Slashdot Mirror
Are Formats What Napster Really Needs?
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.
You can customize what catagories of articles you want to see on your browser. Don't care to see articles about Space? Customize homepage. From what I understand, Adam's turned on by the idea of interactive radio stations where the listener has some direct, personalized input to the program & music director. While most people here likely want complete control and will listen to what they want when they want it sans ads, there may be a market for ordinary folks who tune in an Internet station for background wallpaper, but with some degree of individual user customization of personalized format, and yes, targeted marketing as well (SOMEone's paying for it).
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You give a well-known example, and what does it get you?
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).
There are worthy alternatives to the most popular options, but why do folks feel compelled to advocate them ceacelessly? It gets old fast. . .
The thing I do not understand is why would anyone *want* new search / format features to come from Napster. We should want cool AI based search programs and flexible music category systems, but we should want them to be independent of any specific music distribution channel. Napster and Mp3.com are about the 2nd to last groups of of people I'd want to help me figure out what I want (the RIAA, Sony, etc. being the last people). First, we have no reason to trust Napster's opinion. Second, a company will not really experement with diffrent methods like haphazard development of independent internet music locating services/programs will.
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). 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.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
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 :)
right hErE
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.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Formats... sure. Good system for running an RF station.
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.
napster has this 'image' because that's what the music industry gave it.
As for napster itself.. let it die. Something much better will pop up in it's place. Easy as pie.
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.
FWIW, if I could ever understand what exactly he means, throw whatever it is in a Vorbis comment field (like Genre? How different?) and be done with it. Don't try to invent new formats or modify MP3.
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
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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.
Then try Spinner for the PC- I don't know if it's available for other platforms or not. It's effectively "net radio". A friend of mine uses it to listen to ambient music excessively....
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.
I've seen several radio stations, and a great many nightclubs (and strip clubs..) that are now using exclusively winamp/xing or something.
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..
AC did mtv.com before the Internet was even really kicking off commercially. It was something relatively unheard of, similar to if he signed up to some medium-sized BBS and started a chat room called 'mtv'.
Then.. it got bigger, and he quite, and then MTV whined like a stuck pig.
The point is that you could create your own format based on your musical tastes and drawing from your own musical collection and online.
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.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Wow! I myself have written an article, but this one only took 4 years. It goes as follows: 1. No jizzmops who disconnect when you're half-way-through downloading from them.
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.
Hey, fanboy losers! Now you too can forge your identity by associating yourself with official Adam Curry(TM)-endorsed FORMATS!
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!!!!
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.
Where everytime you make a wish, somebody thought of it a while back...
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
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?
--
+&x
Even if Napster had "formats" would it really help? They are still being sued by the RIAA. What they really need is a legal way of sharing music. That is why people use thier service. No other reason.
I'd like to add a few other points to your list...
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
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
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.
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 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, which allows users to tailor their music feed in much the same way that My Yahoo! 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.
stands for resource definition format (i think). It's a xml based standard for encoding meta data. I think it's a w3c standard and I know mozilla uses it for various things.
Jilles
Napster is an incredibly simple system: one of the reasons it is so revered.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
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
I'm not going to say this isn't obvious, but some people love to have their music categorized, and this format is the ticket for them.
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
Curry's proposing a central database of meta-info that could be used to fill in the boxes like Mad Libs.
It's like CDDB, with more info and less conflict.
This article has taken me a combined 20 years of broadcast and computer experience to compile
I don't doubt it. I tried running it through gcc and got more error messages than I can count.
--Shoeboy
Fine, if I "tell people to use one product". But I can't tell anyone on Slashdot to use CDDB, because they already know about it and have already made up their minds about it.
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.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
They've got all sorts of methods, but the most widely used are diaries that are given to people to document all of their listening; i.e. what stations at what time of day for how long, etc. You can learn a whole lot about radio research and ratings at the Arbitron web site, as they are the primary media research company used; in fact, its their research that "the ratings" are really based on, as its their books that are used as the standard ratings measuring tool by radio (I think they do TV as well, but I don't know TV so I don't want to definitively say so, although Nielson is the standard there so its somewhat moot :)). You want to talk about a company that wields incredible power in the industry? Look at Arbitron. Of course, they are extremely diligent and have never reflected any sort of bias whatsoever, which is why they are held in such high regard, because ANY indicator that they were even the slightest bit biased would destroy their credibility. Multibillion dollar corporations like CBS and Clear Channel don't take kindly to that sort of thing, as you might imagine. :)
,phone and in-person surveys, which I'd be willing to bet that many Slashdotters have gotten in the past, either as a quick phone call with a few innocuous questions, postcard or quick stop in the mall by a guy with a clipboard. These are used to supplement the research done, but the listener diaries are to radio what the Nielson set-top boxes are to TV. Hope that clears it up somewhat. While I learned a lot about this stuff, I'm no expert (else I wouldn't be answering this stupid phone collecting my paltry sum to tell people how to find the space bar:)) so you really should check out the Arbitron site for more info.
Aside from the Arbitron books, the less official means of finding out listening habits include mail
Deo
I did a stint as an intern and then a board op in the programming department of a fairly big radio station in these parts (consistantly #1-2 in the books) and learned a lot about radio from picking the hell out of the brain of a kickass PD during that time (damn, do I miss that gig :)). Basically, there are two magic numbers for radio stations: 1) how many people they can get to tag the station at all, and, more importantly, 2) how many people they can get to listen for at least 15 minutes. That 15 minute one is the big whammy, as that is what most of a book is based on. That's why they use teasers, contests, etc to nab listeners for just a few more minutes, because once a listener breaks the 15 minute mark, its a win for the station.
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
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?
---
END OF LINE
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.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
Hmm. I wasn't implying it wasn't a great tool, or anything else about the quality of the DJ's work.
I was merely stating that DJs are using this stuff.
gnutella's basic idea is good, to bad the implementation and design was never properly finished. One of the problems gnutella has is that the format for queries is not specified in the protocol. Consequently, each client returns different things. Type in the search term mpg and you get a list of jpg files.
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.
Jilles
The guy is right that file sharing would be improved by some way of classifying the music, and avoiding the "same old stuff I know"/"unknown stuff, 99% chance I won't like it" dichotomy. But his solution is still too stuck in the old "broadcasting" way of doing things. We define the format, and categorise the music, for the benefit of you, the sheeplike mass consumer. Bad because it relies on central control, and is therefore not individualised to how a particular person categorises music. (Is Public Enemy the same format as Herb Alpert? No, of course not. So why did they get together and collaborate?)
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.
The problem with the "independent" state of mp3 is that there's no incentive to go find stuff that you might like, but that you haven't heard of yet. What Curry proposes would give greater exposure to innovative, new bands that need the audience that an interesting format could provide. You want a collection of songs to sort through at will -- that's fine. I'd rather have a mix of stuff I know and stuff I don't know but may like. I regularly switch back and forth between a stream and my own playlists, and I suspect others do as well.
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.
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.
--
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?
This sounds a whole lot like LAUNCHcast. And they aren't even in trouble with the RIAA.
EOF
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!
[
At the risk of some RIAA maven finding it, very few people seem to have mentioned the Shoutcast DNAS and Icecast. Shoutcast is moving towards generating analysis of listeners including the 'golden number' of listener time. Site/station popularity is already covered by the Shoutcast directory and associated services like Live 365. While low bandwidth continues to be common, 24 or 56k streaming of the traditional one-to-many radio format remains a popular and usable choice for online listening. The majority of servers on the system tend to be hobbyist or vanity shows but I'm sure it wouldn't take much work to integrate a big hard drive full of tunes with some smart database software to create a DARLA-ish server for streaming .
A couple of things Adam Curry doesn't address (or chooses to ignore) in his article.
.mp3s as whatever the user has them at, but if the ID3 tags are properly used, as least potential "shoppers" could restrict their searches to the type of music they want. (Of course, adapting a really good SQL database could work too...)
(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
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Right now, the most common things found on Gnutella are smut, Metallica, and eminem. It's not another Napster, but then, since it's so open-source, it can't be. Currently, Gnutella servers crawl along at 11k per second while spam hawkers bombard search queries. It's time for another closed-source (but FREE) peer-to-peer mp3 network.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
What he's describing is the basis of a great idea, if you think outside the box. This is not about bringing radio to the internet--we've done that, and it SUCKS! No, this is about making broadcasting/netcasting work like XMMS/WinAmp, and more.
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.
----- Leghorn "Not responsible for program content"
A lot of people don't seem to realize that he's not proposing created-by-the-industry-and-forced-down-your-throa t formats. He's saying that now it's feasible to create-your-own format.
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
As I got around filling up a fair library of MP3's (mostly from my own CD collection due to low bw here) I found it more and more difficult to even listen to the broadcast radio choices here in the LA area. What I discovered about my own musical tastes is that I just don't fit in any of the boxes that are put together out there, nor would I even be able to put together a box of content for myself. My tastes in music are to varied for that.
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.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
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.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
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.
It does though. Say I really like song X. I type in song X into the search, and Napster gives me a list of the people who have it. Now, I download song X, but also shove the person on my "hot list" and look at what else they have... chances are that if they have song X, they'll have other songs that are like song X. Many times I've been pleased by random downloads off of people whose collections I've gone through like that.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Where I live radio is in a dismal state. There are only a few 'formats' and they are lame. Playing the same tunes over and over. Different mixes, but same stuff. I am almost never surprised. (Go KNRK!) Napster has been a lot of fun because of the shared songs feature. I do just what the other post says above. Look for people that like what I do, then grab some new stuff to see if I like it also. This has opened me up to lots of music that I would not have been listening to otherwise.
:) )
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.
Blogging because I can...
Many radio stations are already ripping the 44 kHz PCM from the CD to a RAID system. There is no need to use an MP3 encoder/decoder. If they want to trash the audio, that function is already performed by the Optimod. A RAID system allows the station to get rid of CDs, CD players and tape carts. It also gives fascist program directors total control over the content of the music library.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
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
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Yuck. Maybe someone could do us the service of grabbing the actual three sentences of content, wherever they are, and sticking them up on a page somewhere.
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.
OK Adam. I've 20 plus years of broadcast and computing too. Formats and the subsequent addition of the "Radio Consultant" (anyone remember the WKRP episode - it's for real) are the deathknell of creativity. Let's let it be fun and unique - not a 'top 40' wasteland.
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 in the Legal Cases 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.
The TIVO "model" is a good one: personally, I'd be very interested in an intelligent version of Napster -- something that could search available songs, compile a local "playlist" (with both suggestions and songs that I've selected) which I could then listen to, archive, or trash at will.
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!
OK, listen to me, people. I have an idea that'll rock your world.
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.
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"
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Has anyone noticed that all these MP3 IDs and running cypto through sound streams only aids the RIAA and the record companies not the actual artist. If an artist produced an MP3 and freely gave it away, however stating that if you like the music please give me some cash so I can make some more and afford some milk for my cereal. This would provide a much better means of directly giving the artist some cash because you like there work. However if the artist just wants to get rich, drink, and drive around in his or her BMW flipping of people, well then it doesn't work quite right. Quite honestly if I thought that my purpose down here was to make music I would simply do that instead of aspirations towards greed which seems to be common place. Hell maybe I'm just wrong but it's a free country.
Thanks for the time...
The article refers to station formats (top 40, c(o)untry, rap, etc.) not file formats (mp3, ogg, wma, mid, s3m). To gain legitimacy, Napster needs to support formats other than lossy-compressed wav files (mp3, wma). Support for tracked formats such as mod/xm, s3m/it, mid, etc. will bring more original (non-RIAA) content to Napster.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
There are radio stations on the web.
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.