Music

From the Last.fm forums:

I took a look in the iTunes log and it says exactly why it doesn’t scrobble: I had MobileScrobbler installed. That’s true, when my iPod was jailbroken. However, I restored my iPod so that it’s not jailbroken anymore, but MobileScrobbler doesn’t do his job anymore and now Last.FM won’t either.

I also had a jailbroken iPod which I restored two weeks ago so I could be ready for the new v2.0 software. But since I’m running stock v1.1.4 now, this shouldn’t be happening. But there it is: “Mobile Scrobbler detected on iPod Touch - client scrobbling not needed.”

This highlights a fundamental problem I’ve seen with Audioscrobbler from the very beginning: in their quest to prevent spam, they prevent data from getting into their system in the first place, instead of storing the data and applying spam filtering on what was received.

Imagine if instead of Gmail putting spam in a spam folder it simply rejected the message in the first place — sure, it works great in general, but it sucks for all those false positives, right? As a result this site has never worked for anything but the core use-case: someone who listens to their music only when sitting in front of a computer, where they have a live helper application watching their every play.

Because Last.fm outright rejects data that looks “spammy”, there’s no opportunity to correct it when, in fact, it was system-, computer-, or even user-error. That data is lost for good. I’ve had days of listening lost like this because just one play on a desktop had been “newer” than my iPod sync, and the program thought I was trying to sneak extra listens in.

But this is the wrong way to run the service because not only does it severely punish the user for common mistakes, but it forces them to change their behavior on how they consume music to meet Last.fm’s strict patterns — just so they can’t spam the service and manipulate the overall charts. Not to mention, there’s an extremely easy way to handle that: it’s called sandboxing. Does it look like spam? Don’t count it. But don’t throw it out either. Put it in a space that can be counted for the user, but doesn’t affect someone else’s stats.

So we’re back at the quote at the top of the page. In a rush to keep duplicate entries from getting into the system, it falsely assumes the tracks were already submitted just by looking at the iPod itself and nothing else. Of course, Mobile Scrobbler keeps its own log and preferences on the device. There’s probably some magic it can do to see if Mobile Scrobbler was on, or if the tracks it was about to scrobble were logged as scrobbled by the app, but hell, it’s not even doing a good enough job to see if the app itself is still installed on the device. If Last.fm could sandbox submissions, it could submit those tracks and then see that, hey, those tracks were never actually submitted, so let’s keep them around after all. Instead, I just lost three days of tracks.

I should be used to this. It’s happened before. This is what I wrote in 2006 on this very same issue:

I literally think “Oh my god, did I update the iPod?!” before playing files in iTunes. Three or four days of straight iPod listening would be erased in a heartbeat because of a careless what’s-that-song-again double-click on the computer. This is a horrible thing to feel and I’m so glad to have finally stopped caring enough about my profile to finally get away from it.

And to the use-case point, I immediately got a nasty comment from some freetard saying that I should stop whining that the site makes me do things their way, and that I should just write my own.(1)

Having been a user of the service for over five years total now, I’m finally ready to toss the entire thing to the curb. This doesn’t need to be the end, however, but it requires Last.fm to stop treating all users like spammers, and actually build some real intelligence into track submissions and chart creation.

(1) Oh yes, as a working IA professional, a former employee of a Webby-winning music portal, and a passionate user of social media, I am more than ready to write an alternative. VCs or startup CEOs, give me a call. I’ll hook you up for sure.

Daring Fireball does a good job of covering the problems with iTunes ringtones, particularly in how Apple failed to make the “format” truly user-friendly, even while making them much friendlier than they are in most places:

Apple’s own special way of doing ringtones is this: You can only use songs purchased from the iTunes Store; you must pay an additional 99 cents on top of the price of the song itself; only a small subset of the songs at the iTunes Store are eligible; and, if you decide to create a second ringtone using a different segment of the same song which you’ve already paid for twice, you must pay for it again. But you do get to pick which segment of the song to use.

This “special way” seems fair only when compared to the ringtones offered by competitors, which, as Jobs pointed out in his keynote, typically sell for $2.50, which price includes only the ringtone snippet, not the entire original song itself.

Having worked with the record industry for several years here and there, I would pin the pressure on ringtones on two unfortunate realities of the business.

The music industry is a marketing industry

Even if you are an indie-label who claims to be doing it “for the music,” at best your job is still to tell people about those artists. To say “any person who plays music has the right to earn a living doing it” is a very noble thing to say (and why people always go to labels with the idea of “fixing” them) but that doesn’t map to talent. A lot of people know how to play musical instruments, and marketing is very expensive, so you must either be a) sellable or b) sellable and a Genius. Making something sellable is always about working supply and demand into your favor as much as possible, and geniuses are hard to come by. If you’re going to survive as a business, you’re going to have to get very good at actively selling artists.

The thing is, ringtones are the labels’ only opportunity to bring the market dynamics of singles back. Currently you can lead into an album with a pre-release and a few key tracks, but once that album is out, it’s out, and all the tracks with it. But carefully timed releases of singles, with the right marketing behind it, was the stuff that kept an old album fresh and up on the charts for longer than the average consumer’s attention would allow it to be. Done right, they are events.

More importantly, like singles, they are additional purchases on top of the album. Once Apple and iTunes made buying one track a part of the purchase of the album as a whole (particularly with “Complete My Album”), that extra revenue was lost. But sustaining an artificial barrier between a track and a ringtone of the track keeps that model alive.

Creating an artificial scarcity of a product, combined with big press when that scarcity is alleviated, is often what marketing is all about.

The music industry was built around performances, not recordings

Much of what the industry does is still rooted in what it was doing when it was formed — being a representative for live musicians in a new industrial age where mechanical reproduction threatened their livelihood. If you were a song writer and your sheet music was being turned into player piano rolls, or you were the piano player who was being replaced by said player piano, the industry and its representatives were meant to protect your interests and give you fair compensation when that machine was installed, its rolls were sold, etc. etc..

Today, the idea that a ringtone is a separate performance can be true in a certain conceptual sense, but it’s not in a modern sense, not in the way that the average person thinks about music today. (It’s not like we could have had a live band play follow us and play music when the phone rang.) But to the industry, the music is the attraction — it’s what draws you into the store, it’s what makes you tune in to that internet radio station, it’s what keeps you in the bar, it’s what makes you buy that phone even. They are performances that other businesses are using to make money, so hey, where’s their cut already?

(While the iTunes license should specifically cover the performance rights of the tracks, the question is did the previous license cover playback on phones, or did they have to change the terms to add ringtones, possibly to incent the labels to renew their contracts?)

Problem is, the music industry spent decades trying to get people to consume music as a ubiquitous commodity — The newest release! The exclusive remix! In your car, at the diner or from the movies! — but now it’s paying the price as technology has finally gotten to the point where their product really can be bought and consumed like a commodity — massive repositories, instant access, playable anywhere and in practically anything.

The ringtone, like many other RIAA products, is an attempt to keep the status-quo as long as possible, even though most analysts might say those days are already over.

Interesting facts from the article on WebWare about the debut of Slacker, a one-two punch to Apple’s digital music empire that consists of a music service and custom player hardware:

• About 70 percent of music enthusiasts don’t want to spend hours creating the perfect playlists;
• 51 percent of MP3 player users update their content only once a month or less;
• 46 percent don’t update more often because they don’t have time.

The really interesting twist in the Slacker service is that while the desktop app will perform jukebox duties as these players all do, the service model that integrates into it is radio-focused, meaning a free (ad-supported) version will exist, and the Wi-Fi enhanced player will periodically download and build mixes based on how you rate (and “favorite”) songs on the device, in the web player, and in the desktop app.

The name is clearly appropriate: for those out there who are more into radio and aren’t focused on building a large digital library, this may the device they were waiting for, and clearly targets music listeners that aren’t going to be interested in a library-only system like iTunes and the iPod. This could be big.

Pitchfork is reporting that Mike Ladd will be concluding the Infesticon trilogy this year!

The final album—“Domesticons”—should be out sometime this year.

If you’ve never listened to the first two albums in the series, I highly recommend them: The Infesticons’ “Gun Hill Road” and The Majesticons’ “Beauty Party”.

Quoth the Pitchfork article:

“My work chronicles a timeline leading up to the point we’ve reached now, which is post-futurism,” said Ladd in an interview with the BBC in 2004. “After postmodernism blurred the lines between fiction and fact, post-futurism is the point where even the blur has disappeared, and science fiction and reality are completely unified and symbiotic.” So if you’re thinking giant floating robotic Jay-Z head vs. tentacle-armed cyborg J-Zone, you’re a little bit off.

If you’ve been holding off on getting an eMusic account, your excuse just got that much thinner.

Noah’s cheat sheet to eMusic (Updated):

• Ninja Tune/Big Dada (new addition)
• Stones Throw (new addition)
• Matador
• Warp (only Maximo Park for now)
• Chocolate Industries
• Kill Rock Stars / 5RC
• DefJux
• Touch and Go
• Ghostly International
• Merge
• Thrill Jockey
• GSL
• Beggars Banquet / 4AD / XL Recordings
• V2
• !K7

Go knock yerselves out.

Age makes no difference till you open your mouth