We7 - from Butterfly to Caterpillar Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Image representing we7 as depicted in CrunchBaseImage via CrunchBaseI haven't logged in We7, the music site for over 9 months but was prompted to today when I received an email from the service advising that they were dramatically changing their model.

Their initial offering worked as follows
The economics were simple - advertisers got to directly place their message at a targeted audience, assured that their ads couldn't be avoided; artists got paid; customers got free music with the minor inconvenience of hearing ads for a short time.

Evidently their dealings with the large record labels has forced a re-working of the service with the consequence that the site emphasis is now on free streaming of specific tracks you choose, with adverts appended.
Only a small proportion of tracks appear to be available for download and this seems to excludes recent releases from major artists.

This is a dramatic reversal of approach, which I think is a retrograde move, and whilst always being online to access streamed content is increasingly possible thanks to a combination of broadband and "all you can eat" mobile data plans, there remains a large proportion of the population who
Where I do see that We7 has the edge over services like Finetune, Pandora and Last.fm, which are similar streaming services, is that you actually get to select the songs that you want to listen to in full, rather than samples or "stations". Whilst We7 lacks the "discovery" element that something like Pandora offers, the ability to listen to any track for free online means that exploring new tracks and artists isn't impeded in anyway. Of course, if you live outside of the US, you are presently barred from directly listening to Pandora thanks to licensing restrictions.

If you spend much time online or have unlimited broadband access at home and enjoy listening to music, I think that We7 is definitely worth adding to your bookmarks. Meantime, I hope they will be able to find a way for their original model to re-emerge.
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First Tuesday is back with a band Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Is it dot com mania all over again - oooh errr? Well after the domain Boo.com was bought, perhaps it was inevitable that First Tuesday should reappear.

Tonight was the resumption of First Tuesday in London and I was one of the 75 guests at its inaugural event held at the Soho Hotel. "Music to my Ears" was an event proclaiming it would reveal the next music website hits.

True to its reputation, it drew a big name to open the event in the form of Patrick Vien, Chairman and CEO of Warner Music International. Sadly he read a prepared statement explaining why Warner Music was hip and with it (my summary). Partnerships would be the key to future success and he outlined 4 tests that any potential partner had to be pass. One venture he did loiter upon was Rhino TV which draw revenue from ads, sponsorships, downloads and merchandising. It was an important section in one respect -Patrick made a point of saying this was their first direct to consumer play.

Pandora Music was represented in the form of Paul Brown, the Internation MD, and he gave a great insight into their operations. Each track is subject to 20 minutes of analysis by one of 48 trained musician analysts, who score it against 400 attributes which is the basis of the recommendation engine. I confess to some scepticism to Paul's point that the analysts would score statistical consistently between them, but when you adding 15,000 tracks a months to an existing database of 500,000 I guess a few shortcuts are necessary. Recapping on their business which generates revenues from ads, commerce and most recently through subscriptions, he may almost no mention of their current struggle with the US royalty regime. He did however mention that Pandora will be introducing classical music into their repertoire in October.

But then onto the 4 firms they choose to spotlight which were
Not presenting, but one company I spoke to and worth looking at is Chilirec which is a personal internet recording facility that records thousands of radio stations simultaneously. The service offers the user and endless directory of personal music and media files to download. In essence, you start the service recording, come back later and after one day it has recorded 50,000 songs; 300,000 songs after a week and 1 million songs after a month. They insist this is legal because it is a personal radio recording. Tracks may be downloaded and are all indexed using the music meta data from the radio stations. Tracks will have some DJs talking over them, but if that affects your listening, there are up to 2 other version of the same song stored for you. I'm going to check it out - it seems to good to be true.


First Tuesday have 7 more events planned for the next 12 months. Keep it real kids!

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Pandora's shiny new box Wednesday, May 23, 2007

The online personal radio service, Pandora, has had a facelift recently, with considerably more prominence given to advertising. I've not used the service for some time, preferring services like Finetune and my recent find, Spool

It looks like some of the features have been made more prominent eg sharing your stations with others.


According to Techcrunch
The company says they now have 6.9 million registered listeners who have played 4.7 billion songs and voted up or down half a billion times. This makes them, they say, the third largest Internet radio station in the world. They play 94% of their entire catalog every day.

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Pandora - Pssst you can still get it outside the USA Friday, May 04, 2007

Today Pandora, one of the excellent music discovery internet radio stations pulled the plug on its non-US users as a consequence of the complexities of international royalty arrangements. Techcrunch has the story here. Previously non-US residents were deterred by the barrier that the service was only open who could claim to live in a US zip code. Oddly a huge number of their users lived in Beverley Hills, which coincidentally has the zip code 90210 that also happened to be in the title of an internationally famous TV show.



The new technique to be used by Pandora is the IP address of the user which provides ordinarily identifies the country location of the user.

Annoying isn't it.

So thanks to a suggestion from Lifehacker, here's a list of proxy services that you can route via in order to continue to listen to Pandora! Don't you just love the internet.

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Finetune - needs refining/tuning Wednesday, February 14, 2007

In the week since I started listening to music via finetune I've been generally very impressed and have recommended it to lots of people.

However, I've found myself repeatedly comparing it to the pandora service that I've regularly used.

Two things stood out for me in comparison - how easy Pandora makes it to give a track a thumbs up/down, and to skip past tracks you don't like.

Adding tracks that you hear on the finetune player to your own playlist is a multi-stage process, rather than a simple "one-click" affair. Whilst Pandora doesn't have the concept of builfing playlists because it builds randomised station, it is easy to say you like/dislike things.

With regard to skipping tracks, it was only today whilst searching for the feature that I found it by chance by hovering over the music player in the top left corner. When your cursor is within the music player to the right of the album cover image a "next track" arrow appears, whilst a "previous track" arrow appear when you hover on the left side. Ok, perhaps I should have found it sooner, but guess what - I've been "conditioned" to think that the controls would be along the bottom of the player and oddly the arrows don't appear when you hover below the album image.

I appreciate that there are other control located there, but it did throw me. Duh. Hence this timely Kathy Sierra article resonated with me.

If only last.fm would bring out a means of me importing the tracks I'd listened to on finetune.

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