Artist: Miles Davis
For those who think jazz only has a niche market, please explain why the above video has almost a million hits? Granted, it's from the all-time #1 jazz album "Kind of Blue" (not the all-time #1 track though. That would be "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck)
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Artist: Fueled By Fire
MySpace Link
Thrash is back! At least according to Village Voice. That's good news to me since I have always missed the gold old days of headbanging to Metallica and Testament! Fueled By Fire is supposed to be one of the flagship band of this comeback. ("Thrash is back" is the name of their song)
Thrash is back! At least according to Village Voice. That's good news to me since I have always missed the gold old days of headbanging to Metallica and Testament! Fueled By Fire is supposed to be one of the flagship band of this comeback. ("Thrash is back" is the name of their song)
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Opinion: "Health" of Subscription music service
While researching my previous blog posts regarding Rhapsody and Yahoo Music, I was curious about what players are in the market and who has the biggest market share. The result? It is kind of "scary" to a fan of the subscription model like myself: According to its financial material, Napster had 830,000 paid subscribers world wide and claimed to be the No. 1 player. Consider the subscription model has been here since 2001 and the No.1 player hasn't even break the million subscriber mark. This model doesn't look too promising, does it? Maybe I'm really the minority and the naysayers are right (for the wrong reasons maybe. The arguments from the latter link were not logical at all! For example, the author thinks listeners want to listen to the hits of the moment. I quote: "Tunes are addictive for a while and then discarded. " Isn't this perfect for a subscription model where you could always listen to the latest hits without buying more and more?)
Another way of gauging the health of this market is looking at how the major players are doing: the major players one year ago are: AOL, Napster, Rhapsody, Virgin and Yahoo. Now the music services of AOL and Virgin were both acquired by Napster but we have 2 more new players: MTV's Urge and Microsoft's Zune Marketplace. I guess we will just have to wait and see.
Another way of gauging the health of this market is looking at how the major players are doing: the major players one year ago are: AOL, Napster, Rhapsody, Virgin and Yahoo. Now the music services of AOL and Virgin were both acquired by Napster but we have 2 more new players: MTV's Urge and Microsoft's Zune Marketplace. I guess we will just have to wait and see.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Service: Yahoo Music Unlimited to go
If you've read my previous post, you know I have switched to Yahoo Music Unlimited to go from Real Rhapsody. Price-wise there is no comparison: the recently raised yearly rate for Rhapsody is $119.88. How much does Yahoo cost yearly? $71.88!!! And if you pay with MasterCard, you get the 2nd year free! So I do myself a favor and "upgrade" to the "to go" version, which is $143.88 (for 2 years since I took advantage of the MC deal) and it is still cheaper than Rhapsody!
So what do I have to "give up" by switching? 2 Million songs. (According to Rhapsody, their catalog has 4 mil while Yahoo claim they have 2 mil) Though what really matter the most to me is the loss in classical music. A significant portion of the comprehensive catalog of the budget classical label, Naxos, is available on Rhapsody but not on Yahoo. Don't get me wrong: You could still find a lot of classical music on Yahoo. In fact, I bet the "Top 40" major classical works are there. However, the selection is just too "limited" for serious classical music fan.
What other complaints do I have? Buggy software! Although Real is not known for writing solid software (maybe Listen.com did a real good job and the core was retained?), the Rhapsody client is far more stable and responsive than Yahoo's Music Jukebox (YMJ) during my 2 years stint with them. In contrast, YMJ crashes often and has some weird bugs (e.g. sometimes after playing the 1st song on the playlist, it appeared to move on to the next but actually repeated the 1st one) And when it behaves normally, it feels very sluggish : slow to display contents (e.g. contents on portable devices, artist/album/playlist pages) BTW, unlike Rhapsody, it does not support Windows 2000. (It used to. I wonder why it does not anymore)
The user experience for transferring songs also leaves a lot to be desired. First of all, just like Napster, it is a very slow process, probably due to the overhead of handling DRM. For example, transferring ~720Mb (~100 songs) of music to my Samsung Yepp player took almost an hour! So this is more suitable to be performed in "batch" mode (i.e. before I go to bed!) However, the software is not really well suited to run in this mode either. Let's say I dragged a list of 100 songs to a portable player, the following happens:
Phase 1: it will try to download the 100 songs from its server to my PC
Phase 2: it will try to copy the songs from my PC to the portable.
During Phase 1, if it encounters a previously downloaded song, it will pop up a message and ask if I want to re-download. It will sit there and do nothing until I respond! (What it should have done is comparing the checksum of the local and remote file to determine whether re-downloading is necessary!)
Before Phase 2 begins, if it encouters any error during Phase 1, it will pop up a message saying there were errors. Again, it will not do anything until I acknowledge!
Nevertheless, besides being less expensive, it does have its virtues:
1) higher bit rate: I believe Rhapsody serves music at 160kbps while Yahoo does 192! (I will have to perform some serious A/B testing to tell if the higher bit rate translates to higher sound quality though)
2) better recommendations: I praised Napster for this. Yahoo is also superior to Rhapsody in this regard. My rating of artists/songs/albums/genres affects Yahoo's recommendation. And I could break it down by genre so I could build playlist that have exactly the right balance of different genres. (I know this is weird but sometimes I do insist on 40% jazz, 40% classical and 20% metal!) Unfortunately, Yahoo did not take it to the next level, i.e., utilizing recommendation to enhance portable music experience. What it should have done is supporting smart playlists determined by genre or similar artists, when the songs were played last time and the total size. And it should allow "real" sychronization of such playlists to portables(i.e., keep songs on the player and in the playlist, remove the rest and finally add missing ones) The current so-called sychronization barks when there is not enough space on the player. Also, I couldn't rate music on my portable and "feed" the ratings back to YMJ. I guess it is challenging to support such feature across many players from different manufacturers, unlike Apple only needs to deal with iPods (and iPhones now)
Finally, even though it does not show on Yahoo's compatibility list, I am able to transfer and listen on my Dell Axim x30 (running Windows Mobile 2003 SE) The transfer speed is even worse than my Yepp though. (It probably has to do with Axim's SD card hardware) What a pleasant surprise!
So what do I have to "give up" by switching? 2 Million songs. (According to Rhapsody, their catalog has 4 mil while Yahoo claim they have 2 mil) Though what really matter the most to me is the loss in classical music. A significant portion of the comprehensive catalog of the budget classical label, Naxos, is available on Rhapsody but not on Yahoo. Don't get me wrong: You could still find a lot of classical music on Yahoo. In fact, I bet the "Top 40" major classical works are there. However, the selection is just too "limited" for serious classical music fan.
What other complaints do I have? Buggy software! Although Real is not known for writing solid software (maybe Listen.com did a real good job and the core was retained?), the Rhapsody client is far more stable and responsive than Yahoo's Music Jukebox (YMJ) during my 2 years stint with them. In contrast, YMJ crashes often and has some weird bugs (e.g. sometimes after playing the 1st song on the playlist, it appeared to move on to the next but actually repeated the 1st one) And when it behaves normally, it feels very sluggish : slow to display contents (e.g. contents on portable devices, artist/album/playlist pages) BTW, unlike Rhapsody, it does not support Windows 2000. (It used to. I wonder why it does not anymore)
The user experience for transferring songs also leaves a lot to be desired. First of all, just like Napster, it is a very slow process, probably due to the overhead of handling DRM. For example, transferring ~720Mb (~100 songs) of music to my Samsung Yepp player took almost an hour! So this is more suitable to be performed in "batch" mode (i.e. before I go to bed!) However, the software is not really well suited to run in this mode either. Let's say I dragged a list of 100 songs to a portable player, the following happens:
Phase 1: it will try to download the 100 songs from its server to my PC
Phase 2: it will try to copy the songs from my PC to the portable.
During Phase 1, if it encounters a previously downloaded song, it will pop up a message and ask if I want to re-download. It will sit there and do nothing until I respond! (What it should have done is comparing the checksum of the local and remote file to determine whether re-downloading is necessary!)
Before Phase 2 begins, if it encouters any error during Phase 1, it will pop up a message saying there were errors. Again, it will not do anything until I acknowledge!
Nevertheless, besides being less expensive, it does have its virtues:
1) higher bit rate: I believe Rhapsody serves music at 160kbps while Yahoo does 192! (I will have to perform some serious A/B testing to tell if the higher bit rate translates to higher sound quality though)
2) better recommendations: I praised Napster for this. Yahoo is also superior to Rhapsody in this regard. My rating of artists/songs/albums/genres affects Yahoo's recommendation. And I could break it down by genre so I could build playlist that have exactly the right balance of different genres. (I know this is weird but sometimes I do insist on 40% jazz, 40% classical and 20% metal!) Unfortunately, Yahoo did not take it to the next level, i.e., utilizing recommendation to enhance portable music experience. What it should have done is supporting smart playlists determined by genre or similar artists, when the songs were played last time and the total size. And it should allow "real" sychronization of such playlists to portables(i.e., keep songs on the player and in the playlist, remove the rest and finally add missing ones) The current so-called sychronization barks when there is not enough space on the player. Also, I couldn't rate music on my portable and "feed" the ratings back to YMJ. I guess it is challenging to support such feature across many players from different manufacturers, unlike Apple only needs to deal with iPods (and iPhones now)
Finally, even though it does not show on Yahoo's compatibility list, I am able to transfer and listen on my Dell Axim x30 (running Windows Mobile 2003 SE) The transfer speed is even worse than my Yepp though. (It probably has to do with Axim's SD card hardware) What a pleasant surprise!
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Service: Goodbye Rhapsody. Hello Yahoo Music
I've been a subscriber of Real Rhapsody ever since I started this blog but all good things come to an end. It's time for me to cancel my subscription. There was only one reason: rate hike. I have been paying the quarterly rate of $24.95 and now Real has raised it to $34.99.
And the cancellation experience was not without pain: I had to call them (couldn't do this online) and was put on hold for 20 mins until I was able to talk to a customer service rep, who kept trying to convince me to stay with reasons like it is the first time in six years that they have increased the price of Rhapsody (which I don't really care) I had to be very firm about the cancellation to finally get it cancelled. And I will check my credit card bill very carefully for sure.
Stay tuned for my review of Yahoo Music Unlimited!
And the cancellation experience was not without pain: I had to call them (couldn't do this online) and was put on hold for 20 mins until I was able to talk to a customer service rep, who kept trying to convince me to stay with reasons like it is the first time in six years that they have increased the price of Rhapsody (which I don't really care) I had to be very firm about the cancellation to finally get it cancelled. And I will check my credit card bill very carefully for sure.
Stay tuned for my review of Yahoo Music Unlimited!
Monday, May 21, 2007
Service: Rhapsody - What have they added in the past 2 years?
I'm sure they have added a lot of new albums, i.e, those release during the past 2 years. How about old stuff? Let's compare my sampling of what is available on Rhapsody and what is not by using mostly nonmainstream artists/albums from my first review :
Decent improvement. Agreed?
| Punk: Now become Available | Punk: Still Unavailable |
|---|---|
| Minor Threat, Punk Goes Metal | |
| Jazz: Now become Available | Jazz: Still Unavailable |
| David Murray (2 albums only) | Maria Schneider |
| Metal: Now become Available | Metal: Still Unavailable |
| Shadows Fall (1 old album only) Smashing Pumpkins | Tool, John 5, Exodus, Impaled, Metal Massacre |
| Classic rock: Now become Available | Classic rock: Still Unavailable |
| Led Zeppelin, Beatles |
Decent improvement. Agreed?
Album: Strange As Angels - A Tribute to The Cure
I always want to cover The Cure's tunes with my band but it never happened so I have to listened to others' cover versions. As a metal fan, I found Chimaira's rendition of Fascination Street indeed fascinating. This album is another interesting one and they all play in the punk/post-punk style.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Show: The Haunted/Dark Tranquillity
Venue: The Slim's, San Francisco
This was the first metal show I went to since 2001 (the last one was Pantera's Reinventing the Steel tour, with Morbid Angel and Static-X as supporting acts)
To be honest, I'm not familiar with these 2 bands at all. I learned about them from my new bandmates and we're covering their songs.
Dark Tanquillity is one of the best representatives of the "Gothenburg sound", i.e., the melodic death metal from Scandinavia. Their music striked the right balance between power and complexity, which was showcased perfectly in this show. What interested me the most was the vocalist looked and sounded very polite, which I totally didn't expect listening to his vocal. He kept asking if the crowd would mind hearing songs from their new albums. Of course I didn't mind since the new songs were pretty good. Another interesting thing was he joked about whoever have listened to those songs prior to the show gotta be pirate. However, he didn't show strong objection at all. I guess it's because Sweden is one of the more liberal place as far as P2P is concerned. Also, the band makes most money from touring. P2P is more of a problem for the record company.
Finally, a few words about the headliner, The Haunted: I didn't have too high an expectation about them since some of their songs I listened before sound kinda pop-ish or "soft" (more clean vocal, more metalcore-like than melo. death) And they indeed played a few "soft" ones at the show. However, the rest are better than I expected. The vocalist, Peter Dolving, shared some of his strong feelings against right-wing Christian and wars during the show. Check out his blog.
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