BS Weblog

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The Weblog of Brett Singer. Bringing the world what it needs most - a blog.

Note: Sorry about all of the 'hot deals' entries (someone referred to this blog as CorporateShill.com).
The deals and things are being fed into Multineedia.com. We will soon move the deals category over to Multineedia so you don't have to read it, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

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Fri, 19 May 2006

Questioning my sanity

When most people get an email mentioning a song or artist they may not be immediately familiar with, what do they do? What I do is go to singingfish.com or altavista's audio search and see what I can find. This is almost a reflex. At times people are amazed at what I find, or are curious where I dug it up, but more often they are confused as to why I found it in the first place. Sometimes the reaction is an agitated one, "What are you doing???"

So maybe I'm nuts, but that's what I like to do. I want to know what a certain song or artist sounds like when I hear them mentioned. Thanks to audio/video search engines (imperfect though they are) I can usually hear/see this almost immediately. The various players in online music want me to pay monthly to do this as a service (Urge.com from MTV and Microsoft is the latest such offering). I've tried a couple of them (Rhapsody for example) but for the most part no service has EVERYthing, which makes it immediately less appealing. Not that you can find everything on SingingFish either. But whether you find what you're looking for or not, you'll find a bunch of stuff, and some of it might even be good. It's also free.

If an all-you-can-eat music service wants to succeed - correction, if they want to be something I would consider using, which isn't the same thing - here's what they need to do:

Get everything: I know it's not all that simple, and I know there won't be any Beatles or Madonna in there. I don't care. Buy eMusic and get their catalog. Do a partnership with a site that has a slightly different library than yours and share tracks. The one with the biggest catalog wins.

Don't require me to use a buggy piece of ticware: The first time I tried eMusic, I had to download software in order to use the service, even though I was downloading non-DRM'd files (plain ol' MP3s). It wasn't too bad, but it seemed stupid to have to leave the browser. Most services - Rhapsody, Yahoo - require a separate app entirely. Yahoo's was way buggy when it first came out, and I never did manage to really uninstall it (it left little bits of blech all over the place). It may be better now, I haven't tried it lately. Rhapsody is better than RealPlayer (Real bought that business rather than developing it in-house), but hanging your head out of the window to see what music you can hear is sometimes preferable to using RealPlayer, so that's not saying much. Microsoft's service requires you to download a BETA version of Windows Media Player (at least that's what the paper of record tells me: Since the service is designed in tandem with the latest Windows Media Player, users who click on the 14-day free trial offer will find that their computers begin an automatic download of the latest beta version of Windows Media Player as well.). YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO USE BETA SOFTWARE. How is this not user-hostile? To be fair, I haven't used Urge, so I don't know how good or bad the experience is. But I'll still have to download and install a program that may or may not work well, if at all. That seems at worst wrong, and at best annoying.

Enable cross-platform usage: This will never happen, at least not until we all have Google chips implanted in our heads so that we can communicate directly with Sergei and Larry (this is after they evolve into a higher form of consciousness - I'M KIDDING, OF COURSE). Apple wants you to buy iPods, Microsoft wants you to buy devices that pay them a license so that they can play Windows Media files, Real is just annoying, etc. But if I could pay for one service, and could download it to a portable device, stream it over my Tivo, and also play it in my car? Whoever did that would be an immediate success.

Be cheap (enough): I'd be willing to pay for a music service (I've done it before) if it has what I want. People pay for cable, and that seemed like a stupid idea when it first came out. And tons of people are paying for satellite radio, a lot of them just to listen to Howard Stern. So if you have what people want, and you are offering it in a way that people can actually use it, they'll buy.

So how am I nuts? I don't know, why is this such an important topic? At least I know it's not just me. Still, a fair amount of people I know, their eyes glaze over when I try to talk about this sort of thing. Then again, most of them still listen to CDs.