100 Jazz Classics
Del.icio.us
Last.fm
Rhapsody
Virb
YouTubeEntries from June 1, 2007 - July 1, 2007
Songtapper: Find Songs With Your Spacebar
Songtapper is an addictive new tool that lets you find songs by tapping the melody using your spacebar. You begin by tapping in the song you are looking for. the site returns a set of matching songs. If the song is not in the results, you can teach the system by entering in the song details.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Songtapper matched my attempts at “In A Gada Da Vida”, “Smoke on the Water”, “Alabama Song”, and the “Imperial March (Darth Vaders Theme)”. Results were much better for songs that are slower and have very distinct melodies and it helps to hum or sing while tapping. Even when results don’t match it is sometimes very interesting to see the resulting song list.
The site isn’t much to look at and could use some better information architecture and layout. Result pages link you to lyrics and ringtones but for some reason don’t provide links to buy songs at iTunes, Amazon, etc. Getting a non-match is much more common than a match but since the system is set up to learn from users, it will hopefully only get better with time.
Internet Radio Day of Silence: 6/26/07
(via RAIN) On Tuesday, June 26, thousands of U.S.-based webcasters plan to turn off the music and go silent in a unified effort to draw attention to an impending royalty rate increase that, if implemented, would lead to the virtual shutdown of this country’s Internet radio industry.
Internet-only webcasters and broadcasters that simulcast online will alert their listeners that “silence” is what Internet radio may be reduced to after July 15th, the day on which 17 months’ worth of retroactive royalty payments — at new, exceedingly high rates — are due to the SoundExchange collection organization, following a recent Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decision.
Major webcasters like Yahoo! Launch, Rhapsody, and Pandora.com will silence their streams along with other Day of Silence participants like KCRW.org, Live365, MTV Online, Radioio, RadioParadise, and AccuRadio (for participant list, see RAIN’s site).
So, What Is It That You Do Exactly?
So what is it you do exactly? This is the number one thing most people want to know when they view your website. While putting together entries for the Music 2.0 Directory, I was absolutely astounded at the number of sites that fail to answer this most basic question on their homepage (and if someone who is in the industry cant figure it out, what about the average customer?) I’m not just talking about the small guys either- lots of sites that seemed to put significant effort towards a professional web presence failed this simple test. Though many sites buried this information in an About or FAQ section, there will still plenty of others that still leave you guessing.
Users need to know WHO you are, WHAT you have to offer and WHY they should care. Avoid the nebulous hype-speak like “An awesome and innovative way to play and share cool stuff from anywhere”. Talk to your customers as if they were a savvy potential investor you only have 15 seconds to pitch.
Music 2.0 is becoming a very crowed and competitive space, with new entrants launching almost daily - there are over 200 companies in the directory already and more to still be entered. Most users don’t frequent a variety of music services like those of us in the industry. Getting them to break from an existing service to a new one takes convincing. If they can’t quickly figure out why they should try your service they will either go with someone who can or stick with what they know.
Introducing: The Ultimate Music 2.0 Directory
I’ve been quiet for the last few days because I have been building the ultimate Music 2.0 Directory. A while back, my good comrade Jason Herskowitz began a valiant experiment with the original Music 2.0 Directory. The original directory was based on a wiki format. I’ve never been a fan of most wiki UIs - they are confusing, have a terrible navigation schema, and are difficult to maintain, especially when open to the public (don’t get me wrong, they have their time and place and can be a very useful tool for certain situations).
I was maintaining an increasingly long list of Music 2.0 sites on this blog. I tried to categorize my entries but found it became difficult when a listing had more than one applicable category. The new directory uses a blog approach - each listing is essentially a blog entry. This approach has many advantages that are apparent in the new directory including:
- Listings can have multiple categories
- Users can browse companies by category
- User can browse companies alphabetically
- You can subscribe to a RSS feed to keep track new entries.
- Users can comment on each company
- Users can rate each company
- Editorial control over listings
The new directory already has over 200 listings and more will be added each week. So check it out and tell me what you think. And if you have any suggestions for a listing let me know.
1 Reference
SkreemR: Playable MP3 Search & Facebook Sharing
SkreemR is yet another entrant into the world of playable mp3 search. Just type in a search term and SkreemR will return a set of matching mp3s. Each result contains the filename, description, album, file size, track length, and source. You can play the file directly in the results and rate tracks. There are also links to find lyrics (Lyricwiki), learn more (Wikipedia), purchase album (Amazon), get related videos (YouTube), and located tickets (StubHub). 
While they don’t offer the ability to add songs to a playlist like SeeqPod, you can automatically add songs to share on Facebook by clicking the Facebook icon next to any song. Unlike SeeqPod, you can directly download mp3s.
iPhone Apps Springing Up Everywhere
The iPhone won’t be available for about another two weeks, but some very cool iPhone applications are springing up everwhere. ModMyiPhone has a great list of available apps including a cheap gas finder, iChat, iTweetr, OneTrip, and Digg. You can be sure that dozens of others will be available in the coming weeks.
SonicLiving: Concert and Event Tracking
I came across SonicLiving another Music 2.0 concert and event tracking social network. The free service allows you to track your favorite artists, see upcoming local shows and purchase tickets. To create your artist wishlist, you can manually enter artist names, upload your iTunes library file or use your Last.fm and Pandora data. You can set preferences to be notified by email about upcoming shows on your artist list. Your profile page details shows you are attending and interested in, popular events in your area, messages, friend requests and other relevant information.
You can either search for specific shows or browse though a calendar style interface. When you find a show you want to attend, just click the show and select the “I’m Interested” option on the show detail page. You can also view shows by venue. In addition to concerts, you can browse other events including theatre shows, museum events, festivals and other local art performances.
The two similar sections, “Calendar” and “Wishlist” are a bit confusing. The Wishlist section makes sense as it displays upcoming shows that match artists in your tracked artist list. The Calendar section displays shows you will be attending. There is no way to see other shows that don’t match your wishlist. It would be much better if SonicLiving merged the two sections together into a single calendar and provided the ability to toggle between all shows, wishlist shows, popular shows, and shows you will be attending.
The actual concert detail pages provide basic show information, a tickets link, and people who will be attending the show. You can also add comments and upload concert posters but the information. Artist pages display upcoming shows, fans, and You Tube videos. An interesting feature is the ability to browse the artist’s albums and songs and hear 30-second samples from the iTunes store. However, this feature should be on the main artist page instead of being buried in a secondary page link.
SonicLiving provides a variety of ways to access and share your calendars via RSS, iCal, Google Calendar, 30 Boxes and others. They also provide a variety of widgets you can put on your website, blog or social network profile to share your upcoming concerts.
The combination of tracking music concerts in addition to other events is a powerful one that similar services fail to deliver. If SonicLiving can fix some of the serious but easily correctable UI issues, they can be poised as a strong contender in the Concert 2.0 space.
See also:
Concert 2.0 - 12 Personalized Concert Listing Tools
Bands In Town: Slick Concert Tracking
Mix Your Own Sopranos Ending
Ok, a little off topic but this is pretty fun. Whether you loved or hated the Sopranos season ending, now you can at least change the music from “Don’t Stop Believin’” to something you would want. Stereogum created a cool tool that lets you add your own mp3 file and sync it to the video. Tip: use your media player to find songs that are about 3:42 long.
Sonific: More Choice, but Major Issues Remain
Sonific allows users to select a song from their catalog and add it to any website, blog or social network profile. I have been aware for them for some time but avoided using the service because their catalog was so small and I had a very difficult time finding anything I would want to hear. Thankfully, Sonific has added another 100,000 tracks with an emphasis on Jazz and Blues. They have also announced a new beta service that allows artists and labels to upload their own content for use within the Sonific network.
At least they have some music I like now. However the service still sufferers from a few major problems. Now that the catalog is growing, they need to seriously work on their search and browse functionality. Genres are represented using a tag cloud which doesn’t make much sense as users can’t tag songs. It’s also a waste of space since there are only about 12 genres to choose from. When selecting a genre from their tag cloud, you get a list of subgenres and featured artists. However, many times a subgenre will return no results. Suggestion: Hide subgenres if you don’t have any content in them. They could also use a genre-specific page that contains charts of top songs, top artists, etc. 
There’s no way to currently just see a list of artists in a genre without scrolling through a very large set of song-based search results. Suggestion: provide a way to quickly browse artists outside the context of a song. iTunes’ 4-pane browse feature does this well and LaLa has extended it to their new service. And last but not least, the fact that I need to click the “Find Songspots” tab every time i want to find something is needlessly annoying. Suggestion: provide a persistent search box on every page.
Setting up a Songspot for your site is pretty straightforward and they support over 42 platforms. Just select the “Use” button on any item you want and configure the widget for your site. My only suggestion here would be for a live preview of the player that dynamically updates as you change your settings. Sonific keeps a record of your songspots and you can always go back and edit ones you have created. 
My major issue with Sonific is that other services out there (legal issues aside) like imeem, ProjectPlaylist, Finetune and Dizzler allow you to create and share entire playlists of music where Sonfic restricts you to a single song. This may be cool for a “Song of the Day” feature or featuring a specific podcast. However, in the end I don’t know if this model can compete with the ability to share multiple songs via a single widget.
The Favicons of Music 2.0
I did a previous entry about the Logos of Music 2.0 and thought a good followup should focus on favicons. Favicons are interesting because they need to be recognizable, distinct, and convey a brand image despite their limited size (16×16). They show up in the browser address bar, on browser tabs, and even in RSS feeds. Here is a collection of favicons from the Music 2.0 directory documented on this site. Many of the sites listed there did not have an associated favcicon, hence the smaller number of entries here than the logo collage. For a complete listing of companies check out the Music 2.0 Directory
Bands In Town: Slick Concert Tracking
Bandsintown is a new Music 2.0 concert tracking service that just launched today. Like most services in this category, Bandsintown allows you to track your favorite artists and see when they are coming to your town. The service will send weekly email notifications of upcoming shows from your tracked artists as well as recommended shows.After you register for your free account, you can manually add artists you wish to track or import your top artists directly from a Last.fm account. The “Shows” page displays all upcoming shows in your area though the use of a tag cloud. The service utilizes a very slick AJAX interface that allows you to dynamically change the date range, distance from city, max ticket prices and label type to update the tag cloud. Artists that match your favorites are shown in larger type so you can find them easier. Simply rollover an artist name to see a show summary and click it to view the show detail page.
BIT also provides a calendar view that quickly lets you see shows from favorite artists and shows you want to attend.
Show detail pages contain all the relevant information such as time, place, ticket info, a Google Map and show poster. Users have the ability to add events and edit venue and artist information. You can view other user pages and see their upcoming shows and favorites, but at this time there is no way to add them as a friend or leave them messages.
Of all the concert tracking tools I’ve reviewed, BIT has one of the best UI’s. Aside from some light community features, the only issue I really have with the service is adding artists. While a Last.fm import helps build your favorites, it appears they only use your top 50 artists. To add more artists, you need to go directly to their artist page or enter them manually. They need to explore more ways of quickly adding artists to your favorites, either by integrating that functionality into rollovers or letting you expand the range of artists pulled from Last.fm.
View My Bandsintown Page
see also: Concert 2.0 - 12 Personalized Concert Listing Tools
Jadam Kahn
in Personaliztion, Review, Tools, Recommendations, Concerts
|
3 Comments
Music Discovery Visualization Tools
Most major music services provide the ability to discover music by listing related artists, albums and genres. The primary method used for this is text links which are clear, economical and efficient. Sometimes, photos are used in conjunction with the links to attract attention and provide an additional visual cue. However, this method, while effective most of the time, often obscures the relationships between the recommended items. Several services have cropped up over the years that go beyond the basic text style recommendations to provide immersive, visual environments to explore and discover music. Here is a collection:
TuneGlue
Last.fm and Amazon data power this mind-map style music visualization tool. You begin by typing in an artist name. You can click on the artist to reveal related artists and view album releases. Related artists float within the space and you can click on them to see their related artists, ad infinum. The interface is simple and clean but has some response issues. Another drawback is the fact you cant actually play music.
Dimvision MusicMap
This flash-based application uses a similar mind-map model but uses related albums instead of related artists. Each node is represented by circular album art, which makes the UI more informational and interesting than Tuneglue’s solid color nodes. You can select individual albums to get recommendations, album details, track listings, and purchase on Amazon. Major drawback: you can’t play music.
Gnoosic Music Map
Similar to TuneGlue, Music Map uses artist-based recommendations. After typing in an artist’s name you will see an expanding cloud of related artists. The closer two artists are, the greater the probability people will like both artists. When you click an artist on the map, the map reloads based on the new artist. The Ui is mainly text, load time is very slow, and there is no way to get more info or hear music.
Liveplasma
Liveplasma provides artist-based recommendations using a mind-map model. The closer a node is to your search term, the more related. The larger the node, the more popular. Colors are also used to show relations between artists. Liveplasma provides links to Amazon but no samples of music. If you register you can save your favorite artists and share your maps with friends. 
Musicmesh
Musicmesh uses audioscrobbler data to provide album-based recommendations. The nodes are represented by album art. For each album you can explore track-listings, play videos, read reviews, access Wikipedia info, and purchase on amazon. Play buttons next to track listings would make you think you can hear a sample instead of watch a video. Unfortunately, you cant control the size of the result set.
JSViz
Another album-based recommendation system using a mind-map style model. Nodes are represented by circular album art. Unfortunately, when selecting an album, the page reloads instead of expanding the node in place. You cant listen to songs and there is no additional information or links to purchase music.
Amaznode
This is a pretty cool tool for exploring Amazon’s product catalog. Just type in the name of an artist and select music from the menu. Amaznode will return a fairly large group of related albums. Each node is represented by album art. Rollover the art to see the name of the album and click it to get details, add to your cart or visit the related Amazon page.
Touchgraph
Another album-based visualization and tool for the Amazon catalog. Unlike many other examples in this space, touchgraph provides considerable control over the results both from a data and presentation perspective. The halo sizes represent the Amazon sales rank and similar items are grouped in colored clusters. You can also see nodes for genre and labels. Touchgraph provides detailed album information and provides a link to the related amazon page.
Music IP Playground
This flash-based site allows you to search for artists and see related albums by that artist. You can view and hear samples of individual tracks, get more information from other search engines, and purchase from Amazon. Unfortunately, the site does not show relationships with other artists or provide album recommendations from other artists.
MyStrands Playlist Mapping
MyStrands labs has created a tool that provides recommendations based on songs in a playlist. Once you select a playlist, MyStrands will generate a map. Orange dots represent items in your playlist while green ones represent recommendations. The closer the two given songs are, the better the recommendation quality they are for each other. The size of the node gives you an idea of how popular the song is (bigger nodes are more popular). Also, older recommended songs will become darker and darker (very old songs will be black). You can filter your recommendations by one or multiple genres. You can hear sample of songs but they unfortunately play in an eternal media player instead of inline.
MusicLens
Instead of using related artist/album information, MusicLens provides recommendations using a variety of audio characteristics such as tempo, gender, mood, etc. As you move the characteristic sliders up and down, MusicLens provides dynamic set of song results. You can restrict your search to specific keywords and genres, though the database doesn’t seem to be too large. You can play samples directly in the browser and purchase them from MusicLoad (Germany).
Burst Labs
A very slick flash-based application that allows you to visually discover music in the Burst catalog based on keywords, genres, moods and instruments. After clicking the discover tab, you are presented with a cloud of mood tags. Select a tag to dig deeper and refine your selection. You can rollover the floating nodes to hear the music directly in the browser or link to details. From the detail page you can download digital versions of the songs (login required) and link to similar songs. Unfortunately, the search result page shows composer names instead of artist names, which makes browsing by artist a little difficult.
Playola
Playola is a music similarity browsing tool. You can find new music by moving around in a music “space” and listening to songs (or short clips) that are nearby in the space. Recommendations are given based on various audio characteristics. As you listen, you can give feedback on whether or not you agree with the similarity matching. Playola allows you to tweak various audio “dimensions” to change the resulting set of matches. You can listen to samples and even hear a sample playlist containing all artists in the results.
Kartoo
Kartoo is a visual search engine that works very well with music. When you enter a term, Kartoo analyses the request, questions the most relevant engines, selects the best sites, and places them on a map. You can infer the relevance of the results by their position on the map. When you rollover the result icons, you get a preview of the site in the upper left pane of the window.
Other Projects Worth Checking Out:
Search inside The Music
Radio Protector
MusicMiner
Stats Galore! Internet iTunes Registry
The Internet iTunes Registry is a project that allows you to upload your iTunes library file to a central database and get detailed reports on the listening behavior of yourself and the entire community. iTunes provides minimal information on your listening behavior and Last.fm, while much better, is more focused on providing recommendations and community tools.
After completing the free registration, I uploaded my library.xml file. I was pleasantly surprised to see all the available features and tools to help me analyze my behavior including:
- Artist, album and track statistics
- Histogram style listening habits
- Stats about your ratings
- Detailed genre and subgenre stats
- Tons and tons of useful and useless charts
- An interesting set of odd facts about your behavior
- A wallpaper generator
The one thing that bothers me most about the project deals with genre mapping. iTunes lets you assign custom genres, which can cause problems when calculating community statistics. To simplify the charts, IIR asks you to map all of your genres to their predetermined set. Unfortunately, this set only contains a few basic genres and some strange ones - for instance there is a rockabilly genre but no R&B. I understand the need for genre mapping, but IIR should use the default list that is used in iTunes.
There were a few performance problems here and there, the UI could really use some polish and I could not get some of the tools to work properly. However, It is definitely worth checking out if you’re like me and always wanted to know how many hours you have actually used iTunes since installing it and what your least recently played song was. You can check out my page here.
Jadam Kahn
in Community, Tools, Data Mining, Statistics, Visualization, iTunes
|
Post Comment
Rhapsody User Profiles Gone - For Now
Rhapsody finally added user profiles to their service a few weeks ago. When I logged on to Rhapsody today, I discovered all the community features had disappeared. I went to my profile page and got the following message, “Where’s your profile page? Due to user feedback regarding the new community features we need a little more time to get them working just right. Check back soon for the latest updates.” I agree that the profile pages need a little work but it seems strange that they would completely disable the functionality unless something else was going on. Keeping with their tradition of poor communication, there was no notification of this change either on your home page or via email.
Seeqpod: Playable Music Search
Seeqpod is a new music search service that allows you to search for mp3 and videos scattered around the web. Instead of just providing links to mp3s, Seeqpod provides a set of playable search results that can be added to a playlist.The site utilized a minimal flash-based UI. Search features are on the left and playlist features on the right. To begin, you just enter a search term and Seeqpod delivers a set of matching results. To hear a song just click the play button or click the video button to see matching videos. Each song also has additional links to blogs (Google), MySpace, Wikipedia, lyrics (Astraweb), tour dates (Pollstar), ringtones (Jamster), news (Google) and Purchase (Amazon).
Seeqpod also provides some tools for discovering music. If you click the discover tab in the results area, you will see a set of songs from related artists. It’s not exactly clear how these are being calculated and on many occasions, the results didn’t seem that related at all. if you click the PodCrawler tab, you will see a continuously scrolling list of mp3s that Seeqpod is currently indexing. Its kinda fun to watch as it works and if you watch it long enough you just may find something interesting.
To add a song to a playlist just click the green arrow that appears when hovering over a song. You need to complete a simple and free registration process to save your playlists. To arrange tracks in your playlist, just drag and drop songs in your desired order. Seeqpod provides simple tools to email them to friends or embed them on your blog or website.
While Seeqpod does show the source of mp3 files, they do not provide an option to download them directly. They also claim to follow the DMCA. Check out a sample playlist below:
We7 Review: Free Ad-Supported Downloads
We7, a new service from Peter Gabriel, officially launched a beta site of their ad-supported, DRM-free download service. The business model is pretty straightforward - users can download free music that contains short, targeted ads at the start of the song and the artists receive income from the ad revenue. We7 promises that the spots will contain relevant and entertaining information that users will not find distasteful. They eventually want downloaders to choose the type and style of ads they hear to make the experience even better. They are also planning for the ads to disappear from songs after a certain time period which at this point is set at 4 weeks.
Once you register for your free account you will have the ability to browse music, create a playlist and download music. The catalog at this stage is pretty pathetic - there are only about 100 total songs from 25 artists available across all genres. Plus you would think that there would be at least songs by Peter Gabriel, but alas, no. You can browse music by a set of limited genre but hopefully the genre selection will get better as more artists are added. You can click play next to any track to hear a 30-second sample of the song. Unfortunately, you need to navigate to another page for playback which becomes a real nuisance when you want to hear lots of songs. They should seriously consider providing in-page playback. You also have the option of purchasing the song or adding it to your playlist.
You can’t download individual songs until you have added them to your playlist which is limited to 60 items. However, We7 provides a variety of way of getting music to your computer. You can either manually download items in your playlist or download them all as a single zip file. You can also subscribe to you playlist as a iTunes podcast or subscribe to an RSS feed for the playlist to hear it with another service. They also provide a widget so you can share your playlist on your MySpace, Blog or website.
Users have the ability to both rate and comment on tracks, albums, and artists. Aside from that, there are no traditional community features such as member profiles. They do provide an interesting feature is called Tastemakers. Basically We7 allows independent artists to upload music to their service. However, instead of just publishing everything, they allow the user community to review music first to help them decide what is good enough to make public. Artists need to rate at least five songs before they have the ability to upload their own music. It’s an interesting concept that helps We7 establish community feedback and control the quality of content they offer for download.
The current downloads just have We7 promo spots so its difficult to tell how annoying they will be once real ads are implemented. However, if they live up to their promise and seriously address the catalog issue, We7 may prove to be a pretty promising model.