Tracking Online Music

The world of online music has been evolving and expanding for a long time now. As more people listen and discover more music online, all of our listening, viewing, 'liking', and tweeting creates a mass of data ripe for aggregation and analysis. The volume is staggering. 

Next Big Sound published a 2011 State of Online Music report that estimated there were more than 64 billion plays tracks played online. A counter on their website shows more than 52 million plays today. NBS is a startup that tracks the popularity of music across more than a dozen digital music services and social media websites. There are some notable absences in their list of services, especially Spotify that launched recently in the United States. One site I visit frequently when I'm looking for new music is Bandcamp, which is not yet on their list. 

A great way to hear new music is to stream on Spinner, NPR, and 3voor12 the week prior to their release but those plays are not counted here. I can understand why they don't track those plays as they are just a sampling of the music that you may not suit your musical palate. And there are other streaming sites that are of questionable legality when it comes to copyright that makes sense not track.

It's an incomplete picture of trends in online music but gives you a sense of the scale of our online engagement with music.  BP

Storing & Streaming Music from the Cloud

Apparently, this is the future of the music industry but it is Amazon that launched the first mass foray, into the world of cloud-based music storage and streaming with its Cloud Drive and Player. You get 5 GB of free storage space and, if you buy an mp3 album, you get 20 GB for a year. This is an exciting new development.

But Apple has been slowly building the infrastructure and assuaging the fears of the music industry in preparation for launching a cloud-based version of iTunes. The industry has been speculating about this since Apple bought the streaming music service Lala and shut it down. 

Lala enabled you to match your iTunes library with Lala's licensed music catalog and upload the songs that were not. You had unlimited streaming rights to those and could add to your streaming collection at 10 cents per track or buy the mp3's for about 79 cents. It was great for music discovery because you could stream any album in their collection in full once. Getting close, iTunes now has 1:30 previews.

Time will tell if Apple can play the tortoise to Amazon's hare but, for now, we can store our music and stream it from Amazon's cloud. Yes!  BP

Mile high blogging

The era of high altitude internet has arrived. I'm actually blogging now from an Alaska Airlines flight at over 30,000 feet. Nice! Its all made possible via gogoinflight.com.