Lately I've been exploring developments in the music app sphere. All of my activities have been from my desktop iMac. It was Facebook that lured me into this colossal exercise. There is some sort of relationship between Spotify and Facebook dating from 2006. Getting up and running on Spotify introduced me to Soundrop. Getting familiar with Soundrop connected me with Last.fm streaming radio. There are actually many more connections in this collage of small industry. Soundrop and Last.fm are linked to Spotify as apps that runs in the Spotify music player/browser. There are many more that I haven't looked into.
My initial impression is that this is a mashup from all the different groups around a central theme to bridge an unfulfilled consumer demand to be able to share music, with the technical side of securing intellectual property rights and monetizing delivery of an enabler with the integration of advertising. Spotify is available in Facebook, as a browser web app and on desktops and for mobile devices. The downloadable music player/browser is free, but one's music experience is interrupted all too frequently with pithy, repetitive and annoyingly useless announcements. Since the music is streamed, it doesn't stop, so the announcement causes you to miss the first part of some songs.
One soon learns that they can make that go away for a $5 per month subscription fee, 70% of which is said to go to the copyright holders. There is also a $10 subscription level which adds integration with mobile devices.
The player for desktop computers is quite good. It immediately recognized and imported my music library from iTunes. It doesn't bring in the playlists, however. It segregates locally stored music from that available for streaming. Its layout is simple and intuitive like the original iTunes, much to the dismay of Apple haters. It gives the user access to a deep library of what is touted as 20 million tracks. Some things are unclear. There is a social aspect to the sharing of music, and it seems that this is still a work in progress. There is a "Follow" function, but after several days I'm still confused as to what effect that entails.
Most of the efforts seem to be around fulfilling the artist's demand to be connected to new listeners. There seems to be a great deal of pushiness toward recent releases and following artists.
The best part of the exercise was using Soundrop. In this mini app the creators had taken the streaming music experience into a room metaphor. They set up genre specific rooms where people who gravitated to that genre could gather and listen together/apart as friends or strangers. [see image] The participants can just listen, or they can peruse the list and pick out tunes to bump to the top of the list. As pictured, bumped songs are incremented by 1 and display the avatar of the bumper. Subsequent bumped tunes are placed under the previous, and tunes receiving further bumps (one can only put one bump per tune) from other players are incremented again and move to the top of that pile. The participants can also add tunes to the playlist from the 20M deep catalog using a search function that works pretty well. This can lead to further social interaction, as there is a chat window included on the right, tucked underneath the Activity column.
With Soundrop's room metaphor, users can create their own music rooms and establish themselves as curator, controlling the music list but not the bumps, or open the list for their friends to participate in sharing tunes.
Soundrop's integration with Facebook led me to make my new music room available in a created page on Facebook. The execution is a little wonky. Each participant needs to register with Spotify to get the best results. The music delivery on the Facebook room is synchronized with the Soundrop on Spotify room in real time, but it is fed from Google's YouTube together with matching video when possible. It also gets a bit choppy near the beginning or end of a track.
There were bugs in the Soundrop player. Sometimes, actually rather frequently, when changing songs it starts the song playing and then at a random interval afterwards starts it over again. The second start occurs when there is a delay in updating the screen graphics. I also found that there were some bugs to be worked out between Soundrop and Spotify in handling the extensive catalog. I found a few tunes that played perfect in Spotify's preview and also when shared to Facebook, but got switched to different tracks in moving them from Spotify to Soundrop's playlist. Same artist and song; different studio session and quality.
Last.fm gathers all of one's listening history from iTunes and gathers live as you listen to iTunes or Spotify. They call it scrobbling. It proves to be a worthwhile addition to one's music apps, because it provides on the fly artist information and a little bit deeper analysis of one's listening habits.
In summary, I have to say that I could probably get along just fine with iTunes. It seems that no one wants to listen to my eclectic mix of tunes but me, despite Facebook's tentacles putting the availability information into many people's knowledge. … Sigh.
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