The Chris Motes Blog

Note To Music Industry: Watch Facebook And Learn

Recent announcements by Amazon (international roll-out of Amazon MP3 store) and Last.fm (listen to full-length tracks up to 3x before subscribing) are great moves for consumers.

And then there's Qtrax. 25 million songs, support from all the big record labels, and it's free!

I've tried to use QTrax today but can't:

Based on what I've read, here are a few observations:

1. The music is DRM'd, so the tracks wont work unless you play them in a proprietary player. YAMP (Yet Another Music Player). And...
2. QTrax says their music will be playable on an iPod at some point, but it's not there yet. Until that anouncement transforms into a feature, there's no iPod support.
3. It seems that the inputs into the P2P system are controlled by the labels, not by consumers. I must have bad info here - what's the point of P2P if the input streams are controlled? Seems that the music labels will have to seed the initial DRM'd music into the system... then QTrax offloads the bandwidth costs to consumers.
   
4. If this is P2P, does that mean that I have to wait for people who have the tracks I want to be online?
5. Will controlled input mean that I wont be able to find the super obscure long tail songs that me and only like 5 other people in the world are interested in?
6. Am I the only one that thinks that 25 million songs sounds ridiculously high? How many unique songs are in the QTrax index right now, at this very second? 25 million? Or are there 25 million potential songs in the index, but only [some number way less than 25M] actual and that 25M # is just an attention getter?

I wont be a total downer on QTrax before even trying it. The ad-supported model tells me that the record labels are starting to see the light. It just took them a ridiculously long time to start figuring it out. I'll be glad to take a look once it works on an iPod. And by the way QTrax - I'm unlikely to click on a banner ad, but I'll gladly pay for the music.

To the point: All of my questions above point to potential restrictions in QTrax's product.

Why play reindeer games with users?

Especially when Facebook is not. Facebook  just announced new client libraries that let users put Facebook apps on their own websites. Facebook has a degree of control over the apps, but they've opened up the distribution of those apps. This is kind of like being able to play Facebook on whatever music player you want. This is a great move. 

The music industry and their supporting cast should take note.

Why No Subsciption Model for Apple Music?

Saul Hansell brings up a great point in this cool post in the New York Times this morning about Apple and subscription music.

Apple doesn't have a subscription service for music. Why not? At Macworld Jobs announced a test of the subscription model with videos. Why not with music?

Maybe they think subscription price might be a big leap in price from the pay-per model. Doubtful.

Maybe they feel like people want to own their music, and subscription model suggests that your collection can be taken away. Could be.

I think Saul's rationale makes a lot of sense: Apple just hasn't done it yet, and if/when they do, people will adopt it because Apple is cool and iTunes is cool and iPhones are cool and people want to be cool. People haven't emotionally accepted the model yet - they need someone to lead them into it and frankly Rhapsody and Yahoo! Music are great but they're no iTunes in breadth of catalog or in perception of "the cool".

I don't think that going subscription with video makes doing it with music a slam dunk though. Videos are generally one time experiences, similar to books. You read (watch) because you want to see what happens or you want to learn something. You generally don't watch more than once unless it's something really special (I've seen Shawshank Redemption 10 times).

Music is a little different because you listen to it many times. People don't buy music to listen to it once and never listen to it again (it happens but it's not their intention when they buy... and with all the previewing options out there this happens less often than it used to). Music is more likely to be a repeat usage product than video, so the idea of paying for it and then having it taken away stings a bit.

Come on Apple, make music subscriptions cool.

 

If That's What You're Into

Absolutely brilliant work by Flight Of The Concords!