MeeMix: Personalized Internet Radio

MeeMix allows users to create and share personalized Internet radio stations for free. The service also has built-in taste prediction technology which enables a combination of user selected and automatic music discovery. The company's business application is designed to personalize radio delivery, recommendations and ads by accurately predicting individual music taste.

5 Rdio Features for Music Enthusiasts

I've been using Rdio a few weeks now thanks to Glenn Peoples, and I'm impressed with their service. Below are 5 features that make Rdio a great experience for music enthusiasts:

1. select and listen to a specific artist, album and/or a specific track
2. create and share custom playlists, subscribe to your friends' playlists, or collaborate on their playlists
3. effortlessly write a review for a song and/or album (this data could be a great resource for artists, labels, managers and the like)
4. great social interface allowing users to easily see what their friends are listening to (vice-versa), as well as other Rdio users, and who is listening to the music you like (creating new opportunities for music discovery)
5. nice visualization of music collections (i'm assuming they'll add more visualizations)

Rdio will likely influence other music service providers to modify their offering with similar features and design, benefiting all music listeners, but there are a few areas where Rdio can improve:

• increase content, especially from unsigned artists with services like CD Baby and Tunecore
• easier queue creation/management for individual songs and albums (e.g. the drop down to add is cumbersome)
• tighter integration of music recommendations based on a user's listening activity; it's a bit separated from the experience at present

MOG Launches Mobile Music App

MOG has just released their mobile music app for the iPhone, iTouch and Android devices. For $9.99 per month, subscribers get access to more than 8 million songs with unlimited listening and all-you-can-eat downloads, as well as MOG’s desktop and online service.

Features include:

• Unlimited downloads: Subscribers can download any song or album directly to their phones and continue to listen to music even when out of cell or WiFi range.
• On-demand streaming: Unlimited listening to any artist, album, or song at any time, with no ads and no limit on the number of consecutive tracks by a single artist
• MOG Radio: Only MOG offers the patent-pending “MOG Mobius” music discovery engine, which enables users to control the mix of similar artists, from true "artist only" radio up to a full mix of similar artists.
• Playlist access between website and mobile: Make playlists on MOG.com and access them on your phone. Favorite tracks that are bookmarked from the web are then integrated into a user’s personal library and appear in favorites on the mobile app.
• High quality audio: Songs can be downloaded at the standard rate of 64 kbps or users can turn on HQ downloads (up to 320 kbps) to save the song as a larger file with higher audio quality. This gives listeners the option of receiving high quality downloads for maximum audio fidelity.
• Multi-tasking: Android users can continue to play music with MOG while using other applications. (MOG will add multi-tasking for iOS 4 users)

10 Invites to Rdio

Have you been wanting to try the new social music service, Rdio? Thanks to Glenn Peoples, I now have an account, and I'm giving away all of my 10 invites to readers of IMT. All you have to do is post a comment requesting an invite by logging in with your Twitter account below, and I will randomly select 10 winners.

Essentially, the invite will give you a free, 3 day preview of Rdio, but after that, you'll have to pay. So while the invite will get you in so you can try Rdio, you'll have to start paying after 3 days (please note, Rdio only works within the US at this time).

Below is a brief feature tour of Rdio from lifehacker:

Create your own Interactive Radio Stations with Loudcaster

Loudcaster, a recent 2010 TechStars Boston graduate, enables anyone to create their own radio station for recorded music or live events. Essentially, you upload your high quality MP3 files with the appropriate artist, song and album information, and Loudcaster will simulcast your station.

You can also live broadcast at any time via tools like SAM or the Edcast plugin for Winamp. When you stream a live feed, it will replace your recorded feed automatically, resuming again once you finish your live broadcast, without dropping any listeners.

Presently, Loudcaster provides up to 10 Gigs of storage, and you can add and manage guest DJs as well. Looks like they may still be in private beta, but the service might be another way for you to reach your fans.

RadioDNS

The RadioDNS project is creating an extensible DNS based specification which could significantly improve the delivery and experience of broadcast radio over the Internet by linking the stations signal to IP delivered services, allowing for interactive enhancements like music ratings, artist news, visualizations, meta data, and more.

JELLI, a User Controlled Voting Service for Broadcast Radio Goes Nationwide

Earlier today, Jelli, a user controlled voting service for broadcast radio stations announced its expansion into the following 10 markets across the US:

• WBOS Boston, MA
• WPST Philadelphia, PA
• KXTE Las Vegas, NV
• WJBX Fort Myers, FL
• WJLK Jersey Shore, NJ
• WKRL Syracuse, NY
• WKLL Utica, NY
• KISN Bozeman, MT
• KBAZ Missoula, MT
• KTRS Casper, WY

I've been a fan of Jelli for quite sometime, and even interviewed Jelli about 6 months ago, as the idea of allowing listeners and music enthusiasts to control broadcast radio is the right direction for terrestrial radio. It could reduce a station's operating expenses by eliminating or reducing the need for traditional on-air personalities, so their expansion is not a surprise, nor is their recent press coverage in USAToday - it's just a matter of time before more radio stations adopt this kind of technology.

If you're not familiar with Jelli, the service allows users to control what's played on a local broadcast radio station via their web browser through simple acceptance voting. For example, "when a song is actually playing on the air, listeners can also vote whether it Rocks or Sucks. If enough players think it Sucks, the song is taken off the air instantly, even if it’s mid-song" (via Jelli's press release). According to Dave MacDonald, senior vice president and market manager at CBS Radio, “we were excited about the success of Jelli’s initial launch in San Francisco, and are now putting X107.5 Las Vegas in the hands of the listeners, allowing them to control the broadcast in real time.”

Below is a recent interview with InformationWeek:

Three Videos Worth Watching

If you haven't seen these videos, you may want to find 20 minutes to watch them - you'll be glad you did.

CNN interview with Tim Westergren of Pandora:

Derek Sivers' Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy:


Nate Harrison's history of the the Amen Break:

Band Metrics Releases Public Beta

Its been a long time coming, but I'm happy to announce that we finally released the public beta of Band Metrics this morning from Midem.

What took so long? Great question. We had to re-engineer the entire system, as the previous two versions were flawed. This was a difficult decision that consumed our time, but it's better to get the architecture right before releasing it to the public. We now feel confident we've built a system, which is entirely Ruby/Rails that will not only collect, store and analyze artist data accurately, but will be fast and scale rapidly, as we also moved our entire system into the cloud via Engine Yard. As an example, Band Metrics now pulls-in and displays initial artist data within seconds, not days or hours. Needless to say, I'm proud of our developers.

We also streamlined the site, and added a couple of new features, including Fan Segmentation and Influence Measurement. Essentially, this allows artists, managers, labels and the like to see a breakdown of fans (based initially on Twitter comments), and a fan's influence among their friends (below is a brief screencast).

We still have lots of work to do, including design enhancements and new features, as well as incorporate our existing analytical tools into the new site (we ran out of time as we wanted to release at Midem), so we greatly appreciate your ongoing support, as this is just the beginning!

awsm.fm

Apps for listening to the most popular emerging songs and artists like We are Hunted will soon have a new addition with awsm.fm (pre-release private beta). Thoughts?

How Does SoundExchange Work

Curious as to how SoundExchange works, and how it can benefit you? Then check out this short video they created a couple of days ago:

Stereomood: Internet Radio for your Mood

Stereomood is a free emotional internet radio that suggests music which may best suit your mood or activities based on the tag you select, allowing you to create playlists for your life that can be shared. Looks like most of their music is streamed from blogs. Here's an example of the mood "groovy."

While they've been around for about a year, there are several sites doing something similar, and the streaming space is crowded with clear leaders, but they are pulling in some great indie music like The Fiery Furnaces, The XX and Vitalic.

Online Radio Trends

Two graphs relative to the number of unique visitors for some of the music industry's leading streaming providers during the past year (not a comprehensive list).

Tier 1:

Spotify is not included as they're not officially in the US market yet.

Tier 2:

Indie Music Map for the iPhone by nuTsie

A few days ago, nuTsie released its Indie Music Map iPhone App. It's quite cool - you can select a region of the country and listen to popular songs from indie artists in the North Atlantic, North Central, Pacific Northwest, Mountain, Southwest and Southeast regions:



You can then view more information about the artist, purchase their song directly from iTunes, watch video from the artist on YouTube (if applicable), or learn more about the region an artist is from.

Interestingly, nuTsie selected all of the songs presently available from websites, blogs, festivals and radio stations where the artists were becoming popular like Pitchfork, SXSW, Hype Machine, Coachella, Bonaroo, Idolator, Lollapalooza, Stereogum, and many others. Artists available include Animal Collective, TV On The Radio, Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes, Passion Pit, MGMT, Santigold, No Age, Silversun Pickups, and about 500 more, but I would imagine they'll be adding more songs and artists soon.

The app is only $1.99 and plays tracks in shuffle mode, with unlimited skips, and no advertising - could be a great way to discover new bands while traveling. This app looks promising, but it might be more reflective of what a region is listening to if the app had a user-generated element to it, or allowed artists to upload their music directly - who knows, maybe they're already building-in that functionality.

Jelli Interview

Below is an email interview with Jelli, a new social music service that provides listeners with real-time control over what gets played online and on terrestrial radio via real-time voting, and they just released their public beta last night. I've also embedded a short video about Jelli below as well.

How does it work (technically and practically)?
Jelli users control what plays via Jelli’s website, where they can choose from a list of stations, view all the songs available for that station, and collaborate with the rest of the listening community to decide what is played. Listeners can tune in to Jelli online, or on whatever radio station is currently broadcasting Jelli programming.

On the Jelli website, each station’s playlist is 100% community-controlled and dynamically generated based on real-time voting. The station’s catalog is exposed to users, so they can search for songs they want to hear. Each song has a score, determined by votes, and the highest-scoring songs will make it on the air. What plays next is always up for grabs and determined completely by the community’s votes - the next song isn’t selected until seconds before it goes on the air.

Additional gaming elements allow users to earn even more power over the playlist, with items such as Rockets (which boost a song to the top of the list) and Bombs (which destroy a song’s score), and features such as group chat and messaging enable listeners to band together to decide what plays, create a themed playlist, or even lobby for help to get a particular song on the air. The community can also vote on whether they like what’s currently playing, and if enough of the online audience doesn’t like a song, they can pull it off the air.

The Jelli service is powered by Jelli’s automated platform, which handles the Jelli gaming system, content and catalog management, audio playstream system, real-time audio mixing, dynamic audio content, and announcement of game activity via text-to-speech technology. Jelli’s Station Server integrates with stations’ existing broadcast infrastructure to deliver a DMCA and FCC-compliant playlist – generated by the online community for that station – directly to the station for broadcast. Stations that broadcast Jelli programming have their own co-branded destination sites on the Jelli website.

Who are Jelli's competitors and how is Jelli different from them?
As an online radio service, Jelli competes with services such as Pandora. As syndicated programming, Jelli’s competition includes other shows that stations could select to broadcast over the air. What makes Jelli different from others in these categories is the social nature of the service and the control it gives to listeners over what plays. Rather than a personalized music service, such as Pandora, or even an iPod, Jelli is a social stream where the music is selected by the entire listening community for a particular station – leading to new music discovery and always impromptu, community-driven playlists. As programming, Jelli brings a fresh approach to traditional radio, using the web to give the listening community control over what broadcasts on the air.

What are some reasons why someone would want to use Jelli?
Jelli is a fun social jukebox and great way to interact with other members of a station’s listening community. On Jelli, users do more than just listen – they participate, play, and discover new music.

When/why did Jelli form, and who is behind Jelli?
Jelli was founded in 2008 by internet veterans Michael Dougherty (Microsoft) and Jateen Parekh (Amazon), with the belief that a huge opportunity exists to bring something fresh to the radio industry. Jelli’s experienced team consists of ten members from Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Aggregate Knowledge, etc., with proven experience launching award winning consumer services such as the Amazon Kindle, Tellme and ReplayTV. Jelli is seeking to completely transform traditional broadcasting, which still has massive reach and usage but is becoming less relevant to a new generation of web users. Jelli is reinventing what is possible with traditional broadcasting empowering listeners to interact in a dynamic web experience.

How does Jelli make money?
Jelli’s business model reflects the standard economics for radio syndication: advertising barter and/or licensing fees. Cost structure and copyright frameworks in traditional broadcasting are very attractive/established. Jelli’s partners license Jelli’s innovative programming and pay copyright royalties (onair / online) and delivery expenses (FM / streaming).

Inference is the Difference: Gaining Insight from Music Data Analytics

One of the goals of Band Metrics is to help artists and music industry professionals gain insight from the quantitative and qualitative data we collect, as identifying correlations can be the difference between increasing revenue for your band, or spinning your wheels guessing as to how your fans interact, share and listen to your music. Below are two recent screencasts that help demonstrate a couple of the areas we're working on to make meaning out of your music data (view more of our screencasts here).

The first screencast demonstrates how radio play data (soon social data) could help you build relationships with broadcast stations that are, or are not playing your music. The second one provides a suggested tour map based on the data we're collecting about your band. These are both experimental mapping features at this point, one of the reasons why we're still in private beta, but we thought you might like to see them if you don't have an account:

Mixcloud Releases Cloud Radio

The following is a quick press release from MixCloud. I'll post a follow-up if time allows, but this looks like a cool service:

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New London based online radio startup Mixcloud opened its doors to the public today at 12pm GMT. It's aim is to re-think radio.

The founders of the company – friends from Cambridge University – were frustrated with how hard it was discovering and promoting radio online. As radio presenters and DJs themselves, they were actively hunting down great shows every day and realised more could be done to help connect this content to listeners.

A year ago they quit their full time jobs and moved into a warehouse in West London to fix these problems. Their vision is to build the YouTube of radio – a definitive online platform for on-demand radio shows, from music to talk.

Mixcloud has an interesting view on the future of radio and are innovating to disrupt the traditional ways people discover and interact with the medium. They describe the concept as “Cloud Radio” and the content as “Cloudcasts”, which are stored in hard-drives in the sky – the “cloud” – and accessible on-demand, anywhere, where anyone can upload to the site and the listeners decide who get exposed.

The shows currently lean towards club music and DJs, given the founders’ background in organising clubnights and warehouse parties. However they are already working on expanding the breadth of content and are in discussions with big house-hold names, and they now have over 1,000 content partners and presenters, including: Diesel Radio, former BBC Radio 1 presenter, Chris Coco, leading music blogs such as, Curb Crawlers, great record labels like, Border Community and many more.