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muSick in the Head

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Jason Herskowitz's Profile

Jason Herskowitz (jherskowitz)
38, Male
United States
Hometown:
Potomac Falls, VA
About Me:
I love music. I love technology. Mix them together and I am a very happy man. I started me*dia*or as a simple way for me to stay up-to-date with everything that is going on in the space. And now has turned into this.... a place for me (and a handful of other people) to drink from the firehose of "music 2.0".
Work History:
(current) VP - Consumer Products, MyStrands
(former) Director - Music Products, AOL
Website:
globallistic.blogspot.com
Favorite Music:
Jeff Buckley, Rage Against the Machine, Soul Coughing, Ben Harper, Husker Du, Buffalo Tom, Dave Matthews Band, Elliott Smith, Jane's Addiction, Nirvana, Pete Yorn, Sparklehorse, Sunny Day Real Estate, The Pixies, The Tragically Hip
Favorite TV Shows:
Arrested Development, Lost, The Simpsons, Entourage

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muSick in the Head

iTunes.fm?

Image representing iPhone as depicted in Crunc...Image via CrunchBase, source unknown I just read a really good post from Read/WriteWeb with more speculation on what is coming with iTunes 8.0 software next month (click the link below to see the whole story):


The Case for an Apple iNetwork: Welcome to the Social - ReadWriteWeb: "While most of that is common knowledge, what most people overlook is the glaring lack of any community aspect to iTunes. There are millions of people, many of them with similar tastes, flocking to the same destination every day, yet they never interact with each other... because they can't. If Kevin Rose is to be believed, however, (as discussed on TWiT 157) that all is about to change with iTunes 8.0.

He says, '... the one thing I hear about iTunes 8.0 is that it's gonna do something along the lines of, um, looking at your music, and, uh, kind of recommendations based on certain things.' In other words, the next version of iTunes will monitor your media purchasing and consuming habits and correlate them with everyone else using the system to figure out which songs you will probably like but haven't bought/listened to. If you're a fan of collaborative filtering systems or internet radio (Pandora, Last.fm, etc), you're probably familiar with the idea already and that iTunes may be considering implementing this doesn't come as a surprise (I found myself wondering why this wasn't introduced 2-3 years ago)."


To make a real play at being a music network I think Apple needs to give iTunes a web presence (outside of the client application), but nonetheless the potential notion of Subscription + Cloud + iPhone + Taste Networking = pretty compelling proposition. Last.fm, iLike and iMeem have established the market for such experiences now. This is about the time when Jobs likes to walk in with an offering (while claiming they *invented* it).

I still think that they will come in with subscription at some point (if not now), but I'd put pretty good money that September announcements include MobileMe + enhanced taste networking/discovery features (with still an outside shot of full-blown subscription being announced too). Apple wouldn't be going through the headaches with MobileMe transition (aka "upgrade") if it wasn't key to their strategy moving forward - the next logical step for it is cloud storage (and playback) of your iTunes library with the additional kick of wireless (push) sync management of that media down to your iPhone/WiFiPod. Once your content is in the cloud and universally accessible, then limited sharing (streaming) to a small social network of your friends enhances discovery of new content, with easy "buy" links back to iTunes which can then push the newly purchased content to your device, computer and cloud all simultaneously.

Thoughts?



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iTunes Unlimited Coming Next Month?

Image representing Apple as depicted in CrunchBaseImage via CrunchBase, source unknown We'll see if this actually plays out... but news is (re)surfacing that Apple's iTunes subscription plans are for real.

Rumors of iTunes music subscriptions fly again | The Industry Standard: "MacDailyNews says the service will be called 'iTunes Unlimited' and offer 50% of the songs currently on the traditional U.S. iTunes store through the program at launch. The subscription will be for one year and be available through iTunes or a retail box, similar to how MobileMe/DotMac is sold. iTunes Unlimited would launch, initially, on the U.S. store only. The subscription would cost $129.99 on its own, $179.99 with MobileMe or $99.99 for existing MobileMe subscribers. The site claims a late September announcement with late October rollout, just in time for the holiday season. TUAW received (almost certainly from the same source) a similar report."


But if it does, I won't hesitate to be the first to say "I told you so". :-)

Also check out some of my speculation on Apple's continued subscription world domination plan from January of this year.



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Radio Royalties on Repeat Mode

The RIAA Logo.Image via Wikipedia The latest (yet not new) story on Pandora claiming they will pull the plug if there isn't relief on the proposed new streaming radio royalty rates has people talking again. The discussions and debates on these potentially crippling rates (see previous posts and savenetradio.com) are heating up again thanks to the Pandora story (and the recent RIAA-backed shutdown of Muxtape).

I agree that it is a very complex issue - with many parties to be considered. Webcasters, songwriters, artists, record labels, technologists, legislators, consumers. There are some that think that the music "establishment" (aka major labels, RIAA, SoundExchange) are doing everything in their power to reverse the clock so they can go back into history and undo some of their previous actions. The hope is, that in doing so, they create a better future for recorded music sales - one in which they own and control every piece of the pie. Others go so far to say that the labels actually have a vested interest in *killing* streaming radio as they see it as actually a replacement to sales. By killing the existing ecosystem, they can start over (an idea I don't totally disagree with). It's like those movies where some madman wants to nuke the planet so we can "start anew" and cleanse the sins of humanity's past.

I don't really know where I am going with this... other than, this is how I see the most recent actions of the "establishment". I may be somewhat naive, this is how this whole thing seems to be playing out:

Act 1
  • labels give terrestrial radio the rights to broadcast royalty-free (to generate awareness and sales of physical product)

Act 2
  • labels want more promotion so they start *paying* to get the content played (payola)

Act 3
  • labels told that "pay for play" is illegal and start looking for additional (free to them) promotional outlets

Act 4
  • labels want more promotion so they give MTV rights to royalty-free broadcast of music videos

Act 5
  • labels see other parts of the music ecosystem starting to make money (or *not* make money, but attracting users) and think "hey, that should be ours too"

Act 6
  • labels start demanding/increasing payment on plays (where they used to gladly pay for such a thing and would still be doing so if the federal government deemed it illegal)

Act 7
  • streaming/radio ecosystem can't afford to be in the radio business and all exit - or move to royalty free programming (talk, news, etc.) - this is in addition to MTV/VH1's continued shift to reality TV and away from music

Act 8
  • labels don't have any promotional outlets to get their content heard

Act 9
  • labels continue to explore new media distribution outlets for their content (commercials, soundtracks, etc)

Act 10
  • due to limited inventory and increased competition to get song "placement" labels offer royalty-free content

Act 11
  • go to Act 1

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” - Albert Einstein


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RealPlayer 11 + Mac = No WiFi

RealPlayerImage via WikipediaI have been having major connectivity issues on my MacBook for the past week. Dropping the connection, pages not loading, streaming media stuttering. I spent days searching Google to find out what the issue could be and tried everything - deleting preference files, clearing my PRAM, rebooting, reconfiging my Airport, reboot, reboot, reboot.... all with no luck. There are tons of forums that have lots of theories as to what is causing it (and lots of people yelling at Apple to fix the problem).

In my case, it was something simple. RealPlayer 11 was the cause. Presumably something to do with the "stream catching" feature. Granted, it is a cool feature that will let you rip YouTube videos, songs from Pandora, and more... but the damn thing my computer virtually unusable for 3 days. I dragged the app to my trashcan and all my issues were resolved instantly (didn't even need to reboot).

I'm not sure if there was a setting or config in RealPlayer 11 that could have been switched to remedy the problem, but if you are having similar problems you may want to see if this is the culprit.
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Apple's SDK Restrictions Limit Innovation in Social Media Applications

The lack of multitasking support is a bigger limiting factor than what appears on the surface for the iPhone (e.g. "it sucks that I can't view my calendar and listen to Pandora at the same time"). Particularly hamstrung are the social music and discovery applications, and the consumers that love them.

  • You can't run apps in the background therefore you can't build a "scrobbler" for things you listen to locally on your device - see the (shameless plug) Strands Social Player that runs on Symbian, Windows Mobile and other mobile OSes but can't be implemented on the iPhone due to their restrictions
  • The SDK doesn't allow you to touch any of the local music, only streaming content (or so I've been told), so you can't build an alternative local music application that has social features built-in (who else is listening, top fans, etc.)
  • No support for flash - so you can't port/expose existing flash players in the Browser

Therefore, if you are a social media company/developer that wants to do something with music you are really pretty limited to building streaming applications (much to the chagrin of AT&T I'm guessing). Unfortunately, that hinders many discovery companies and applications from doing really compelling stuff around helping people discover new content based on what they are currently listening to (locally).

As for the streaming apps, it is interesting to note the impact of their format decisions on performance (at least on EDGE).

  • Last.fm is basically unlistenable on EDGE - each song buffers for an extended period of time (a minute +) so once the song starts playing back it is good but the in-between song silence is almost longer and more unlistenable than a commercial break. This is presumably a byproduct of their 128k MP3 streams (or so I think).
  • Pandora *almost* will sustain a stream in my car at high speeds - I believe they are streaming 64k AAC(plus?)
  • AOL *was* in a prime position to offer a great EDGE streaming use case, for many years they were supporting 16k AACplus streams for their dial-up users - I don't know if this infrastructure was abandoned or whether it was a business decision by CBS, but they disable all but terrestrial simulcasts when you are on EDGE.
Dear Apple, let the reins loose a little bit and let the ecosystem thrive. The first batch of music apps is a great start, but there is so much more that can be done if allowed.

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me*dia*or: finally gets some fixes

The relaunch of Tumblr finally forced me to clean up me*dia*or and I think it should be much more user-friendly now. Before I had just been using Tumblr to aggregate all of the "music 2.0" feeds that I pull (almost 100 now I think) - which is not really it's primary purpose, but it worked. Then a few months ago I reimplemented the me*dia*or tumblelog as more of it's own social netwo…

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Posted by Jason Herskowitz on November 10th, 2007 at 9:18am — No Comments (Add)

River is Temporarily Dry

It appears that the free-flowing firehose of music 2.0 information on Mediaor has dried up for the moment. I'm looking into clearing the log jam and hope to have it flowing again before the weekend is over. Stay tuned!

Posted by Jason Herskowitz on November 2nd, 2007 at 12:33pm — No Comments (Add)

Live from Live Earth

As I sit here and watch some of Live Earth I figured I would pull some of Dave Holmes' liveblogging from the show in New York. Enjoy below...

Posted by Jason Herskowitz on July 7th, 2007 at 2:16pm — No Comments (Add)

me*dia*or shower- rinse, lather, repeat

Between vacation last week, and some work I've been doing on on me*dia*or - I haven't posted much lately. But, I think me*dia*or is getting pretty good. Well, at least *I* find it useful for keeping up with the news and dialog around "music 2.0". I've turned what was once just a simple feed splicer into a full blown "river of news" feed aggregation network. I'm pulling about six dozen feeds right now - and using Yahoo Pipes…

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Posted by Jason Herskowitz on June 25th, 2007 at 8:10am — No Comments (Add)

New Music 2.0 Directory

A while back, I started a wiki with the goal of creating the ultimate Music 2.0 Directory. Unfortunately, it was pretty much a total bust. The community generated entries were poorly written/categorized, spam showed up regularly, and I did not have the bandwidth to play editor-in-chief. Lucky for the…

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Posted by Jason Herskowitz on June 21st, 2007 at 3:32pm — No Comments (Add)

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At 3:11pm on May 9th, 2008,  Mark Schoneveld said…
Dig it. Thx for setting this up!
At 5:56pm on June 14th, 2007,  misteredx said…
Hey, no prob, thanks for setting this thing up! Just poking around and lurking mostly.
 
 

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