p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- Until March this year, Steve Gravell was a developer at Last.fm.

But after three-and-a-half years of toil on behalf of the now-corporate station, on the auspicious (for him) date of Friday the 13th he hit the road, “to do other things,” including, “writing about music, writing music, and online music from time to time”.

In one of his first writes, “There are mainly 4 varieties of music related websites and services out there for you music consumers, artists, and labels to try out,” he said last month, going on »»»

There’s Content Pushing Aggregators, Content Pulling Aggregators, Content Hosting Aggregators, and Content Requesting Aggregators. All these services in each category work together(sometimes, and not always on sensible terms) with the primary goal of streaming music to you people, the fans. Once this goal is achieved, apparently everyone gets paid. Oh joy. The truth is that this process is totally fucked up. It’s the evolution of the music industry of yesteryear, social networks and other music sites in an attempt at handling more and more esoteric methods of music delivery across the web. Granted we’re only at one step of this evolution at the moment, but a ton of it along the way has been absolutely shit, and in the worst cases completely alients the artist to the point of giving up. Well done us.

Let’s take a look at those 4 main types of music services on the web for an example of a site wanting to stream or sell licenced music content:

Content Pushing Aggregators (Merlin, Major Labels, CDBaby, etc)

• Gets artist’s content and sends it to loads of other places
  
• Gets paid and pays artists / labels

Content Pulling Aggregators (MySpace Music, Last.fm, Pandora, Spotify, 7digital, iTunes, etc)

• Want as much music as possible
  
• Have to sign huge deals with the bigger Pushing Aggregators like the major labels
  
• Makes money from either advertising or from actually selling the content to the end user
  
• Are innovating in content delivery and recommendation

Content Hosting Aggregators (Soundcloud, ReverbNation, etc)

• Provide services for artists and labels to host their content with the potential of pushing or posting their content to other places via webservices and/or widgets/embeds
  
• Artists and labels sometimes pay money for these services
  
• Is a way of syndicating content to a subset of other websites

Content Requesting Aggregators (MySpace, Last.fm, PureVolume, Verb, 7digital, Amie St., Muxtape, etc)

• Gets given artist’s content from the artists via a link such as “upload your music” specific to that site
  
• Normally don’t pay for free streaming of those indie artists (except for Last.fm Radio)
  
• Gets paid and pays artists when dealing with purchasing (7digital, Amie St. etc)
  
• Only adds the facility to their site to get yet more content and boost their community
  
• Gives artists a profile / foot-hold on their site

All of these services were created to facilitate the release processes of music, and we’ve been putting more and more of them on top of each other in an effort to make the previous service that little bit easier or try and make sense of it. Take content pushing aggregators (still just for the situation of pushing the finished content), they get the music to the content pulling aggregators, which is the best way of getting the most amount of popular music in the shortest amount of time (though it’s the most expensive way too). The content hosting aggregators do the same thing, but this time we’ve made it all about manually uploading content and leave the syndicating parts to you. Whether the service itself updates your widgets on many of the sites, you still have to go and put them on a subset of sites that you’ve decided to put them on, which to be honest is still a complete head-fuck.

We’ve created this widgets and single-site-that-syndicate-to-many-sites-for-you-via-widgets-and-crosspostings business to make our lives easier. But what we end up with is a gigantic tangled mess of suck. Branded widgets. Cross posting to sites A, B, and C. Cross posting to sites A, B, but not C yet because we haven’t got around to it yet. Facebook applications. OpenSocial widgets. If what these services are in-fact doing is trying to help out artists, why be egotistical enough to brand your widgets and build the experience around your service being “the one”? Along a similar line to my previous post, it’s getting so super fucking easy to create these tools, and what makes you different from your closest competitor? Services like SoundCloud are shining above the rest by attempting to focus on their web-services, slim-lining their feature-set, and understanding the needs and frustrations of their core user-base. But I still get put off by widgets. Ah so I could create my own app/widget on top of an API and put it on MySpace, but MySpace have a music player? Oh well, I want to syndicate from you to many places, so that’s fine. The actual problem here for me is that MySpace make me upload music to their site at all. This introduces content requesting aggregators.

By asking for you to upload your music to them content requesting aggregators get to decide on the UI, and that’s brilliant. I get to go around a site and know that I’m expecting to see a player in the position I am used to and it looks like how I remember, so I know exactly where to find that fucking play/pause button. We’ve learnt that this leads to social network fatigue, it’s rife, don’t do it. There’s so many of these sites that people end up just giving up, even when there is the option of widgets! It’s because it still fucking sucks. This is a quote from a friend of mine who’s in a million+ selling band who’s helping out some other friends in a new indie band:

Hey!

What do you know about genericmusicsite.com? I started setting one up at the request of our manager, but it’s just too time consuming signing up for all these fucking social networking sites!!! Just wondered what you thought…

I would have sent him this article! But instead I had to tell him that he should stick with what he knows and what works for him. They have a MySpace, it works great for them, and if they’re not interested in maintaining another site and don’t like widgets, then my advice is to not bother.

Social networks that purely work by requesting music from artists directly are dumb, and I’m amazingly glad new ones don’t seem to crop up as often as they used to. That still didn’t stop Facebook from coming into this space did it? It’s ok for them, they’ve got loads of weight and user experience experience (emphasis on user and not artist). And this also doesn’t stop services like MySpace, Last.fm, and iLike from keeping this functionality exactly how it was when they came up with the idea. A number of these sites also serve as content pulling aggregators to get the major label stuff, so simply provide the extra indie artist upload functionality as a side-lined alternative. When you can get a hundred thousand really popular songs from a major by paying for it there’s not as much incentive to improve the service for indie artists and get a small trickle of content. MySpace is probably the only one where indie uploaded music may out-weight major label sourced content. What hope is there for other sites that want to be able to tailor their own music playing service around sourcing the music from the content pushing aggregators plus as many indie/new artists as possible? If they ask artists to upload the content manually, ABSOLUTELY NONE, UNLESS THEIR SERVICE IS EXTREMELY EXCEPTIONAL AND AS POPULAR/GOOD AS MYSPACE.

So how should you contribute to this huge fuck-up of brilliant services held together by the endless supply of new music and new ears? The most important thing to remember is that one-up-man’s-ship is an absolutely fucking terrible idea. Creating a similar service and making it slightly better does not an awesome incredible experience make, especially if artists still have to upload music to you!

Secondly, again… creating websites is fucking easy, and if you’re going to join the fuck-party you’d better contribute to something bastard exceptional.

Thirdly, don’t alienate the artist. Don’t try and act like they need you, because most of the time, they don’t. All they want is for you to fuck right off and not exist at all, and for something better to replace you.

We need to backtrack a little. Instead of providing services that bands have to take part in and contribute to; instead of creating aggregation services to patch all these things together with widgets, give artists the tools to host their own content (without limitations on you) by truly doing it themselves, and get the content requesting aggregators to come get it from them directly. With a little semantic sugar on a band’s own websites all the content requesting aggregators need to do is requester permission to pull, bumping them up into the realm of content pulling aggregators. Granted these sites don’t need to plug in to this, but as one of those sites why wouldn’t you? This needs to happen. And I can’t wait. If it doesn’t then I’ll eat my hat. And my shoes.

“I’ll be doing a screencast of some diagrams for some of this mess soon,” Steve promised, adding:

“Then maybe some of this will make more sense and come across less like brain-vomit.”

Also check out his more recent Seamless music playing across web pages round-up (+examples +code).

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May, 2009

now-corporate station – MP3.com artists – moved to Last.fm, March 27, 2009
one of his first writes – Please stop creating your own brand that artists and labels need to participate in and contribute to unless it’s outrageously exceptional, April 20, 2009