SeeqPod, the popular “playable media” search service that many music sites use as the foundation for their core offering, has filed a petition for Chapter 11 yesterday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California.
Music recommendation engine / social network Last.fm has launched an official, feature-rich application for the Android platform that enables users to stream radio stations (including personalized streaming radio), consult up-to-date concert information and also offers the ability to track users’ listening habits based on their Last.fm profile.
The company says the application should be available here, but I’m not seeing anything there yet so maybe we should just be patient until they get around to effectively have the app up for download on Android Market. (It’s also nowhere to be found when you actually search from the G1).
Update: it’s available from the phone now.
The application enables users to access their Last.fm profile and millions of streaming tracks on Android-powered phones, and supports ‘background playback’ so you can listen to music while you access other programs.
Pandora Radio, the cool personalized radio station that recommends songs based on its Music Genome Project, has started serving audio ads. The high royalty costs associated with streaming licensed songs seem to have finally caught up to the service, which until now has primarily used image-based advertising. The ads seems to be fairly sparse, but have received enough attention that the company’s official Twitter feed just annouced “So you know, we did not take on audio ads lightly. We try to be extremely respectful of your listening experience, & promise to be prudent.”
MOG demo’d the next version of their popular music service to me today, and I was impressed. It combines a best of breed interface with free on demand streaming and a Pandora-like music recommendation engine. The trouble is, it may never launch because only two of the four major music labels are supporting it so far.
MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today includes a media player plugin that records and analyzes your music habits, a website that has a dedicated page for every artist, album and song with user generated reviews and posts, and an advertising network that provides revenue for 300 top music blogs. Users can also stream music via an excellent front end to Rhapsody.
All of that brings about 5 million unique visitors a month to their network, and the company says they should bring in about $5 million in revenue in 2009.
Pandora Radio, the personalized internet radio service that has remained among the most popular iPhone apps on the iTunes App Store since its inception in July (and that I’ve previously called the iPhone’s killer app), will be releasing its most significant update yet later today.
Dubbed Pandora 2.0, the application will now include artist biographies, streaming samples for songs you’ve bookmarked, and perhaps most notably, the ability to create a station using a single song (much as you would using the iTunes Genius features). Other features in the new release include a CoverFlow-like view for song history, the ability to share stations with friends using Email, and a song progress bar (which has long been annoyingly absent).
At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this – previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies – this list is all mine.
This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.
The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.
I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer.
Last night we released the finalist names for the Crunchies Awards. Vote here for who you think should win. We’ve set up a site that is pretty self-explanatory, with all of the names of each finalist for every category, along with links to their Websites and Crunchbase profiles where you can learn more about each one before voting. The Crunchies represents the best the Web had to offer in 2008, and you get to help choose who will win. Below is a voter’s guide for two of the major categories to get you started.
Best Overall is the big prize. Amazon Web Services makes it as a finalist this year because of the sheer number of startups that are built on top of its cloud computing infrastructure. Facebook won last year, but makes a return as a nominee due to popular demand. Facebook continued to gain massive mainstream adoption in 2008 (with 140 million members now) and launched some major initiatives to extend its social computing platform beyond its site, most notably Facebook Connect (which by itself is a finalist for Best Technology Innovation, going up against Google Friend Connect). But does Facebook deserve to win again?
Just in via Twitter: Pandora has registered its 20 millionth user. The three-year old music streaming service is trying to hold its own despite tough economics and recent layoffs.
Its music-recommendation engine pumps out personalized radio stations over the Web, and its iPhone app remains one the top free apps on iTunes (currently No. 21).
Today, CBS Interactive is laying off people across several of its properties, I’ve confirmed with the company. CBS is not saying which divisions or how many people are affected. It is positioning the layoffs as part of the integration process it began six months ago when it bought CNET for $1.8 billion. But it is not just the CNET businesses that are being cut.
I’ve also confirmed that earlier today employees at social music site Last.FM were let go. CBS bought Last.fm in 2007 for $280 million. One source puts the number of layoffs at as many as 40 people, mostly from LAst.FM’s London HQ, which has a total staff of 95. A spokesperson for CBS Interactive says that number is inaccurate on the high side, but won’t provide the correct number. In any case, it is likely a small fraction of the overall number of employees being laid off across CBS Interactive. Update: CBS says the number of Last.fm layoffs is less than 20, which would put it at about 20 percent.
Indie music download subscription service eMusic is getting an overhaul. Individual artist an dalbum pages already have more of an AJaxy feel and incorporate YouTube videos and Flickr photos. On Friday, its homepage switched over to a new design centered around a new recommendation engine powered by MediaUnbound. Now, when you sign in as a member, you are presented with a grid of “Music You’ll Love” made up of personalized recommendations. You can also sort by “New Arrivals,” which tries to give you new music that you will like, as well as standard “Best Sellers” and “New and Noteworthy” albums selected by eMusic’s editorial staff.
Helping members find new music they will love is the key to eMusic’s business, and it needs to do a better job. eMusic has 400,000 paying subscribers who have downloaded 250 million songs since 2003. Members can download anywhere from 30 to 75 tracks a month before they have to start paying on a per track basis. Once people stop finding new music they want, they are more likely to cancel their subscriptions. Better recommendations would reduce that churn.
Music-streaming service Pandora joins the growing list of startups laying off employees to survive in a worsening economy. The company let go 20 people yesterday, or 14 percent of its staff. Founder Tim Westergren broke the news in a blog post:
This is a very sad day for Pandora, and for me personally. Today we reduced our staff from 140 to 120 employees. Like virtually every company, Pandora is not immune to the challenges presented by the current economic turmoil. We are trying to react quickly and responsibly to the new environment.
Yesterday, CBS sent out a press release touting the success of Last.fm’s month-old redesign, citing a 20 percent increase in unique visitors and a 36 percent increase in total minutes between June and July. Despite a few bugs on the day of launch, the redesign seems to be paying off. But why is CBS so keen on beating its chest when it comes to Last.fm?
Ever since CBS bought Last.fm in May, 2007 for $280 million, it’s been under pressure to justify the purchase. At the time of the purchase, Last.fm was running neck-and-neck against social music network imeem and music radio service Pandora.. Today, imeem is killing Last.fm (see Google Trends for Websites chart above), and Pandora is still holding its own.
Since CBS cited comScore numbers, though, let’s look at those. In June, 2007, the first month under CBS ownership, Last.fm has 2.5 million unique U.S. visitors. A year later, in June, 2008, it had 2.4 million. In other words, it had gone absolutely nowhere. In July, after the redesign, it had 2.9 million. Meanhwhile, during the same time period, both imeem and Pandora doubled to 7 million and 4.8 million unique U.S. visitors, respectively. And these numbers don’t include imeem’s widgets, which the company says reaches about four times as many people as its site does on a worldwide basis.
And in terms of time spent on each site (engagement), imeem is heads and tails above both, with visitors spending 295 million minutes on the site in July, compared to 56 million minutes for Pandora and 20 million minutes for Last.fm.
The comparison with imeem isn’t completely fair because it is a broader social network centered around sharing videos and photos as well as music, although music is its main driver. (In fact, it is leading the move towards advertising supported music streaming, with a more comprehensive catalog than Last.fm’s). And Last.fm isn’t doing so well against Pandora either, which is a more direct competitor.
So did CBS totally screw up its acquisition of Last.fm, or will the redesign be enough to put it back on track?
Pandora’s internet radio has always been one of those sites that was really cool in concept, but too inconvenient to ever go mainstream. The service was long tied to computers only, and while it eventually expanded to special internet radios and some mobile phones, it still has yet to become a household name. But with the launch of Pandora’s new iPhone app last Friday, it looks like the service is about to hit critical mass. It’s a free, mobile, digital radio station that only plays music you like and lets you skip the stuff you don’t. And it rocks.
The personalized music service employs a small army of 50 musicians to create a “Music Genome” that describes each song according to 600 attributes. Listeners input a few of their favorite artists, and the site analyzes the Genome to serve up an endless stream of recommended music.
We introduced the app last Friday, when we called it our “flat out favorite application so far”, and since then it hasn’t failed to impress. Streamed music plays flawlessly over Edge and 3G networks – during a 40 mile drive I didn’t once run into any kind of skipping or static. Even better, the app currently has no advertisements playing, though we can probably expect that to change.
Unsurprisingly, Pandora’s usage stats are overwhelmingly positive. Pandora is currently the fourth most popular free app on iTunes (behind Apple’s Remote, AIM, and WeatherBug), and has reportedly been seeing a new listener every 2 seconds. Usage over the weekend hit an all-time high for the service, with 3.3 million tracks streamed to iPhone listeners alone. Perhaps more impressive is the retention rate of listeners, who are averaging over an hour of listening per day.
If there’s one thing that could kill the service, it’s ads. Pandora is going to need to monetize the app somehow – let’s hope it allows us to pay an upfront fee (say, $10) to avoid the annoying interruptions that have made listening to traditional radio a painful experience.
It’s not official quite yet, but the iPhone App Store is live and you can download version 2.0 of the iPhone software – which is all you need to run the 552 applications currently available.
We’ve been gathering videos and overviews of many of the applications and have held them until now. We received demo vidoes for dozens of applications, ranging from basic games to complex GPS-enabled social networking applications. Below are some of our favorites.
Among the apps that we didn’t include below (primarily because of their simplicity) are Recorder (a voice recorder), Movies (movie showtimes), and iMaze (a basic maze game).
Social Networking On The iPhone:
The iPhone, with cult-like users and location aware technology, is the perfect social networking device. Earlier this year we speculated that someone would emerge with a killer social networking app for the iPhone. It turns out that there are lots of contenders.
Loopt
Loopt – We’ve been tracking Loopt’s efforts around their iPhone application for months now. In April we posted early screen shots of the app without saying who had built it. Think of Loopt as a simple social network to find local businesses, message friends and send status updates with where you are (using the iPhones location technology). And a key difference with Loopt and many of the other networks below: you can meet new people who are nearby, if they choose to share that information. If everyone used this, you could see who’s single in a bar before you approach them (and flirt with them by phone first), and know the first name and job of everyone at that cocktail hour at the tech conference. We’re big fans of Loopt, and will have more news on them later today. For now, download the free application here.
Limbo
Limbo – Limbo is another geo-aware social network that behaves like a mashup of Twitter, Loopt, and Whrrl. One of the app’s most compelling features is its grid-like diagram that visually groups your friends according to what they’re doing (for example, all of your friends that are Out Drinking will be lumped together, even if they aren’t necessarily drinking in the same place). The app accomplishes this feat by forcing users to select from a predefined hierarchal list of activities (while this might sound restrictive, the list is pretty comprehensive). This categorization allows users to see what they’re friends are up to without having to sift through each of their messages.
On the geo-positioning front, Limbo allows users to interact users who are within a close radius (about a quarter mile), in a manner that is similar to Loopt. You can download the app here for free.
Personalized radio service Pandora has taken the plunge and released an AIR application into beta that allows users to play music from Pandora without opening the browser.
When I first heard of this development, I thought it was such a cool idea. Music playback is one of those things that really doesn’t need a full browser experience; just give me a simple control panel to enter songs, play and pause, and fast forward.
Unfortunately, the AIR version of Pandora doesn’t do much to actually improve the user experience. See that screenshot above? You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a screenshot of the regular Pandora homepage. It’s actually a screenshot of the AIR application itself.
Why does it look and function pretty much the exact same? Pandora explains that it needs the real estate of a large window to show the advertisements that support its operations.
But the large window pretty much robs the AIR application of all its value. The only additional functionality of any substance is a menu for switching stations that pops up when right clicking on a dock icon. Alas, even this triggers the large window to appear.
If Pandora is going to make this work, it’ll need to find a way around the advertising conundrum. But even if it does, it won’t be the only one. I imagine that lots of web services will have to wrestle with how to provide maximum functionality through AIR without sacrificing too much ad revenue. The problem is only exacerbated with a service like Pandora that’s so simple to operate.
Sonific, an online music playing servuce similar to Pandora and Seeqpod, is to close May 1 as the company was unable to obtain licensed music rights in a way that made the service viable.
1) There are countless startups providing access to any and all music streams without any license whatsoever. However, when we approached the major record label decision makers in order to obtain licenses for some of the music in their catalogs we have routinely faced demands for very large cash advances and fixed per-stream minimum payments, pressure to give them ‘free’ company equity, and requirements of utterly bizarre usage restrictions. It seems that the industry’s major stakeholders still prefer this turf to remain unlicensed rather than to allow real-life, workable and market-based solutions to emerge by working with new companies such as Sonific. This is not the way forward.
2) We therefore had to realize that a company that wants to provide interactive streaming music services must either a) risk the constant complaints of their users, due to the lack of hit content b) proceed to use any and all music (this is routinely done by allowing users to upload their own MP3s) without the required licenses, and therefore be at the total mercy of the record labels at some point in time, and c) build a huge audience very quickly, based on having the content available – permission or not -, and then very quickly sell themselves to a large company that will take care of placating the labels while the money is plenty and the pockets are deep.
MyPlayList, a bootstrapped startup from Agentbleu, a Englishman living in France, combines streamed music and Flickr for a free music service that delivers visual as well as musical abundance.
MyPlayList uses the XSPF xml format to combine the images from the Flickr image sharing service, with music that is hosted across the internet, and similar to Seeqpod does not host or cache any of the music to avoid any copyright issues.
To use, users enter the name of any band or singer, and the system automatically compiles a Flickr – music combination, or suggests an existing playlist if one is already in the system. Registered users can create custom playlists and the site offers various embedable versions as well.
We covered GrooveShark’s new player yesterday, and MyPlayList works in the same space (along with Seeqpod). The visuals delivered by MyPlayList is a nice touch, particularly in full screen mode. Mark the site down as another free music provider that may challenge the likes of the play five times then buy Last.fm and the geo-retarded Pandora.
Update: It appears as though Global Pandora has been shut down since this post went live…deadpooled until further notice.
I haven’t been able to test it myself, since visitors from within the United States are redirected to Pandora itself. But a new site called Global Pandora (recently written up by TechCrunch France) apparently allows you to access Pandora from anywhere in the world.
As we covered last May, Pandora was forced to block international users from its streaming music service because there are no international laws equivalent to Section 114 of the DMCA that allow Pandora to pay rights holders for the usage of their content without signing deals with them first. Listeners in the UK were the latest to have the Pandora plug pulled on them, just after Duncan was compelled to write a how-to guide for accessing Pandora and other blocked sites internationally.
While international users can set up proxy servers or VPN connections to listen to Pandora, many less technical users will find a simple website like Global Pandora much more accessible. If you’re a reader from outside the US, give it a try and let us know how it works for you in the comments.
Pandora is to block users in the United Kingdom from January 15 after failing to obtain a reasonable licensing agreement.
Pandora first started blocking users outside the United States in May 2007 due to licensing issues, but had continued streaming into the UK under the belief that they would be able to obtain an affordable license to continue doing so.
UK Pandora users received an email that included the following:
.As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee….Pandora will stop streaming to the UK as of January 15th, 2008
The stupidity of the RIAA continues to have little bounds, particularly when a decision like this forces a US company to stop streaming outside of the United States, and yet American owned companies based in the United Kingdom (like Last.fm) are free to stream music anywhere. The RIAA is costing the United States jobs and investment by regulations that will force innovative companies like Pandora in the future to only set up overseas, or never set up at all.
Readers in the United Kingdom (or anywhere outside of the US) looking for ways of continuing to listen to Pandora can read this article on how it can be done.
I can remember when OpenHulu launched thinking that the name was nearly false advertising; essentially it provided access to Hulu content away from Hulu, but only to those in the United States. Veoh and MSN have since followed suit and provide Fox and NBC content from Hulu on their sites, but like OpenHulu it still remains IP blocked to those outside of the United States (and possibly Canada).
Web based proxies have been around for a long time, but most don’t work with video, and even those that do don’t provide decent enough bandwidth from which to view content from sites such as Hulu.
One alternative service that has been in use for business for a long time now are Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). VPN’s offer a secure pipe from where you can access the web, and in turn disguise the location of the user on the end connection.
There’s quite a few paid VPN services available, many at reasonable cost ($5-$20/ mth were a few I found on Google) but one service doing the rounds at the moment offers a VPN connection for free.
HotSpot Shield is a plugin for Windows or OS X that offers a free VPN service. There is a catch, it rather annoyingly adds a banner ad to the top of every page you visit, but at the ultimate price point of $0 most people will be able to live with it…well, at least whilst getting access to sites that were currently blocked, and the ads can be switched off on each page, but only after they have appeared.
Does it work? From Western Australia I’m currently listening to Pandora for the first time since May (still a great service.) Earlier this weekend I caught up with a new Simpsons episode, complete with ads from Hulu, then watched archival footage of the Nixon Resignation just for good measure. The only thing it didn’t work on was Joost which told me I should stop using a proxy…no matter, the blocked stuff is mostly on CBS.com anyway, and yes CBS.com works as well.
The speed wasn’t always great, but it was enough to watch video, varying between 600kbps and 1.3mbps on my 2mbps Cable connection.
I hesitated in writing this post because the more people who use services such as HotSpot Shield, the more chances we might end up killing them, or worse still Hulu and others might get smart and find ways of blocking it. Even if we lose HotSpot Shield today I’m betting given the strong demand services like this will have that others will offer VPN services as well, and hopefully free ones at that. At least I hope so, now I have Pandora again I’m really going to struggle if I’m forced to give it up again
SeeqPod, the popular “playable media” search service that many music sites use as the foundation for their core offering, has filed a petition for Chapter 11 yesterday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California. 
Sonific
MyPlayList
