Music industry in the digital age

As a big music fan and amateur musician who doesn't make a living from the music business (also a tech guy who makes a living in the tech biz) I have always been interested in how tech affected the music industry. For example, everyone must have heard that illegal download was killing the record companies. Most people know about musicians got signed by record companies or work as session musicians and made money from record sales. It seems that illegal download or even legal streaming broke this model completely: musicians earn much less from streaming or downloads. Record companies became more "conservative" and only willing to promote artists that are deemed "safe bets" Even the "frugal" (i.e, not paying musicians enough) streaming service providers were not making a profit! (Well, at least the last one was no longer true for Napster, rebranded from Rhapsody, the service I used for years and just dropped in 2016 when they became profitable!) Some in the industry think high resolution downloads might save the day. It does have a niche market of audiophiles as potential buyers. Check out this article to see if this is for you.

So, what type of music company/service looked promising and profitable in the digital age? Here is an example: Bandcamps, which allows musicians to upload their music for free. They make money by taking a cut when fans buy downloads from musicians they enjoy. I guess it's really a win-win-win situation, isn't it? Not using traditional record companies as a middleman is definitely a trend. Jazz guitar master Martin Taylor has gone this route. In fact, this "route" is century-old, the same one used by Mozart! Basically his music was funded by his patrons: who got to watch Taylor's video and listen to his tracks.

Another jazz musician has also found his way to make money as a multi-faceted performer, recording artist (running his own label) and educator. That is trumpeter Dave Douglas. Bloomberg wrote an article about him (available to professional subscriber only)

I guess if you are savvy and good at music, you could still make a good living. 

Sensuous Sax

Smooth jazz ballad, especially when played with saxophone, has long been associated with the image of a couple having sex. Perhaps that's because a lot of movies have employed this cliche. And there is a whole series of recordings that uses this as the theme, at least for the cover, where there are always a man and a woman in intimate positions. It is not actually all the typical "movie sex themed" music. For example, I just listened to his cover of Pink Floyd's classic, "Us and Them", from "Sensuous Sax: The Kiss." This version could still be considered "sexy" but in a different way.

By the way, it was interesting how I came across this series: I was writing about smooth jazz and the established musicians like Marion Meadows. When I checked out his discography on Rhapsody, I found a "Sensuous Sax: Sensation", which listed him, Kenny Geoffrey and Dan Pickering on the cover as the featured musicians. However, this album cannot be found on his discography elsewhere. In fact, most other albums in the series are under the name of one "Le Valedon" which is a very mysterious artist. I just can't find any bio of this person. Some of those albums listed "Compose" as the label. And I tracked it down to "Peter Pan Music" which seemed to be the parent company. That's all info I have on this series.

So, why am I so interested? I want to play like Le Valedon! Seriously, his playing is no doubt very crowd-pleasing, especially to the female audience I suppose, with all these familiar melodies, in a quite romantic mood. In the last 8 years jazz was my main focus and I played a set of the most popular jazz standards at our high school reunion. The question I got the most was: can you play something people know? (And when does your song end.)

Smooth jazz revival?

Several years ago there were many articles written about the "death" of smooth jazz, like this one and this one in 2010 that talked about Chicago's WLFM trying to fill the void left by the former smooth jazz station WNUA. Well, WLFM switched to alternative rock in 2012 too, according to this site. FYI, these folks has created

a Chicago-based, Chicago-targeted, Chicago-driven Smooth Jazz-formatted digital station available through the internet.

I listened via this link. It's alive and kicking. The playlist was similar to the "old school smooth jazz radio station", i.e, a mix of vocal and instrumentals. As I mentioned before, I am not a big fan of smooth jazz vocal. And I found a few interesting fact about it here:

The goal of every radio station, says WQCD operations manager John Mullen is to be heard. "The bulk of music is smooth jazz - so out of 10 or 12 songs, the majority will have an instrumental, jazzy texture. So if we throw in a vocal, maybe to add a little spice or to bring in a few people who are not jazz fans to our radio station, it's our way of getting people who have never tried us to try us."

Oddly enough, instrumentalists often find their songs have a tougher time at jazz/AC radio if they have vocals on them. "I had a song called 'Body Language' with vocals by Shai that got to No.6 on the adult R&B chart, but it didn't get as high on the jazz/AC chart because of the vocals," says James.

He adds that another single, "All Night Long," featured a background vocal hook, while an all-instrumental version of the song was featured on the Japanese release of the album. "When Warner Bros. in the U.S. sent out the CD promo, they included both the instrumental and the vocal version, and the instrumental version was the most popular one here. The stations are playing vocals, vocals, vocals from other people, but when an instrumentalist comes along with one, they won't play it."

Actually, my indicator of its revival is the live performances here in the SF bay area. Looks like it's part of the "new direction" of Yoshi's, which traditionally booked mainly "traditional" jazz musicians but I have been to quite a few smooth jazz performances in the past year, including Peter White, Michael Lington, Jessy J...... I know Najee has played recently. Mindi Abair and Brian Culbertson are coming up in Sept and Oct. I hope this change helps Yoshi's business (Yeah, I still count on them booking those traditional jazz cats) 

Taylor Swift 1989 Tour

Yes, I went to her stop at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara last Sat, with my daughter of course. And this was the first time ever I have been to an American pop-star's concert. (Depeche Mode was close but they were not American :P) We bought the tix in the morning of the first day it went on sale and we could only get the "top-level" tix (which still costs $100+ each) We estimated she probably makes between 1-9mil that night. Well, according to this article, she made 2.5mil per stop on average recently. And this tour will push her 2015 earning over 100mil.

Enough about the business aspect, let's talk about the music! So, the format of a pop concert is actually similar to a rock concert: both started with some lesser opening acts (I mean, usually, once in a while you find the likes of Alice Cooper opening for the likes of Motley Crue) The openers for Swift were Shawn Mendes and Vance Joy. Mendes played all by himself with only his guitar (and his voice) which was tough (but also less people to share his money :P) Apparently he has lots of teen female fans and didn't mind. Personally I don't care too much of his songs (sounded like a lesser Ed Sheeren) The music of the Australian Vance Joy was more enjoyable to me as there were traces of influence by English bands like Oasis (according to Wikipedia, he's inspired by George Harrison, so that's in the ballpark)

The wait for TayTay's appearance was finally over ~9pm (oh yeah, that's a long wait. My daughter was a huge fan of Swift for several years. It peaked around the time of the release of "1989" last year though. You know a girl could only like the same artist with the same level of dedication for so long! She has already "moved on" to One Direction. I guess our constant reminding of how expensive the tickets were made her appreciate it a bit more. In fact, glad to see her enjoying the concert a lot that night) The setlist could be found on the Wikipedia. As expected, she started with several hits from 1989, which represented her transition from pop-country to "simply" pop. I was on the fence about this transition. I mean, I like to see musicians sticking with their roots. However, Swift has been more pop than country already so she might as well cross the line completely. Anyway, the new songs are kinda enjoyable. I just think the country elements made her more stand out from the other run-of-the-mill pop stars. I admire the efforts in rearranging her old and new songs to make them coherent in one concert though, for example, Trouble was rearranged and sounded more mysterious. The other highlights include her playing acoustic guitar/piano to accompany her singing, and she played a white Johnny Marr Fender Jaguar on the song We are never ever getting back together (You know how much I love Jaguar :) Last but not least, the production was top-notch: the sound system was loud and clear and the "run-way" stage that split, elevate and rotate was cool (and seemed safe for TayTay and the dancers) I wonder what concert I would go with my daughter next.

New music service owned by artists: Tidal

Tidal is one of the new players in the crowded space of music streaming service. And it made the news recently because of ownership changes. Tidal is now owned by a group of artists led by the financially (and musically?) successful Jay-Z. It claims to pay more royalty to artists than other services. For some reason it is getting quite a few backslashes. For example, one Bob Leftsez complained "We’ve got uber-rich artists complaining they’re just not making enough" which is refuted by this article. Musicians are NOT supposed to be poor, are they? And I just read the criticism mentioned in the Wikipedia about the service being too expensive ($19.99 for hi-resolution streaming. $9.99 for regular. No free option) One Marina and the Diamonds claimed that $240 a year is NOT a positive way for everyone to consume music. Oh well, that's about the price of 16 CDs (or 24 albums in MP3) Is that what artists expect any serious fans of music to spend on new music per year?

I think the biggest challenge for them though is to compete with all these other free or paid services and get enough subscribers to sustain the business. Exclusive content might help but it's just one factor. I have listened to Rhapsody for about 10 years WITHOUT the likes of Led Zeppelin, AC/DC or Beatles available and I still have plenty of good music to listen to. To be honest, if I cannot afford Rhapsody anymore, I would count on free services offered by all these online radio and Pandora. Their another selling point was hi-res streaming. I read someone conducted test and found that a lot of listener cannot distinguish between hi-res and "regular" files because the latter were usually encoded in bit rates > 160 these days, which is not exactly lo-res.

What has Rhapsody added in the past 8 years?

I wrote this review 8 years ago comparing what is available on Rhapsody and what is not by using mostly nonmainstream artists/albums between 2005 and 2007.

Jazz: Now become Available	Jazz: Still Unavailable
	Maria Schneider
Metal: Now become Available	Metal: Still Unavailable
John 5, Exodus, Impaled	Tool, Metal Massacre
Classic rock: Now become Available	Classic rock: Still Unavailable
Led Zeppelin	Beatles

I know Maria Schneider would still be unavailable because she doesn't believe in streaming music as a sales platform. However, the biggest deal is that Led Zeppelin is finally on board! Big improvement. Agreed?

No-one-likes-the-blues Blues

I came across a blog post about how unpopular the blues is in America. He mentioned one of the "makeover" TV show host suggested a blues club to switch to other type of music in order to be more viable because a study found that only 3% of American claimed blues as their favorite music genre. (Well, JJ Blues didn't need this TV show host's advice and "converted" already) I don't know if that study matters that much. As much as I like blues (or metal or classical for that matter) I won't claim that as my favorite music genre though. Another thing mentioned by that blog post was the harp (a.k.a. blues harmonica) player Paul Oscher from the legendary Muddy Waters band performed for free in a suburb city of Austin Texas. However, some readers pointed out in the comments that it wasn't that bad: Oscher actually performed at other shows that charge for admission. Anyway, blues and blues club hopefully will survive. 

So, how about jazz? Does it have better stats? I found this article from 1999, which quoted numbers from a 1992 study (that's 20+ years ago) Jazz lovers came in as 5% compared to Blues' 3%. I was trying to look for that number from the 2012 study but I couldn't seem to find it. The only jazz related number is that 8.1% of U.S. adults have attended a jazz concert. And that number went up from 7.8% in 2008. I guess this is encouraging.

JJ's Blues has changed hand too

Two of my favorite music genre, jazz and its older sibling blues, are both struggling in the SF bay area. I wrote about Yoshi's changing hand and its departure from jazz last year (here's another article on another failed jazz venue in the Fillmore Jazz preservation district) And I just found out the legendary San Jose blues club, JJ's Blues, has changed hand last Summer too. Even though I've only been there 2 or 3 times (once in 2014 before it changed hand) I was impressed. The atmosphere was awesome. Too bad it won't be blues-centric anymore.

The Yoshi's SF Saga

The formerly premiere jazz club of SF known as Yoshi's SF is done, which was sad news to me and I felt that it was not given a fair chance to fight for its survival. Oh well, as an outsider I could only find out so much from the media, like this article from SFWeekly. The whole Fillmore district redevelopment and jazz preservation project started in 1995 was supposed to be the way the city made amend to the "original" 1950s redevelopment that chased away black residents, businesses and the vibrant jazz scene. Yoshi's SF which opened in 2007 was probably the "crown jewel" of the project. I saw Yoshi's SF as a more up-scaled version of Yoshi's Oakland (i.e., jazz and Japanese food) with higher price tags on admissions and dining (and I predicted the top-tier, bigger name jazz musicians will have their shows in SF in place of or in addition to Oakland and made more money) I was wrong on the money part though. The ownership had spent a lot to make the place looked that good (more than twice of the original estimate) Unfortunately, opening in 2007 was bad timing: people cut spending during the financial crisis. Even though Yoshi's brought in $9-$10 million or more a year, it's still not profitable after paying down all its debts and covering more than $60,000 per month in rent, taxes, and maintenance charge. Like other businesses started with money from the redevelopment agency, it had problem paying back the loan and needed more money to bail them out. Some owners of these businesses complained the agency didn't provide enough help. On the other hand, critics of the redevelopment agency claimed that there was insufficient oversight on how the agency handed out the money. Anyway, some fingers were pointing at the musical genre (i.e., jazz) as a cause of the failure: the city surveyed local residents and claimed that interests in jazz were not high (which I don't think it's that relevant: there were jazz fans all over the SF Bay Area who would come to the Fillmore district when there were great jazz shows) Even branching outside of jazz couldn't save it's original majority owner (co-founder of Yoshi's Oakland) from losing Yoshi's SF to the "new" ownership group (formerly minority owners who were the builders and landlords of the place) Not sure if Yoshi's is paying less rent now. Oh yeah, as part of the deal, 5 million dollar of the debt to the city was forgiven. (Did anyone say sorry to the SF tax payers?) Actually the deal itself is quite complicated and I found some details here.

RIP Yoshi's SF. Long live Yoshi's Oakland (I hope)

Contrasting opinions about the industry

I have always enjoyed reading guitar magazines, even before the days I play much! The "Big Two" here in US are Guitar Player and Guitar World (there are also Acoustic Guitar and Guitar Aficionado. And for a while I enjoyed Guitar One a lot, before it folded) GP is in general higher regarded with a broader spectrum while GW is more trendy with more focus on rock/metal/younger generation. GP vs GW is one recurring topic (they are actually owned by the same company NewBay Media since 2012 :P) Still, they maintained their own distinct identities and it's interesting to see how to differ on the same topic regarding the industry (published on the same day!):
GP's 99 Problems of the Recording Industry
vs
GW's 10 Reasons why today's Music Industry doesn't suck

One could argue they are not actually talking about the same thing: Music industry covers more than recording industry and includes music publisher, instruments, education and so on (the former actually mentioned the high tuitions of Berklee/Julliard) but both of them mentioned the impact of technology (download/streaming, DIY recordings, social media) I guess it's hard for a musician to become your good old rock stars who made a ton of money after releasing a hit record but on the other hand those with creative spirits will be heard these days as there are more channels or space to perform and promote.

Here is the irony: musicians don't get paid much by streaming services like Pandora and Spotify. At the same time, these companies are not making much either and their business models are being questioned (Spotify lost $78 million in 2012. Rhapsody had to cut staff last year.) I guess it takes a company as powerful as Google to be able to make money off music. In fact, it's troubling to see that Google is planning to shut out artists on indie label that didn't sign with Google from streaming their music videos on YouTube.

Finally, here is a local article about artists not being able to afford living in the bay area because of the "well-paid techies." The author doesn't seem to think a mid-level Python programmer is worthy of his 120k annual salary (Well, not me as I don't do much Python at work.) 

Black Sabbath Tour 2013

I've been to concerts of most legendary hard rock/heavy metal bands, including Metallica and Van Halen. However, I have never been to a Black Sabbath concert, arguably the first ever heavy metal band. I first listened to them ~1989 via a "Best of" cassette. Ozzy had left the band long time ago and had huge success as a solo artist at that point. I missed their reunion ~1998. I decided I mustn't miss this latest reunion again 'coz you'll never know if there'll be another. Ozzy is 64 already and Tony Iommi has just gone through cancer treatment. I bought the $40 lawn ticket at Shoreline Amphitheater. To be honest, I have never been a big fan of that place. The only concert I remember watching there was the one by Depeche Mode. You basically either sit on the lawn or stand up. Not to mention the horrible traffic in and out of the pricey parking lot. Fortunately I was close enough to bike there. Still, the lawn area was way too far to see Ozzy, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler. Shoreline clearly understood this shortcoming and tried to remedy by aiming camera at them and project the live feed behind the band on stage (and also on big screens at the lawn) which is better than nothing. Back to  the music: the set list included every Black Sabbath classic I wanted to hear: War Pig, Iron Man, Paranoid, N.I.B.... etc. Plus a few songs from their latest album, 13 (their 13th studio album), which was a present surprise. Ozzy's vocal was a bit shaky. For example, he didn't seem to be able to find the key on 'Children of the Grave.' It's quite possible that dumping water (on his heads and the audiences) like he always does messed up his monitor though. Check out this discussion by previous concert goers (which was a response to a poor newspaper review of the first concert of the tour)

Still, I was so glad that I went. They are the one and only Black Sabbath.

Is Smooth Jazz Dead?

I didn't come up with the title. I simply took it from an article in the JazzTimes magazine (discussed here on the Saxophone music forum.) I am really surprised that a type of music that is trying to please everyone and offend no one could go downhill like this [link1, link2] (I was equally surprised when the radio station KKSF dropped the smooth jazz format) I guess the moral of the story is that musicians just need to be themselves and play without worrying about offending or pleasing some audiences. Good players will always find way to be heard, with the smooth jazz moniker or not. (Look at David Sanborn) On the other hand, less talented folks who rode on coattails of others won't last long.

Current landscape of cloud music service

Yes, I intentionally made the title sounded like some sort of research/report from the likes of Gartner. Well, it was 5 years ago last time I wrote a related post. The buzzword "cloud" wasn't as big back then and the industry still refered to streaming services like Rhapsody and Napster as "subscription" Lots have changed though between these 5 years besides of the name. I'm still a user of such service (back to Rhapsody after Yahoo Music Unlimited was shutdown in 2008) but haven't paid much attention to the health of this business until today. I've found:
1) Rhapsody was spun off by Real Network (and partner MTV Network) as an independent company (Real still owns some stakes) in 2010
2) Rhapsody celebrated its 10th anniversary, reached one million subscribers and on track to become profitable last year according to this. The growth was credited to popularities of competitors like Spotify and support on portable devices like iOS and Android tablet/phones.
3) Among the providers I mentioned in my 2007 post, only 2 remained: Rhapsody bought Napster from BestBuy last year. MTV's Urge merged with Rhapsody in 2007. Microsoft's Zune Pass will become Xbox Music soon. And I already mentioned Yahoo shutdown its service in 2008.

Lots of techie disliked Real Network because of its practices (Real Player installations related) in the early dot-com days so I guess not longer associating with it is a good thing for Rhapsody to some potential customers. It seemed quite amazing to me that a business could survive for 10 years while struggling with profitability. It is also surprising that the appearance of a heavily hyped upstart like Spotify actually revitalize the whole sector ("grown the cake" if you will) and benefited "old timers" in the sector like Rhapsody. Hey, anything that's associated with "the cloud" is cool, especially after Apple created iCloud, isn't it? I guess it showed that Rhapsody was way ahead (9+ years) of its time. I certainly would not blame its lack of success on its technology. Not sure how many people knew and remembered the whole saga of Harmony DRM back in 2004 (BTW, finally a class action lawsuit was filed against Apple recently). Rhapsody created Harmony so that their tracks (purchased by user only, not the subscription ones) could play on iPod. Of course, Apple being Apple wouldn't allow this to happen and patched this "loophole" during the next release of firmware. At that point I thought Rhapsody could make a great move by releasing its own iPod firmware that works with both purchased and subscription tracks! (They don't even have to do it officially. Just leak it and claimed it's a hack by the user community!) Well, things come full circle when Apple finally approved Rhapsody's iOS app years later, which works for both types of tracks. IIn fact, the app was another boost to Rhapsody's growth. Looks like this industry is in good shape and we could all go back to enjoying great music.

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.

Service: XM Liquid Metal is BACK!

This is kinda old news. XM has put Liquid Metal back on air last month after about a year of hiatus (it was available online only during that period.) Hurray! I guess XM heard too many metal fans bitched about it. Power to the people! (well, power to metal fans actually)

What does it mean to me since I wasn't a subscriber of XM? I am a Directv customer and Directv switched their music provider from Music Choice to XM last year. Music Choice has fairly decent metal programming. When I heard that Music Choice's Metal channel would be replaced by XM's Squizz channel. I thought WTF 'coz Squizz is more of an alt. rock station and that's when I realized Liquid Metal was canned.

Now I'm one happy Liquid Metal listener rocking to "Are You Dead Yet?" by Children of Bodom!

Service: My experience with Napster-To-Go, part 2

If we take the To-Go portion out of equation, how does Napster do in general?

Let me start with its weaknesses:
1) Poor selection compared to Rhapsody in the genres I like (jazz, blues, classical, metal) Lots of artists have none or only few songs available. For example, Jimmy Bruno and Jimmy Raney aren't exactly household names but they are well represented on Rhapsody, not on Napster though.

2) Poor user interface: it just ain't user friendly. For example, on some artist's page, the top pane (list of album) is too big and makes the bottom pane (list of song) too small. Users like me are more interested in the bottom pane, which allows me to pick songs to download. Another examples are cryptic radio station names like "Crossroads." You would never know if you're not a blues fan already. Doesn't it discourage users to explore music they are not familiar with?

3) Poor classification/information:
For example, "Top albums" of Blues are Confessions by Usher and #1 by Destiny's Child!
And there is no consistency: following a certain navigation path you may see John Coltrane filed under Blues. Everytime I click on Top Artists under Blues I see a different list. Sometimes the album has a "download album" link next to it but I found that even if it doesn't say so, songs from the album might still be available for download when I click the album to drill down.

Nevertheless, it does have some nice features:
1) its radio feature actually generates playlists instead of streaming. Why is this a good feature? It allows listener to keep a record of what has been played so that (s)he could download all or some of them in a shot later on.

2) In addition to the "radio station" Napster created for every user, you could build custom station based on all songs in your library or your current playlist. This is more flexible than the more common way of setting up custom station based on artists/genre.

3) This is just me being nostalgic: the download window really reminds me of the good old days of the original Napster :P

The verdict? I don't think I'd switch to Napster since it charges the same as Rhapsody (and more than Yahoo) I do hope Napster will improve 'coz more competition in the digital music business could only be a good thing for consumers like myself.

Service: My experience with Napster-To-Go, part 1

Almost a year after last time I wrote about Napster-To-Go, I finally get to try it out (free trial of course) with my newly acquired Sandisk Sansa m240, one of the cheapest PlaysForSure Subscription compatible player out there. (Sidenote: I bet a lot of people would be surprised that Sandisk is No.2 in US MP3 player market They did it by building solid and competitively priced products instead of hype. I think there's something to learn from their approach.)

Remember I wrote the service sounded exciting? I still agree with that, but the keyword is the quantifier: "theoretically." Practically speaking, I ran into these problems:
1) sometimes I got errors for no explanation, during downloading of songs to my computer or transferring to the player.
2) songs are transferred to the player very slowly, much slower than copying DRM-less MP3s using Windows Explorer. I bet the overhead for handling the DRM (digital right management, or copy protection in layperson's term) is pretty big.
3) the Napster client cannot tell what is loaded on my player consistently.

To summarize, this is the exact opposite of good end-to-end experience like what you get from iPod + iTunes I am not sure if these problems are Napster only or it is universal across all PlaysForSure Subscription services (i.e., Napster, Rhapsody and Yahoo Music Unlimited) since I haven't tried To-Go with others. (In other words, how much could they blame on Microsoft, the vendor of PlaysForSure DRM technology?) In any case, simply copying iTunes' look and feel into Napster most likely cannot make it happen.

In the next part of this series, I'll compare the non-To-Go portion of Napster with Rhapsody.

Service: Cellphone music download

For those who think it's outrageous to pay $2.5 per track to download music to your cell phone from your carrier, you haven't seen nothing yet!

According to Next Magazine in Hong Kong, a Hong Kong 3G service provider, 3, is providing a music service that allows you to listen to music 10 hours per month for a promotional rate of $2.3 (~HK$18) Sound like a good deal huh? Here's the catch: each song you download costs $1.15 (~HK$9)!

This is what I call greediness with a capital G!

Interview: Rob Glaser of RealNetworks

Check out this interesting interview of Mr. Glaser by EnGadget. Not that I'm a big fan of Real (in fact, I think most people became haters of company X whenever they become a customer of X these days. And I'm a subscriber of Real Rhapsody) but I think he made some very good points about the current state of digital music market. His takes on the virtues and shortfalls of Apple's approach (with iPods and iTunes) are fairly accurate and impartial IMHO.

One key point he made is the need to have a "good end to end experience" from the music service provider all the way to the device, which Apple did very well with iPod + iTunes. Judging from all those complaints on their message board regarding the latest version of Rhapsody (3.1) not working properly, I think Real really needs to work hard in this department.

Finally, regarding the web interface (Rhapsody.com) that he plugged during the interview, I'm happy that I could finally listen to Rhapsody on my iBook without using it as a terminal to a PC. Check out a detailed review by the Digital Music Weblog. I came to a similar conclusion: this interface needs lots of improvements (IMHO not a version 1.0 product as Mr. Glaser touted) My particular gripes are:
1) There is no way to reorder tracks in the client's current playlist.
2) I cannot cue songs to the current playlist without the player switching to play the new songs.
3) Dunno if it's just my iBook: sometimes the player window opens but sits idle without playing anything I asked it to play.

In any case, Mr. Glaser is definitely correct that the subscription model is a sound one. Just check out the math: At my peak I used to buy 50 new CDs a year. It has gradually gone down to ~25 CDs. You know how much I buy this year? 0. I don't need new CDs anymore as I got my fix from Rhapsody, which I spend $100 for a year of subscription. For serious music fan like you (if you read this blog then your are) and me, subscription IS a good deal.

On a related note, the latest stat from music industry says sales of CD is down by 8% in the past year. (Well, in my case it is down by 100%) I bet they won't be able to make it up by just sitting there and sending out their army of lawyers. The days of CDs being cash cows are over. Wake up and embrace digital music! These guys could surely use some advices from Mr. Glaser.

Service: Rhapsody

While we're on the topic of RealNetworks, I've got some advices for Mr. Glaser too.

He mentioned the editorial on Rhapsody as a differentiating feature from his competitors in the subscription market. I beg to differ. Artist info (incl. bio/discography/influences/similar artists) is everywhere on the web (Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia) What Rhapsody really need is a better recommendation engine and better personalization. It is sitting on a "gold mine" of user preferences (forget about 1-5 star ratings of songs. If I listen to the same song over and over, 5 stars. If I skip the song 10 seconds into it, 0 star. It should be that simple. Also, asking me to click on other people's playlist is not good enough. Sometimes people prefer auto-pilot) If they use it for social networking/correlation, they'll have one awesome recommendation feature. It might be easier just go out and buy a last.fm/Audioscrobbler.