Pandora Mobile highlights awesomeness but also severe lame-itude

Do you know Pandora?  If you’re in the United States, where Pandora is legally available, you may have come to enjoy this awesome uber-customizable music radio over the past years.  If you’re not in the U.S., perhaps you’ve discovered the beauty of anonymous proxies :cough:, which I’m not going to mention here :p.

But perhaps you didn’t know that Pandora has become available on mobile phones!  More good news:  It’s available for free on phones that run the Windows Mobile operating system, free on Sprint phones, and free on (some versions of) BlackBerry phones.  Ironically, it’s also free on the iPhone, and I say ironically because AT&T apparently is charging—I swear I am not making this up—$8.95 per month to its other mobile customers for the privileges of using Pandora.  I mean, I love Pandora and all, but even if I were insane enough to be contributing to the income of the evilness that is AT&T, I sure as heck wouldn’t fork over that much dough for Pandora.  For an on-demand mobile music service?  Perhaps.  But for streaming radio?  You’ve got to be kidding.

One other note on the Pandora Mobile offerings:  Apparently, I’m not supposed to be able to access Pandora Mobile because T-Mobile phones are not supported.  Which is odd, because I’m enjoying streaming music via Pandora on my BlackBerry Curve (on T-Mobile) right now.  Go figure.  I also shouldn’t mention that I was also able to do this while in Ireland a couple of weeks ago (listening to, appropriately enough, The Corrs on St. Patricks day :-D ).

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Anyway, if you’re an iPhone user or a non-AT&T subscriber, give Pandora Mobile a go!  If you’re an AT&T subscriber, well, heaven help you, and for reasons way beyond this Pandora issue.

[Gee, Adam, tell us what you really think about AT&T :D]

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Okay, okay, I’m thinking I should flesh this entry out a little bit :-)

Some stuff I like in the mobile app:
- Seems to work internationally (though I can imagine this being “fixed” [sigh])
- Works as a true background app on my BlackBerry!
- Can play through my BB’s speaker (actually sounds decent!) or a headset
- Song-to-song time isn’t bad
- Nice graphics, simple, intuitive interface.
- Access to all my stations :-)
- Can even view “Why [did Pandora play] this song?”
- Thumbs up / thumbs down works.

Some stuff I don’t like:
- Takes a while to start up the app
- No way to see detailed info on artist or song

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All in all, pretty damn cool! :-D

Great ways to discover and (legally) listen to music online

Here are a few thoughts on music services I’m in love with online.  CAVEAT:  Many, if not all of these only work in a limited number of countries due to lame licensing complications… typically the United States, often coupled with Canada and/or the UK.  And it’d be wrong, oh so wrong to use proxies to get around this ;-).

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I just learned that on Last.fm you can not only play tons of (full length!) songs on demand now, but do so without even having an account.  This makes it a great service to share neat music finds with others!

Here’s an example:
The short, catchy, and wordless 47 Reasons, from the charming and often hilarious a cappella group, The Bobs.

Downside:  Individuals are technically only supposed to be able to stream a song full-length three times.

Other music services online that I love:

• Yahoo Music Unlimited, but it’s being discontinued soon, sending all of its members to…
• Rhapsody, with limited free streaming online and a service that offers memberships with unlimited streaming / tethered downloading for $13-$15/month.  Great selection of artists and tunes!
• Imeem, which—like Last.fm—also lets you stream a ton of awesome music full-length for free… and on Imeem you can even embed/share it, too, but all of this only for folks who are logged in.  Others get 30 second snippets.  Still, better than nothing… and better than services like iTunes which require you to use proprietary software.
• Pandora, which doesn’t let you stream on demand or download, but it’s a fabulous (and free) online radio service that learns quickly what you love. Not just artists or genres, but actual sounds... swing feel, lots of trumpets, major keys, fast tempos, etc.  Note that you can establish many different stations to fit your mood (big band jazz, laid back acoustic piano, etc.). Try this one out, create a couple of stations, seed ‘em with a few artists and/or song names, and then rate a handful of songs (thumbs up, thumbs down).  You’ll be amazed and grateful :-D.

Have thoughts on the ones I’ve listed above?  And are there other music services online that you love and I haven’t mentioned? 

[Hat tip for Last.fm info: DeWitt Clinton]

Fair use, mashups, and profits - why hasn't anyone figured this out yet?

Lots of us love music and we love to share it; I think that’s even more powerful than simply “grab lots of music for free”—it’s the sharing that excites us, motivates us.  Music is a shared experience!

Why, then, hasn’t anyone made it easy to share music snippets legally from a simple iframe, a simple widget that someone can cut and paste or even drag and drop into their blog?

Let me give an example of how painful it is to share (within, IMHO, fair use) a music snippet:
1) Identify song you want to share with others.  Determine that it’s DRM’d.  Ack!
2) Remove DRM (yes, I know this may technically be illegal, but frankly I don’t give a damn.  Call it civil disobedience)
3) Use software to grab a relevant thirty second snippet and save it as an mp3.  Make sure tags are still embedded.
4) Upload to server.
5) Before all of this, download and install a good flash player so others can listen to your snippet whether on a Mac or PC.
6) Embed the appropriate code into your blog entry.

Check out this entry on the emotional wallop of strings for an example of the result. 

I think it took me at least 20 minutes just to prepare, upload, and post this one clip.  Does that sound very conducive to sharing to you?!

So you know what massively puzzles me?  Why on earth hasn’t any major player (Amazon, Rhapsody, Napster, Apple, etc.) made this process easier… not only facilitating the discovery and sharing of music by the increasingly powerful blogosphere, but increasing subscriptions and download sales?!  Let me explain how I envision this working…

What the blogger / music lover does:
1) Blogger goes to associates.amazon.com or embed.rhapsody.com or whatever and looks up an album or specific track.
2) They then selects an embed method (php include, javascript, iframe, etc.) and optionally set other customizable widget options.
3) If not already logged in, they enter in their subscription ID or affiliate ID so they can get credit from referred subscriptions and purchases.
4) They copy the specified HTML and paste it into their blog, along with (hopefully) personal comments.

What the person visiting the blog sees:
A simple mini-player widget that contains a play button and a short description of the clip (title, artist, album), along with links to:
- "Learn more about this artist, album, or song"
- "Purchase this song" (on iTunes, Rhapsody, etc.)
- "Subscribe to service for unlimited listening to 3 million songs" (again, on Rhapsody, Napster, etc.)

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Of course, even cooler would be all the online music folks coming together to make a common standard of some sort, so this widget could actually have a small pulldown menu enabling listeners to buy the tune on or subscribe to their preferred online music service.

So why hasn't any of this happened? Some guesses:
- Music services are shortsighted and want to more tightly (and obnoxiously) control the listening experiences.
- Music services are scared crapless of lawsuits; despite the fact that any sane person would envision 30 seconds being pretty much fair use, the RIAA would probably sue anyway.
- Fears over brand tarnishing (putting the names of artists and music services on splog sites featuring child porn, for instance)

I'm skeptical about the third issue, though. After all, Amazon seemingly lets pretty much anyone embed jpegs of book covers or album covers on raunchy or spammy sites.

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So, what to do in the meantime?
If I wanted to be lazy AND give the finger to non-Windows-users, I could just link to Amazon.com clips, for instance, like this clip of "Where Does the Wayward Footwear Go?" from The Bobs. But that's pretty inelegant, and it also depends upon Amazon:
- having the song I want to show off
- including a decent snippet
- not changing the URL or blocking folks from accessing it off the Amazon.com domain

And, to be fair, it's not a very attractive option for Amazon.com. I mean, what do they get out of it? No potential sales, no branding (except from my arbitrary mention), etc. And unless I manually create a link to the album ("Songs For Tomorrow Morning" ), it's not even easy for the listener to learn more about the album or group, much less purchase the CD. In other words, it's a lousy experience for everyone.

Surely there's got to be a better way?!

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Update at 12:58am the next day:
Hmm... well, there's Napsterlinks.

But...
- They require people to register with Napster before hearing any music (even a 30 second snippet)
- Each registered user can hear a track only three times total (which is reasonable, IMHO)
- The embedded widget doesn't allow one to fast-forward in a song, nor can it contain multiple tracks (much less an album). Just one track per widget :(.
- There seems to be a bug whereby any page with the widget on it never finishes loading. Weird.

So, unsurprisingly, napsterlinks are seemingly quite unpopular (I had never actually seen them in the wild, and doing a blogsearch yielded just a tiny handful in existence). Such a lost opportunity!

And Rhapsody? Sure, you can listen to free tracks with them, but...
- You're limited to 25 total plays per month (kinda stingy).
- You have to download and install their plugin (not too time consuming, though)
- The player window can't be embedded :-(.
- Any click to play a song opens BOTH the player window and a full-sized Rhapsody page. Boo!

Obviously NOT a decent experience for bloggers :(.

So, hey, music services... we're still waiting. Yahoo? Apple?...