Thinking About Music
I’m a big music fan. As painful as it is to admit, I got my first CD player twenty years ago and have been collecting music ever since. Piles of cases gave way to towers gave way to binders, then bigger binders. In about 2003 I had a big enough hard drive to rip them all into MP3 format, where they still live (except when I want them to sound really good, then I have to bring out the old uncompressed audio).
Lately, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about music, and the different approaches companies are taking to bring music into the digital age. Some might think this question is self-evident, as we’ve been living in the next generation of music with our iPods and the iTunes Music Store and so on, but ultimately I don’t think that’s really the future. I’ve been looking at a few novel approaches companies are taking to getting us good music.
Perhaps a little old-school (if you’re a tech person) are Pandora and Last.fm, but no discussion of alternative delivery would be complete without them. Both of these offer a customized stream of music based on your preferences. Both have a nifty flash or ajaxy window that allows you to communicate with the service. Pandora uses a fairly black-box mechanism known as the “music genome project”, which purports to have mapped out specific characteristics across different songs, so that when you tell it you like certain songs (or artists) it can cross-reference those characteristics with others in its database. Very cool, although personally I find that it tends to go off in strange directions sometimes (if I tell it I like one song that might be considered to have a slight country influence, it will immediately bombard me with country, which I generally don’t listen to).
Last.fm adds a whole social networking element to the process, which is moderately interesting to me, but which I suspect a ton of people like. Mostly, I just think last.fm does a great job of picking music I like. I downloaded their automatic “scrobbler” application, but frankly it doesn’t seem to produce a whole lof of results. Mostly I think it helps them build their database, which doesn’t bother me too much, as I benefit from that.
Looking a little lower-tech, I recently discovered Lala.com and think this is quite excellent. Back in the day (and occasionally today) I bought CDs from half.com. Back in the day there were a lot cheaper, by and large, especially for obscure artists. I get the sense that these days the majority of listings on half.com are the inventory of record stores, and that’s driven prices up on most items. That’s fine – supply and demand and all that. Lala takes a different approach – you trade your existing CDs to someone else and pay them a $1 gatekeeper charge. They have Netflix-style packaging and a ton of users. I’m definitely going to start doing this with the CDs that I don’t think I need to hear in crystal detail on the $20,000 hi-fi rig I keep telling myself I’ll own some day.
Saving the coolest for last, I’ve been recommending Amie Street to everyone I know. This is an idea I really wish I’d had, and apparently the founders are college students (doesn’t that seem to always be the case?). Talk about supply and demand, the Amie Street approach is that artists put their music on the site, and people pay for the tracks based on their popularity. The more people love a given track, the more it costs (up to the iTunes price, no higher). This is just a fantastic idea. Why should my favorite song in the whole world cost the same as some back track I’ve never heard? Plus is there any better rating system than what people chose to pay more money to get? Love it.
There are a bunch of other companies taking interesting approaches to music delivery, but this is long enough. If you have sites you like, comment.
