holdout groups for streaming music: The Beatles, King Crimson, AC/DC, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin and Frank Zappa – but hell, I’ve already bought those, some more than once, some even three times. Streaming music still has millions of albums, so for $4.99-$9.99 it’s a great deal. But, how many groups have to pull their catalogs before people give up on streaming music?

Problem #3 – Can Artists Make Money Only On How Often a Song is Played?

To make money on streaming music services artists must create songs people want to play and play and play. If you create an album with 10 songs and people only play one of them, then 9 songs won’t be earning revenue. Streaming is a dog eat dog world of music competition. Hit songs will make money. But will they make the same kind of money as selling hit songs? I don’t know, and I can’t find out.

Problem #4 – Can the Music Industry Convince People to Buy Music Again

Because of stealing sharing songs free on the Internet, a whole generation feel music should be free. The convenience of streaming makes getting music for $5-10 a month far easier than stealing, so it might be a viable revenue stream, but can it compete with convincing people to buy music again? And now that I’ve spent years using streaming music, I don’t know if I’d want to go back to buying music. But then I’ve got 18,000+ songs I’ve already bought and I’m 60 years old, so I could coast awhile without buying. If I did go back to buying music I’d buy single songs at Amazon and hope Amazon stays in business for the rest of my life.

Problem #5 – What Happens if Most Fans Go With Streaming?

Even though I own the Beatles, Frank Zappa, Eagles and others on CDs, I no longer play their music. I went out and bought all the remastered Beatles CDs when they came out and then didn’t even play them. Streaming music is too convenient and great. I just don’t mess with my collection anymore. I recently uploaded it to Google Music, but I don’t play it. Spotify will call up my library when it can’t find it in theirs, and that’s cool, but I wished Rhapsody and Rdio did that. I want all my music in one place – in one search engine, and I want it in the cloud, so my playlists work from any computer or mobile device.

Sorry Black Keys, but I’m not going to buy your new album. Leaving Rhapsody and Rdio doesn’t make me want to go buy your album. My world of music is now streaming. If the song ain’t there it ain’t anywhere, at least in my musical reality.

Sources of Streaming Music News and Reviews

JWH – 12/14/11