Gary Robinson's Rants

Introducing MP3Beamer

OK, I'm 4 days late in posting this, but I spent the week sitting on the beach at St. John, USVI, Michael Robertson writes

Leaning on the experience from my MP3.com days, and with the help of some smart guys at Linspire, I designed MP3beamer - a music appliance that we're making available today. It's designed to not only keep track of all my music, but also make sure that I can play it anywhere in the world: my house, work, from a PDA/phone as I move about or even at 30,000 feet on a cross-country plane trip in a middle seat.

...

You're probably wondering how it all works. There are several software components that make up MP3beamer. Of course it runs the Linspire operating system - Linux is ideal for a music applicance because it's low cost, durable, and immune to viruses that plague Microsoft Windows computers. Then there's the MP3beamer software, which is the brains because it communicates using various protocols (this is fancy name for computer languages) so you can use your music on iTunes, home stereos via media receivers, Java devices and over the internet. MP3beamer includes Lsongs, which is the software used to auto-rip your CD collection. It also includes MP3beamer Sync - a small utility used to mirror songs from MP3beamer to iTunes so you can access your music without an Internet connection. You'll find screenshots, videos, and lots more information on the MP3beamer web site describing it in much greater detail.

Here's a video of Robertson demoing it.

The iPod People

Excerpts from an interesting Andrew Sullivan piece:

There were little white wires hanging down from their ears, or tucked into pockets, purses or jackets. The eyes were a little vacant. Each was in his or her own musical world, walking to their soundtrack, stars in their own music video, almost oblivious to the world around them. These are the iPod people.

...

Every now and again some start unconsciously emitting strange tuneless squawks, like a badly tuned radio, and their fingers snap or their arms twitch to some strange soundless rhythm. When others say “Excuse me” there’s no response. “Hi”, ditto. It’s strange to be among so many people and hear so little. Except that each one is hearing so much.

Yes, I might as well own up. I’m one of them. I witnessed the glazed New York looks through my own glazed pupils, my white wires peeping out of my ears. I joined the cult a few years ago: the sect of the little white box worshippers.

...

You get your news from your favourite blogs, the ones that won’t challenge your view of the world. You tune into a satellite radio service that also aims directly at a small market — for new age fanatics, liberal talk or Christian rock. Television is all cable. Culture is all subculture. Your cell phones can receive e-mail feeds of your favourite blogger’s latest thoughts — seconds after he has posted them — get sports scores for your team or stock quotes of your portfolio.

Technology has given us a universe entirely for ourselves — where the serendipity of meeting a new stranger, hearing a piece of music we would never choose for ourselves or an opinion that might force us to change our mind about something are all effectively banished.

Atomization by little white boxes and cell phones. Society without the social. Others who are chosen — not met at random. Human beings have never lived like this before. Yes, we have always had homes, retreats or places where we went to relax, unwind or shut out the world.

When the Internet reached critical mass, I must admit I was one of those with someone Utopian visions about how it would allow everyone to connect to myriad different points of view, and thus make the world a more open, accepting, understanding place.

But I think Andrew's essentially right. Yes, the Internet makes it easier than ever to access points of view different from one's own, and so creates a huge opportunity for learning and expanding. But it makes it even easier to max-out on information content that reflects the one point of view each of us is most comfortable. Subscribe to a few favorite blogs, which usually are mirror-images of our own opinions, and that's often about all the information we have time to absorb in a day.

If we want to go beyond that to hear other perspectives, it takes a conscious effort. The upshot is that Andrew is right: new technology, from the Internet to the iPod has more of a fragmenting, atomizing effect than an integrating, expanding one.

NASA Researchers Claim Evidence of Present Life on Mars

A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.

The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed. [Space.com]

"Strong" evidence? Very interesting, and even exciting, at least to a science fan like me.

I'll be focused in strange life forms closer to home in the coming week though, namely underwater ones. I'm heading off with my family for St. John tonight and plan to do some snorkeling. Quite good reef there!

MP3Tunes

MP3tunes.com introduced its digital music service on Wednesday, offering 300,000 songs at 88 cents each from mostly independent and unsigned artists. [CNet News]

And look, here's an MP3Beamer.

47% Legal Downloads

About 47 percent of people who downloaded music in December and who were age 12 or older paid a fee to do so, the market researcher said. That's up from 22 percent a year ago. The study is based on data from a sample of 1,112 respondents.

...

The study also noted that for the first time, the proportion of the U.S. population that's engaged in fee-based downloading is about the same as the percentage engaged in file sharing (about 11 percent). [CNet News]

I'm impressed. I didn't expect to get to such numbers so soon.

Do-It-Yourself American Idol

Andrew Sullivan is right:

WHO NEEDS AMERICAN IDOL? When the Internet can give you this? Warning: Put down your coffee.

Software patents in Europe go back to square one

In a victory for anti-software-patent forces in the European Union, the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament (JURI) has decided to restart the software patent directive. Since its original introduction in May 2004, the directive has come under heavy fire from critics. It has been postponed on a number of occasions, most recently last week when Poland intervened to stop the Council of Agriculture and Fisheries from approving it.

Software patents have been a controversial issue in Europe since the directive was originally introduced. Currently, the European Patent Convention states that software is not patentable, although patents have been granted in a few legal disputes. The fear is that harmonizing European law and streamlining the patent process will lead to the kinds of abuses seen in the US. [Ars Techica]

More Subscription Discussion

I, for one, bought a lot of music in my late teens and early twenties, and now I am content to listen to my collection, the radio, and the occasional purchase. Some people do buy music in a fairly regular way throughout their lives, but judging by the actions of the studios, they at least believe that many people spend like me. [Hans Fugal, writing in the comments to a previous post on this blog.]

This brings up an important flaw in all current music subscription efforts I know of. And that is that they are all one-size-fits all. Hans, and many others who feel the same way he does, may really have no need to spent $180/year on a music subscription going forward, because they just don't care to spend that much on music. They are happy with a relatively small collection of owned music plus the radio.

So, it's true that today, one-at-a-time purchase models have the advantage that you have complete control over what you spend in a given year. And for many people, that is indeed a huge advantage over current subscription offerings. But there is no reason whatsoever to believe that subscription services won't do something equivalent. That seeming limitation of subscription services is in fact only an artifact of the reality that they are still in their infancy and have yet to display the features that they will inevitably acquire in time.

For instance, one can envision a subscription service with bronze, silver, and gold levels. The gold level might work as Napster To Go does now: you can listen to as many songs as you want in their collection per year.

The silver level might be: You can listen to all songs from 200 different artists in a given month.

The bronze model might be: You can listen to all songs from 50 different artists in a given month.

Now suppose you're someone like Hans, and you're happy with an occasional purchase plus listening to the radio. Then you really don't need to listen to 200 artists every month in addition to what you year on the radio. You probably don't spend enormous amounts of time listening to music; it's usually more of background thing.

Now consider what your experience would be with the silver or bronze model. You don't have to commit to the specific artists in advance as you would if you were buying CD's. Rather, you listen to whatever you want when you want to. But, your listening habits are such that you don't listen that much, so you don't hit the limit of artists you can listen to in a given month. In other words, experientially, your bronze or silver subscription would be identical to what your experience would have been if you had chosen the gold level.

The only real difference would be that it would cost less. The subscription vendor could charge much less for the silver and bronze levels than for the gold level because you would not be using the same degree of "music resources" (i.e. engendered copyright fees) as a gold-level subscriber would.

If your listening habits changed, and you wanted to bump your level up, that would be fine, you could do so at any time.

Eventually some rough equivalent to the levels described above will be part of the offerings of any competitive subscription service.

An advantage over buying albums is that it realistically addresses the facts that a) tastes change, and b) people get tired of albums they've heard too many times before, and so their frequency of listening to even albums that are still well-loved therefore decreases over time.

A purchased album is a binary choice that says that you want infinite access to that particular album forever. The money spent on it can no longer be spent on other music that you might prefer hearing in the future. But that's not a good match to actual listening habits. In reality, that money should ideally be divided up between the music you want to hear now, and the different music you'll want to hear in the future.

That's the real difference between a subscription service and buying albums.

Let's "Do the math" again, considering Napster To Go to be the gold-level service. It would take 55 years of paying for Napster To Go at $180/yr to spend the $10,000 it would take to buy 10,000 iTMS songs to fill up an iPod. Let's consider that to be your "lifetime music cost".

The cost is the same $10,000 either way. But with Napster To Go, that cost is distributed between the songs you want to year at various stages of your life. With iTMS, it is 100% spent on those 10,000 songs, period.

(Note that with something like iTMS, you are not only committing to the particular songs you buy, but also to their not-great 128kbs sound quality, which will be considered very low as bandwidth resources increase.)

Now consider the silver and bronze levels. With those levels, you might still end up listening to many more than 10,000 songs whenever you want in the course of your life -- but you don't have to spend nearly so much because your listening habits don't require you to have access to thousands of different artists in each month of that life.

So, while subscription services now appear to be too expensive relative to the listening habits of people such as Hans, we can expect that to change in the future. The current advantage is simply because subscriptions services are very new, and getting them working at all with a broad catalog has been a major achievement in the negotiations with the major labels. One of the next steps will be offering different levels of service.

More Robertson MP3 project details

...he said he's putting up some of the money he made from MP3.com to launch a startup, MP3tunes, next week in San Diego. Unlike Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iTunes, Yahoo's (Nasdaq: YHOO) Musicmatch or most other services that sell downloadable songs, MP3tunes will use the popular music file format MP3 without any encrypted "digital rights management" features that restrict how the file is used.

...

Robertson said he already has a database of 200,000 songs. But, at least for now, he's not disclosing which artists or record companies he has signed up for MP3tunes. He did say he hasn't snagged the major labels yet. "I think it takes time to win them over," he said.

...

In addition to offering online music, Robertson said MP3tunes will sell a device called the "MP3 Beamer" that can be used to access a library of digital music from an Internet connection. The device will cost $330 or more, depending on the style.[ E-commerce Times]

So is it MP3Beamer, as it was originally referred to, or MP3 Beamer?

Kind words

Seen on del.icio.us today:

Goombah - Music Discovery
Finds iTunes users with similar tastes, and recommends new songs. Uses BitTorrent to distribute bandwidth usage. Brilliant. [del.icio.us / christopher / macintosh ]

Thanks. I like that!

Million Dollar Baby

Great movie. Really. Don't miss it.

Clint Eastwood, starred, directed, and wrote the music (which was perfect). Last person I can think of who did all three was Charlie Chaplin.

Goombah plug

Cheap plug: if you're a music-loving mac user, you might want to check out our product, Goombah, if you haven't already done so. It creates communities of people with extremely similar tastes for purposes of recommendations and community. It's unique in that it runs on the client side in order to involve the user's CPU in the recommendation tasks instead of dividing up a few server CPU's among tens or hundreds of thousands, or some number of millions, of people. This gives it far more horsepower, and as we get more and more users involved, far more expected accuracy and reliability.

It reads your iTunes profile to learn all about your musical interests and uses that data in extremely detailed ways to find your very best "nearest neighbors" in taste.

Do the math

Napster today introduced a portable version of its digital music subscription service, backed by a $30 million print and broadcast ad campaign that takes aim at Apple's iPod and iTunes Music Store. Napster's promotion will include a Super Bowl ad, called "Do the Math," that argues it would cost up to $10,000 to fill up an iPod, while it would only be $14.95 a month to load up an alternative player through the new Napster To Go service. The ad campaign also includes strategic alliances with companies that make rival players to the iPod--Creative, Dell and iRiver...

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said he does not believe that there is a significant number of music fans willing to pay $180 a year to subscribe to a collection of tracks that they do not permanently own. "When you rent stuff, in the end you're left with nothing," Jobs said. [iPodLounge]

When you pay for cable TV for a month, you're left with nothing if you stop paying too. But that doesn't stop people from paying for cable TV.

Lemme see... to spend as much on Napster To Go as it would take to full up an iPod, you'd have to subscribe for, oh, about 55 years. So let's just say subscribing to Napster To Go for life is about equal in cost to filling up an iPod. But if you fill up an iPod, you only have those 10,000 songs. With Napster To Go you've got every song in the world that has been deemed significant enough to add to the database. Virtually song you want to hear at any time, you'll be able to hear. No limits. (Due mostly to contractual issues, there are real limits to what can be found in subscriptions services today, but the size of such collections will asymptotically increase toward completeness over time. And hey, you still can't get the Beatles through iTMS.)

Right now, though, the one-at-a-time sales route makes more business sense for Apple, because if you have hundreds or thousands of purchased iTunes songs, you're going to think twice before buying an incompatible portable music player. From their point of view, it's worth a shot as a strategy. whether it will work depends on the success of Napster To Go and other such services.

I also think it might be worth quoting an exchange I had in the comments section of an earlier post I did on subscriptions, where I said the subscription model was clearly superior:

And here's one reason it isn't superior: when I stop paying all the music goes away

Posted by: Steve Jobs at October 12, 2004 08:33 PM

But, unless you were planning to stop buying music piece-by-piece, you'll be spending money in the future on music anyway. And I, for one, have no such plans. So, I don't see how the "when I stop paying all the music goes away" has much merit in the real world. But the other arguments I list in my post do have merit in the real world.

Posted by: Gary Robinson at October 13, 2004 06:16 AM

MP3Beamer

Michael Robertson's Michael's Minutes contains the following interesting tidbit today, point 4 among other points:

4 - MP3beamer After a three-year hiatus from the digital music business, I'm announcing that I'm back with a new company called MP3tunes. At the Summit, I'll be demoing a couple of music-related products from MP3tunes that carry on many of the principles that encompassed my experience with MP3.com. I'll be demoing a new product called MP3beamer, which I'm very excited about.

Hmm... Google doesn't bring up a lot of hits for MP3Beamer today. Actually it brings up 2 right now, neither of which successfully loads in my browser.

Update 1: As of Thursday there are two more hits: this blog and the original announcement on the Linspire site.

Update 2: A commenter suggested I look at MP3Tunes.com, and there is indeed more info there. MP3Beamer isn't directly mentioned, but one would assume that that's the new service it refers to, to be announced at the Desktop Summit. The Desktop Summit begins February 9. That will be their first service. Their overall plans include a "hardware device, software products and an online music store."