Are Formats What Napster Really Needs? 170
Adam Curry writes: "This article has taken me a combined 20 years of broadcast and computer experience to compile and I couldn't be more excited about the possibilities the Internet can bring now that we have witnessed the cultural change from the traditional broadcast models to the Peer to Peer networking model technologies such as Napster and Gnutella have shown us." Whether or not it convinces you that Gnutella needs formats, this piece also offers a bit of knowledge-in-passing about the music biz that may interest readers putting together audio streams at home or for friends.
mp3 usage (Score:1)
I, personally use shoutcast and winamp and live365 [live365.com] to broadcast our own radio show at iceball.net/awm [iceball.net] and we have seen how much easier it is to use winamp and mp3s and all of that...before, we were using tapes and a big tape player, and a cd player and it was quite the pain to get everything in order for one broadcast...now it is simple..If everyone switches over, it will make it a million times easier...especially if the radio stations stream over the net as well.
just my 2 senses..
Not mine. (Score:1)
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
Example: the /. format (Score:2)
Curry's idea is not sound (Score:1)
Secondly, I really hate being canned like that. I like napster because I can search for anything. I have an eclectic taste, and it does not lend itself to being canned.
Napster does not need this, napster needs a way to get out of the legal troubles it is in, and this will not even begin to curtail that.
Back to the drawing board, Adam. I guess this means another 20 years.
Formats? Bull! (Score:1)
He says that the DJ has no place in radio anymore, and he couldn't be more wrong.
Broadcast management is now in charge of programming on the radio, and consequently we get crap - more Britney, more Madonna, more N'sync etc, instead of creative, quirky, original music. We only get that when there are people whose job it is to find it. Good DJs don't just do all the tech stuff Curry mentions, they also (and foremost) seek out new music that their audiences don't yet know, and play it mixed right in with the music the audience does know. Their ears and their taste, not their agility with CD players or their mellifluous voices, are what makes them useful. Curry has never worked in radio in an era when DJs were allowed to do this and, since he apparently has neither taste nor good ears, has forgotten that.
Sigh (Score:2)
Advocacy.
Mention Windows 2000, they'll advocate Be.
Mention MS Word, they'll advocate Star Office.
Mention KDE, they'll advocate Gnome (yes, even now [linuxplanet.com]).
There are worthy alternatives to the most popular options, but why do folks feel compelled to advocate them ceacelessly? It gets old fast. . .
Re:Formats: Just what we -don't- want (Score:2)
Now, once we forget about Napster and start tallking about AIs and music categories there is a lot of interesting stuff. I wrote a little Perl/GTK front end to mpg123 a few years ago which tries to learn your moods from your past lissening habits (SmartPlay [gtf.org]). We could create a forum (web page) where independent musicians could claim to be simillar to famous artists, provide mp3s of their music, and lisseners would vote on the simillarity.
Anywho, there are lots of interesting things which we can do to make it easy to find new music, but Napster is not the company to do these things.
Re:Formats: Just what we -don't- want (Score:1)
Ha! That'd be fine and dandy if that frustrating teaser feature worked just one of ten times or so. It simply doesn't. So, in practice (at least with the current Napster server(s) & [Win95] client implementations) it's not a tangible feature -- only a theoretical one -- to locating previously unheard music you stand of better than average chance of enjoying.
Believe me, I wish I could post otherwise in support of your assertion that Napster does allow for finding new artists in that manner...
Andy
Re:Gee Wiz What a Cool Idea (Score:2)
Well, it's worth a shot :) yes, I am gearing up to do just this. Some would argue the thing to do is then to turn around and sell the 'high end' handmade product for $40 or something, but I have a hard time seeing any CD as being worth that much :)
There IS FreeForm(at) radio already: WFMU (Score:2)
use rtsp://206.190.42.136/wfmu.rm if the Yahoo ads interfer w/ the stream. Alan Watts tonight at 6. There's some on the west coast also.
Better to just have consistent music ids (Score:1)
If every music track, irrespective of it's format, could be uniquely identified, then you could have central databases like CDDB or FreeDb [freedb.org] that store such meta-information for us, rather than relying on tags stored with the track.
Re:Define a "Format" (Score:1)
But then again, who will determine what constitutes a genre of music.
Re:I am kind of interested in this (Score:1)
Just my thoughts. (Score:2)
The thing is... many of us don't care if the station *ever* identifies itself. We don't *want* to hear advertising. We don't *CARE*.
I know there are a few (2 at the moment) mp3 streams out there that I would happily *pay* a montly feel (say, $5 or $10) to have the privelege of listening to, uninterrupted, commercial free. As for the DJ.. his job is to put the music together and play it; easy nowadays, as you say. I don't *care* what his opinions on real life issues are; they are worth no more than the next persons. He is not a celebrity. They do NOTHING but play music. Music that I like.
Formats? Bah. I just want to hear music.
As for the need for streams at all... I have an extensive collection of personal music, that I do enjoy listening to. And sometimes, I want to hear new things. So I tune into a station I like, or that I've never heard before, and listen to what they play. If I like the music, I can pull up amp and see what it was called. I can always email them, chat them up, find out what it was, where to get it. Maybe ask them to play some more so I can hear it. I don't need station identifiers; It's right there in winamp. I *know* how I got to that station. I can look it up any time I want to.
I'm listening to it purely by choice; not because it's being 'marketed' to me.
Re:What Napster needs... (Score:2)
As for napster itself.. let it die. Something much better will pop up in it's place. Easy as pie.
Re:Formats: Just what we -do- want (Score:3)
I think you missed the point of what he stated completely and entirely. He's not talking about being forcefed by predefined playlists or whatnot. This is not an advertising related thing he's talking about.
What he stated was that there should be more definable (less broad, more ways of mixing various ones) genres with subtags and what not, and a large database of them online. Then, as the amount of music climbs skyhigh from heavy usage on Napster and proceeds to fork itself into the database, it gets to the point where you can go to the database, state "I'd like to see stuff that's kind of very similar to this music" and it can cut it up across genre and msicellaneous information lines, which gives you.. More music by more bands you haven't heard of that are in a similar style! Imagine that.
IMO this could be a major improvement over Napster, who's main purpose right now is finding mp3s of bands you know. Browsing other people's repositories can sometimes help to learn about more bands, but isn't as effective as it could be. (Although searching for 'remix' is amusing for hours on end.)
Anything to increase the diversity of music is a good thing, and that is what he wants. It won't remove anything as it is, it's a secondary layer atop it that nets like styles together, mixable by however you choose.
Re:This guy talks himself up so much... (Score:1)
Basically, he seems to be saying that Napster should have playlists for different music formats. Anything new here? Radio has had this since, what, the 20's? And the station managers then probably would have told you it's just like having print publications that address different interests.
---------
FWIW... (Score:2)
Re:Formats: Just what we -don't- want (Score:5)
Mr. Curry claims that "you may hear Madonna one time and Jennifer Lopez the next", but what if I wanted to listen to Madonna and got Lopez instead? I want to choose the songs I listen to; I don't want some impersonal AI with no inkling of my emotions to try to decide what I'll like.
The concept is that you will hear Madonna one time and Janis Light the next song. Who is Janis Light? I have no idea, but the DJ is betting that if you like Madonna, you'll like Janis Light.
If anything, Napster has the flaw of making people download the same few artists over and over again. Rather than having a DJ tie in similar artists by "feel" (like Nick Cave, the Cruxshadows, and Black 47, three compeletely different genres, but many of the same people like all three), Napster simply says: "Enter the artist you are searching for". Unless you know the artist, it dosen't help.
Now, having *said* this, Napster *does* have formats... you can view the listed shared files, and (aside from the people who download everything for the hell of it), you can guess that if you like 80% of a person's collection, you might like at least some of the remaining 20%.
Does Gnutella do anything like this?
--
Evan
Re:I think Gnutella needs more organization (Score:4)
It sounds draconian but it is the only way to have an orderly and useful file trading service. Think BBS. When you joined a BBS Back in The Day, you didn't just get full access to everything right away. You got perhaps a few minutes a week with limited downloads and no messaging. Then maybe if you where a good user, you would get chatting priviledges. And after that, perhaps file uploading priviledges. If you were a fuckup, your account was permanently revoked.
Regarding Gnutella's particular scalability problems, I'm afraid there may be no solution aside from a complete redesign.
Very Intresting Concept (Score:1)
Re:Formats: not quite what we want (Score:1)
Re:A (music) portal... How new! (Score:1)
Re:Welcome to the Internet (Score:1)
Re:I don't fit in a box (Score:1)
If you LIKE formats.... (Score:2)
One problem with radio and MTV is commercials- even more of a bother on the FM than the dish, more pervasive and annoying in my opinion. And I'm sure the lot of us start reading Slashdot right below the ad banner and don't even look at the danged thing, do we?
Another IS the format problem- like someone else on the board said, you're looking for Madonna and you get Lopez. Woopee. What if your tastes are a little less Top Forty? I for one listen to Anthrax, Therion, Coil, Death, Pro-Pain and Throbbing Gristle, among others. Under format restrictions you would NEVER happen across any of these save Anthrax, and if you're partial to a particular era of the band, forget it. I love the randomness of having a six hundred song playlist- and the fact that I personally selected EVERY song, from Rage Against the Machine to Einsterzende Neubauten, is what makes it worth listening to. Split things into genres and all of a sudden you lose out on the selectability of what you're looking for- and in the world of steaming audio, you lose out on quality and choice completely: I stopped listening to radio because I think POD, korn, Kitty, and 3 Doors Down are tortuous to listen to- and anything else I may like is so overplayed as to spoil the experience.
I can agree on including a "Genre" pulldown in the search selections, however, it would only make sense of you could search in excess of a hundred (the Macster limit). Most rippers include tagging options- and you can still search for music in other ways if they don't- the Napster search criteria are in need of some serious improvements, and this option could easily be one of them.
Re:mp3 usage (Score:2)
The DJ spent a few weeks in the off-hours just slamming the entire collection into the cheap-o $2000 computer (cheap for a nightclub) and his jub just got WAYYYY easier.
Heck.. he doesn't even need to be in 'the booth' anymore..
And if you like the box? (Score:1)
Call me a freak, but the only entertainment media that I use are a dish for a couple of hours a week (HBO original programming and Babylon 5), and my laptop, on a 32.2 connection thanks to the area wiring.
Even if I wanted to expend ALL of my bandwidth listening to something that I already have on my hard drive, why would I want to include the second most annoying element of radio- the DJ?
When you're online for half of the day, the weather is a click away- www.accuweather.com- no halfassed weather channel "local" forecast that shows you Iowa for ten seconds. The only thing you'd need a DJ for is song recaps, and with something along the lines of Winamp, you can read those already, so the dude is completely phased out. Though I'd rather have him thant the ten hours of Ads he's forced to play.
Re:Welcome to the Internet (Score:2)
Then.. it got bigger, and he quite, and then MTV whined like a stuck pig.
OT: Adam Curry, former MTV VJ from way back... (Score:1)
I have one question:
Did you ever get rid of that horrific mullet?
Best,
-jim
p.s. nicely written manifest...
Re:I don't fit in a box (Score:2)
The only interest a content provider on-line is ever going to take in my musical interest is collecting data on me to focus marketing my way. It's the very same reasoning behind narrowing the market within the broadcast radio world. It allows marketing folks to sell advertising based on calculated demographics.
For example, you aren't going to be hearing the same commercials running on a soft jazz station and a top 40 station. Even within the same station the commercial content will vary based on the time of day, and the expected audience. They've got a fair idea of how much of what kind of market is listening to those stations at what times of day.
Move this model to the Internet, where you go about answering a helpful questionaire of musical preferences, your age, approximate location, and a stack of seemingly docile data. You're now talking about data drill down capabilities that marketing folks would kill to get their paws on. Match up the expected customer base with the listening audience, and you've got a perfect formula for all kinds of push advertising.
It's arguable as to whether or not this is a bad thing though. On one hand you've got this invasive technique, but on the other you've got a market place bringing vendors to those folks most likely to be interested in their products. Given enough interest I suppose I could effectively debate this point on either side. Instead, I'd just prefer not to give them any information at all about me and take the time to make my own playlists.
Maybe... (Score:1)
Why rely on human catagorization? (Score:1)
Although there is still a human element to the algorithim, you don't have to rely on other people's tastes, or arbitary labels like "Top 40".
I've used a beta of this engine, and it kicks ass. Its ability to match similar songs is pretty impressive. And you don't have to use any of the labels like agresive or happy. You can just search for songs that sound like any other song in the database.
Now imagine if every song in the universe was available in a database. You could look for titles of songs sounding like your favorite song of the moment, listen to a low-bandwidth preview, then grab them from Napster.
What napster really needs (Score:2)
2. Disallow anyone that has 33k or less modem. In fact, it will fry their modem for trying to bog down the service. It will also call the cops.
3. People coming to their senses and realising that Metallica are actually shit.
4. Napster inc. might actually try changing the banner to an ADVERTISER's banner.
5. People will stop chatting with me over napster when I d/l an 'unusual' mp3.
6. People will love me for who I am.
Re:whee, first (OT) (Score:1)
... I challenge you to do better than this! Where are our funny takeoffs of Weird Al songs, where are the lovely poems, WHERE DID THE MAGIC GO?
In return for any troll who takes up my offer of making GOOD trolls for once, you will earn the following:
A good deal of my respect.
Thank you.
-----
Re:What napster really needs (Score:1)
They could somehow link the results returned by a search to someplace online (Amazon, CD Now, their own store, etc..) where you could buy the CDs.
Another way would be to track a user's downloads and send out like a weekly e-mail with something to the effect of "You downloaded X, if you liked it, click here to buy. Here's some other people who you'd like too."
Actually, scratch that second idea, what better way for the RIAA to track down freeloaders? "Just because I downloaded the entire works of Britney Spears without buying the CD because it sounds like she was nekkid when she recorded them..." =)
Anyways, if option #1 was in place I'd have bought 4 CDs last night. Total CDs purchased by me in the past 48 hours, zero. I know the RIAA's math skills are limited, but I think even they can figure this one out.
Formats: The last thing Napster needs. (Score:2)
That's right, you can be anyone you want to be, just by picking an Adam Curry(TM) format. Choose from any of the following:
Alternative -- You're a badass, but you hurt inside.
Contemporary Hit Radio -- Chew bubblegum!! Do the splits!!!
Album Oriented Rock -- Smoke a dooby!! Light it up!!
EDGE -- Like guns?! Love Quake!? You're EDGE, man!!!
Golden Oldies -- If you like black and white TV, you'll love GOLDEN OLDIES, daddy-O!!!
Uptempo -- Remember Kevin Bacon in Footloose? Damn right! Uptempo is for you, Baby!!
MIX -- Ever had a trippy flashback while driving your BMW? Check out MIX, dude. And keep away from that brown acid!!!!
But that's not all... You can ALSO be...
Adam Curry(TM) -- That's right. Mullet poseurs are WELCOME!!!! COME ON IN!!!! IT'S LEETY!!!!
Re:Formats: Just what we -don't- want (Score:2)
One problem I have with Napster (and maybe it's just a PEBKAC[1] problem) is that I can search for songs, or artists, but I can't search for "something that sounds like Husker Du, but different". End result: I wind up downloading stuff I know. This is fine, but I haven't been turned on to much really new stuff via Napster, for exactly that reason.
I don't consider "format" to be a dirty word (Although when I hear it from Messr. Curry, I want to take a shower). The DJ my local college station does not slap on random records. He plays stuff that works together. Is that a format? Yes. It's not a driven-by-the-station-manager-and-the-promo-chick- that-blows-him format, but a format nevertheless.
Mostly, it's a question of choice. If I want to download x song by y artist, I should be able to do so. If I want to just listen to stuff in an associative stream, I should be able to do that too.
If Napster turns into the little boxes #Top40# #Country# #Dance# that Mr. Curry with his 20 years of brain ossification is visualizing, then yeah. We have a problem.
j.
[1] PEBKAC - Sl. Cust. Service.: Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.
Welcome to the Internet (Score:2)
from the article
If one looks at these Clock based Formats as a sequence, you immediately notice the playlist like structure. Each hour starts off with a station ID, followed by a Top3 hit -->Station ID -->Recurrent hit (usually 3-5 years old) --> Jock Banter/Contest tease or promo -->commercials -->Station ID --> Time/Temp --> New Release etc etc etc.
I view these elements as boxes, to be filled in from the known content pool, which resides in the stations' library (digitally as with the Dalet system). This "filling of the boxes" occurs based on a certain rule-set, usually created and maintained by the format creator. In our radio station example the main box categories are defined across all known content (Top 40 hit, New Release, Golden Oldie etc) along with meta tags very similar to the ID3 specification: think of tags like Genre, Artists, Uptempo, Ballad, Group, Solo etc.
The trick is to subsequently fill in the boxes while abiding to the rules, such as separation, but also "clash-rules" so we don't play too many ballads back to back or to female performers in the same situation. (According to our format example at least!)
Try over here [sonicnet.com]
Interesting rant, I read for a bit and couldn't find out why he quit MTV (and tried to do it on-air), was it because of the lawsuit? [eff.org]
--
how many of you (Score:1)
________
That does not solve their problem (Score:2)
Re:mp3 usage (Score:1)
More of what napster really needs (Score:2)
7. People will stop setting their queue limit to zero, thereby allowing you to see the song but not download it
8. People will have to enter their real connection speed (You don't know? Well, guess what, YOU'RE A FREAKIN' MORON!)
9. People will not be allowed to rename one artist to another artist (The Gourds - Gin And Juice being listed as Phish, Dexy's Midnight Runners songs listed as the Clash, etc.)
10. Breaking of above rules will be punishable by death (as will be jay-walking, tele-marketing and working for the MPAA, but more on that later...)
Thank you, that is all...
-His exellency, El Presidente and self-appointed supreme ruler for life: GreenHell
Define a "Format" (Score:4)
For example, I could have a "vocal," "choral," "madrigal," "classical," "baroque," "religious," song, depending on what service I looked for information about it. Likewise, metal fans would be hard pressed to mark many albums or artists as "light rock" or "heavy metal." In the end, the individual reviewer is the sole judge of if a song matches a format. Often I find myself disagreeing with them.
Adam Curry Misses the Cluetrain (Score:2)
The central point in Mr. Curry's article is that formats, essentially radio stations buying playlists from a market research firm rather than trusting the taste of their DJs, are what is good and pure about radio today, and that we should spread the white light of formats to Napster and Gnutella.
Formats have destroyed the creativity and the variety in radio. It is now possible to drive cross-country listening to the radio and not hear one new song. I'm sorry, Mr. Curry, but some of us don't want to listen to the same Top 3 song at the top of every hour. Some of us would like to have radio introduce us to exciting new artists, not to rehash the same tired old songs that every other radio station plays. The tragedy of this practice is that most of the DJs at these boring radio stations are people who feel passionate about music, people whose taste I would love to explore, if they were only given the opportunity to express that taste. But they are not given that opportunity. Rather, they are forced to play a bland repetition of songs that no doubt bores them as much as it bores me.
Those who seek something new and different from music have either turned to college or public radio, or have found their way to Napster and internet music. Napster is refreshing precisely because it does not have formats. Once can download whatever music they like to their hard disk, create a huge playlist, and random play to their hearts content. Napster provides depth, so that one can listen to Cat Power and Erik Satie and Black Flag back-to-back, should the mood strike you.
It is a characteristic of old-school people who find themselves in a new paradigm to attempt to clothe their previous medium in the new technology and to pretend that they are modern. WorldClassRock [worldclassrock.com] is a great example of this. Los Angeles is a vast, diverse radio market provided with an abyssmal selection of radio stations. Channel 101.9, and later channel 103.1, were a brief break from this monotony. In both cases, though, they could not establish a profitable presence on the dial. My own theory is that they were killed by their own playlist. The listeners of those radio stations truly wanted the "world class rock" that the stations claimed to have, and were instead provided with playlist rock. For a while it was a different playlist, and was a novel break, but soon other radio stations copied their format enough to make their station sound old and tired. One had hoped that going online would allow the radio statio to take advantage of the novel features that the internet provides. Throw out the playlist! Listen to your DJs! Perhaps support real-time user rating of the songs you play. Or support two parallel streams at the same time, so that if a person doesn't like what is on one stream, they could listen to the other. The internet, after all, does not have the same limitations on the available number of frequencies that broadcast radio has. Alas, so far it appears that WorldClassRock is the same old playlist, the same old commercials, and the FM stations offered, just broadcast over a different medium, but perhaps it is too early to tell. One can still hold out hope that their true spirit will emerge in time.
I do, however, hold out some hope for SonicNet [sonicnet.com], which allows users to tailor their music feed in much the same way that My Yahoo! [yahoo.com] allows user to select the news articles they want to see. The selection is still a bit limited, but what is encouraging is that SonicNet is trying to do something different and creative with the technology rather than pushing the same thing threw new wires.
The nerds on the internet in general have very good taste in music. We want the same variety and creativity from our music that we put into our own work. Mainstream radio hasn't given this to us, they've given us Brittany Spears and Third Eye Blind played over and over and over, and we've gone to Napster. Those who escape from the roof will think twice before coming in through the front door again. I'm sure that Mr. Curry means well, but I'm afraid he simply doesn't Get It.
Re:I think Gnutella needs more organization (Score:2)
Re:A (music) portal... How new! (Score:1)
have to be fancy, even a filesystem will be
god enough. Create directories with descriptive
names then populate them with links (or
shortcuts) to songs in a master directory.
Or maybe you mean standardizing MIME types
for music content? That would be a good idea.
Gnutella? (Score:2)
Napster is an incredibly simple system: one of the reasons it is so revered.
Re:Slashing Back (Score:1)
One of the best times I've had in my life was the all-too-brief four months during university (shortly before I failed out, natch) when I had a weekly radio show on the campus station (CKMS, University of Waterloo). From 2-5pm every Wednesday afternoon it was Aardvark's Playground, and I got to play whatever the hell I wanted.
It was spectacularly fun. If I was in a good mood, it was TMBG, Yma Sumac and "Vapour Trail" by Ride for three hours. If I was feeling crappy, it was Joy Division, Cowboy Junkies and "Vapour Trail" by Ride for the afternoon. If I was angry I'd play Public Enemy and pick out bits of Noam Chomsky to read (usually flipping through the book while on the air, stalling with "It's around here somewhere...") and play "Vapour Trail" by Ride.
There's something...I dunno...wrong...about what this guy's talking about. Maybe I just don't like having the curtain ripped away, but it feels like when I was in grade 5 and I was told what elections were like in the Soviet Union: you could vote for whoever you liked, because the candidates all belonged to the Communist Party. I remember the very vivid image I had of three politicians all looking exactly the same, beaming at an audience from the podium. Sure, pick whichever one you like. It makes no difference.
Maybe I'm just climbing up on a pedastal here, but doesn't music mean enough....isn't it sacred enough...that it shouldn't be bastardized like this? I'm really trying not to go OT here, so let's tie it in: I love that Napster lets me find the weird stuff that me and three other people like (unresolved serious ethical dilemmas about IP, licensing and artist compensation aside). I was really disturbed when, driving around the continent for two months last year with my girlfriend, every single city in the US and Canada had a station named Z(\d{2}), and each one sounded exactly the same.
There's something really, really disturbing about cultural Borgification. I don't want the process to be accelerated.
You want Mojo Nation (Score:2)
Files are broken up into small redundant blocks and spread all over so you spread your load all over the net instead of concentrating it on one host (so even people with slow connections can play). It also means some of the hosts can disappear without loosing data. It's way cool.
Burris
Re:how many of you (Score:1)
Of course it turned him into a multimillionaire, but how could I know
Re:Format "problems" (Score:1)
Re:Define a "Format" (Score:2)
It's much easier to link stuff with a computer than a radio station. Simply have a database with an entry for each artist that says "similar to..." and lists, say, 6 other artists that they are most similar to -- or the artists themselves claim they're similar to. Wander through such a database and you'll usually find a bunch of interesting stuff you like. MP3.com does this.
Otherwise, just find people who's taste matches your own and leech off their playlists. Again, MP3.com does this with its "Stations". I have a station there myself. [krisjohn.net]
Use the formats... wisely (Score:2)
And I would love to see this done for me, to categorize music so that it plays in a nice, non-repeating loop for well, easy listening. No, it's just a during work or surfing thing, some of the time thing. But for background music that doesn't suck, this proposal kicks ass.
-Ben
Re:I am kind of interested in this (Score:1)
Is it me, or have you also noticed that since the whole napster thing, radio stations are not as forthcoming with titles anymore?
Re:Formats: not quite what we want (Score:1)
I don't think anything this complex is really necessary or helpful, because it's still genre-ized. What do you do with Willie Nelson, who is a country star but is far different from the current "country" genre? What do you do with the Elvis Costello album "Almost Blue" (a collection of country covers in EC&theA style)?
Pipe dream, but this would be cool: XMMS button labeled "world-playlist" that randomly grabs a song off of Napster or a streaming MP3 site. First you get Taal, then you get Negativland, then you get the Pixies, then you get an Israeli newsmagazine. If you don't like what you get, hit next. Of course this assumes a really good streaming technology (damn it's getting good now, though -- my mother-in-law listens to ballgames on RealAudio now because the sound is better than AM radio) or unlimited instant bandwidth to anywhere in the world.
No Coke... Pepsi! (Score:1)
Huh? I've never seen Pepsi served at a BK. I've always thought of that as one of Coke's victories; they've worked their way into both of the top two burger chains. How can we trust this guy on music if he doesn't even know fast food? ;)
]$`};L(;/proc);[I(;];<C{;};1S[;`\/while=1E1L[`\p roc{>=
Re:Format "problems" (Score:1)
Yes, stations do sell advertising. Thats why there are SO MANY shitty radio stations. Yet in the 7th paragraph, after Mr. Curry gives us a little background and thesis, he states that he started at a fairly fresh point by manually creating a radio show. Throughout his argument he shows how much little effort is now involved with possibly being able to create your own radio show. It seems to be a valid point to me. He expressed ways that he belives would make this process easier.
As for your second point, stations play to the mass demographic. They play what most of the people listen to them want to hear. Mr. Curry appears to be suggesting a little escape from the industries standards. It seems that he is saying that we should be the one who decides what our demographic is. Example: I listent to classic rock radio stations, but I fucking HATE kiss. In Mr. Currys proposal I would get all the classic rock I want but never any KISS.
If you could set up a rules based interface on a streaming mp3 server and insert adds every X seconds, I bet you could make a lot of add revenue without "selling out" (as they call it). Imagine if you could tell your spinner client to play punk, classical, and hip-hop but never play the Germs, the Vandals, any german opera, and Liszt, any new Q-tip or ODB. Wouldn't that rock to have personalized streams with almost no effort?
Re:Formats: Just what we -don't- want (Score:1)
I like radio stations with people who are genuine in their love of music. I am talking about no playlist, freeform, the DJ plays whatever he wants. I love to hear new music, really good or just interesting. But I don't have time to listen to the thousands of releases.
Finding a kindred spirit on a non traditional media outlet becomes as interesting and enjoyable as the good music it can expose you to.
I don't expect this from napster, but if music on the internet is no more than looking for stuff on you own you will be no better off than buying random records. Except you will waste time instead of money.
Just a little rant, I miss the 2 good stations in NY.
Half the solution... (Score:1)
Like CDDB, silly! (Score:2)
It's like CDDB, with more info and less conflict.
Amazing (Score:5)
I don't doubt it. I tried running it through gcc and got more error messages than I can count.
--Shoeboy
Re:There's a good reason though. (Score:2)
I used CDDB as an example, because everyone already knows about it. Musicbrainz is a terrible example, because no one's ever heard of it.
I agree that what's happened to CDDB is upsetting, and I even alluded to the "conflict", though I didn't say much as I was just trying to make a quick point.
Re:But... (Score:2)
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Re:Format "problems" (Score:2)
Aside from the Arbitron books, the less official means of finding out listening habits include mail
Deo
Re:Format "problems" (Score:3)
You wouldn't believe the insane amount of research that goes into each and every goddamn song that gets spins. There was this massive book in the PD's office that had 2-3 pages for damn near every single song in the archive that contained interest levels of every age/sex group for that song, so that they could determine what adds to throw into the playlist to boost a certain demographic. The amount of time and money devoted to testing music is enormous! And radio stations still use their own testing to supplement the millions of dollars worth of research already available. The station I worked at had a weekly listening session where they'd bring in a few people, stick some cans on them and play cuts of new and older music to get an idea of what people wanted to hear, what they are burnt out on, what they should reintroduce into the playlist, etc. Every night, they play a couple new tunes being considered for the playlist and solicit responses from the listeners. We even periodically kept track of all requests made throughout the day as another tool for determining interest.
While it may be true that the record companies push off certain pap on to the stations to get spins, radio stations are not tools of the RIAA, as they make their money off of advertising revenue based on the almighty ratings, so they can't afford to blindly play whatever gets thrown on their plate. You may think that radio sucks because they play the same crap every three to four hours, but that's because you only see it from our unique perspective of high volume music listeners. The majority of people have only a passing interest in listening to radio, such as on the way to and from work or at lunchtime; hence the reason that the magic number of minutes for a listener to peg in the ratings being only 15. And, while I hate to say it myself, they love that shit, and while you may want to argue with millions of dollars of market research, the fact is that radio stations have very little influence over what a person really wants to hear; shit, if they could actually do that, they sure as shit wouldn't bother paying the promotions department or the on-air personalities to try and maintain listener loyalty so that they could squeeze a few more minutes out of them; they'd just force you to listen to whatever they have on hand, as so many people love to assert, and save the tens of thousands of dollars spent trying to figure out how to keep people listening in the first place.
Whether you agree with their methods or not, their is a damn good reason why radio stations play what they play and use the formats that they do: because they work. For those of us who listen to a whole LOT of music, it begins to seem pretty boring after awhile, but we aren't the real target anyway; Joe Sixpack who spends around 45 minutes a day listening to the radio is, as there's a whole hell of a lot of him than there are us. Hope that helps at least give you an idea of why the current state of affairs in the industry exists and why independant stations who eschew format don't have great reputations of longevity.
Deo
Playlists (Score:2)
I find this interesting from a different point of view than organizing the vast sea of mp3s available on the 'net. I'm currently working on finding a good way to organize my mp3s for creating playlists from them, and one of the things that's definitely going into it is a database of various `boxes' (to use Adam Curry's term) that each given song fits into.
So, lets say I've got a hankering for some ambient industrial techno. It'll pull out some Kraftwerk, since it most closely fits. (I haven't decided on fuzzy matching yet, but I think it'll prolly fit the bill).
Instead of having a traditional playlist to wake me in the morning, I'd have something like this:
I think the function of the above example is pretty obvious. Just know that ^ is being used for negation.
Now, maybe that's the wrong format, but I think it's a much better way to do it than flat playlists. It could be rendered to a flat playlist to retain compatability with current players, although then it wouldn't have some other features I want.. but that's another story.
Any comments? Suggestions? URLs of implementations of similar systems?
---
living up to the potential of mp3 (Score:2)
One of the big problems I see with mp3 is that it basically plays whore to the record companies et al. Sure, they don't get money, but they still provide almost all the trash you find out there. The reason, I think, is that instead of allowing people to find new artists, you search for "Bobby Bigname - Yet Another Hit.mp3", but never "Unknown Artist - Song I Don't Know.mp3".
If you had a format as he suggests, you could pick by genre, and have no name artists coming directly to you without having to do lots of searching and sampling. I'm sure the generic, commercial music would still be there, and I'm sure that there would be people with all Madonna-all the time formats, but at least I would be able to choose a balance of new and familiar stuff that I was comfortable with.
Re:mp3 usage (Score:2)
I was merely stating that DJs are using this stuff.
Re:I think Gnutella needs more organization (Score:2)
A strategy that worked in the beginning for searching movies was to type divx and then sort on file size. This way you could find the two or three working downloads of popular movies. Nowadays there's so much noise in what you get back for nearly any query that gnutella is close to useless. Most of the links returned don't even work.
Any initiative for a new P2P protocol should start with defining metadata. This ultimately leads to more specific queries and helps keeping traffic down. ID3 tags are a nice start for mp3's but I think that ID3 is ultimately too limited. I would like to see a P2P network based on RDF.
Formats: not quite what we want (Score:2)
As a more modern alternative, let me suggest a web of trust type idea, which develops the idea of looking through someone else's files.
(1) The songs you like.
(2) Other people who have the same songs
(3) Their mp3 collections
(4) The songs which are most common among those collections
So, I would find that among fellow Tindersticks lovers, Belle and Sebastian was popular. This would be a more individualised way of collecting music you want, and more reliable than just browsing through an individual's files, because it would aggregate the choices of a lot of people. No cheesy DJ or MTV muppet required.
Lack of formats encourages isolation (Score:2)
It's a mistake to assume that "formats" would change the way mp3's are available now; it's likely both would exist side by side.
The best possible answer, IMHO, would be for more people to utilize Live365 to broadcast their own lists, and better recognition of those who do.
Slashing Back (Score:5)
I think Curry has gotten it right, but at the same time, I bemoan the loss of real, old-fashioned, free broadcasting.
I loved doing college radio, because every show was basically sharing songs and getting excited about music. Now that we have the net, we have the ability for a LOT of people to share songs with us.
But more likely to evolve is some sort of XML-based jug of songs with other stuff mixed in. (But not NEWS, Curry; when we want news we go to the news channels. Does anyone else get irritated that, when a news channel has "traffic on the 2s", you know that you have to wait as long as nine minutes - an eternity for our supposedly-connected age.)
What's missing is a human touch. I don't want a channel that programs ballads every 25 minutes. I want a human, who programs ballads because s/he feels like shit, who programs love songs because s/he's in love. I want someone who appreciates the same key changes I do.
Before radio was taken over by big business, it did nothing less than spark a cultural revolution. Now radio is a soundtrack to a bad movie. Maybe the *real* reason that Napster et al have become so popular is because our ESTHETIC/ARTISTIC NEEDS are not being met by the corporate world.
--
Just another little ditty (Score:2)
Choose life. Choose some sort of groupware. Choose a low spam diet with a daily assortment of e/n junk food. Choose drkoop.com to find out what that horrible thing is growing under your arse. Choose a job. Choose another job because you were fired for too many hideous things to do on the internet, while you weren't getting any work done. Choose a family content filter. Choose e-circles, and e-room, x-drive, or some sort of ASP technology. Why would I want to choose all of that, when I have the latest 600 GB Ultra 160 SCSI drive?
Take for instance, a new idea....Yahoo Radio (pardons if it exists already).
When you visit Yahoo Radio, you have a long list of music genres, bands, albums, individual songs, suggested playlists, etc. You choose what you want to listen to, and Yahoo streams it to you. Log into "Your Yahoo", read the type of news that you have chosen to be delivered to you. Chat with your preselected Yahoo Messenger buddy list. Read your nifty Yahoo mail. Check your Yahoo auctions. Look for updates on your Yahoo club. Hell, you can even use Yahoo for a search engine.
This just seems like another one of those cute little "internet conveniences" that people will waste time with. This is why we have 30GB drives...so we can download mp3's, make our own playlists based on the content that we want.
Doesn't anyone specialize in a specialty anymore?
Sounds like he's describing LaunchCast (Score:2)
Re:This guy talks himself up so much... (Score:2)
Formats go like this: McDonalds--Coke/Big Mac. Burger King--Pepsi/Whopper. My years in the business have led me to this brilliant insight.
Actually, Burger King is an all-Coke business. Just like McDonald's.
Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut. That's the Pepsi trio of fast food companies, now spun off into their own collector's edition!
Re:Amazing (Score:2)
Never mind Napster (Score:2)
Format "problems" (Score:3)
(1) Stations sell advertising to businesses for cash. This cash is what keeps the station going, especially if the format isn't the most popular in a given area. More popular radio stations can charge more because more people are listening and can potentially be influenced by the advertising.
(2) Stations don't play songs that aren't popular (at least not for long). If the song doesn't have an appreciable fan-base, it doesn't get played nearly as often as the latest pablum from boy-bands or teenage-blond-singer-of-the-week.
(3) What the heck does this mean?
Don't expect any major radio networks to really jump on the bandwagon of "Formats" the way Curry outlined it. Radio stations do not want the listeners to be able to cut out the ads, or modify the playlists by 'subtracting' artists from the playlist. Yes, there will be web-casts, but they
will be what the radio station wants to play.
That's for major radio networks. Independent web-radios can play whatever the heck they want, for the most part, because they aren't dependent on advertising. Heck, it might be nothing other then the DJ ranting on local stuff for hours on end. But the prolificacy of web-radio means that if you search long enough, you can find whatever you want, be it "All-Metallica, All The Time", or 24-Hour Reggae...
Now, assuming that Napster doesn't die the Good Death due to Mssr. Ulrich and Co. any time soon, I do see Napster (and Gnutella and others) updating their programs by using "Formats" and ID3 tags to seperate the music out to make it easier to locate what you want. Napster will always have the inherent drawback of listing the
All in all, while using "Formats" would definitely be beneficial to the music browsing process, it is ultimately dependent on the User, as they are the ones who need to set the ID3 tags correctly.
Kierthos
I think Gnutella needs more organization (Score:2)
This is a great idea--if you think outside the box (Score:2)
Work with me here...
Imagine something with a user interface like XMMS/WinAmp that works like a TiVo, where it watches what's out there and you pick-it/dump-it based on your own preferences. Start with some assumptions about your musical tastes, then expand on that based on your preferences and some educated guesses by the software.
Add to that the song database of Napster--everything from everyone's personal collection, in all types of music.
Next, add jocks who can deliver news, weather, sports, traffic, whatever--from anywhere you choose--and put into the stream automatically, as often as you want, only on-demand, or not at all.
Here's where we go outside the box: Make it work in your CAR or WALKMAN.
Would you pay $10/month for this? I certainly would.
The technology to do this exists. All someone needs to do is put the pieces together.
Similar stuff - "formats" on the 'net (Score:4)
In fact, it's already been done, although not for peer-to-peer stuff. Check out www.launch.com (I think.) Unfortunately, last I checked, it was Winblows-only. (Windows Media Audio for their codec.), but if you occasionally boot to Windows, launch.com is a good example of a broadcast version of what he's talking about. Basically, you pop in a list of radio stations and genres that you like. Then launch.com starts broadcasting music. If you think a song totally sucks, you tell the system never to play that song again. The system will remember that, and the chances of a similar song playing will be reduced. Rate a song high, and the system will try to increase the chances of similar songs being played.
Unfortunately, it takes an hour or two of learning before it starts putting out mostly good music. (I think my rather varied music taste confused it... Not fine-grained enough...) Note: This is an hour or two of time, even skipping songs that suck.
Check it out, play with it, and think how much cooler it would be if it had a Napster-sized music collection, including all the nifty esoteric stuff that Napster has and launch.com does not.
Another similar approach - Go to mp3.com. Go to the site of an artist you like. (Assuming that you know of an artist or two there that you like.) Then check out the "other artists we like" links.
BTW, if you like the Rocket Arena 3 soundtrack, most of those artists are on mp3.com. If you liked the stuff from Silent Warrior, Upbeat Depression, or Masada, there's a lot more good stuff on their pages.
I don't fit in a box (Score:3)
For example, if you were to categorize the styles of music that I have in my own playlist it would include rock, blues, jazz, modern swing, 40's pop, modern pop, a couple of country tunes, some classical, comedy, a smattering of movie quote wav's, new wave, and a time range covering every decade since 1940 to present. How do you box that into some pre-packaged product for the masses?
The answer is you can't, nor should we allow them to take what amounts to a marketing scheme and apply it to the Internet. What this article is really about is the guideline for re-tunneling the flow of art through old style funnels. Prince hit the nail on the head when he compared a music consumer to those that love the art form. Old world media doesn't know how to deal with the latter, so here is a proposed blueprint for creating more of the former.
Slashdotted already (Score:2)
Well, I'd like to read it and comment on it, but I can't. Does editthispage.com run on IIS? Does anyone have a mirror?
Formats are pigion-holes. I much prefer a more difficult concept called "taste". I like particular artists. I search for more by the same artists. I look at the list of people who have obscure songs by those artists. I notice other artists on the list. These other artists reflect that person's "taste". I'll chat with that person about their "taste" and see how closely it matches my own. In this way, I discover new music.
Re: (Score:2)
I am kind of interested in this (Score:3)
Shared mp3 pools also have this same effect. Everybody puts some in, and you listen on shuffle play. Refresh the directory every once in a while, and you get new songs. Kind of like a group radio station. This also is way better than radio.
Maybe the building of formats has value. Just reaching into the bag of free music tends to be a lot of trouble if you are looking for something new. It takes your attention, and you have to sift through the crap to get to the gems. This has always been the reasoning behind the formats in the first place. Radio stations build an identity by the songs they play. The more diverse the list, the less they are able to focus on a particular audience.
Right now promoters have to basically go to the radio stations, and get them to put songs on their play lists. This works in a fashion, but what if you are in a lame market? You don't get to hear new stuff that is relevant to your lifestyle and interests. (could be you that is lame also, and the same problem still applies
People are always going to buy CD's. The quality of mp3 and the effort to play/move/encode them will not be worth it for a lot of people. Popping in a CD and pressing play is the way to go. Most people want easy. I don't think that will change.
This means that the 'free' music on Napster actually comes at a price. This price is the time and attention required to actually get complete quality copies of songs you like. The other price is that you lose album continuity. (There still are artists out there that know what this is!) Even though the number of tunes is high on Napster, the depth still has quite a ways to go. Not everybody puts up an entire album, so that means that most of the hits are going to be on the mainstream singles with the occasional remix. Fine for people on a budget that want to fill out their collection with a few extra tunes that are not worth a whole CD, or for those that really just are backfilling old songs. What about those wanting something new?
This format thing could easily be a service that people would pay for. You get the songs for 'free' but you also get some ads, and some new stuff that you don't ask for, but that might fit. Maybe you will buy some more CD's because you are hearing stuff you like, not stuff they want you to buy.
I have always liked the surprise factor radio can have. You are listening to one of the better stations that will throw in random stuff, and all of the sudden there is a great tune! Subscription mp3 format services that are personalized have the potential to fill this void.
With this sort of system, new content would have value a few times over. Just as it does now, only more so. You sell it to the subscribers, then based on their response, move it to the radio, and promote the CD. Let the subscribers get the CD a little sooner so word of mouth works in favor of new sales. Then finally as things wind down it cycles in there with everything else and things work the way they do now. Some people buy 'em some don't. Eventually the case gets notched, and they sell at $3.99 or something.
They can still market the cd. It has ease of use, cover art, album continuity (spelling czars back off!), and sonic quality in its favor.
Re:Slashing Back (Score:2)
Hyperlinks provide a really nice alternative to this. I can just hear Curt Loder saying;
"Madonna reinvents herself again, Courtney bodyslams the RIAA, Sleater-Kinney comes correct and Bustah Rhymes picks up an acoustic guitar - click on the news link if you want more..."
I could definetly deal with this.
.02
My
Quux26
Re:mp3 usage (Score:2)
Formats: Just what we -don't- want (Score:5)
Mr. Curry claims that "you may hear Madonna one time and Jennifer Lopez the next", but what if I wanted to listen to Madonna and got Lopez instead? I want to choose the songs I listen to; I don't want some impersonal AI with no inkling of my emotions to try to decide what I'll like. Curry says that this would be "my radio station", but I don't want a radio station -- I want a collection of my favorite songs that I can sort through at will.
The whole concept behind the digital music revolution has been to empower consumers to be able to listen to the music they want, whenever they want to -- and not just be forcefed the Britney Spears / Blink-182 / Metallica / Moby drivel that record label fat cats want you to pay for. How can you expect a system like the one Mr. Curry proposes not to be abused? Napster is already under substantial pressure from the recording industry to stop distributing free music-on-demand.
Implementing "formats" in Napster might finally make Shawn Fanning and Jon Johansen rich, but it would be a huge step backwards for the digital music revolution. Let's not turn MP3s files into "My Radio Station" -- let's keep them in the independent state they should be in.
Re:This guy talks himself up so much... (Score:2)
It seemed to me that he was establishing his background and credentials. As someone who is in the radio industry myself, I know how inbred that industry is. At the same time, radio (and television) have been broadcasting far longer than Shoutcast. Only a fool discounts either the wisdom or mistakes that the preceeding technologies encountered.
He gives an overview of his own background, and then explains the aspects of radio that apply to all forms of broadcast. In fact, he glosses over his biggest point of his resume with "Although many know me from my seven and a half years on air at MTV, I have always been and always will be a radio guy". This establishes that the article is about radio, not MTV.
If anything, he's passonate about radio, not himself.
--
Evan
Re:This guy talks himself up so much... (Score:2)
At your service, the FuzzySummarizer's analysis:
My credentials are better than yours because I'm older, and I had more jobs than you. So listen here you whippersnappers as I dispense my wisdom:
Formats go like this: McDonalds--Coke/Big Mac. Burger King--Pepsi/Whopper. My years in the business have led me to this brilliant insight.
MTV. Napster. I'm not a programmer, but I can spell XML. I was a DJ. I can spell DJ too.
XML is good.
Someone should use XML for playlists like this one dude did.
Something about ID3 tags fitting into XML.
Discuss.
Re:Welcome to the Internet (Score:2)
I first read Adam's little sad story about being the founder of mtv's internet presence and then having it sadly yanked from under him. Sniff. Happens all the time in Corporate Amerikka, Adam. Then I decided, on a total lark, to go to Mtv.com. In no other circumstance but curiosity would I have ever visited the site.
And there I was on the front FUCKIN' page of mtv.com, surely visited by RIAA gestapo every day of their life to see what's 'hip' in the real world. And there are mp3's for FREE download. THOUSANDS of FREE downloads, it says. Some are this .wma format, which I'm sure Windows Schmedia player can interpret, and some are genuine mp3's. So I'm downloading two. One from Fastball and one from some band named mojave something that I've never heard of. I have no interest in either of the songs; I picked stuff that I imagined wouldn't make me throw up, but it's not anything I would ordinarily be interested in. I'm just not that 'hip' anymore, I guess.
I have to qualify this: I have never used Napster or Gnutella or any of the other services. I'm not shilling for anyone here. I just want to know, what in the hell is the difference between what I'm doing right now and what a zillion napster users have been doing for the last several months? I have not paid a dime for either of these songs. I was required to put in an email address -- oh its a valid address all right but I haven't checked that particular hotmail account in eight months or so and it has no visible reference back to me -- and a zip code, which I 'mistyped.' But no 'beam-it' came down to check my cd player for a valid copy of the CD. I just have to wonder, and again excuse me for being kind of obtuse about this, but WHY is this not being included in some massive DMCA-fired lawsuit against mtv.com for dropping me, a would-be music pirate, off at the scene of the crime? I read no EULA, I agreed to nothing, I paid no cash, I entered no credit card. Nothing appeared to stop me from just taking the songs. I was encouraged to do so. Am I ranting? I'll stop now. Just had to comment on this.
Formats......we know what good that has done Radio (Score:2)
Re:how many of you (Score:2)
have been on the web long enough to remember Adam Currys' MTV.com when it was just on gopher, and when they sued him to get the domain? I have.
And there's even an archive of that dispute over at EFF [eff.org] in the Legal Cases [eff.org] section.
I think it was the first high-profile domain name dispute.
I've also been online enough I remember when people called it the Internet instead of the Web.
All Hail Napster, TIVO, and MetaData (Score:2)
After working with the TIVO for several weeks now, I'm pretty convinced that it's the greatest gadget I own. (And I say this just at the TIVO "base" functionality level -- the fact that I can crack the case and add another hard drive makes it just about the greatest gadget I have *ever* owned.)
What's surprising about TIVO -- and what consistently shocks me day in and day out -- is TIVO's ability to record "suggestions" -- most of which are right on the mark.
I use the TIVO exclusively to watch and archive to VCR old movies from channels like TCM and AMC, and I'm surprised nearly every day at how TIVO is able -- after only a few weeks of suggestions -- to pick movies that I've overlooked in the guide data or didn't realize that I wanted to see.
Now, I may be generous with TIVO praise because I like movies in the first place -- and TIVO oftentimes functions as that oddball teacher in Film Studies 101 who decides to create a syllabus of shit that you've never heard of but that once you watch all the way through, you slap your forehead, lean back in your chair, and think: Film is Fucking Awesome! But I digress...
I suppose if MP3s are embedded with metadata -- like the sort of metadata that TIVO has from the daily guide download from the Tribune -- it would be a cinch to get Napster to do the exact same thing.
Metadata is always the thing that makes me stand up and take notice. Me, I forget how nifty metadata is.
All hail the oddball!
All hail Metadata!
I Have An Idea! (Score:2)
We've got new technology here. Incredible technology. It allows people to get what they want, when they want it. Plus it's on the Information Superhighway, and face it, baby, that just sounds so damn cool.
So. What we gonna do with this here new technology? My friends, the choice is obvious. Use it to continue to box people in with the same tedious, soulless "formats" they can already get on local commercial radio! But here's the revolutionary part: give it a cool logo, or -- this idea is still experimental, I'm not positive that it's not too daring for the public -- give it a name that starts with a lowercase e or i! Oh, and maybe toss in some new formats like "Extra Golden Oldies", "Golden Brown Oldies", or "Quote Unquote Alternative Music That Even We Can't Tell Apart".
Is anyone else here as excited as I am about this? Technology, baby. You gotta love it.
A good feature (Score:2)
Indexes your collection, and what you search for, so that when you're in that adventurous mood, you click "recommendations". It looks at who else has those songs. Then makes a list of the songs they have that you don't, sorts them by frequency and some google-like algorithm, and gives you your recommendations.
That could really speed up the process of a good, new artist getting recognized, while not giving you stuff you aren't likely to enjoy.
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"
Gee Wiz What a Cool Idea (Score:2)
Thanks for the time...
Wrong kind of "format" but I'll bite. (Score:2)
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
A (music) portal... How new! (Score:3)
They do the "format" thing. That's not
what downloading is about. Downloading
is inherently offline oriented, i.e.
I download now and play back later when
I am offline.
P2P is only big now because it offers
lack of commercial involvment. I upload
you download and no commercials or
banners are involved. You don't know me,
I don't know you, nobody gets spammed.
In reality, this will degrade quickly but
formats would be worse from the start.
Also, many if not most go to Napster and
the like to find obscure songs from obscure
(often unique) artists. What format would
the great Russian band Aquarium fit in?
The nail in the coffin though is that
people have experimented with formats,
channels, boxes etc. Most have failed
because in this day and age, we need
EXACTLY what we want, not just close enough
topicwise.