I’m a Web fanatic, I admit. But you probably already knew that… My work environment has been completely web based for years now. The same applies to my music. Like many people, I used to download music from Kazaa or eMule (Yeah, I know some of you still do). Most of the time now, I listen to music on the web and don’t have any need to download it. My laptop benefits the most from this inclination since it’s not weighed down by music files, thus saving me tons of space and virus headaches (you eMule users know what I’m talking about). Anyhow, if I do choose to download music, I can always do it over at iTunes or my favorite place in the web: Jamendo.
Music plays a large role in our lives. Since the web now plays an even bigger part, combining the two together has become unavoidable. The greatest thing about this powerful duo is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time searching for music you like — just use this nifty guide list and you’ll find just about everything you need to enjoy hours of good music. The sound quality changes from service to service, but overall, it’s good enough for regular web usage.
When it comes to promoting new music, pay-for-play schemes are generally frowned upon. The practice, which involves music labels or artists paying radio stations to play their songs in heavy rotation, dates back to the beginnings of terrestrial radio. It got so bad in the 1950s that Congress had to intervene, but it keeps rearing its head in new forms.
Now, pay-for-play has hit online radio. Jango, a music streaming service which claims 6 million monthly listeners, is selling paid placement to labels and artists through a program it launched last week called Jango Airplay. For as little as $30, a band can buy 1,000 plays on Jango. Each song has links to buy the song at Amazon or iTunes.
Given the scandalous history of pay-for-play on terrestrial radio, it is not surprising that people are skeptical about whether it is a good idea to bring it to the Web. Matt Rosoff at Cnet sums it up:
This tarnishes the entire service with a distinct air of “suck”.
Rosoff is under the impression that good artists don’t need to pay for promotion. I am not so sure. Bands don’t break out without some sort of promotion, whether that is paid for by their labels, or earned through new kinds of algorithmic and social promotion we are seeing with online music services from Pandora to iLike to imeem.
If we accept paid placement in our search results, why should online music be any different? The real question is relevance. Either the paid promotions will make Jango a better listening experience and the experiment will pay off, or it will make it suck and alienate its listeners.
Tel Aviv, Israel based MeeMix, which we first covered in August, is kicking-off the New Year by moving their taste-predicting Internet radio service from closed to open Beta.
Internet radio is already a very crowded space dominated by entrenched startups like Last.fm and Pandora. Smaller players and recent entrants such as SpiralFrog, Jango and Slacker are not increasing the breathing room. MeeMix wants its share of the pie, too, and is keeping its crosshairs focused on the U.S. market and its dominant revenue potential.
MeeMix’s public beta launch is marked by the addition of new features:
- Meeps: Comment-based conversations users can have regarding a song, album or artist.
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Station Home: Every MeeMix station now has a dedicated page allowing users to interact in its context and shape its playlist.
- Mee Feeds: This is basically MeeMix’s version of Facebook’s News Feed. The feed indicates songs favorited, stations rated, friends added, etc.
- Mee Journey: Users can see other members’ public log or “journey” of actions in MeeMix.
- Station Gift: Users can now send other members a station as a gift. The station is then the “property” of the recipient who can customize it without affecting the original station.
- Twitter Integration: Users can update their Twitter accounts with songs they’ve listened to, their favorite stations, etc.
MeeMix claims to have doubled its music catalog, but a search for my personal favorites ‘John Coltrane’ and ‘Miles Davis’ came-up empty. The same searches on Jango and Slacker both came-up positive.
I would like to have seen the addition of “genre” to the channel creation wizard which is still limited to artist and song. A widgetized player also would have been a welcome addition, especially the desktop kind.
In my original post, I hypothesized that licensing its engine could become MeeMix’s core business. Looks like this might not be far fetched as the company says they have been approached by a mobile operator for the purpose of powering a taste-based cellular music streaming service. The company has also shared with me some interesting offline deals on the horizon that should keep MeeMix’s potential on a positive note for 2008. We’ll post another update soon. In the meantime, let us know how you think MeeMix compares to the competition.
Update: MeeMix also sent out an email to some users today saying that they will be discontinuing the service in Israel for now due to licensing issues (Thanks Orli):
It’s been a little over a month since we reported on Jango and a lot of exciting things have been happening. Their stable of music has expanded, though it still needs a bit of work, but we’re willing to bear with it as their catalog improves. Since their public launch in November they’ve enlisted 180,000 registered users and 750,000 listeners who have created over 1.5 million custom radio stations.
According to Compete.com, in the month of November Jango had 244,522 users compared to FineTune who had 149,106. Slacker garnered 329, 310 while last.fm and Pandora raked in roughly 1.4 million each. They obviously have a ways to go to catch up with the big dogs, but that’s not too shabby considering they’ve been out of Beta for just over a month.
So what’s Jango to do? Their algorithm appears to work much better (IMHO) than that of the music genome variety, but how are they going to drive those numbers up? Enter the Jango Jukebox. Try not to scoff just yet. Hear me out. The JJ is a slick embeddable widget that’s completely customizable and animated. There’s an interactive filmstrip of scrolling artist images where you can select who you want playing and you can skin them to suit your mood, if you please. It will surely liven up your personal pages or MySpace accounts. Create your own player in just a few seconds or have Jango scrape your list of artists from your MySpace and you’re ready to go in no time.
That’s not to say the Jukebox is perfect. It will surely hit MySpace like wildfire and it’s well suited for that crowd, but I’d like a smaller version that isn’t so in your face. The catalog of music still needs to be expanded, but both of these gripes will surely come to be addressed soon enough. You can get your own Jango Jukebox widget below by choosing the “get your own” button.
Say hello to Jango. No, not Jenga, though, that’s a bitchin’ game to play when you’re having a few tasty beverages, but I digress. Jango is a fresh and interesting spin on streaming radio. It brings a social networking dynamic that can be found elsewhere, but it sets itself apart from the rest of the pack because of its music-centric nature. The social network is just an added bonus. As you can imagine, you have the option to add friends and listen to their playlists or ‘tune into’ their stream whenever you like. Build a rockin station and see who is listening in, but don’t stalk them. That’s just weird. Well, you can stalk their stations, but not the people. Editing your stations is neat since you can add artists to an existing station or delete suggestions from Jango and then rate songs from each artist so you hear what you want to hear and not what you don’t.
Another outstanding feature is the simplicity with which you navigate and interact with the site. Have an artist you need to look up? Type it in without ever signing up and you’re already streaming. It is really easy to further customize a station by checking off similar artists that you like or don’t like. You can even rate songs individually from each artist. There are 200,000 songs (and growing) in Jango’s catalog, and 10,000 artists from all the major and independent labels. I also like that new windows don’t pop up when you navigate from one page to another and your stream of music is never interrupted
What I like the most about Jango is the ’similar artist’ algo that’s being used. It just works. I get to listen to artists that are ultimately in the same league as the artists I like. For example, I like the Brazilian Girls and Jango spits out artists that are similar unlike Pandora, which gives me music from Brazil. WTF?! I don’t want music from Brazil, you jackass music genome.
Now this isn’t to say that Jango is perfect. It’s pretty damn close and it’s only in Beta so you can see what is possible for the future. The artist base is constantly expanding so bug the Jango folks about artists you can’t find. That’s the gloriousness that is Public Beta. Another thing I’d like to see is a ‘previous list’ of songs, like, the last five tracks, which I’m told is in works as we speak. Because we love you so much Jango, an angel-backed startup based in New York City, has agreed to give us unlimited invites for all TechCrunch readers right here. The general launch is on November 12th, and look for embedded apps for Facebook and Myspace after that.
