It's Rishi

Okay that pic doesn’t look like much so let me explain.  Last night had some friends over and for living room music, instead of clumsily trying to connect my iPhone or streaming music from my laptop, I thought hmm let’s try Pandora on the PS3’s web browser.  Turns it out works flawlessly.  Quick tip though, in the browser menu, under the View option, turn the Resolution setting down to -2.  That will essentially zoom in on the Pandora flash UI to make it much more legible on your TV.

As usual Pandora served up some awesome music and it was fun to glance over and look at the track info.  Pandora would do well to make a PS3 specific UI.  Maybe even distribute it in the form of a cheap PSN download game?  That would enable Pandora to build a UI tailored to the PS3 controller.  Now that would be sweet…

Seeqpod is a music search engine that crawls the web and finds music files. I have used it a few times recently and was pleasantly surprised with the results. Many of the songs that I was looking for were found. Full DRM-free mp3s. Where does Seeqpod find these files? From what’s often called “open directories”. Open directories are typically user directories on web servers that have inadvertently been made public. They often aren’t publicly available for long since once they are found, they are leeched like crazy by users, which drives up bandwidth usage on the user account (which eventually leads to the account being suspended).

Savvy users have been finding open directories for years. With the right search parameters, Google is a great tool for finding such open directories. However, Seeqpod is an ideal tool for this. Not only is it laser focused on finding music, it mashes up relevant discography data and can even stream the search results so you can listen before you download.

The problem is that Seeqpod is essentially a Napster for the Web. Whereas the real Napster searched people’s own local computers for music, Seeqpod searches the Web for music that people have uploaded to servers. While there may be some legitimate content that Seeqpod is crawling, I think it will be very difficult for the Company to defent itself against a new lawsuit from Warner Music which claims that Seeqpod directly contributes to copyright infringement by helping people locate pirated content.

As usual, I think the record labels are picking the wrong battles and need to focus their resources on figuring out how they can add value, and build closer relationships, with music listeners. The recent developments at Last.FM makes me hopeful that the record labels are in fact seeing the light.

One of the hot news bits of the day was that the mega popular rock band Radiohead shocked the music world by announcing that not only will they not distribute their upcoming album, “In Rainbow”, via a record label (this fact had been known for some time), but also they will make the album available only on their own website for the shockingly low price of….free! Well, “free” doesn’t really capture the spirit of what Radiohead is trying to do. Instead of assigning a fixed price to the music download, they tell the customer that the price is “up to you”. The customer decides the price, no strings attached.

This marketing & distribution strategy that Radiohead can best be described with two words: brilliant and revolutionary.

Some points to consider:

1) The majority of consumers who were planning on getting a pirated copy of the album were never going to buy the album. Piraters are going to pirate…that’s just a fact. You can take measures to curb it but they’re generally ineffective. So, instead of trying to damn these people, people who want to listen to your music, instead why not embrace them. Give these people access to a free, high-quality download and hope that they will become concert-going, album-buying fans in the future.

2) Radiohead creates an incredible amount of good karma with their fans and, really, the music community as a whole. They’re basically saying to the world: “we create music for the sake of creating music and we want it to be enjoyed by as many people as possible.” There are people who truly can’t afford to spend the money for an album and others – each one a potential Radiohead fan – who may never become familiar with Radiohead’s music because they were not compelled to spend money to acquire it. By removing the cost barrier, these people can now listen to the album. Some will hate it, others will love it. Some will eventually pay full market price, others won’t pay a cent. Either way, the net effect for Radiohead is their music will capture some ears and some wallets from a new segment of music listeners.

2) Radiohead is essentially saying that they’re so confident that their album is great, their confident that music listeners will hear the music and feel compelled to compensate the band for the great product.

3) Radiohead will receive a tremendous amount of free PR for their new album from news organizations around the world. Again, the PR isn’t going to affect those people who were already awaiting the new album. Instead, the PR will pique the curiosity of millions of non-Radiohead-listeners.

The upshot of the prior 3 points is that more listeners = more fans = more concert ticket and memorabilia sales = more $ for Radiohead.

4) No record label = no revenue split. No iTunes = no revenue split. By making the album available only via their website, 100% of album revenue will go to Radiohead. (Actually that’s not entirely true..Radiohead will be selling a standard CD in record stores next year but you can almost bet that the vast majorify of people who buy the CD will be those people who had already downloaded – and loved – the digital version). For each CD sale, even a top name like Radiohead will only earn a small fraction of the selling price after everyone else in the supply chain has reaped their cut.

If Radiohead is successful with this expirement, what does this mean for the future of music?

1) This could be the final nail in the coffin for the record label industry. The Time article mentions the following:

“This feels like yet another death knell,” emailed an A&R executive at a major European label. “If the best band in the world doesn’t want a part of us, I’m not sure what’s left for this business.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. What is left? It’s becoming increasingly clear that artists can promote themselves and their music independently from labels and, if this experiment proves successful, can even distribute and sell their music independently. Even iTunes will need to re-think their strategy. The role of the radio station music dj/director and the corner record store as marketing vehicles is dying rapidly as every iPod is sold and digital music track downloaded.

One question that has has been mentioned in many news articles is that if Radiohead, a top band, is allowing consumers to get their music for free, then how can lesser known, or more specifically the upstart, band compete? I would argue that it’s not as . Most fans who seek out new bands do so not because they can’t access (don’t want to pay for) music from more popular groups. Fans generally do so because they have already exhausted music from popular bands and are in search of something fresh and different. In this likely scenario, the upstart band will not be directly competing with well-known bands for consumer dolllars.

I’ll be eagerly following this story. Hopefully Radiohead will make an effort to be transparent about the various sales/revenue numbers for the new album. No matter what happens though, it is a real possibility that in a decade we will look back on this move by Radiohead as the crack that broke the dam in the record industry.

While browsing around tonight I stumbled upon a discusson thread about imeem. The thread starter was “addicted” to the site even though he was never into other social networks like MySpace. Seeing the imeem name caught my surprise. It’s been atleast 18 months since I’d last heard heard anything new from the company. Apparently they have completely re-strategized and launched a new site with a new focus:

IMEEM is an online community where people and groups can upload, share, tag, and playlist the media they care about.

The new imeem is a very nicely done site. The site design, flash widgets, and profile customization tools are beautifully done. As the quote above suggests, the core of the site is that users can upload music and video (and photos of course) and directly share them on their profile. With imeem’s embedded flash players, you can stream music and video directly through your browser. You can also create your own playlist containing any songs and video you find on the site. As you would expect, there is an imeem flash widget which is embeddable into any other webpage (MySpace pages are the obvious one but I have a hunch this will get blocked by MySpace since this directly competes with MySpace’s own music and video widgets).

The first click I made on imeem was to view the most played songs of this week. As you might expect, songs from hot artists like Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake were in the top 10. Not too surprising right? Well I wasn’t surprised that those artists were amongst the most viewed, but then I looked at who uploaded those songs. As you might have suspected, it wasn’t the artist or label. It was just random users who uploaded the mp3’s of those songs. My first thought was “holy crap! if this is legal it’s pure genius!”. After all, imeem already has a impressively large library of popular songs that has been uploaded by users. In addition, unlike iTunes and other music services, you get to listen to the full song, not 30-second previews. All of this for free.

I dug a little deeper on the site and sure enough on the upload page, I saw this message: “Only upload your own music and video, or stuff you have permission to share. Uploading media that you do not own can be a violation of the artist’s copyrights and against the law if you do not have legal permission from the copyright owner. Your account may be shut down if you don’t follow the imeem terms of service.”

In the site’s Terms of Service, a statement to the same effect is found including this: “Uploading copyrighted media or content without the explicit consent of the copyright owner will result in cancellation in any and all of your accounts.” Judging by the countless number of users that have uploaded commercial music and whose accounts remain active, it’s clear imeem is not enforcing this.

And, really, why should they? As YouTube’s story proves, it’s best to just give your users what they want – free access to commercial content – and place the burden on copyright holders to enforce their rights over the content that’s uploaded to the site. As is now well-known, according to the DMCA Title II: OCILLA, as long as online services promptly remove infringing material upon notification by the copyright holder, the service has a safe harbor against copyright liability. As you can see from the Alexa graph above (both Quantcast and Compete.com show a similar pattern), this strategy is working great. imeem’s traffic stats have blown up in just the past four months.

What I find most strange is the company’s VP Marketing is a guy by the name of Steve Jang who, prior to joining imeem, was Director of Digital Business Development at EMI Music. So I think it’s safe to assume imeem’s management is well versed in digital rights. Which leads me to wonder what the heck is going on then? I was hoping to find some recent news articles about imeem but found none. With imeem’s tremendous growth of late, there is bound to be some buzz soon. Hopefully, along with the buzz there will be a conversation about the copyright issues concerning imeem. Until then, I’m confused…

NOTE: I should point out that just like YouTube, imeem does have plenty of legitimate content as well. In fact, the #1 played song in the past month, with over 1.6m plays, is Body Rock by Mike Relm. In this case, Mike Relm himself uploaded the song onto his own imeem profile page. There are other songs by independent artists which have made the most played chart. So clearly imeem, like MySpace, is a proven venue for artists to promote their music.

This afternoon, Yahoo! sent me a friendly reminder that my Yahoo Music Unlimited annual subscription is up for renewal in a month. I had signed up for Yahoo Music right when it came out a couple years ago and I must admit it’s been an awesome companion for me. Having access to well over a million songs across all kinds of genres has introduced me to a lot of new artists that I hadn’t been famliar with and also given me the chance to listen to the full albums of artists I already was a fan of. The downside is that the Yahoo Music application is pretty slow and clunky. Also, while the star-rating recommendation system does an OK job at pushing me music that might fit my taste, it would be nice to have more help, such as having some better social features or more editorial content.

After reading reviews about other music subscription services that have launched over the past couple of years, I thought I’d do some quick research before renewing. A couple of my friends have Rhapsody and say really great things about the service. Also, in this CNET review from a couple weeks ago, they named Rhapsody their Editor’s Choice amongst competing services. One of the best features of Rhapsody is the team of music editors which write commentary on the various artists and genres. Rhapsody does cost a little bit more but the difference is only a few dollars a month. I became really tempted to make the switch – if for no other reason than to have a change of scenery.

Then it hit me. I have now rated over 2k songs, artists, and albums on Yahoo Music. Those ratings represents thousands of hours of music listening for me and represent a deep description of my music taste. When browsing music it helps me sort out music that I have and have not listened to. Furthermore, in a sense I’m sort of proud of my ratings. I’ve put in a lot of time creating those ratings and since my music taste is a big part of my identity, hence my music ratings are a big party of my identity. I don’t want to lose those ratings. As is typical of big portal sites, there’s no way to export my music rating data. In all fairness though, import/export is not supported by any of the services and since they presumably use different music databases, it’s not even clear if an import/export could reliably be done.

The bottom line is that I don’t want to lose my ratings so the switching cost for me is impossibly high (I’d have to manually transfer my ratings one-by-one).
It turns out that there is actually a very good reminder here for consumer services. The deeper a customer can personalize the service, the higher the switching cost is.

Anyway, in conclusion, for the time being I’m Yahoo Music’s bitch. I’ll be renewing for another year…

“The era of the blockbuster is so over. The niche is now king, and the entertainment industry – from music to movies to TV – will never be the same.” says Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine.

Mr. Anderson has written an article that clearly articulates a trend in media that you and I have observed over the past few years but since it has been gradual, it may not have struck you as being as dramatic as it truly is.

Let’s look at some facts:

• Twenty-one of the all-time top 100 albums were released in the five-year period between 1996 and 2000. The next five years produced only two
• Time spent listening to the radio is now at a 12-year low, and rock music is among the formats suffering the most.
• The average top 25 blockbusters in any given year so far this decade have accounted for 5 percent less of the total box office gross than in the 1990s, even as they’ve cost 57 percent more to make.
• Today’s top-rated show, American Idol, is watched by just 18 percent of households. During the ’70s, American Idol wouldn’t even have made it to the top 10 with that kind of market share.
• the number of weeks the average best-selling novel remains at the top of the list has fallen by half over the past decade.

OK, enough with the facts. Read the article

There were some scary rumors floating around that AllOfMP3.com was shutdown after the site was “down for maintenance” for a few days. Well, the good news is that they are back up. Phew! The funny thing is, if in fact AllOfMP3.com was shutdown, I simply would have downloaded more albums off of BitTorrent. So instead of paying ~$1.50 for an album, I’d pay nada. RIAA: take your pick. =) I should note that I spent more money on music last year than probably the preceding 3 years combined. The difference is that between buying music on AllOfMP3, my Y! Music Unlimited sub, and buying discounted used CD’s from Amazon and GEMM, I feel as though I’ve gotten tremendous bang for my buck.

The Steve Jobs Keynote this morning left most, including many Apple die-hards, wanting a bit more to talk about. The item that caught my attention the most was Steve’s announcement that Apple had sold its 1 billionth song on iTunes. Pretty amazing.

I dug up some fun facts about iTunes:

• “The billionth song Speed of Sound was purchased as part of Coldplay’s X&Y album by Alex Ostrovsky from West Bloomfield, Michigan. As the grand prize winner he will receive a 20-inch iMac, 10 fifth generation iPods (5 white/5 black) and a $10,000 gift card good for any item on the iTunes Music Store. In addition, Apple will establish a scholarship to the world-renowned Juilliard School of Music in his name to commemorate this milestone.” Lucky bastard! (Wikipedia)
• 42 million iPod products have been sold. That’s approximately 25 iTunes downloads per iPod sold.
• At last measure, approximately over 3 million songs sold per day or over 2 thousand songs sold per minute!(Pocket-lint.co.uk)
• In it’s first year, Jobs predicted iTunes would sell 100 million songs. iTunes fell short selling 70 million songs.
• iTunes has 83% of the $1.1 billion online digital music market (Red Herring article)
• It’s estimated that Apple’s profit margin on each song is in the low single digits, or in other words, a few pennies per song sold. Assuming 5%, 1 billion * .05 = $50 million profit since iTunes launch
• Only iPods are compatible with Apple’s DRM. Why? The purpose of iTunes is to sell iPods, not to sell music. The fact that Apple is able to turn a profit on iTunes is all gravy. However, while it’s not really an apples-apples comparison, one could say that the purpose of MacOS is/was to sell Mac hardware….that didn’t work out to well in the long-term.

There’s tons of inspiring quotations you and I hear on a regular basis. When I hear one, I’m usually like “oh wow! that’s so true!” but after passing it on to a couple friends, I forget it in a day or two. Well, one such quotation I heard recently I can’t seem to get out of my head:

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” – Henry Ford

When I first heard this a few days ago, as usual I was like “oh wow! that’s so true!”. What one can achieve is all a matter of one’s attitude and commitment, right? Well, a few hours later, I started thinking more about this though and I realized that actually I don’t agree with it.

I reflected back on several situations that took place over the past few months in my life and I strongly feel as if the opposite is true: If you think you can you probably can’t. If you think you can’t, you probably can.

This may sound bizarre but think about it for a second. When a person is bullish on something, they tend to focus only on reasons which support their conclusion that it is possible, neglect the realities involved, and thus become overly optimistic. When a person is bearish on something, they tend to grasp at any excuses they can find which support the conclusion that it’s not possible and thus become overly pessimistic.

Anyways, I realize I’m totally overanalyzing Henry Ford’s quotation and I realize that it’s meant simply to be inspirational, but for some reason this quotation has been (uncharacteristically) stuck in my head for several days now. Which do you agree with, Henry Ford’s version or my contrarian version?

Out of all the RSS feeds that i subscribe to, Paul Graham’s Essays is my favorite. When I see a new item on his feed, I usually pause what I’m doing and read it. His latest essay this month is titled “How to Make Wealth” and it discusses the difference between money and wealth and how understanding this difference is fundamental to understanding entrepreneurship. Some of my favorite quotes:

Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.

To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.

The problem with working slowly is not just that technical innovation happens slowly. It’s that it tends not to happen at all. It’s only when you’re deliberately looking for hard problems, as a way to use speed to the greatest advantage, that you take on this kind of project. Developing new technology is a pain in the ass.

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you’re trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you’re even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what’s the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.