Reid Dossinger

I'm one of the many people who love last.fm . I love getting a view of my listening habits over the course of years, and I love being able to see what my friends have liked and have been listening to lately. There are things about last.fm that I would like to see changed/added, but it's a great site for music sharing. And in the days when it was active, I found that the wall page on Lala to be extremely useful: seeing what friends of mine had listened to and liked. Lala and last.fm got so close to creating the perfect simple music sharing site. Why is it so hard for Google, Apple and Amazon--companies with more than enough resources to finish the job--to give us something great? What people want from a social music site: To be able to share what their music statistics are (like last.fm ) To be able to see what their friends are listening to and liking What I'd love to see is a Facebook-wall type page that can either show only the songs that your friends have liked or show...

My Google Music invite came through a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure what took so long, since they surely would want an internet superstar like me who has ALMOST A DOZEN RSS SUBSCRIBERS to give it a whirl, but whatever. Google, ammiright? The short story of the pros: it's pretty slick for something that's playing from the cloud. The short story of the cons: it still falls well short of what I'm looking for in a cloud music player, which I could also say about Lala's old player, Amazon's and even what little I've seen of Apple's offering. I'm picky. Interface: The player itself is actually pretty nice. Songs play quickly and the view switches quickly. Usability is good and intuitive. I'm not sure how I feel about the orange overkill, but overall, the player is probably the smoothest that I've seen of any of the cloud music offerings. It's light years better than Lala's now-defunct player, but Amazon's player is pretty quick a...

TechCrunch (among others) has been  drooling  over Apple starting to sign licensing deals with some of the major music labels for their inevitable (and, from the looks of it, coming soon) cloud music player/storage, finally making good on their purchase of the much-missed Lala. The standard line is that, because Apple is succeeding where both Amazon and Google failed in getting the major labels, that they'll beat their competitors handily. But what that assumption misses is that success in this area will have nothing to do with major labels. It will only have to do with the quality of the product. Now, Apple has a reputation for turning our quality products, so there's no reason to believe that they won't have a better product, but the deals with the music labels will be a minor factor into the quality of the product they're able to turn out. TechCrunch keeps mentioning how the agreements with the labels means that Apple will be able to provide a product that won...

Last week brought my attention to a couple visual jabs at how DRM encourages piracy ( here and here ) in books and movies. The bottom line: piracy's reach is larger because it provides a better, easier product than the legit stuff. The music industry has learned a lot of lessons in the last ten years, but it still hasn't figured out that the wall-less world we now live in requires that the industries think of illegal sharing not as piracy, but as a competing product. And the legitimate businesses are slow to compete. Here's what the music business need to do to provide as good a product as piracy offers (and provide the kinds of lessons that the sellers of movies and books can really learn from): Offer high-quality versions While bitrates have gotten better over the years in mp3 stores like Lala and Amazon mp3, there's still no variety. The only way you can legally get a fully lossless digital version of an album is to buy the CD and rip it, leaving you with a CD you d...

If you haven't already read Digital Audio Insider's interview with Camper Van Beethoven's Jonathan Segal ¹, it's a must read for anyone with even a slight interest in digital music and the money of the industry. Segal has tons of thoughts on just about every aspect of digital music, but best of all, he brings in these thoughts as someone whose initial music industry experience was in the days of purely-physical media, when "pirating" meant copying something onto a blank tape. My main takeway is general and obvious but an important reminder: we are in a transition time for music, and what it will become is anyone's guess. I think Segal's take on merchandise and live performances taking the place as artist's primary source of income as "asinine" is too harsh to be true, but I do think that we're in such a state of transition that any shot at predicting artistic income in the future is completely in the dark. Such predictions are really ...