Music Gadgets

iPod sales is slowing

2009-03-16T01:36:00.000-07:00

Apple shipped 22.1 million iPods in its October-to-December quarter, up a mere 5 percent from same quarter last year.

But as I've argued before, you must count iPhone unit sales for a fair year-to-year comparison because each iPhone takes the place of a potential iPod sale. It's essentially the highest-end, most expensive iPod.

But even with the 2.32 million iPhones it sold, that makes a total of 24.42 million, for a total of 15 percent unit growth over the previous year's quarter. That's respectable and Apple's doing spectacularly well elsewhere--for example, iPod revenue (not including the iPhone) grew 17 percent over last year, suggesting Apple's selling a lot of high-end iPod Touch units. But compared with the previous quarter, which showed 17 percent unit growth in iPods--and 30 percent growth if you add in the iPhone--this is a definite slowdown.

I doubt people are buying other MP3 players instead of an iPod--I don't expect Microsoft to report anywhere near a million Zune sales for the December quarter, for instance. (Microsoft reports earnings Thursday.) Rather, I'm guessing that we're seeing the maturing of the MP3 player market. The early adopters were in three or four years ago and have already gone through one or two replacements. The mass market's been in for at least a year now, and now it's coming down to bargain hunters and the normal replacement cycle.

Yahoo prepare to support DRM-free MP3s

2009-03-16T01:23:00.000-07:00

Yahoo Music's going to join Amazon.com in offering DRM-free MP3s, either for free as part of an advertising-supported service, or for sale on a per-download basis, according to anonymous record company executives cited in this AP story.

Ian Rogers, the exec in charge of Yahoo's music service, has certainly thought long and hard about the future of the music industry, and Yahoo's got tons of traffic (which it hasn't done a very good job of monetizing, but that's another story). I like the site's search interface--it's a lot better than Amazon's, which mixes MP3 downloads and physical CDs with no rhyme or reason--and it's the only major commercial music download site that offers lyrics.

They've got a fighting chance, in other words, but will need something extra to differentiate themselves from the rapidly growing pack. Some ideas: offer a range of bitrates, all the way up to lossless. Do more with the lyrics, like integrating them into music streams, then scrolling them across the Yahoo Media Player when users play or link to a song that's hosted on the Yahoo streaming service. Make it as easy as possible for independent artists to post their files on the site, like CDBaby and (recently) Last.fm--depth of catalog is key.

What not to do: stay wedded to Windows Media Audio, require a subscription fee or online registration, or (worst of all) try and create yet another desktop application for playing music--we've got plenty of those already, and most iPod users will stick with iTunes.

I'll wait on the details before speculating further as to whether a revamped Yahoo Music will hit or miss.

A poll about music

2009-03-15T23:30:00.000-07:00

Do you buy CDs, LPs, MP3s, iTunes, or 8 track cartridges?
I purchase about 80% of my music on LP. For a few years in the early 1990s it was almost impossible to find new vinyl, but now it's reasonably common, especially for indie rock, electronic music, and hip hop. (Classical? Not so much. Jazz? Only re-releases.) In fact, vinyl availability sometimes convinces me to buy a record I otherwise might have skipped--Of Montreal'sGladiator Nightstick Collection and Wilco's Sky Blue Sky come to mind. (The Wilco was particularly nice because it came with a full CD, so I could more easily rip it to my computer to transfer to my iPod and Zune players.) About 1 in 20 brand new LPs have defects--most recently, Radiohead's In Rainbows was marred by a bunch of crud in the grooves on side 2. When that happens, I'll exchange it for a CD, reasoning that there might be some persistent manufacturing or storage problem. (A record store worker recently told me that every shipment they received of the $200 Sigur Ros box set contained warped records. They had to take a lot of returns.)

If so, do you buy them from Amazon or other online retailer, brick and mortar chain store, or local "record" shop?
Local record shops have the best selection of vinyl, so I usually buy from Sonic Boom in Seattle, and go out of my way to visit Amoeba whenever I'm in the Bay Area and Other Music in New York. If I really want a new release, I'll check the band's or label's Web site to see if they sell the LP. I also buy LPs at shows whenever they're sold--I'll buy an LP from a band whose set I liked in a heartbeat, but hardly ever a CD. I have not bought anything from iTunes because of DRM, although I've gotten plenty of free downloads as promotions. I've bought a handful of songs from the Zune Marketplace and other Windows Media-based stores for testing purposes.

Do you regularly buy used CDs or LPs? And rarely buy new CDs or LPs?
I regularly buy new and used LPs and occasionally buy new CDs. I never buy used CDs. For used LPs, the seller might have gotten rid of it as they replaced it on CD. For used CDs, the seller almost always got rid of it because (a.) it sucked (which means I'll seldom take a risk on a used CD) or (b.) it had a scratch or other mar that made it physically unplayable. Either way, I'm often too lazy to go back to the store to exchange it within the allotted time period, which means I'm stuck with a CD I don't want.

Do you subscribe to a subscription service, if so, which one? Rhapsody, Yahoo, Napster, etc?
No, but I might if it offered lossless downloads with no DRM.

Or do you get your tunes from a P2P like Morpheus or Blubster?
Only for tracks that I can't find easily, like unauthorized live recordings. Instead of suing me, why not sell them to me?

What about DRM, do you care?
I won't buy DRM-protected files because I want to play music I own on any device or player I own. CDs don't have DRM, analog sources don't have DRM, why should I pay the same price for less portability?

What percentage of your physical music collection did you get for free (ripped CDs, gifts, etc)?
Less than 10%. I have about 40 ripped CDs and a number of LPs and CDs I've received as gifts over the years. I also have a number of digital files that have been given to me on flash drives.

Is sound quality a factor, would you pay more for higher quality downloads or subscriptions?
Yes, I'd pay more than $0, which is what I pay for downloads today.

Do you buy CDs, burn 'em, and them sell them?
Luckily, I've always been able to find work, so I've never needed to do this.

How do you discover new music? Radio, friends, online, record stores?
Almost exclusively through friends and by going to shows, with about 10% through local radio station KEXP. Often, I'll hear about the same band or album several times from multiple friends who don't know one another, read a great live review in a local weekly, then hear a song on KEXP--that happened to me with Battles last year, and it turned out to be a good indicator that I'd like them.

Microsoft iPhone?

2009-03-15T23:05:00.000-07:00

How long have we been reading these Zune Phone rumors? Microsoft still hasn't officially announced any plans to build an iPhone, but yesterday's corporate reorganization clearly points that way.

Microsoft has reason to be worried. After about five years of plugging away with Windows Mobile, Microsoft's managed to create a reasonable competitor to Research in Motion for e-mail-enabled phones. But that's about it. In contrast, Apple launched the iPhone in June 2007 in the U.S. and by Q4, it was already the number-two provider of smart phone (or "converged device") OSs in the U.S., with 28 percent market share--ahead of Microsoft's 21 percent and behind RIM's 41 percent. Worldwide, despite an October European launch and a smaller global footprint than its competitors, Apple managed to reach 7 percent share worldwide, just behind RIM's 11 percent and Microsoft's 12 percent , although all of these folks are bit players compared with Symbian's 65 percent share. (All numbers courtesy of a February 2008 report by Canalys.)

Microsoft's acquisition of Danger has already been the subject of much speculation on CNET and elsewhere, so I won't spend too much time pondering how long it will be until Microsoft kills the Sidekick and its Java-based OS (as long as it takes to build a Windows-based version) or guessing about the acquisition price ($500 million sounds high, but possible given the premiums Microsoft has been offering lately).

The interesting part is buried in yesterday's press release announcing the latest Microsoft reorg: the company has appointed Roz Ho to lead the Danger integration. Ho has spent the last few months in an unspecified "special projects" role under J Allard, Mr. Zune himself. But before that, Ho was the longtime leader of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit, which means there's probably no Microsoft executive more familiar with Apple. Connect the dots and they spell iPhone.

So how will Microsoft go about it? My guess is they'll whip out some sort of Zune client software for the current iteration of Windows Mobile as a stopgap measure, while simultaneously building a completely new device that combines a consumer-oriented UI, mobile services, and an associated hardware reference design. They will probably brand it as a Microsoft product (like Zune and Xbox), instead of merely licensing the software (Windows Mobile) or software+reference design (the short-lived Portable Media Centers). Sidekick's manufacturing partners, Sharp and Motorola, might be involved. Timeline: probably not until 2009, although the Windows Mobile Zune client could come out this year.

Artists experimenting with USB releases

2009-03-13T00:49:00.000-07:00

A Billboard story this weekend discussed the rise of flash memory drives and bracelets as a medium for album releases. I knew that Willie Nelson had experimented with selling USB bracelets of live recordings, but artists like the Mars Volta and Ringo Starr are also offering new albums on USB. So far, because they're more expensive to produce than a CD, most artists are selling them as niche products for the biggest fans--for example, the Mars Volta is offering a monthly download to fans who pay $30 for the USB version of their last album, The Bedlam in Goliath, and Radiohead's former record label, EMI, is offering a live show download to fans who bought the USB drive containing all seven of the band's EMI albums. Eventually, though, as memory prices continue to drop--as they inevitably will--USB drives could become a mainstream product.

Companies like All Access Today and Aderra are already promoting services where they'll record you live and immediately press the recording on to a USB drive for sale at the show, so I'm sure independent artists could strike a deal with them to press a limited number of new albums on USB as well.

So while the CD's certainly not dead yet, its physical replacement is in the market today.

Jill Sobule

2009-03-13T00:28:00.000-07:00

New or relatively obscure artists might have to turn to an organization like ArtistShare or Sellaband to get listeners to fund a professional-level recording project, but established artists have an easier way: they can ask their fans. (Or have their mothers do it.)

That's what Jill Sobule has done. She's best known for her minor 1995 hit "I Kissed a Girl," but has released several albums since then. Unfortunately, she's had a lot of trouble with her labels--two have gone bankrupt, and another two have dropped her. So to fund her next recording, she's soliciting fans on her site jillsnextrecord.com, and offering them exclusive perks based on how much they give: $25 gets you an advance copy of the CD, $200 gets you into all her shows for a year for free, and $5,000 gets her to play your party. Before the AP published a story about her earlier this week, she'd received more than $54,000 since mid-January; now, she's at more than $66,000.

My only question is: 75,000? She explains that she wants to create a record that "kicks ass"--think big-name producer, professional studio musicians--plus do some serious promotion on it, but that seems pretty expensive for a recording by an independent musician. Money can't necessarily buy a great recording--I've heard amazing full-length LPs recorded with SM-57s and 58s into a Roland VS-880, and we can all think of terrible recordings by artists with enormous budgets. Then again, if she can get that kind of money up front without capitulating to a label, more power to her.

BlackBerry users can download musc

2009-03-13T00:14:00.000-07:00

BlackBerry owners may be feeling like they have nothing to brag about now that the iPhone has added connectivity to Exchange e-mail systems--the BlackBerry's bread-and-butter feature.

Not to worry. By April, Blackberry owners will have something the iPhone still lacks--the ability to download songs over the air from any location with cellular access. Canadian company Puretracks, which has licensed more than two million songs from all four major labels and plenty of indies, announced plans to launch a mobile store for the BlackBerry family of devices in April.

The files will be in the AAC format used by iTunes, which offers higher quality at small file sizes than MP3. But unlike iTunes, none of the songs will be encumbered by DRM, allowing users to transfer them to as many computers as they like. Puretracks also promises to make a Wi-Fi enabled version of the store for BlackBerry devices with built-in Wi-Fi connectivity--a direct competitor to the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store. No word yet on download pricing.

Different Music have colors?

2009-03-13T00:05:00.000-07:00

Synesthesia is a mental phenomenon in which different senses (sight, sound, smell, and so on) become associated in unusual ways. A friend of mine has a form of synesthesia in which numbers have particular colors. I think it came out for the first time when she said my phone number was very blue and black. I asked her what she meant, and she explained how each number has a specific color, although these colors can sometimes change based on a number's proximity to other numbers. She also said that numbers and the fingers of her hands have particular genders.

Perhaps my friend would understand Guitarati, a music recommendation site that launched earlier this week. The front page consists of a collection of colored dots. Click on a dot, and you will see some songs that somebody (editors at the site? the artists?) have decided fit into that particular color scheme. Users can sample the songs and, if they like them, stream them for a penny or download them for a price set by the artist (most songs are $0.99 today). Over time, as users listen to particular songs, they can vote on the color they should be, and the song's color will reflect the average of all votes.

I give Guitarati points for uniqueness, but I'm not sure I get it. OK, perhaps Brian El's song "Aquatica," which appears about halfway down the page for a blue dot, is kind of turquoise, but that seems to be a suggestion from the title rather than the music. Most of the other songs on this page don't seem particularly blue to me...in fact, the top song on the page, "Eddy" by Happy Elf, sounds too aggressive to be blue. Perhaps it's more orange. Then again, maybe I'm a bad test case--Kind of Blue has always sounded grey and black to me. More like a rainy evening, not a clear sunny morning.

Future iPod with about 1 million songs

2009-03-12T23:53:00.000-07:00

IBM researchers have reportedly demonstrated technology that will increase hard drive capacity 100-fold, as well as offer major improvements in energy consumption (leading to much longer battery life) and better reliability. Production is estimated in seven to ten years.

The reports summarizing the researchers' findings, which were published in Science (subscription required), use the shorthand "500,000 songs on a portable MP3 player" to describe the advance.

Today's iPod lineup contains no product advertised to hold 5,000 songs, so I'm not sure where the 500,000 figure came from. In fact, the current highest-capacity iPod is 160GB, and is advertised as being able to hold 40,000 songs. So this shorthand would imply a hard drive size of just under 2TB--only 12.5 times bigger than today's largest iPod.

That's actually well short of what Kryder's Law predicts--if hard drive capacity continues to double every year, then the hard drives of 2015 should be 128 times larger than today's. So the IBM researchers' claims of up to 100x capacity, while impressive, are not particularly surprising given the trends of the past decade. According to my calculations, 100x would mean the biggest iPod would have a 16,000 GB hard drive, which would be enough to hold more than four million songs at the current advertised compression rates. Or if you assume that Apple's lossless codec compresses the typical song to about 25MB, it could hold about 650,000 songs--with no loss in audio quality.

Of course, few people would use a portable hard drive of that size solely to store music--movies, games, and applications will probably take up most of that space. Still the idea that we'll be carrying terabytes of data in our pocket in a few short years explains why Apple, Microsoft, Google, and the rest of the industry are focusing so much attention on mobile computing.

I like Apple Store

2009-03-12T23:41:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, they remodeled to get rid of the large screen and seating area they used for in-store workshops. I liked the few classes I happened in upon during the weekend, but most of them were sparsely attended, and the workshops I really wanted to take--like Garage Band--were during normal work hours. In place of the demo area, they more than doubled the size of the Genius Bar, Apple's in-store customer support desk. The end-result: a mass of highly engaged customers at the back of the store, instead of a mostly empty space. (Engaged might mean enraged, but it seems that even customers with serious problems--like a dead iPod out of warranty--remain calm when faced with a real person as opposed to an anonymous phone support employee.)
Recently, I've noticed two interesting changes at my local Apple Store, both evidence of Apple's mastery of retail.

More recently, my wife went in to buy me a Shuffle as a surprise--my 4th-generation iPod died a copule years ago, her iPod is permanently connected to an iHome clock radio upstairs, and my 30GB Zune is a little bulky for walking the dog or going to the gym. After talking to a salesperson who led her through colors and GB sizes and prices, she said she was ready to buy and started walking toward the registers at the front of the store. Not necessary--the salesperson had a handheld device with a credit card scanner, checked her out on the spot, and e-mailed her a receipt. Genius.

Sony has a lot of great products as well, but when I go to the nearby Sony Style store, it always feels a little haphazard, with PlayStations next to flat TVs next to Blu-ray discs. And it's never crowded. And I never leave with a purchase. (Although the array of flat-screens looping this Bravia commercial is refreshingly inoffensive--very little branding--and completely mesmerizes my two-year-old daughter.)

I've occasionally seen and heard rumors of a Microsoft push into retail. If so, they should be using the Apple Store as a model--nobody else does it better.

Blackberry 9000 will get iTunes sync

2009-03-12T18:37:00.000-07:00

Smartphone fans are excited about yesterday's announcement of the Blackberry 9000, aka Blackberry Bold, aka Research In Motion's iPhone killer. But Blackberry users are a different breed than iPhone users--the Blackberry's reason for existence is always-connected e-mail, and Blackberry users tend to be all business, afraid of being out of touch for even a moment. (An old friend in Washington D.C.--where Blackberry users are legion--had to make a vow after her third child was born not to check her e-mail after 6 p.m.)
So while the iPhone grew out of the iPod, and thus counts music playback as one of its primary features, the Blackberry Bold focuses more on its core communications features--e-mail, messaging, and telephony--as well as new physical improvements, like a bright color screen. You can see this focus in the first detailed hands-on review of the product at Crackberry.com, where media playback isn't even mentioned until part III (of IV) and gets no more than a paragraph. And 1GB of onboard memory isn't really enough for serious music listeners anyway, although it's expandable to 16GB.
But the clearest indication of all: while the 9000 might echo past Blackberries and ship with a Roxio application for organizing music on your PC and transferring it to your phone, RIM is also preparing a new application called Blackberry Media Sync that will let you use Apple's iTunes to transfer files to the phone. Of course, once you do get music onto the device, a relatively powerful internal stereo speaker system might actually make listening without headphones a reasonable option--sort of like the boombox of tomorrow. The iPhone's speakers are apparently not quite up to the task.
Still, for music fans in desperate need of a new phone--like me--the iPhone is still the most obvious choice, especially now that a 3G model is almost certainly on the way. But if you're already a Blackberry fan, or are primarily concerned with having access to e-mail at all times, the 9000 seems like the clearest alternative to the iPhone.

Wii demo at low-tech music festival

2009-03-12T00:14:00.000-07:00

Contrary to predictions, Sunday in Seattle was sunny and warm, so I took my daughter down to the annual Northwest Folklife Festival, a donation-funded event at the Seattle Center.
Because of its focus on traditional forms of music, Folklife is an unusually low-tech festival. There was a Balkan dance band, Orkestar Zirkonium, with oom-pah tuba holding down the bass and various brasses, woodwinds, and string instruments weaving Eastern European melodies. There was a bagpipe/drum duet, Nae Regrets, that seemed to be playing a version of "Tom Sawyer" by Rush. There was a youth fiddle orchestra from British Columbia. There was a learn-to-bang-a-drum tent, a hippie drum circle, and random ensembles in the walkways with lots of string basses, banjos, small drum kits, and other non-amplified instruments. The crowd was wearing traditional folk costumes (tartan kilts, dashikis), tie-tye, and this retro-depression look that's been popping up recently in Seattle (knee pants, suspenders, hats with brims).
Right in the middle of this aggressively low-tech festival, standing out like an alien spaceship, was a white-and-green demonstration booth filled with high-definition TVs. There, attractive young women in skintight costumes who looked like they should have been at E3 were demoing Wii Fit, a fitness game that's played with a balance board. I watched some kids laugh at each other as they played the hula hoop part of the game, then wandered on, scratching my head. It looked like an interesting game, but I'm puzzled why Nintendo decided to demo it at Folklife. Is there some crossover between folk music fans and Wii users?

BurnLounge

2009-03-12T00:07:00.000-07:00

I first heard about BurnLounge about a year ago when a fellow musician was approached by one of its representatives in a mall. He asked me if I'd ever heard of them and what I thought.
I did a little digging, smelled a multilevel marketing scheme, and suggested he proceed with caution. Sure enough, later that week the Federal Trade Commission announced it was investigating the company on suspicion of being a pyramid scheme, and a couple weeks later, BurnLounge said it would get rid of its Amway-style program where representatives earned compensation from signing up other reps.
Now the site's gone. You can still see all the skeptical and hostile posts about BurnLounge in the Google search results, but when you try to click through to the site itself--nothing. This doesn't necessarily mean that the company has disappeared--there could have been a domain registration snafu or dispute with their hoster. The Wikipedia entry for BurnLounge says that the company laid off most of its employees last August and suspended operations in November, but has no citations for this information. I can't find any news stories or blog postings about the company that are dated later than mid-2007.
Posting on this subject used to garner lots of comments, so here goes. Any BurnLounge resellers still out there? How's business?

Web 2.0 eMusic

2009-03-11T23:41:00.000-07:00

It's sometimes lost in all the flavor-of-the-week mix-remix-download-social networking sites, but eMusic has been selling DRM-free MP3s--meaning they can be played on the iPod or any other player--from independent labels and artists for a decade now, and has a reasonable claim to be the No. 2 music store behind iTunes.
A planned redesign is meant to help eMusic retain this position. According to reports in Fortune and Digital Music News, the site's slated for an overhaul beginning next week. Artist pages will be updated with Wikipedia biographies, original editorial content, and embedded YouTube videos. In a nod to Web 2.0, fans will be able to embed portions of these artist profiles, including streaming song samples, in their Facebook pages, as well as on other social-recommendation sites such as Digg. A navigational update is also in the works--for such a well-established site, eMusic is kind of hard to get around.
One thing they're not getting rid of: the subscription-based purchasing model. That's always been a deal-breaker for me, as I simply don't download 30 songs from independent artists and labels per month. Still, if you're a voracious consumer of new music, and prefer legal downloads to file-sharing or buying physical recordings, eMusic remains an excellent choice.

Microsoft Surface

2009-03-11T23:29:00.000-07:00

Starwood Hotels, one of Microsoft's initial partners for the Surface touch-table, has begun rolling the tables out in some Sheraton Hotels. I happened to be in downtown Seattle this morning and stopped by the Sheraton there to check it out.
I've seen Surface in a controlled demo environment at Microsoft, but this was my first time encountering it "in the wild," and despite the big-ass table criticisms that some have leveled at the product, there's an undeniable thrill in seeing something so weird and new in a public place. No, it's not going to revolutionize computing like the iPhone, but I think it has great potential in public spaces like hotel lobbies and restaurants. At 7 a.m. in the Sheraton lobby, all four tables were occupied, and three of them had people actually using them. (The fourth was serving as a more conventional table, as one traveler rested his bag upon it.)
Sheraton and Microsoft built a jukebox application for the table, and while the song selection is extremely limited--it's got about two dozen albums, all from Sony BMG, each with a single song on it--I saw how Surface could be a great jukebox. You drag albums from a menu onto the main surface, touch them twice to see a list of songs, and drag the songs onto a playlist. In this case, the music played through small speakers on the side of the table, creating a little ambience for folks sitting on the chairs around the table, but I could imagine it working like a regular jukebox hooked into a house sound system in a bar or restaurant.
For this to happen, Microsoft would have to make the tables more broadly available and offer a software development kit to the general development community, who will think of all sorts of clever ways to use it. Imagine what Pandora or Last.fm could do, for example. Right now, the company's limiting rollouts to a few customers to make sure the first apps offer a consistent experience. (For example, making sure that they're all multitouch and that drag-and-drop works in the same way.) But I expect the company to open the program up by the end of this year, at which point the product could really start to flourish.

LimeWire Store deal.

2009-03-11T23:06:00.000-07:00

Lime Wire LLC has announced a deal with The Orchard, a large digital distributor for independent artists and small labels. The deal will effectively double the amount of music available in the LimeWire Store to more than 2 million tracks.
I wrote about the store when Lime Wire first announced it a year ago, thinking that it was a possible exit strategy in case the major labels won their lawsuit against Lime Wire and forced the shutdown of its Gnutella-based file-sharing client. But this announcement seems to show that Lime Wire is taking the store seriously as an alternate business.
Here's my question: if you're aware of LimeWire at all, aren't you already using it to grab free music? I suppose if you couldn't find a file for free, it might be convenient to use the same client to buy it, but doesn't that seem a little bit like...giving up? Any LimeWire users out there care to chime in?

A nice boombox

2009-03-11T20:26:00.000-07:00

I was a big fan of Logitech's Squeezebox Duet, which I saw demonstrated at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show, and today Logitech announced a follow-up that looks even better: a boombox for your digital music collection. And unlike the Duet, which had to be plugged into a stereo, the Boom has speakers.
Once again, CNET's John Falcone has beaten me to the punch with a full review, but even without his validation, at first glance this looks like a great product for users with large collections of digital music trapped on their computers. Beginning in September, $300 will get you a boombox that can connect to your computer over a Wi-Fi network, and plays a huge variety of files--not just garden-variety MP3s, WMAs, and AACs, but also relative rarities beloved by digital audiophiles like Ogg, FLAC, and Apple Lossless. The necessary software works not only with PC and Mac but various flavors of Linux (including a Debian/Ubuntu installation package). It also lets you connect to various Internet radio services, such as Pandora, Rhapsody, and LastFM. The only possible drawback: it can't play DRM-protected files. Which means if a large portion of your digital music collection was purchased from iTunes (or a WMA competitor) before the last year when these services began offering more DRM-free files, you won't be able to play it on the Boom.
An aside: the product line is called Squeezebox, which I assumed was a reference to the 1975 Who song. But Logitech's product shots show the Boom playing "Tempted," the 1981 single by Squeeze. So which is it--Who fans or Squeeze fans?

Albums as applications

2009-03-11T18:43:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of speculation lately about whether iTunes is a boon or burden to album sales.
Kid Rock has sold more than 1.7 million copies of his latest album, Rock and Roll Jesus, with no iTunes presence at all. And last week, Warner Bros. pulled Estelle's new album from iTunes in the U.S. in hopes of spurring physical sales. (The plan appears to have failed miserably.)
Apple is striking back before this scattered practice turns into a trend. According to Music Week, the company is working with alternative rock band Snow Patrol on an interactive iPhone/iPod Touch application for its next album that will include more album art, videos, and--most important--lyrics, which are still way too hard to find online. (The exceptions are those pop-up-infested and largely inaccurate lyrics sites that show up in Google search.)
I hope this becomes standard practice for new releases--one of the greatest losses in the move from LP to CD to digital files was the gradual elimination of lyric sheets.

Buy from FM?

2009-03-11T01:30:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago, after being briefed on the new Zune, a colleague described some of its features to his teenage daughter. She responded positively to the Wi-Fi download feature, but was skeptical about the "Buy from FM" concept that lets people tag songs they hear on the Zune's built-in radio for later purchase.
Would lots of radio stations actually support this feature or would it be relegated to a narrow niche like XM radio? (Her example, not mine.)
She need not have worried. On Monday, Microsoft announced that many of the largest radio conglomerates in the U.S., including giant Clear Channel, would support the RDS tagging technology necessary for this feature.
Let me just get this out of the way: I find commercial music radio to be way too narrow and repetitive, I hardly ever listen to it, and I don't get any new music recommendations from it. But I'm in the minority. A Microsoft-commissioned study recently showed that more than 60 percent of music listeners still use radio as their primary source for discovering new tunes.
So this is a win for Microsoft. While Clear Channel was rightly reviled earlier this decade for allegedly accepting money and other compensation from brokers to play particular tracks, it's still the big gun of U.S. radio, with 9 percent ownership. (That's about 1,200 stations.) Other partners announced Monday include Citadel (with more than 200 stations), CBS Radio (with 140 stations), Entercom (110 stations), and Cox (86 stations).
When the feature launches on September 16, it will immediately work with 450 stations across the U.S., with many more to come.

Good news for Zune users

2009-03-10T23:41:00.000-07:00

Most of the news about today's release of the Zune 3.0 software and devices leaked last week, but one piece of interesting news remained under wraps.
Microsoft signed a deal with public Wi-Fi provider Wayport and McDonald's restaurants that will give Zune users free access, no password or Web page log-in required, to hot spots in more than 9,800 McDonald's. This addresses a potential "gotcha" with the Zune's download-from-Wi-Fi feature--the fact that users can't access any hot spot that requires a browser redirect (either to enter a password or accept terms). Now they'll have nearly 10,000 guaranteed places from which to buy or (with a $14.99/month Zune Pass) stream music wirelessly.
The other point I didn't mention in my previous Zune posts is the MixView feature. As you're playing one song in the Zune PC software, other related artists, songs, albums, and Zune Cards of other users with similar tastes will gradually fade in around the central image, which will be the artist or album cover for the song you're playing right now. This gives users a really cool way to find music they might like based on what they're playing now--particularly if they have a Zune Pass, which will let them play any suggested song immediately. As Wired's Listening Post blog pointed out, this feature makes the iTunes Genius feature--which I like--look a little bit primitive.

Kid Rock comes to Rhapsody

2009-03-10T23:26:00.000-07:00

Truck stop rocker Kid Rock has been one of the poster boys for the "ignore downloads" crowd.
His latest album, Rock and Roll Jesus has not only sold more than 2 million albums, but has continued to sell lots of copies long past its release date--this week, nearly a year after release, it's still at No. 7. That's almost unprecedented in this day and age, when top-selling pop artists (think Mariah Carey) sell hundreds of thousands of albums in their first week then plummet off the charts. Why the staying power? Some argue it's because the hit single from the album, All Summer Long (which is basically a reworking of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama") hasn't been available as a digital download on iTunes or anywhere else. If you want to own the song, the only way to get it has been to buy the full CD.
That changes today: you can now download the entire Rock and Roll Jesus album--and Kid Rock's entire catalog if you're so inclined--through the Rhapsody MP3 store. The albums are also available to Rhapsody subscribers. You still can't buy the single on its own, as Kid Rock considers himself an album artist and wants you to hear the full package. And still no iTunes, as Apple frowns on album-only sales. It'll be interesting to see if digital availability has any impact on sales, or whether fans keep preferring the CD.

iPod is already dead!

2009-03-10T22:56:00.000-07:00

There has been much blogorrhea over Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's offhand comment to the Telegraph that the iPod would go the way of the transistor radio and the Sony Walkman, becoming a cheap and eventually boring commodity product.

News flash: it's already there. Sure, Apple will still sell millions of units every quarter, and it might even continue to grow unit sales and revenue for a while. But it's clear from Apple's most recent announcements that the company no longer views the iPod as its main vehicle for innovation--new (old) form factors, colors, and one interesting update are the kind of incremental tweaks you make to a cash cow product line, not the groundbreaking innovations that move markets forward.
Apple passed its mantle of innovation to the first iPhone a year ago, and that's where the action's going to be, from now on--multifunction devices with interesting new interfaces (touch is just the beginning) that act more like tiny computers than single-purpose devices. iPod? That's just another application icon on the iPhone deck.
(And here's something you'll never hear in a presidential debate: I was wrong. Specifically, I was wrong when I suggested that consumers would continue to favor single-function devices and that the iPhone's bet on convergence would sink it. I underestimated the power of the touch screen and Apple's relentless focus on ease of use, which have made the iPhone the first ultraportable computer for mere mortals.)
I appreciate Microsoft's latest Zune innovations, but they needed to be in the product when it launched two years ago. MP3 players are becoming a commodity in which low price overrides new features--especially given how tight consumer spending is likely to be this holiday season. Microsoft isn't into commodities, unless it's got dominant market share, so look for the company to turn its attention to building a more competitive version of Windows Mobile. Zune will live on--as the music playback application for Microsoft's mobile phones.

$20 MP3 player from Sandisk

2009-03-05T19:35:00.000-08:00

Like many other commentators, I greeted last month's SlotMusic announcement from SanDisk with befuddlement. I don't understand why a consumer would pay $14.99, which is almost the same price as a CD, for a tiny MicroSD card preloaded with digitally compressed audio. Yes, the attached USB dongle gives you compatibility with any computer with a USB connector. But still, a CD gives you higher sound quality, compatibility with billions of devices, and much less chance of misplacement between the couch cushions.
Today's announcement that SanDisk will also release a SlotMusic player for $19.99 changes my opinion a little bit. If you're just getting into digital music--and new teenagers and ex-Luddites are created every day--and want the cheapest way to take large quantities of music with you anywhere, a SlotMusic player could fit the bill. It's tiny--less than 3 inches along its longest side. Earphones and battery are included. I'm getting a unit to test out, so I'll let you know if the sound's any good.
The idea is that you'd buy a player and one of these preloaded albums, which comes on a 1GB card. Even with a full album of songs, artwork, and a couple videos, you'd have plenty of extra space to fill the card with other MP3s or unprotected WMAs. I'm not sure how many people have a bunch of MP3s and no MP3 player, but I suppose they exist--perhaps your older brother (or college-aged son) just left for college with his MP3 player and a new laptop, leaving a bunch of music files stranded on the home PC.
There's still a lot of potential for confusion: you'll have to remember which files you burned to which card before you put it in your SlotMusic player. But SanDisk also sells cards up to 16GB in capacity, and I suspect this is the real long-term play for the company. Once users get fed up with buying preloaded cards, they'll just move everything to a bigger card and never swap it out again. Not a great story for the record labels, but fine for SanDisk.
SanDisk also announced today that more than 30 artists from the four major labels are releasing albums on SlotMusic cards, including old faves like Jimi Hendrix and Kiss and new stars like Coldplay and Nickelback, with more artists to come by the end of the year. There will also be artist-branded SlotMusic players from Abba and Robin Thicke for $34.99. All are on sale at Wal-Mart and Best Buy, so mainstream American consumers are going to see these things.
If the format takes off, perhaps we'll begin to see curated collections. For example, maybe a radio station like Seattle's KEXP could sell a SlotMusic card with the top 90.3 songs of the year, instead of simply listing them on its Web site. Or Billboard could issue monthly cards with a selection of hits from its various charts. Rights clearance would be a chore, but not so much harder than putting together a compilation like the Now That's What I Call Music series. Other possibilities include higher-definition uncompressed audio files--imagine the 96kHz/24-bit masters of your favorite albums--or complete collections from single artists--no more bulky box sets.
Finally, one more sure-to-be-useless plea to SanDisk and marketers everywhere: can we please end the creative use of capital and lowercase letters in product names? The actual terms are "slotMusic" and "microSD," but I never remember to type them that way. Product names are proper nouns. Apple gets a pass because the iPod's been so ubiquitous in the media and advertising for the last five years that if I typed "IPod" or "IPhone" it would draw attention to itself, breaking the first rule of clean writing. But apart from Apple, forget it. Sorry.

iPhone app proviede by JamBase

2009-03-05T19:13:00.000-08:00

If you're into live music, JamBase is essential, with a searchable list of more than 50,000 shows in the United States. It's updated by fans, so it tends to be up-to-date and more complete than newspaper or events sites. And it's a heck of a lot easier to run a search on JamBase than it is to pick up your local weekly and look through the ads and print listings.
Now, JamBase has come to the iPhone. You could always access it through the built-in Safari Web browser, but a free app released Monday lets you enter your Zip code--or, if you allow it to use the iPhone 3G's built-in GPS tracker, it will figure out where you are automatically--and then displays a list of shows in your area for the next few days. If you've saved a list of favorite bands at the JamBase site, you can enter your username and it'll limit results to just those bands.
It's definitely a version-1 application, and thus a bit klunky--when you click on a listing, it opens the JamBase site in Safari to give you the listing details, and you can't search for particular bands directly from the app. But it's free, and nice to have if you're stranded in, say, Los Angeles for a tech conference and want to escape from the officially sanctioned parties for some authentic jazz at a club nearby

Save your music library

2009-03-05T18:58:00.000-08:00

Last week some family members suffered a corrupted hard drive on their only PC. They had no backup. They're relatively light computer users--no online banking, no important business documents--but the lesson still hurts. Their e-mail contacts weren't too hard to recover--they simply called everybody they had regular e-mail contact with and told them to send an e-mail. Their digital photos are gone forever, unless emergency tech support courtesy of their son-in-law produces a miracle. And their music library?
That's one nice thing about having a large-capacity MP3 player: if you're lazy about backup, at least you still have all (or most) of your tunes. The easiest solution for iPod users, in my opinion, is to use a utility like Music Rescue (I used it back when it was called iPod Util and highly recommend it) or 4Media iPod to PC Transfer for a Windows PC, or Senuti for Mac. Follow the instructions carefully--you don't want iTunes on your new replacement PC to try and automatically sync its (empty) library to your (full) iPod or you'll overwrite all the songs in their last remaining location!
If you don't mind improvising a bit, this CNET tutorial from 2006 describes how to set up your iPod as an external drive in Windows XP, although you'll have to skip step 1 if your original PC is dead. (Steps 3 and onward should work for many other MP3 players as well.) Apple has also posted instructions for moving songs from an iPod to a Mac or PC, but again they assume that the computer with your original library on it is still working.
If you're among that minority of users who bought a Zune player from Microsoft, it has a pretty straightforward reverse sync process.
Of course, the most important lesson to learn is backup, backup, backup. If you've got a few GB of files you just don't want to lose, an inexpensive flash drive or online service (I use Microsoft's SkyDrive, which has a 5GB capacity and is free) is probably fine. External hard drives are for large amounts of critical data--like if you're building multitrack recordings. If you want backup and restore--that is, the ability to restore everything on your computer to the way it was, not just recover lost data--then you'll need disk imaging software for PC or an equivalent Mac solution.