If you didn’t know by now, MySpace Music has launched as a joint venture with all the major music labels that opens their music catalogs to unlimited free streaming on MySpace profiles. People in the tech blogosphere are giving it rave reviews and declaring that paying for music is over! TechCrunch declares that, “MySpace Music Puts the industry on the right track”. I have a few things to say about this.

1. Until there is ubiquitous wireless broadband internet access on every music playing device, this doesn’t really do much for the user. You still have to pay to download tracks. I really like having my iTunes playlist and music stored locally. It lets me put it on iPods, send to my friends, listen to when my internet breaks. Manage tracks in my collection like I actually own them. Also, the interface is a little clunky and the audio quality isn’t perfect.

2. This is more a breakthrough in the labels ability to monetize their music catalogs but it is unclear how much the actual artists will see of this revenue. So we can all cheer that the labels have found a way to pump money again. But you won’t see me cheering until their is a better infastructure for putting money into the hands of the artists themselves. Yes, it is clear that selling advertising is easier then selling records, but does this make a big difference to musicians? Here is my vision for the music industry:

What is needed is an infastructure similar to Google Adwords and Goggle Adsense, where Google connects advertisers to content producers. All those ‘Sponsored Links’ boxes you see across the internet are served up by Google. Advertisers pay Google a certain amount for each click they generate, and in turn Google pays content producers (bloggers, websites) part of that money to get more clicks.

Imagine this model with music. Artists submit all their tracks to a service. Then that service pairs advertisers with bands that they think target their demographic. Advertisers bid on given bands, so clearly the more popular bands will get more bids, as well as have more plays to pair advertising with. Then anyone blogging about a band and their music can embed a music player on their site that plays the tracks and serves up the advertising and for each play the blogger takes a percentage. Ok, here is the kicker, each track can be downloaded for free as well. But each free download comes with a mini audio ad at the end of each track, that while could be easily removed, would probably get a number of listens. Band’s then offer souped up albums, that come with hardback books, or posters, or anything that document the process of making the album or artwork associated it. This is already happening but I would like to see more of it.

The reason why the Google Ad network works so well is that it doesn’t really cost much to launch a website and write content for it. There aren’t many powerful ‘blog labels’ that own writers’ content. Back in the day music recording technology was not in home and to make music sound good you needed a lot of expensive equipment. Now music recording technology is available to anyone, check out my music, thebdmethod music @ myspace.com, I did that all with Garageband. Its no longer about access to technology, its about how good you are at writing songs and using the technology. The only mileage that the labels have right now is that they own the rights to nearly all popular songs. But more and more bands are going independent, NIN, Radiohead, they know what’s up.

With this new model, you just have to put out an EP have a lot of people like it and before you know it your sitting on some cash to pay your own producer and recording engineer to make your music sound better and you are off to the races, with no need for a label. Promoters, yes, but bands will have no need for the full suite label.

So for this to work, music discovery needs to become more powerful. Services like Pandora and Last.fm are on the right track. But there needs to be a better infrastructure for people to find new independent music, stuff that isn’t promoted as much. I see something like digg.com for music coming in handy here. Or some type of iTunes feature that compares the taste of everyone using iTunes to generate recommendations, and if all music is free to download then that will grease the wheels even more. Perhaps the new Genius feature on iTunes will enable this type of filtering.

What would also come in handy would be a module that automatically adds ads between every few songs and let people curate their own radio stations through iTunes. People can start to find the DJs they like and be exposed to lot of music quickly, and the moment you hear a band on that station you like you can download their entire album. Who even likes mainstream radio anymore?

At least MySpace Music lets you do something like that in a small way. You can make your own custom playlists and share them with people. Perhaps this will be the new form of the mix tape. Check out a playlist I put together here, and look at some McDonald’s ads.

My MySpace Music Playlist

Hmmmmm, this gives me an idea for a website like Digg.com where people can post links to people’s playlists and vote on them…. Maybe if I get better at Ruby on Rails I could build it.

Recently, other then the iPhone Apple hasn’t really been impressing me with updates to their products. But the new iTunes really turns me on for a few reasons.

The Genius Playlist

Lets say you finally pick a song that fits the mood for whatever you are doing, you pick a upbeat song for a party, or some downtempo stuff for late night internet browsing, now all you have to do is press the magic genius button and iTunes will generate a playlist with similar songs from your own iTunes music library.

For instance I start listening to Bjork’s track ‘Hidden Place’ and want to continue to the mood, so I click the genius button and iTunes creates a playlist filled with tracks from Air, Portishead, LCD Soundsystem, Goldfrapp, even Shpongle. Now I would never sit down and listen to a Shpongle album these days, but somehow iTunes finds the song of a Shpongle album that is similar to ‘Hidden Place’ that works really well in the context of the new playlist.

For people with large music collections this new feature allows you to rediscover music you already have on your computer that you may have overlooked. I already like it much better then Pandora which has never really helped me to find anything new.

Beware: iTunes accomplishes this magic by reading and storing the details of your music library. Also, this features only works with tracks that are on the iTunes music store, so if you want to test what else sounds like some Garageband track you made it won’t work.

Grid View - Ripping Off Cover Buddy

iTunes also added another view setting called grid, that is more or less a rip off of a number of 3rd party plug-ins that have existed for iTunes for a while, like Cover Buddy. Lesson #1 never make a plug in for an Apple product because they will steal it and make it better by the mere fact that it integrates cohesively into Steve Jobs worldview. Remember, Apple is interested in creating a world for you, rather then allowing you to create a world with it.

Just like with cover flow I tried to getting into using it but kept switching back to the normal list view, because its just more functional. I actually wonder how many people out there use coverflow and grid view. The idea of having the visually stunning artwork of the album covers displayed while listening to your music is definitely attractive, but not always that functional.

It is not like when I play music I just want to sit there and look at the album art. I am usually doing things on the internet or working in some other application. I usually just have iTunes running in the background. And if I ever want to have a visual I will just turn on the visualizer. I think that the coverflow and grid view work much better on the iPod because its only function is to play music.

With that being said I think the best set-up is the list view with the album work as a small thumbnail on the side. This gives the cohesive feel of the album while not taking up too much space.

The New Visualizer

The choices of Visualizers for iTunes has always been lacking. Clearly no one out there takes serious the art of the visualizer. This new one looks really pretty and slick but it doesn’t really grip to the music like the classic one does.

Because this new visualizer is so crappy it is inspiring me to learn how to build my own visualizer. So as I investigate that I will post my finding and hopefully make it easier for others to program their own visualizer, this could wind up to be very difficult but I shall explore anyways.