Are We There Yet?

This Fall has been a busy season for the music industry in a variety of ways. Outside of the usual belly aching of the RIAA and their arrogant attitude towards their consumers, perhaps the biggest news has been the release of a variety of online music services.

Personally, I prefer Yahoo's free streaming music service, LaunchCast (click here to check out my station). I've been using LaunchCast since this Spring and have been more than impressed with it. The quality isn't the greatest as it's probably slightly worse than FM radio. However, unlike FM radio, you do have the ability to pause and skip songs plus their remarkably good rating system. You can rate songs, artists, albums, and genres. Once you've rated these things, LaunchCast uses it to generate your playlist. You can even select to never play the song, artist, or album again. On the surface, this means you get to listen to more music of the kind you like. I've had times where I've heard a new artist, gave them a favorable rating, and within the next hour had heard a couple more songs from them. The rating system even recommends artists and songs you haven't heard before if they are popular with people who have rated similar artists and songs as you. That's how I discovered Blindside; it was recommended to me by fans of Taproot.

Of course, if you dig a little deeper, Yahoo is able to use this information to "recommend" new artists and songs to you. LaunchCast features artist and events on a monthly and sometimes weekly basis during which time you'll hear a lot about whoever is paying them for that time period. There are other frequent ads in LaunchCast (that can't be skipped). Sometimes, they are more frequent than I can stand and other times they're very reasonably spaced aprt. LaunchCast does offer a premium service (LaunchCast Plus) that increases the quality of the streaming music, eliminates commercials, and provides other features as well. The free LaunchCast only offers a finite amount of time where you can skip songs, but I can't recall how long it is (I've only reached the limit once).

Other musical offerings of late includes BuyMusic.com, iTunes for Windows, and now Napster 2.0. I've tried out all 3 services and abandoned each one. Here's why:

• BuyMusic.com:
1. Archaic licensing agreement - very restrictive on where you can use your music and how often you can burn it to CD, copy to a portable MP3 player, etc. Really, do I need more reasons than this? Ok...
2. Requires Internet Explorer (I use Mozilla Firebird) since it's all based around WMA and Microsoft's DRM technology.
3. Poor website design - could they have made it any wider?
• Apple iTunes
1. Their application was horribly slow on my machine. It's like running Windows XP in a window on your machine.
2. Their license explicitly states that when iTunes is installed, ONLY iTunes can be used to transfer media to an iPod. I'm sorry...who owns my iPod?
3. M.e.m.o.r.y. H.o.g. - Beyond the eye candy layout they've developed for the application, it also runs services for burning files to CD and transferring files to an iPod...regardless of whether or not you have a CDR(W) or iPod connected to your computer.
4. iTunes wants to do EVERYTHING in AAC format. MP3 support almost seems like an afterthought. It doesn't even support OGG.
• Napster
• I played the least with Napster. Why? I couldn't even connect to their service. Their server doesn't respond when I try creating an account.
• The app is very similar to iTunes.
• Also like iTunes, Napster installs a Roxio burning engine and runs it with the app even if you don't have a burner installed.

The challenge for these services will be in meeting the needs of a very diverse market. I don't need and don't want an all-in-one solution. I have my preferred audio player and burning software. I don't want to use anyone else's. But some people do. As all 3 services are targeted towards the mainstream market, I'm not surprised at how they're designed and implemented. The BuyMusic.com website solution is the closest thing to being acceptable to me. Unfortunately, their dreadful licensing agreement will keep me away from using their service.