AT&T Wireless Announces Music ID Service

mindless4210 writes "AT&T Wireless announced today the release of their new Music ID Service from Musicphone. AT&T customers can identify songs by dialing '#ID' and holding their phones next to the music source. Daily Wireless did a full review of the new service, testing it in several environments against different genres of music. Now you can finally figure out the name of that song on the radio that you've been dying to know!"

Comments

Good idea, too much money.

[jrj102]

I've done extensive development work in the area of audio watermarking and audio fingerprinting, and I'm amazed that AT&T can make this happen, given the reduced fidelity of a wireless phone connection. Music fingerprinting technology is a smaller (and more approachable) problem domain than open-ended speech recognition, but still this is quite an achievement.

I congratulate them on the technical achievement, but I think that $0.99 (which is the price quoted in the review) is way too high a price for this service-- for that I could actually buy the song on iTunes or Napster. Unless they drop the price, I don't think this service will be terribly successful.

On an interesting note, it is not clear from their TOS whether or not you still have to pay for a song recognition even if the service is unable to accurately provide you with the song title.

Cool idea, but not for a buck.

--- JRJ

Re:Good idea, too much money.

[phatsharpie]

On an interesting note, it is not clear from their TOS whether or not you still have to pay for a song recognition even if the service is unable to accurately provide you with the song title.

From the article:

AT&T will let you test the service for free your first call, but everytime after that it costs $.99 cents, plus standard airtime charges. If it can't guess the song, then your next call is free.

Not fan of the "next call is free" policy. I'd rather have the current call to be free. Who knows when will I try to use it again.

-B

Re:Good idea, too much money.

[Chiasmus_]

How could you buy it on iTunes or Napster, unless you know the name?

You know, I was thinking about this, and the real solution here is for AT&T to partner up with iTunes and/or Napster in this regard.

It'd be pretty cool to be able to tell iTunes, "I'd like to be able to buy this song..." (holding cell phone up to the radio), pay the standard $0.99, and then let iTunes pass off a nickel or so to AT&T.

But, yeah, doubling the price to hold up your phone to the radio rather than type a lyric fragment into Google is a little.. steep.

Re:Good idea, too much money.

[gilrain]

That's a cool idea, but let me expand it a little. I'm not usually listening to the radio when I'm on my computer -- I'm listening to my iTunes library. I listen to the radio (sometimes) in the car.

I think it would be more useful if you could have AT&T identify the song, and then something like "Press one to cue this song for purchase in the iTunes Music Store." When you press one, AT&T sends the information to your iTunes account (you've opted into this by linking phone numbers to your iTunes account via they're account management page).

That way, you could review the songs when you got home, and place the order if you still wanted them.

Hello, ClearChannel?

[LostCluster]

You know, it used to be the responsibility of the DJ to make sure listeners knew the name and artist of the tracks they played. They didn't have to say it every song, but they should do so before or after any new song that might not be familiar to the listeners yet.

Of course, that was before Clear Channel laid all the local DJs off in most markets. Now, the same network DJ banter can be heard before different songs in some cases...

My radio tells me the song name

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you can finally figure out the name of that song on the radio that you've been dying to know!

The radio in my car (a 2000 model) has a little button labeled "Info." If I press it, on many stations the name of the song will scroll across the display. This is just the factory standard Chevy radio that came with the car. I don't need my cellphone for this, you insensitive clod!

I remember something like this..

[gl4ss]

having been in use here some time ago, maybe a year ago, or two?

can any other Finnish people confirm?

I thought it to be just a cool gimmick, not something that real people would use.

Re:I remember something like this..

[jc42]

an any other Finnish people confirm?

Funny; I was thinking of testing it out with some Finnish folks songs that I've heard but don't have names for. And some Bulgarian, Nigerian, Peruvian, and Chinese songs, for that matter. Also, I probably wouldn't be playing a radio for them; I'd be playing my fiddle or flute or accordion or Yamaha keyboard or some such, because I don't have recordings of them.

Think this would work?

I wasn't too impressed by their tests. They failed to identify Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Of course, I wouldn't need them to identify that one for me, since I know it. But there are some less-known sonatas, by lesser-known composers, and if they can't even handle Ludwig's Moonlight Sonata, what are the chances they'd recognize the others?

This isn't a trivial concern. There's a growing threat to musicians who accidentally perform copyrighted works without first getting a license. We've had stories of music industry guys showing up at sessions at bars and such, and hitting the proprietor up for a fine because the motley gang of fiddle, flute and accordion players played a copyrighted tune. It's a followup to the story a few years ago when they sued the Girl Scouts for singing copyrighted songs around the campfire. (And note that the Girl Scouts lost that one. Or rather, they caved and are paying the protection money.)

This is getting to be a serious problem for amateur musicians. You remember a tune and play it, and like George Harrison, you get sued for copyright infringement. But there's nowhere you can look up a tune and get the name and email address of the owner. If you want to do a proper search for permission, it'll cost you years of your life and millions of dollars. All you can really do is play it, and see if anyone sues you.

You could buy an annual license from every agency in the world. That would only cost tens of thousands of $$ per year. Yeah, right. That may work for a handful of top professionals whose albums are selling well. For the rest of us, especially us amateurs, it's far more money than we'll make playing music in our lifetime.

So what's the hope for a service that will correctly identify an old Finnish or Bulgarian or Mongolian folk song, or warn us that the tune is modern and under copyright?

(Actually, I could build such a site. I've been in several discussions of how to do it. But of course, it would be illegal, and I'd be sued out of business by all the copyright owners. ;-)

probably leverages govt. R & D

[SethJohnson]

This probably uses existing R & D from voice identification technology they developed for the US govt. For instance, Pablo Escobar was captured after he made a phone call. He didn't call a traced number or from a traced number. His voice simply popped up on the phone lines. Bam! They identified his voice and captured him. And that was more than 10 years ago. Obviously, this is an example of how this technology has improved.

Probably never.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

More useless services from cellphone companies.

Like personalized ring tones and bust-your-thumbs instant messaging? B-)

They're TELEPHONE companies, dude!

They learned a long time ago that millions of customers dribbling in a buck here-and-there for "value added" services add up to BIG BUCKS! They COULD have provided this for free, as a convenient side-effect of the computers they used to cut the cost of their switching equipment. It's just a bunch of software hacks. But why give it away when they can CHARGE for it, and people are willing to PAY?

When will they get to lowering rates and giving cheap internet access? Hmm?

Cheap? Probably never. Or when they're going broke due to competition from other companies that ARE providing such a service cheaply. Even then they're probably price it at "all the traffic will bear" and count on their broad coverage to get them customers despite cheaper competition.

They WILL roll out non-cheap portable internet services - eventually. But don't hold your breath. Expect it to be folded into some other upgrade to their cell systems (like the upcoming move to QoS-enabled-IP based voice transport) rather than a standalone upgrade.

Indie and other non-mainstream?

[RobertB-DC]

Interesting service, but how well will it work with independent, non-mainstream artists?

Susan Gibson wrote and originally recorded the song "Wide Open Spaces" It became a hit for the Dixie Chicks. What happens if I put the phone to the radio while a station that knows the difference is playing the original version?

Would an artist like Slaid Cleaves or Mark David Manders, which you won't hear on your local corporate country channel, even be identified?

I suspect the music library won't be broad enough to support the people who actually care about the music enough to use the service.

Does this tell you anything?

[David Hume]

Does the following tell you anything? (I'll leave it to the reader to decide "about what"... if anything.)

Trial 1
Artist:Red Hot Chilli Peppers
Song Title: By the Way
Quality: CD
Environment: Office
Record Time: 22 seconds
Response Time: 14 seconds
Verdict: Correct

Trial 2
Artist: Ludacris
Song Title: What's Your Fantasy
Quality: CD
Environment: Office
Record Time: 18 seconds
Response Time: 16 seconds
Verdict: Correct

Trial 3
Artist: AC/DC
Song Title: You Shook Me All Night Long
Quality: Radio
Environment: Car
Record Time: 25 seconds
Response Time: 15 seconds
Verdict: Correct

Trial 4
Artist: Mary Wells
Song Title: My Guy
Quality: Radio
Environment: Car
Record Time: 17 seconds
Response Time: 18 seconds
Verdict: Correct

Trial 5
Artist: Beethoven
Song Title: Moonlight Sonata
Quality: CD
Environment: Office
Record Time: 24 Seconds
Response Time: About 3 Minutes
Verdict: STUMPED

Let's see. Red Hot Chilli Peppers, yep. Ludacris, of course. AC/DC (even on the radio), check. Mary Wells (also on the radio), good to go.

Beethoven? Who the hell? "Moonlight Sonata???" Sure it was CD quality, but... Beethoven?

Re:Does this tell you anything?

[Soporific]

I'd bet it had trouble differentiating it from the 8 zillion different recordings of Moonlight Sonata. It is still interesting though.

~S

Re:Does this tell you anything?

[Polymath Crowbane]

I'd be willing to bet the service has a minimal amount of classical music in their database. Of course, it could simply be they don't have room for such an obscure piece of music as the "Moonlight Sonata."

The sad part is that there are many times I hear a piece of classical music on the radio and would gladly pay $0.99 to find out what it is, especially when I'm on the road and likely to be out of range of the station before it's finished. I suspect there are other classical listeners in the same boat, and with disposable income for such a service.

so glad you could make it, now you really made it

[rokzy]

>Now you can finally figure out the name of that song on the radio that you've been dying to know!

er, been doing that for years in UK with Shazzam Song Recognition thank you.

Cellular add-ons

[huie]

It's stuff like this (value added services?), Cingular's comics and instant messaging that are turning cell phones into more than just a handset you talk into.

I like it, but I fear that it'll get to the point where it's too hard to figure out how to access a given extra feature. Obviously they'll have to work on the UI to select from all these (marginally) useful features.

That said, I'm still just using my phone as a phone, so maybe they already have that solved, but I wouldn't know.