Amie Street - happy birthday!

Today is the day we celebrate the 1st year of Amie Street. 21 days after its launch, I was already signed and addicted to their service. Amie Street is, at their own words, "a social network centered around the discovery of new music", but they are a lot more than that - as a matter of fact that's not a way I would describe them.

Amie Street is an online music store that sells DRM-free mp3's, each of them at a price that goes from 0 to 98 cents (or, in other words, from free to less expensive than with-DRM iTunes files). As I said last year, when I uploaded there my own music for sale,

So, what do these guys give of so new? As a matter of fact, their business is quite simple: artists give their music for free there, music is rated, the best rated songs move from free to costing money and getting more or less expensive depending on being more or less rated. To avoid bad ratings or people not caring about rating at all, they pay money for users that especulate well (telling that a band will start selling well and being right gives good money for the artist and for the raters).

So, where's the flaw? Well, people can simply not buy non-free music, so that since the moment a songs start costing money can be the moment that the song stops selling, until is free again. But comparing that to having the song forcefully free (like in those other services), well... I just guess that no artist has nothing to loose with this.

The only problem I see with this service until now it that it is way too buggy, and has a really small selection of music (yet). Considering that the site is still at it's "Alpha" state, I'm not really worried about it, tho.

In January I wondered if they would survive for long: I even posted some graphs back then, so here's another visits graph today:

Does "one year" means that they've made it? Well, it means that they've made it through the first year - but nothing more. They're removed the "alpha beta" tag, for instance, but that doesn't really mean that their website is stable or perfect - it surely isn't. Also, they have to do some serious thinking about their business model, if they want to keep up with the latest trends. In the "selling DRM-free music business" they'll have Amazon entering the space, in the "giving money to small artists business" they'll have ad-supported free solutions to care about, like the long-awaited reverbnation feature. Well, let's wait and see, next year I hope we're both still be here to talk about it.

Techcrunch is giving free music to celebrate Amie Street's birthday.

Happy birthday!

Amie.st on the deadpool?

Amie Street (my coverage here) appeared in August 2006, and since then I had some concerns about the viability of this service: the idea was great, but...

At the 14th of December I've noticed some problems in the service, and swapped a couple of mails about it. My situation was fixed, but I don't know about the general problem.

And now, since for I don't know how long, the website is down. I've tried to contact its staff to get some answers, but nothing was replied until now.

With this, and looking at alexa's graph on it, I have to ask: is Amie.st aming to the deadpool?

UPDATE: Amie Street is back live and kicking. Yet, I still believe that the project isn't being sucessful as it could.

Thoughts on being a Musician

Armando Alves wrote yesterday about the fact that Amon Tobin is pissed off with Piracy, because his album leaked to the Internet before its release, and he's claiming because that happened his disk won't sell. I beg your pardon? Reality check: even if the album had not leaked before its release, it would certainly be a zero-day leak. He's enough well-known for that. Heck, even my musical project, Merankorii, had it's first album (a 33 only copies release) leaked before it sold out, and the second one (a 50 only copies release) also leaked before it sold out. Not that it matters to me - it sold anyway! Crash (the second album) is actually still selling - you can buy it in mp3 format on Amie St.! So don't let you be fooled, someone's turning the menace of the pre-release leak into an opportunity, and creating a publicity campaign in order to sell more!

But Rui Seabra posted on that blog some comments that I also disagree - claiming that the album should be released in a mp3 store like eMusic instead of CD. I'm sorry, but it's just that there is a lot of added value in a CD in comparison with its tracks in a digital format, and there's also lot's of fetishism regarding the package itself. I still purchase some music digitally, but still I'm just not able of giving complete attention to an artist until I can have one physical album of that artist in my collection (may it be CD, Vinyl or even Cassete). Let me use once again my experience as a musician to give you an example: not only I force myself into releasing my music in CD (actually the forthcoming album will also have a Cassete release, but it wasn't really my call but my labels', which I heartedly embraced), but I have some problems in releasing in a digital format. This is something that I wanted to talk a long time ago (or here or on Merankorii's blog), and I felt the urge to write as a comment to a blog post Melo did last month, so here's the time and place for it. Releasing an album is expensive. Really. I'm not whining, just stating. I spent some money releasing Mordor (my previous band), I spent some money releasing "O Monólogo do Mudo" (Merankorii's first album), I spent a big load of money releasing "Crash" (Merankorii's second album), and with "Melencolia III", the latest Merankorii album, I got signed with an underground label, meaning that I had a better release and spent almost no money (still, the balance is negative). With Sanguine (the forthcoming album), I have no intentions of spending money anymore, even if I also don't make any money (it was never my intention in the first place). But how do you manage to cover the costs? Easy - selling CD's. CD's give you a better ROI than digital music, if you're a small artist. Two points here: 1 - selling CD's when you have the digital stuff out there, specially if it will be cheaper that the actual CD, is harder; 2 - selling digital music turns the revenue to the artist, selling CD's turns the revenue to the label. If you don't give revenue to the label (even more - if you don't make it have profit instead of loss), you're not going to do another release with them. So, I'm selling Crash in mp3 format, but Melencolia III is sold in CD format until it sells out. This decision I took already granted me an extention of the deal with the label for the forthcoming album, so, in a certain way, the decision is providing me better ways of keep being a musician. Cool, heh? Oh, and Miguel, I undestand that some people really believe that bands make the big money in gigs. Sorry, that's false for a big portion of the artists out there. Anyway, if you give me the means to do a concert, I'm available! ;-)

Finaly, on digital music stores. Rui (yes, once again! ;-)), I know that you like eMusic, but I think you really should take a look on Amie St.: it's also music in mp3 format, no DRM, you can buy per track or per album (an album costs the sum of it's tracks), and no track costs more than $.98 USD, ever. What's the really sweetness? Well, Amie Street works as a "music market": the songs arrive at Amie Street costing $.00 (yes, it means FREE), and if people think that one specific track is worth more than that (basicly if the track sells), it's cost starts rising. Meaning - lot's of free music, and lot's of really cheap music. To give you an example, Crash costs there $.40. Now that's way cheaper than the 1.50€ it costed in CD.

Now to comment final pieces I caught from the comments in the blog post that lead me to this one:

Armando: Tobin had no "very expensive production costs". His label did. Also, having stats of more than 90% of Flash plugin penetration in the browser market means that potentialy almost 10 in every 100 visits that website gets are from people who can't see nothing. It actually was my case - I read your blog post with Opera Mini, and there's no Flash for it (blame Adobe and their stupid license). I really don't see a big of a problem with Flash websites, if I have an alternative way to go to the info. That happens in lot's of websites, but in Tobin's he's just telling me "I don't want you to know what I have here". Which sucks, because I want. Oh, and my comment asking a "link to those statements" was misunderstood: I was just asking a link to Tobin's logbook (which I still didn't find, and I am curious to read).

Web for music artists and lovers

Yesterday I wrote a piece on how to find info about music on the web, and ended with Pandora Backstage. But that leads me to talk about Pandora: a great way of knowing new music. I'm a heavy Pandora user: at work I arrive, open a tab for Pandora, and start listening to it until my work day is over, when I close the tab. Yes, Pandora is an online music player, but with a twitch: you tell it what do you like, and Pandora aplies some genetic algorithms to find out what other stuff you like to listen. I'm impressed on how good their algorithms are: it almost never fails on me, and it's a really great way of knowing about more music and more artists, and, in the same time, is a great way of listening to the music you like, without having to care about moving your mp3's or CD's to the places you want to listen to them, and stuff like that... It's a great service, and in those people tend to emphatise the flaws, so who am I to mark a difference? Pandora has two main issues: first of all it is a Flash player, which really sucks. Besides having to restart the browser sometimes to get sound from Pandora, don't even try to let Pandora running over a weekend, it will suck each free byte of memory you have.

When Pandora appeared, lot's of people tried to compare it with last.fm, but I really don't understand why, since they do quite different things. With last.fm you can download a player or use the last.fm plugin to your music player of choice (iTunes, amarok, you name it) and start rating the songs you have and like. Then, you can see charts and recommendations (based on camparisons between user tastes) and stuff like that... Well, a mix between Pandora and a social network. It has it's value and I'm glad it exists, but if you want to find new music Pandora is better than last.fm for you, specially if you're no computer geek.

It was no surprise for me, but quite interesting since I was thinking on writting this post when yesterday at lunch I heard a friend telling to another "hey, every band needs a MySpace page!". While not necessarily truth (if you pick the last post's example "Marilyn Manson", you'll see that he isn't on MySpace), this is truth for every and each band that is less known and needs to be more. While Marilyn Manson or any other billboard bands don't need the exposure MySpace can give bands, other known bands do: if you look to my contacts on my MySpace's corner, you'll see I'm linking there to well-established bands like Novembers Doom (7 full-length released), Antimatter (4 full-length released) or ThanatoSchizO (3 full-length released), so if bands like those are investing their time in MySpace there must be a reason, right? Well, the advantage of MySpace is it's userbase: half-world has an account there and the other half already heard about it. In MySpace (music-related) you have an easy way to browse between artists, kisten to their music while reading their MySpace pages, and still maybe download those tracks. The concept is good, but poorly implemented, as I ranted about before.

While there's no ultimate sollution to solve artists and lovers problems while using the web to reach their purposes, there are several services that try to do it better than MySpace. From all the alternatives, and please don't make me name them all, the best, IMHO, is PureVolume. you just need to go there and view a band's profile to easilly notice three things: it has all the band features MySpace has, it's an only-music social network, and it's way more usable and clean. Who wants the mess of those MySpace pages when there are pages so nice as this? Then, the player: it's also a flash player, but this one works perfectly, even if I would prefer a different behaviour in some cases. The pages are quite Ajax'd which is perfect if you want to browse and don't loose track of the music you were listening to... If you're an artist, take in consideration that there's a limit of 4 songs published in the free accounts, and then you have to pay something (I don't know and I don't care) to be able to post more songs.

Being an artist myself, when Crash (the last released album from Merankorii) was released I faced a problem: I wanted to have the entire album available for download somewhere, and had no web service where to put it on. OK, I could use PureVolume for that, but since I want to offer the music as free mp3's available for download, I don't have to add to that an expense just to host a couple of mp3 files. So I decided to create an account on SoundClick. This service is worse than PureVolume's: you have a worse player, navigation is bad, but you have no limit in the number of songs hosted. People can listen to them with no trouble, but if you want to download them you have to be registred (is free). Having to be registred sucks: most people won't bother doing that to download some music, and artists want having people downloading their music the easiest way possible.

In the beggining of this week a new service appeared, still on it's Alpha version: Amie St.. This is a service that, like SoundClick, lets you host the number of songs you want, freely, and that people have to be registred to download them. But this service has a completely different business model: people don't "download" music, they "buy" it, even if it is "buying a free music" (when the cost is 0 you don't have to pay for it, obviously). More, the price one track isn't fixed by the artist (as you see in several other services) but, instead, Amie's ecosystem creates a market where your tracks have a value of worthiness. "Better" music is more expensive and "worse" music is free. I think this is an awsome application, but it is still too young to have no fear, and I really have some concerns about it. Besides, there are lot's of features lacking there: what if I have a band and I want all my tracks to be for free, even if they could be sold? On those cases Amie St. isn't for me.

Unfortunately, there's no "killer app" for Music Artists and Lovers. And yes, the "killer app" have to be the same for both: in a web full of social features, you just have to put bands and listeners together, giving to both of them the possibility of doing everything they might want. We're not there, yet, but some inside info in the Web 2.0 market tells me that the future might be brighter... Let's hope and see.

Amie St.

I've just added my musical project Merankorii to Amie St., "a social network centered around the discovery of new music".

This is definitively a different application with a different approach to digital music, and they have my thumbs for that. They aren't playing in a shaking ground, so they can easily have success, but things for them aren't as good as the feedback they're having lately seems to.

So, what do these guys give of so new? As a matter of fact, their business is quite simple: artists give their music for free there, music is rated, the best rated songs move from free to costing money and getting more or less expensive depending on being more or less rated. To avoid bad ratings or people not caring about rating at all, they pay money for users that especulate well (telling that a band will start selling well and being right gives good money for the artist and for the raters).

So, where's the flaw? Well, people can simply not buy non-free music, so that since the moment a songs start costing money can be the moment that the song stops selling, until is free again. But comparing that to having the song forcefully free (like in those other services), well... I just guess that no artist has nothing to loose with this.

The only problem I see with this service until now it that it is way too buggy, and has a really small selection of music (yet). Considering that the site is still at it's "Alpha" state, I'm not really worried about it, tho.

Congratulations guys, and good luck.

Amazon announces DRM-free music store

ArsTechnica and Mashable are reporting that Amazon announced an upcoming DRM-free music store, being the first well-stablished brand to do a completely DRM-free online store. I still doubt that their store is going to be better than others like Amie Street, but will at least have a way bigger catalog.

Quick links

Quick links for the day:

• I wonder where is this legal, but being able to capture Last.fm streams into propperly tagged mp3 files is sweet (TheLastRipper);
• Music to check out;
• More music to check out;
• The Portuguese petition against OOXML has surpassed the 1000 signatures;
• UK and Microsoft ignoring the existence of ODF;
• After all Amie.st is not that hot, I'll probably write about this later;
• My musical project has now all its tracks licensed with a Creative Commons license, and the latest CD is almost sold out.

AllOfMP3 dead? Long Live MP3 City!

Today, in a couple of hours, the new Russian law that will make AllOfMP3 illegal will be passed and activated. A good description about what is AllOfMP3 and what's the case behind it is here:

AllofMP3.com is a small Russian company which has become the international poster child for attacks on independent music download sites.

By itself, it probably doesn't represent much of a genuine threat to the labels or studios. But if it's allowed to survive and prosper, its existence would certainly encourage other entrepreneurs to adopt the same marketing approach - DRM-free downloads at reasonable prices - which would result in serious competition for the corporate cartels which, until the Net became universally adopted, had been able to control virtually everything ordinary people saw or heard.

Competition is good: it promotes free choice. But neither 'choice' nor 'competition' are words found in cartel lexicons. So a massive, and ongoing, multi-million-dollar campaign has been mounted against AllofMP3.com by the cartels, with the record labels to the fore.

Leading it on behalf of the labels and other vested interests is the US administration, which has brought its full weight down on a handful of people in another country who dare to compete with Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, with the major movie studios and software houses lurking darkly in the background.

In rich irony, only Warner Music can be said to be truly American. And even it's run by Canadian. The other three members of the Big 4 music cartel are EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, based in Britain, France, Japan and Germany, respectively.

In other words, the US government is generously spending money provided by American tax payers to help four foreign companies maintain an iron grip on a market whose openness would benefit American artists as much, if not more, than artist in other countries.

Nor does it appear anyone in either the United States Trade Representative Office, which is behind much of the US-mounted pressure on AllofMP3.com, nor music industry 'trade' organizations, such as the IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry), have made any effort to talk directly with AllofMP3.com executives to find a way to reach an accord.

But if you want to see how high they go, take a look at this: according to Reuters, US Trade Representative Susan Schwab said:

"I have a hard time imagining Russia becoming a member of the WTO and having a Web site like that [AllofMP3.com] up and running that is so clearly a violation of everyone's intellectual property rights"

Of course that what is legal and what is not all depends on the standing legislation, and AllOfMP3 are under Russian laws.

While DCC's Russell McOrmond (DCC is Digital Copyright Canada, Canada's RIAA) says that

While AllOfMP3.com may be perfectly legal for Russian customers, it is not legal for them to sell to foreign customers. Copyright and licensing need to be analysed domestically, and you can't say that what is legal in Russia allows you to do something in Canada or the USA

Any lawyer will tell you that that's not true: AllOfMP3 is legal on Russia, and their license lets them sell worldwide (according to their exportation laws). The only way you can make illegal for Canadian or American people to buy stuff from AllOfMP3 is for those countries to actively forbid those transactions. In that case, their citizens are forbidden to buy from AllOfMP3, but still AllOfMP3 have the right to sell their music to Americans or Canadians.

Anyway, nothing of that really matters, since Russia will change their laws today, to ilegalize AllOfMP3.

I thought of changing this blog's layout to a black theme for a day, or talking about sweet, nice and cool alternative online stores, like Amie Street. But that wouldn't really be an article that would piss RIAA off, if they were to read this, right?

So, I've searched and came out with a better music service to talk about: MP3 City. First of all, MP3 City sells mp3 files, no .wmv's and such. The files are all DRM-free, and untagged. Like in AllOfMP3, here you can find lot's of kinds of music, from underground stuff until major label's artists. Damn, you can already buy there Marilyn Manson's "Eat Me, Drink Me", an album that is only to be released in four days, or Paul McCartney's "Memory Almost Full", also to be released next week. And you know what? $1.76 is the price for Marilyn Manson's album, $2.08 for Paul McCartney's. No, I'm not talking about one track, I talking about the whole album, in DRM-free MP3 files encoded at 320kbps.

As cool as AllOfMP3, right? Cooler in fact, since MP3 City is also legal with Author's distribution rights granted by State Enterprise "Ukrainian Agency on Copyright and Related Rights" (UACRR), and, as far as I know, Ukrain isn't (still) being pressed to change their laws.

Eat this, suckers!

SellABand goes bankrupt

I've written about SellABand in the past:

2006/09:

[...]SellABand, a German startup that tries to act like a record label for registered artists. I also intend to do a full review on this later, and to sign Merankorii there, but I have to confess that I don't believe it's business model will make this service survive. Anyway, the fact that startups like this are starting to appear just show that there's a need to do something into the new music market reality, and Web 2.0 might be a key tag on that future. I also think I'll talk more about that in my presentation on BarCamp Portugal.

2006/09:

When I talked about the actual music industry scenario with the technological advances we're seeing on BarCamp Portugal, I said that new stuff was needed, and that some webapps are walking towards the solutions needed (like Amie St. or SellABand) but we weren't there yet. Well, yesterday I knew about Treemo, the next step towards what we need.
[...]
While new features are surely going to appear, their model business will hardly change - but will, perheaps, evolve. Yet, and under the actual stance that, I don't see them as being a viable way for artists to earn money with their art, but it's a good step towards it.

2007/02:

SellABand - I promised a full review of it that I never did (shame on me). To give you an example... I have a musical project and I've used the internet to promote it - and even to get the label that released my last album. Of all those music services my music can be heard, SellABand is the one where I probably have less people listening to it - but in the other hand is the one that possibly granted me more fans. Also, Last.fm and SellABand were direct creators of revenue: I sold at least one CD thanks to each of them. What's SellABand? What makes it so different? No better than this page to explain it, but basicly bands, for free, create their profiles there, with (at their choice) free-to-listen music. "Believers" (the name for listeners) may "believe" in an artist by buying one "part" of the band ($10 per part). Then, "Together Believers have to raise $50,000 to get their Artist of choice in the studio. At any point before your Artist has reached the Goal of $50,000, you can withdraw your Parts and pick a different Artist. You can even get your money back. It's your music. It's your choice." If one band reaches $50,000 (in four months two already did), a CD is released, you get a copy, 50% of the profits go to the band, and the other 50% are distributed to their believers.

2007/05:

SellABand also keeps going on, and are, at least, a very successful case of an indie label - after all in less than an year they've managed to launch several bands albums and compilations, besides organizing events - for instance. Here listeners pay to give the bands a chance to release an album, and after they can make money out of it.

2007/09:

But the big question here remains: what's the really good way of doing this? How to create the "Record Label 2.0"? Every one of the three concepts for music have problems (SellABand, Launch A Label and the $100 label), and while ideas can and should be taken from stuff like Open Source or examples like Swarm of Angels, there's still no idea of how to create the "killer record label", that which is fair to everyone (from the artist to the public). I wrote my ideas of how to create the perfect record label [6] in the past, even if it was just a collection of loose thoughts in a way that seemed to make sense. There's no answer yet, but it's definitively something interesting enough to make me think.

In 2007/10 I actually interviewed SellABand. All of it is relevant, but let me highlight this part - more interesting when we think about it's state of bankrupcy:

When it comes to SellaBand I am very confident that it is a sustainable business model. The relationship of the artist with his or her fans is a unique one that is very difficult to break. Imagine seeing 50,000 dollars roll in on your account. Imagine realizing your dream because thousands of music fans believe in you. Imagine seeing an artist you supported on MTV. All of this magic is happening and will happen a lot more for a very long time.

In 2008/07 I interviewed Equal Dreams, a SAB competitor. This is what they had to said regarding SAB:

Compared to the other services Equal Share provides the artists with more flexibility in defining what he or she is actually selling to the audience and for what price; first of all, there are no pre-set target goals, but the artists can define their own funding needs; after all the quality of the produced music does not necessarily correlate with the amount of money spend in the project. Nowadays this is true more than ever as the prices of digital recording equipment have come down so drastically. Artist could also use Equal Share together with a record label/producer to gather a partial funding for the production. Secondly, the co-funding, which works with a pre-order concept, can be flexibly assigned to even just one song, and the pre-order price can be set as low as 0.50 EUR. We think this is more attractive from the customer’s point of view than being prescribed to invest tens of euros. Fans can be updated about the progress of the production project using the internal messaging system in the Service.

In 2008/11, I wrote:

They're changing for better, but they're still too far from where they should. Let's see how this goes...

In 2009/06, I questioned some bands decisions regarding their editions, based on SAB figures, and questions that should also apply to SAB themselves.

...

Today SellABand's website gives us this message:

On Friday February 19th, SellaBand AG requested provisional suspension of payments (moratorium). This was granted by the Court in Amsterdam on the same day. Yesterday, Monday February 22nd, this moratorium was changed into bankruptcy, with appointment of, Mr Paul Schaink, an amsterdam lawyer, as trustee. The trustee wishes to inform the 'Sellaband community' that, apart from a few technicalities, the completion of a transaction with a potential buyer of the business, is to be expected soon, in order to make a fresh start, safeguarding both the rights of Believers and Artists. More news will follow shortly.

I don't know what "shortly" is, but I'm sure I want to know about it. In the meanwhile...

• artists and believers are talking about it on SAB's "Get Satisfaction"
• an old SAB forum (before there was an official one as reactivated and old users are talking there
• An artist from SAB decided to create a site dedicated to SAB's bankrupcy

There's one thing I know for sure - this bankrupcy is not SAB's business model fault, it is their management fault - just ask anyone from its community.

The "We're not Evil" Music Label

Being as interested in music as you might have noticed by now, I've thought inumerous times about what kind of music label the world needs. Heck, I've even thought several times in creating one... So here's a sum-up of how that music label should be:

01. Rights are exclusively from bands - the copyright should belong to bands, and they should be the ones to decide whatever to do with their songs;

02. CD releases - The less evil labels I know of are exclusively netlabels, or do CD-R releases. But bands deserve the choice of having their art in propper Audio CD's, without having to go with a not so un-evil label;

03. MP3's for free - All tracks released should be also available for free as mp3's (and possibly in other formats, as ogg), DRM-free (of course), so listeners could do the usual try-before-buy legally and without restrictions;

04. When the CD's are sold out, digital sells continue - Maintaining a release is impossible: even the major labels go out of stock for a long period of time (I'm talking about years) before they do a re-release. To a smaller label the problem gets worse, so it is common to see some bands whose first works are already out of market: and the only way for you to get them is by downloading them (legally or not). So, in this scenario, I think that, for those wanting those previous releases and actually buy them, sold-out albums should start being sold in non-evil music stores (like, for instance, Amie Street), at a reasonable price for everyone involved;

05. CD's at reasonable prices - I don't really know (yet) the praticability of this (the cheaper the album is, more is the profit share that must go to the label), but I was aiming here for something like 5€ per album;

06. Label profit only to cover the business itself - We can't have a scenario where all the money goes to the artists, since doing this costs money. So, the idea is to give a share to the label good enough to cover the expenses in the release, running the label itself, and to invest in new releases. I was aiming for nothing less than 50% for the artists, but, as I said in 05, the biggest the artist share, biggest the unit price, so I think that, as a test, 5€ per album and 50% for the artist is a good combination, suitable to enhancements;

07. The "usual" promotion - The label must do the "usual" promotion of the band. Unfortunately I think that the "usual" part is not that usual, and that's bad - for both artists, the label itself and the (potencial) listeners. And easier too. When I mean promotion I'm talking about several things, from making the band have an online presence to making their album available in as many music stores as possible;

08. The "unusual" promotion - AKA "getting better deals for the band". Of course the concept of "better" isn't a well-defined thing, and should be developed with the artists (project by project): for instance, I don't think I would want another record deal other than this one if I have such a label, but with "unusual promotion" I mean stuff like "getting you a bigger label, if that's what you want". Of course that I also mean many other things, such as promoting the band on things like SellABand;

09. Consider musicians as artists and music as art - self explainable, yet most of the times ignored;

10. Items from 02. to 08. negotiable - and the others not. This is perheaps the most important of these items: setting what must be, and talking about what by default would be, unless the artists (the real important piece in the music industry) think otherwise.

What are your thoughts on this? And do you know any label that does something similar to this?

Treemo: walking on the right path

When I talked about the actual music industry scenario with the technological advances we're seeing on BarCamp Portugal, I said that new stuff was needed, and that some webapps are walking towards the solutions needed (like Amie St. or SellABand) but we weren't there yet. Well, yesterday I knew about Treemo, the next step towards what we need.

Joining the likes of Flickr and YouTube and a fairly busy marketplace, Treemo is trying to change the status quo in two noticeable ways.

The first is that they’re paying strong attention to the mobile device market on both the contribution and the consumption side.

The other twist is that the company seems to be very interested in growing a socially conscious community and have set up affiliations with a number of different organizations in an effort to keep its users involved in some things besides just sharing video clips from last night’s adventure at the bar.

Here's some cover on Treevo, TechCrunch's is outdated so discard it. Specially regarding to the issue that made me look to Treemo at first:

When you sign up for a pro account, you can enroll in our upcoming revenue sharing program. Treemo will share back revenue to users for the content they create.

That's right, while consumers of your content don't have to pay nothing to get your content, you still might be able to get some money for it. Too bad it will only happen to pro accounts:

Treemo is free with 200 MB of storage per month (1 GB total limit) and most of the functionality. We will be rolling out a 'pro' service -- that costs $2.99/month -- soon. The 'pro' service will have essentially no storage limit and several new, exclusive features.

Paying three dollars per month to get 50% of revenue out of advertising? It seems that you won't have money to win here (probably to loose) unless your content is really highly requested...

While new features are surely going to appear, their model business will hardly change - but will, perheaps, evolve. Yet, and under the actual stance that, I don't see them as being a viable way for artists to earn money with their art, but it's a good step towards it.

The Social Web of Music

For those who read this blog for a while now, you've probably noticed that I write a lot about music and technology, sometimes both. A pair of posts I did on the issue may be already somewhat outdated: one about finding music on the web, and other about the web for music artists and lovers.

While there's some discussion around the web on wether Web 2.0 is better or worse than P2P for this kind of stuff, an issue I would love to talk about in a future post, today I'm going to talk about "The Social Web of Music", impelled by the fact that Techcrunch made a Social Music Review that, IMHO, doesn't really reflect the great web apps out there in the field.

They chose eight products: FineTune, Pandora, Last.fm, Mog, Radio.Blog.Club, MyStrands, iLike and iJigg.

My first comment about the chosen applications is that FineTune, Pandora, Last.fm, Mog, and Radio.Blog.Club aim exactly for the same, so they're concurrents themselves.

FineTune lets you create playlists of music you want to hear, which is great if you want to be listening to some music instead of knowing new music.

On the other hand Pandora (here are some posts where I talked about it) has the easiest user interface of all, and has the best algorithm of finding out music that you'll probably like. On the other hand, it has two major problems: it almost only has mainstream music (almost everything comes out from the major labels) and it's only legal to use it in USA (so, no Pandora for us European guys).

My favourite of the bunch is Last.fm (my cover here): while it wasn't until some time ago, the social features it has are preety good. I'm intending to do a full cover of Last.fm and the way I use it, but for now I'll only say that it has an impressive social component that lets you (only if you want, and that's good) tag, rate, talk, know new stuff, get free tracks, and a lot lot more. It has something that beats those others: it lets bands or labels to create their pages there and promote their music. That makes it preety cool for bands and for those wanting to listen music, mainstream or not. The social component there is strong enough to make a band, by publicising themselves there (upload a music free for stream or even download, and it will surely be heard) to get fans or even sell your music in a much success rate than any other webapp I know of.

Mog also lets artists upload their music, but... well, it quite sucks. It's confusing, it has bad design, and the real use for which I can imaging Mog being the app you're looking for is only if you want to blog about music. And, for that, Last.fm would also be fine...

Radio.Blog.Club was a big surprise: I can't imagine it being relevant in a discussion about the "social web of music". I guess that the only reason why it was referred is that the author thinks that "the interface is good". Sorry, but I do not agree. Call me stupid, but while the website says that artists can upload their music, and while, by the file names, users are obviously submitting (copyrighted stuff, BTW), I walked around for 10 minutes or so and didn't find out how to do it. I don't intend to come back there.

MyStrands might be "social music", but isn't web: it's a desktop application you have to download, and there are only versions for Windows or Mac OS. Since I'm a Linux user, this isn't for me.

iLike is even worse: it's an iTunes plugin. No, I don't use iTunes.

Finaly, iJigg: the music digg. I don't really like digg, so I might be biased on this, but iJigg is just... well, if you want to discover music and you want "anything" (forget finding stuff similar of what you already know and like), or if you want copyrighted stuff that others post there (lot's of it, there), then you might find it interesting. But I doubt that it will be "the music web app you'll get used to use".

So, if these are my oppinions about the choices, what would be mine?

For me, only five stand out:

Pandora - I've talked about it up there, so go back and read it :-) If you're resident in USA and what you want is to get at your job in the morning, open a browser tab and make it play music you like until it's time to go home, this is for you. Easy, fast learning, great interface, preety cool. If you like something enough, you can buy the track or album in iTunes (please, don't - those tracks have DRM) or Amazon.

Last.fm - The music experience and interaction. Put your music player to feed Last,fm, use it to listen what other people recommend you, bands similar to the one you're listening now, other bands from the same music label, leave a comment, take a peek on what other Last.fm users that listen to it like to hear, know new bands, get some free, legal, DRM-free music.

SellABand - I promised a full review of it that I never did (shame on me). To give you an example... I have a musical project and I've used the internet to promote it - and even to get the label that released my last album. Of all those music services my music can be heard, SellABand is the one where I probably have less people listening to it - but in the other hand is the one that possibly granted me more fans. Also, Last.fm and SellABand were direct creators of revenue: I sold at least one CD thanks to each of them. What's SellABand? What makes it so different? No better than this page to explain it, but basicly bands, for free, create their profiles there, with (at their choice) free-to-listen music. "Believers" (the name for listeners) may "believe" in an artist by buying one "part" of the band ($10 per part). Then, "Together Believers have to raise $50,000 to get their Artist of choice in the studio. At any point before your Artist has reached the Goal of $50,000, you can withdraw your Parts and pick a different Artist. You can even get your money back. It's your music. It's your choice." If one band reaches $50,000 (in four months two already did), a CD is released, you get a copy, 50% of the profits go to the band, and the other 50% are distributed to their believers.

Amie.st - I talked about this before, and Mike from Techcrunch is a big fan of this, so my surprise was huge when I noticed that this wasn't on their list. Basicly they consider that every track has a value, but music lovers are the ones who should decide whats its value. So, When a band uploads one music there, it starts costing "0 credits", and if people say that the song should cost more than that, it starts costing something, and more, and more. It's the free market aplied to music - a way better way of knowing and buying digital music - you're basicly paying it's "real value".

MySpace Music - This had to be here. I don't like MySpace (nobody does, right?) but it's the biggest website on the Internet, and that means something. If you ignore all the kiddy social crap and take a look to in only taking into consideration the music aspects, you'll see that this is the most used "music webapp". You have from really big and well-known bands like Björk there, and you have that until the "I don't have or want a band, but I once did this track" stuff. You have music for every kind of tastes, some you can only stream and some you can download. You can see, specialy from the "top friends", what other somewhat simmilar bands you'll possible like, and discover lots of music.

And you? What music web applications do you use?