I have been collecting digital music files since the MP3 became a practical storage and transmission format in the late 90s. Whether traded, ripped from my own CDs, downloaded in the heydays of Emusic.com – which for a time served up all-you-can-download music from mostly independent labels for a reasonable monthly fee – or purchased direct from artists or on Bandcamp, I’ve amassed a pretty substantial, and idiosyncratic digital music library.

Because I worked in IT and can be a little obsessive, I’ve also done a pretty good job of holding onto this collection, backed up in many ways across CD-Rs, then spare hard drives and, now, the cloud. But in 2021 such a collection is most valuable only if you can listen to it everywhere and every way you might listen to Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music or Tidal.

That brings me to Plex.

Plex is a free audio and video streaming platform that was created to let you host and stream your own media collection to just about anywhere on the internet. At its most basic, you install the Plex server software on a computer – available for Windows, MacOS and most flavors of Linux – where you store your media library. Plex indexes it and makes it available online. Though Plex is most well known for helping people organize and stream their video collections – the platform now even offers free on-demand and live movies and TV – my primary use case is for music.

The simplest way to access your Plex library is with a web browser. But its utility is multiplied by the Plex app, which is available for most major connected TVs and streaming devices, like Apple TV and Roku, iOS and Android, as well as audio-only platforms like Sonos.

That all means you can use Plex pretty much like any music streaming service. The difference is that the music is all yours. Moreover, you can let friends and family listen to your music collection, too, if they have a Plex account.

The Journey to Plex

I finally landed on Plex after going through several different methods for just making my digital music library available inside my house. There are standards like DLNA that let you make a hard drive full of music available to apps and platforms like iTunes/Apple Music, VLC and Sonos on your home network. You can even run the server on many standalone network hard drives, which don’t need to be connected to a computer. While great in theory, I found the actual experience to be glitchy and unreliable. However, most importantly, that only made the music available on computers and certain devices on my home network – not all devices, and certainly not on my smartphone or tablet when away from home.

No doubt there are smarter geeks than I who have made these solutions work better, and know how to set up their routers to make collections available more widely. It’s just not something I was successful at in the amount of time that I could invest.

More than just being able to stream my music collection just about anywhere with internet, what I enjoy about Plex is that the interface and features are also similar to commercial streaming services. You can create your own playlists, or start a radio station based upon an artist or song you’re listening too. The mobile Plex apps also let you sync music to your device for listening when you don’t have internet access or need to conserve bandwidth.

Plex also brings in artist and album metadata, like bios, album reviews and genre, and provides recommendations for similar tunes based upon this info. You can use these recommendations to go on a guided tour of your own music collection, not unlike browsing records or CDs, sometimes rediscovering old favorites or stuff you forgot you even had.

Recommendations for Set Up

For the most part setting up a Plex server is pretty easy, but there are a few things to keep in mind. First, whatever computer you use should be one that can be left on all the time, connected to the internet. Plex doesn’t require the latest most powerful machine, so my recommendation would be to use an older machine that you don’t need everyday. I wouldn’t use my everyday work or family computer.

You could use an old laptop, but need to make sure that it doesn’t go to sleep, even if the lid is closed. It doesn’t need to have a display on all the time – it could even be tucked away. It just needs to be on whenever you expect to stream something.

All your media files will need to be stored on a hard drive inside or attached to the computer. For music this isn’t very demanding, so speed isn’t terribly important – a USB hard drive is fine, but a USB thumb drive or SD card is probably not the best choice.

As I would recommend for any music library, make sure you’re backing it up. Plex doesn’t do this for you, so make sure to use some kind of backup system that’s appropriate for the computer running your Plex server, such as Time Machine or iCloud for a Mac. I actually keep my music library in a Dropbox folder that is continually sync’d to the cloud, and then I periodically (about monthly) make a full backup to an external hard drive.

I’ve also found that Plex seems happier when the server is connected to your home network via an Ethernet cable. I found it to be unreliable over wireless using Windows, MacOS and Linux. It seemed like the host computer would disconnect from the network, or experience bandwidth issues, at the most inconvenient times. Your mileage may vary, but that’s my experience.

My last point is to note that if you want to access your Plex media outside your home network, you may need to set up your home router to do that. That said, most recent-vintage home wireless routers support protocols like UPnP or NAT-PMP which the Plex server will use to automatically negotiate and allow external connections. For most people this should just work.

For my own Plex set up I’m using a refurbished Dell Optiplex slim desktop with an Intel i5 and 8 GB of RAM that I purchased from Portland Free Geek. It’s running Mint Linux, which has a pretty intuitive graphic interface, and is a variant of the very popular Ubuntu distribution. Conveniently, Plex can be downloaded and installed using Mint’s app store. However, I’ve learned that updates have to be done manually from the command line. So keep this in mind if you’re considering Linux.

Previously I was running Plex on a mini PC with an Intel Atom processor on Windows 10. This setup was just barely powerful enough for serving music, but it worked fine (when it was working). It was Windows 10 that I found to be a real pain, downloading and auto installing updates that would reboot the machine or cause things to stop working. I’m not really a Windows guy, and this became just too unreliable.

The main problem with my current set up turned out to be my 6 year-old Apple AirPort Extreme wireless router (though I’m connected via Ethernet cable). This now-discontinued model doesn’t support UPnP or NAT-PMP, which means I had a heck of time trying to make the server available outside my home network, even after trying to configure port forwarding. Ultimately I found that the AirPort supports assigning a single LAN IP address that is basically outside its firewall, specifically for gaming and similar applications. Assigning this IP to the Plex server solved my problem.

I like using Linux for my Plex server because I have total control over OS and other updates, and the system is otherwise rock solid and stable. While I am not a server admin, I have been using Linux and Unix for decades and am comfortable with command line basics when necessary.

Overall I’d say setting up a home Plex server requires an intermediate level of skill and comfort with computers and home networking. There are plenty of how-to guides and documentation out there that I think one ought to be able to get it set up in a weekend.

I use Plex alongside paid streaming services (full disclosure, at the time of writing I work for SiriusXM / Pandora) and all sorts of internet radio. That means I can stream all sorts of live stations, new music, artists and albums I’ve just heard about, as well as rare obscurities in my collection that maybe never had a wide release, like a long broken-up local band or a friend’s DJ set. When I buy new vinyl that includes a download card, those MP3s go up on my Plex server, making it trivial for me to sync it to my smartphone to stream on trips out to the Oregon Coast where portions are outside good cell or radio reception.

Mind Your Metadata

One last hint for getting the most out of Plex is to be mindful of your metadata. Every major music file format (MP3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, etc.) has metadata information that minimally encodes artist, song and album names. Plex will rely on this to catalog your music.

One way to check the metadata of your file is to play it in an app like VLC, Quicktime or Windows Media Player and see if the artist, song and album info is there, and correct. I’ve found that often with older MP3s or ones of unknown provenance there might not be any metadata (ID3 tags) at all – everything is in the filename (“artist-song-album.mp3”) if it’s there at all (possibly only “track01.mp3”).

If the metadata is only a little incomplete Plex it can be pretty smart about this and fill in gaps of missing information, but not always. I’ve found that the more obscure the music, the less good Plex is at cataloging it.

Plex can also be pretty terrible at cataloging compilation albums. It really wants to file each track under the artist of that song, rather than as a single compilation album. The solution I’ve found is to be sure that all the tracks on a comp have the same “albumartist” tag.

The simplest way I’ve found to fix metadata is using a free app called MusicBrainz Picard, which is available for most major operating systems. For most major releases you can do a database scan and Picard will pretty accurately identify all the major info. That doesn’t always work for more obscure stuff. However, it’s also a very powerful metadata editor. There is a bit of a learning curve – Google (or DuckDuckGo) is your friend.

I know a lot of people who have a hard drive full of music that doesn’t get listened to very much even though it’s not available for streaming. I totally get how the convenience of streaming services trumps being leashed to a single computer just to listen to music. Plex really helps to bridge that gap and make your music collection just as accessible. I hope maybe this inspires you to metaphorically dust off your old MP3s and bring them into the 2020s.

The post Build Your Own Personal Streaming Service with Plex appeared first on Radio Survivor.

After coming to the brink of a shutdown when grant monies were dramatically reduced, the Free Music Archive announced that it will live on under the ownership of camera rental company KitSplit. A few weeks ago my Radio Survivor colleague Erick Klein talked at length with FMA Director Cheyenne Hohman, who explained why the project was on the verge of shutting down, though leaving the door open to a possible recovery.

Although the FMA was originally conceived by founding community radio station WFMU as as a repository of music free from performance royalties for non-commercial radio stations to play online, it also became a place for independent film- and video-makers to find music for their productions, available for free or at low-cost. The KitSplit acquisition reflects that constituency, since the company supports independent creators in a variety of ways.

As it turns out, non-commercial radio stations were able to negotiate reasonable rates to play commercial music on their online streams, making the FMA less of an outright necessity. Yet, it still developed into a immense catalog of curated sounds that attracted an enormous community of listeners and creators. The irony is that its popularity only increased costs to host all these files.

As a for-profit company one assumes that KitSplit is in a better position to keep the FMA funded. While some from the community radio world might be suspicious of a for-profit taking over the archive, on the FMA blog Cheyenne assures that, “though KitSplit is a for-profit business, the FMA will remain true to its mission of sharing free, curated audio to all.” She also points out KitSplit’s efforts to support women in filmmaking.

On its own blog, KitSplit says, “FMA will stay up and running as is, and together we’ll be able to serve creators and our community even more powerfully.”

Though FMA listening and downloads have remained online while its future was being sorted out, artists have not been able to contribute new tracks for about a month. Fresh uploads should resume in a few weeks.

The scare that the FMA might go away (though with the current library backed up at the Internet Archive) serves a reminder to me that vital independent projects like this need our continuing support. It’s easy to become complacent and think that grant funding or others will keep them afloat. Yet, they’re often more secure and health when a multitude of small funders contribute rather than when relying upon a small number of large funders.
That’s why community radio fund drives are a necessary, thought sometimes annoying thing – the loss of a few individual donors can be made up by new ones, who might be brand new listeners. The loss of a multi-thousand dollar grantor is much harder to recover from.
So support your favorite independent non-profit, low-profit and what-profit? enterprises while they’re still here.

The post The Free Music Archive Lives On appeared first on Radio Survivor.

There are all kinds of reasons why I love my neighborhood in San Francisco, and Thrillhouse Records is definitely one of them. It is an excellent little community based record store situated on Mission and 30th street, just below the climb up to scenic Bernal Heights.

Thrillhouse describes itself as so:

“Thrillhouse Records a volunteer run not-for-profit DIY Record Store.  We specialize in Punk and consider ourselves a “Punk Record Store”. But in addition to punk, we carry all types of new and used records and tapes – Classical, Jazz, Oldies, Indie Rock, Classic Rock, Soul, Reagge, Hip Hop, Soundtracks and more. We also buy records daily.”

On Sunday I decided to deploy my modest mobile video and iMovie skills to pay a homage to the operation.

Et voilà!

The post A quick tour of Thrillhouse records in San Francisco appeared first on Radio Survivor.

National Record Store Day has once again come and gone and [doh!] I keep forgetting to post a piece on that day mentioning that for years I worked for one of the biggest post World War II record chains on the East Coast: Sam Goody records. I clerked at the 49th street and Broadway store in Manhattan through the 1970s. Eventually I wrote a memoir of the experience which community radio pioneer Lorenzo Milam published on his Ralph Magazine website. It was the first essay I ever wrote on the web. I hope that Lorenzo won’t mind my posting a lengthy excerpt about some of my co-workers. My favorite was Louis Weber, who enjoyed a city-wide reputation as classical music’s occupational equivalent of the insulting waiter.

“A short, stocky man in his early 60s, Lou didn’t suffer fools easily,” I wrote. “Actually, I think he enjoyed fools. . . . “

Lou would camp out on the northeast corner of the store, and hum to himself cheerfully, waiting either for his first coffee break of the day (9:15 am) or for some naïf to torture. An elderly lady might walk up to him with two recordings of Beethoven’s “Pathetique” in hand, one performed by Vladimir Horowitz, the other by Arthur Rubinstein. “Which one would you recommend, Mr. Weber?” she would ask respectfully. “Frankly madam,” Lou would reply, “I don’t think you could tell the difference.” He would then politely hand her one or the other album.

During the four years I worked at Sam Goody’s, I saw scores of people patiently endure this kind of treatment, and come back for more. One afternoon a customer came into the store and asked me to show him the “male vocals” section. I took him to the classical male singers bin, divided into names like Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau and Tito Schipa. He looked unhappy. “No,” he explained to me, “I mean, you know, like Frank Sinatra.”

Lou observed this confusion and waved a chiding finger in my face. “Matthew, Matthew, Matthew!” he said, affectionately. “Can’t you tell by the level of mental perspicuity on this man’s face what kind of singers he wants?” The man laughed and thanked us as Lou led him to the popular male vocals section, from which he took three Mario Lanza records to the cash register.

Jeff Atterton ran the jazz department. A tall, wiry man, Atterton had served as a pilot in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. I didn’t know much about Jeff besides the fact that he treated me kindly and was, in my opinion, slightly barmy (as the British say). If you annoyed Jeff, as did Lou Weber, he would write obscenities on your locker in the employee room. Most of the time, however, Jeff simply walked up and down the jazz aisles offering commentary about Bix Beiderbecke or Fats Waller to various friends. “I used to know Fats, you know,” he would mumble, as often to himself as to anyone else. And, of course, Jeff detested modern Jazz, which meant Charlie Parker and beyond.

I am grateful to Atterton for one favor—an introduction to an especially interesting customer. One afternoon he nervously approached me, and asked if I might assist “a friend” of his with the purchase of some classical recordings. I looked at the friend. He sported a black, drapelike overcoat, and was, as I correctly guessed, by virtue of his sunglasses and long cane, blind. In addition to these objects, he wore a top hat with feathers sticking out, a wide variety of necklaces, rings and wristlets, and carried several musical instruments, including a clarinet and a soprano saxophone on hooks attached to his coat belt.

I looked at this customer, and glanced at Lou. He stood at the opposite side of the store, anticipating with horror the possibility that he might have to deal with the patron. I had clearly been assigned the job. “I would like to introduce you,” Atterton began gratefully, “to Mr. Rassan Roland Kirk.”

We shook hands and “Kirk,” as his friends called him, explained that he wanted to check out some contemporary classical music. We walked over to the avant-garde area, and it soon became clear to me that my task was to pick out compositions that I thought au currant and describe them to him.

Kirk became my regular customer, and I quickly became accustomed to his tastes. He always wanted a complete rundown of the orchestration. If in my reading of the instruments we came across anything electronic, the jazz master would immediately nix the prospect. “No man, no,” he would intone grimly. “I don’t want any electronic instruments. Just acoustic.” In this fashion, Kirk would accept a copy of Boulez’s “Hammer Without a Master” and veto a just released version of George Crumb’s “Ancient Voices of Children.”

We would then march over the to the opera vocals section and pick out five or six Caruso, Chaliapin, or Kirsten Flagstad solo albums. Kirk loved old opera recordings. But the same rule applied. I’d have to scrutinize each record to make sure it hadn’t been somehow remastered. “No remasters man,” he’d warn. “Just tracks of the original acoustic tubes, you know?” After about an hour of this kind of research, I’d trudge up to the cashier’s desk with 20 or 30 albums, a very satisfied Roland Kirk clanking along behind me.

Over the years many people have written to me about the essay. Some have corrected some of my recollections (in my defense, I wrote the piece decades after my last day with the operation). Others have written in to share their memories as well. I even get market researchers asking for advice.

In 2006 a clerk who sounded like he was about my age (back then) wrote to thank me for my piece. He was working for Sam Goody in Arizona. “I liked your story,” his email continued. “It was pretty interesting.”

I just thought i’d write to you to tell you that. I guess they are closing 200 stores after christmas…for being “continually not performinng” stores. They’ve already knocked off the other two that were closest to mine. I’ve been there for a year. Only time will tell, but i think they’ll close ours down too. I like being employed there, especially after that rotten Best Buy Inc. sold us because we were losing them money. That’s business for ya I guess. We are owned by Sun Capitol Inc now which from what I understand is a business that buys other companies to help them when another company sells the company. It’s weird. Oh well. That’s about all I have to say. Have a good one.

With that, what was left of the Goody chain gradually disappeared. As far as I can tell, the last Sam Goody outlet in the United States closed in San Diego in 2011. Happily, vinyl records are coming back. Here is hoping for more memoirs about crazy cranky record store clerks!

The post Nat’l Record Store Day footnote: my years at Sam Goody records appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Latest Sprint buzz: the carrier may try to acquire T-Mobile. This follows Sprint announcing that it will offer six months of Spotify Premium to “all new and existing postpaid Sprint customers” who are on one of its “framily” plans.

This is good news, except that if you take advantage of the aforementioned offer your carrier is Sprint. Last November Consumer Reports dropped the wireless outfit to last, giving it “dismal marks” in all the major categories: reliability, texting, messaging, and overall value.

Sprint Corporate all but agreed with the assessment, telling CNet that “while the findings in the Consumer Reports’ survey are disappointing, they’re not necessarily surprising. We’ve asked customers during the past year to ‘pardon our dust’ as we build out and upgrade our network.”

You can read Phonedog consumer reviews of Sprint to your heart’s content. First three review titles: “Worst company I have ever dealt with.” “THEY SET ME UP!” and “Absolutely the worst phone service ever.”

On the other hand, Sprint does offer unlimited data plans (at least for now), and the “Framily” group subscription system does appear to make wireless more affordable. So if you are a Spotify fan and crave a commercial-free music sharing experience, the trade-off might be worth it.

The post Is Sprint worth six free months of Spotify Premium? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Radio is still the dominant way people discover music

• 48% discover music most often through the radio
• 10% discover music most often through friends/relatives
• 7% discover music most often through YouTube

And that’s the way that Rolling Stone ran with the story:

“For all the hullabaloo over the past decade about iPods, iPhones, satellite radio, Pandora, Rhapsody, Spotify, illegal music piracy and YouTube,” its blog post declared, “old-school radio continues to dominate the way fans consume new songs.”

Ditto for Reuters (“Video hasn’t yet killed the radio star after all . . . “) and the usual conventional broadcast sites, eg: FMQB and RadioInk (“Radio is where consumers discover music.”).

But the more broadband technology oriented blogs were quick to emphasize other sections of the report. Here was the headline for TechCrunch. “Nielsen: More Teens Now Listen To Music Through YouTube Than Any Other Source.”

TechCrunch acknowledged that 48 percent stat. “For almost two-thirds of U.S. teenagers, however, Google’s YouTube is now a more important source of music than radio (54%), iTunes (53%) and CDs (50%),” the site added. Same approach from PC World: “Teens Most Likely to Consume Music on YouTube.”

Here are the relevant percentages from that section of the survey:

More teens listen to music through YouTube than through any other source

• 64% of teens listen to music through YouTube
• 56% of teens listen to music on the radio
• 53% of teens listen to music through iTunes
• 50% of teens listen to music on CD

Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of the Nielsen report was its observation that suggestions or feedback from friends make a huge difference for many music consumers:

• 54% are more likely to make a purchase based off a positive recommendation from a friend
• 25% are more likely to make a purchase based off a music blog/chat rooms
• 12% are more likely to make a purchase based off an endorsement from a brand
• 8% of all respondents share music on social networking sites, while 6% upload music.

All this goes to show that we are reading this sort of data very differently, depending on our industry or social sector vantage point. I have to admit that I like WFMU’s tweet on the survey the best: “It’s True! Radio Remains the Top Method for Discovering Crappy New Music.”

The post Radio still “dominant” music discoverer? Contested readings of Nielsen data appeared first on Radio Survivor.

These sort of commentaries represent our children as misers. But are they the ones responsible for rising income inequality and skyrocketing college costs?

“I am an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. I’ve only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.”

These words, written by college radio general manager and NPR intern Emily White, will probably go down in history as the most remembered in the great music file sharing debate of our time. White acknowledged that most of her music collection comes from CD ripping, provoking a stinging takedown response from Camper Van Beethoven star David Lowery.

“On a personal level, I have witnessed the impoverishment of many critically acclaimed but marginally commercial artists. In particular, two dear friends: Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse) and Vic Chesnutt. Both of these artists, despite growing global popularity, saw their total  incomes fall in the last decade. There is no other explanation except for the fact that ‘fans’ made the unethical choice to take their music without compensating these artists.”

My colleagues Paul Riismandel and Jennifer Waits have written very smart posts in response to Lowery and White’s comments. I’m less sympathetic to Lowery, myself. Most of the protests against file sharing (or “file stealing” if you insist) I read from musicians and from the content industry seem oblivious to the larger context of the problem, an economic war on the young that shows no signs of subsiding, and which is obviously a critical factor in the free content craze.

Deep empathy

“I also deeply empathize with your generation,” Lowery claims in his response to White. “You have grown up in a time when technological and commercial interests are attempting to change our principles and morality.”

What is so striking to me about Lowery’s commentary is its lack of empathy for White’s tech savvy generation, which paradoxically is looking down the barrel of the most dismal economic future that any wave of college students has faced in decades. Like Lowery, I too am a college teacher. But for whatever reason, I’m willing to notice larger factors in this discussion that Lowery doesn’t acknowledge:

• Tuition rates are rising at unsustainable levels for most college students. They rose on average at around eight percent at public colleges in 2011. But that’s nothing compared to California, the state that jacked up tuition to the tune of 21 percent last year.

• In response, students are borrowing more money than ever to finance their degrees. The New York Federal Reserve just issued a report indicating that student loan debt has now reached $904 billion in the first quarter of this year. That’s a $30 billion increase from just the previous quarter.

• Tuition hikes are only one factor in this spiral. As the value of their parents homes have collapsed, they’re contributing less and less to their kids college funds. The Federal Reserve says that household wealth in the US has declined by well over a third from 2007 through 2010 because of collapsing home values.

• When these kids graduate, an estimated 85 percent of them are moving back home with mom and dad, and taking low wage jobs like the ones offered by Apple Computer. Or they’re going to graduate school to rack up more debt.

Beyond finger wagging

This sad story didn’t begin with the Great Recession. It started around the time that the file sharing debate really exploded, around 2000, with the rise of Napster and other P2P services. That’s when income inequality in the US and elsewhere really began to accelerate. From that year onward, wages for most American households began to stagnate. Look at UC Berkeley economist Emanuel Saez’s chart on real income growth for most Americans: a miserable 6.8 percent during the Bush “expansion” of 2002-2007, wiped out by a shrinkage of negative 11.6 percent over the subsequent two years, and a pathetic 0.2 percent “comeback” during the Obama administration.

“Between 2000 and 2010, the number of children living in poverty in America increased by 41 percent, and now includes nearly one-quarter of our kids,” reports The New York Times.

Lowery’s screed is tone deaf to all of this. Then he offers a litany of device and access costs that college students pony up for.

“Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself? Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?”

“Congratulations,” he continues, “your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians!”

This is way off. College students aren’t paying money for computers and data plans out of some malicious desire to hurt musicians, they’re doing so because they have to, just like they have to mortgage their futures to stay in school.

So here’s the Victorian message we older folks give college and high school students:

“We lost a bundle on our homes and we don’t want to raise our taxes, so you’ll have to borrow much more money for your education as college tuition costs rise. When you graduate, the best you can expect are low paying jobs and debt default. But despite all this, we expect you to collectively pay millions of dollars for one of the few commodities whose retail cost has dramatically dropped over the last decade: recorded music.”

Yeah, right. Good luck with this. What bugs me the most about these laments from musicians is that they give the impression that recording and performance artists are the only people who have suffered over the last decade. Sorry, but its been a little tough for teachers, manufacturing workers, radio and newspaper journalists, and about one hundred other categories of people, too—our children prominent among them.

I expect to get at least one response mentioning some rich brat from Harvard who shares files, plus a lecture about how “none of this condones stealing”—blah blah blah.

Look, I get it. I don’t rip CDs. I don’t P2P files. I dutifully buy mp3s on iTunes and Amazon. But let’s get real folks. We can debate the morality of file sharing until we are blue in the face. We can get the Federal government to regulate Google and the rogue sites via SOPA and other nasty proposed laws (if we really want to go that route). But bottom line: not a few of our kids are acting like economic realists because of economic realities. If we really want to fix this problem, we need to plug those realities into the discussion and start fixing them, too.

The post Is this guilt trip necessary? Music file sharing and the war on college students appeared first on Radio Survivor.

New cassettes at KFJC (Photo: J. Waits)

Social media outlets were abuzz yesterday with discussion about the ethics of stealing music after 20-year-old Emily White’s post, “I Never Owned Any Music Anyway” appeared on NPR’s All Songs Considered blog. In the piece, White, talks about how she has more than 11,000 songs in her iTunes library, but has only bought 15 CDs. The self-proclaimed college radio DJ explains that some of her music was taken from her college radio station. She writes:

“During my first semester at college, my music library more then tripled. I spent hours sitting on the floor of my college radio station, ripping music onto my laptop. The walls were lined with hundreds of albums sent by promo companies and labels to our station over the years. All of those CDs are gone. My station’s library is completely digital now and so is my listening experience.”

According to White’s bio at the end of her blog post, she’s the General Manager of American University’s online-only student radio station WVAU.org (although the WVAU website says that she’s one of the station’s Music Directors).

Although many are attacking White for stealing music (be sure to see David Lowery’s insightful rebuttal and my Radio Survivor colleague Paul’s excellent piece in response to that), I’m also interested in how this debate intersects with college radio and wonder about the ethics of copying music from a college radio station library.

I realize that it’s inevitable that college radio DJs will make copies of music found in their station’s library. And certainly this is preferable to outright theft. I’ve volunteered at stations over the years that struggled with the occasional bad apple record-stealing DJ. Less music seems to walk out the door of the station where I DJ than in the days before iPods and iTunes, so digital music piracy does seem to have cut down on the theft of physical music. That’s great news for a college radio station, but not necessarily good news for artists.

I remember a listener calling the station once to ask about a particular track that I was playing. After we chatted for awhile, the listener made a comment to the effect of, “Wow. I’d have the coolest iTunes library ever if I had access to the station’s library.” That statement irked me at the time and I am still bothered by it. Perhaps my annoyance comes from the fact that the caller was fixated on re-appropriating our station’s library. Why couldn’t the listener just enjoy the radio station as his source for amazing, hard-to-find music? Why did he feel the desire to “rip” our collection?

White also mentions that her college radio station no longer has CDs in its record library, that its collection is entirely digital. As a college radio participant and observer, I’m curious to know more about what happened to her station’s physical library. Were the CDs and vinyl digitized and then sold off? Were the records donated to DJs? What happens now when the station is sent promotional CDs? She concludes her post, saying,

“What I want is one massive Spotify-like catalog of music that will sync to my phone and various home entertainment devices. With this new universal database, everyone would have convenient access to everything that has ever been recorded and performance royalties would be distributed based on play counts (hopefully with more money going back to the artist than the present model). All I require is the ability to listen to what I want, when I want and how I want it. Is that too much to ask?”

Folks are attacking White for her attitude of entitlement (“what I want, when I want and how I want it”) and for her presumption that her entire generation isn’t willing to pay for music. Beyond that critique, I’m also saddened that as a college radio DJ, White isn’t understanding the ways that she is both hurting the artists that she loves, but is also discounting the very essence of radio.

White wants her music on demand, yet she’s apparently heading up an entire college radio station where whimsy and DJ-curated playlists should be the norm.

It also seems weird to me that a College Radio DJ/Music Director/General Manager would be someone who doesn’t buy physical music. White is missing out on some of the joys of college radio. I guess she never goes to record stores, never scans thrift store bins for hidden gems, and never goes to a merch table at a show to secure her own signed copy of her favorite band’s CD, record, or tape.

Speaking of cassettes, there’s a resurgence going on in the underground and artists are continuing to release material on tape. Although back in the day there were fears that “home taping” was killing the record industry, a return to vinyl and cassettes in 2012 may actually help to save the record business. If artists go the cassette-only route, they are rebelling against the digitally-oriented collectors.  I’m guessing that the “I want it now” folks are unlikely owners of cassette decks and will likely be too frustrated by the complexities of digitizing a cassette to attempt pirating one.

The post Is Ripping CDs from Your College Radio Station Ethical? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

David Lowery

David Lowery is a veteran rock musician known for his work with the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker. Over the last quarter decade he’s had plenty of experience with the music industry, both independent and major labels, and has recently expressed strong criticism for the way services like Spotify compensate artists. On Monday he issued a stinging rebuke to NPR intern and blogger Emily White who wrote about how although her iTunes library “exceeds 11,000 songs” she “never owned any music to begin with,” having “only bought 15 CDs” in her lifetime. White is also the general manager of online college station WVAU at American University, which she says also has no CDs any longer, saying that the “station’s library is completely digital now.” According to her piece, most of her collection came from ripping CDs in the station’s former library.

Lowery deftly deconstructs White’s assertion that

"I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience.

“What I want is one massive Spotify-like catalog of music that will sync to my phone and various home entertainment devices.”

He examines the harsh economic reality of Spotify for artists, while also taking on the legitimate value of those 11,000 songs in her library. Taking head-on the oft-heard argument that “It’s OK not to pay for music because record companies rip off artists and do not pay artists anything,” Lowery does a little math to demonstrate that under a typical major label contract and royalty rates the artists represented on her hard drive would still be in line to receive $2139.50 had those songs been purchased.

It’s obvious that the issue is personal for Lowery not just because he is a working musician, but because he has watched the poor health and decline of independent artists like Vic Chesnutt and Mark Linkous, who “saw their incomes collapse in the last decade.” He argues that, “there is no other explanation except for the fact that ‘fans’ made the unethical choice to take their music without compensating these artists.”

But Lowery doesn’t just single out Millennial generation music fans for their downloading and ripping. He also targets what he calls the “Free Culture movement, which is funded by a handful of large tech corporations and their foundations in the US, Canada, Europe and other countries.” Lowery points out how plenty of companies profit from this activity, from sites like The Pirate Bay and Google which profit from ads served around download search results, to the network and technology companies that provide all the underlying technology.

He also argues that all of these “free” music downloads aren’t actually free, since the aggregate cost of the technologies and services required to access music online–like laptops, internet access and smartphones–greatly exceeds the cost of buying CDs. This leads him to ask, “Why do you pay real money for this other stuff but not music?”

Lowery’s response to Emily White is perhaps the best concise critical analysis of the current online music industry from an artist’s perspective that I’ve read. When Kim Dotcom, the outlandish CEO of the file sharing site MegaUpload, was arrested in January, I didn’t view him as a victim precisely because it seems pretty obvious that his fortune was raised on distributing and profiting from other people’s content not by accident, but pretty much by design. But I’m also not ready to throw the whole Free Culture movement out with the infringers’ bath water.

I support a strong Fair Use regime which permits the truly fair use and reuse of culture for criticism, commentary, education and creating new works. As well, many emerging artists have taken advantage of free culture principles and networks to distribute their work to new audiences and develop ways to make a living. Yet, at the same time, the choice to give away some or all of one’s work should be the artist’s decision, no one else’s.

I also think that it is both practical and ethical for fans and listeners to trade music in a limited fashion in order to share discoveries with others. So many formerly underground artists over the last twenty-five years grew in popularity in part due to tape trading, mix tapes and CD-Rs. But I also agree that it is unethical to simply copy and download artists’ work en masse in lieu of purchasing it. It is probably unrealistic to expect a contemporary music fan’s iTunes library to be filled only with files ripped from her own CDs or purchased online. But I also agree with Lowery that a ratio of 15 purchased CDs to 11,000 tracks ripped or downloaded is not defensible.

Finally, I find it interesting, but vexing, that Emily White is a college radio DJ who doesn’t buy music. I wonder if that’s more generally true for today’s college DJs as a whole. Certainly when I was in college radio it was very common to have a ready supply of blank cassettes to tape the newest releases or make mix tapes at the station. But like Lowery, I also spent a significant portion of my tiny disposable income on records and CDs every month, because I was constantly being turned on to exciting new artists and albums and owning the actual article always seemed better to me.

With one-click CD ripping it’s even easier for today’s college DJs to inhale a half-dozen CDs in the time it would have taken me to tape just one album in the 90s. Does this ease, combined with the apparent change in popular attitudes meant that most college DJs are more like Emily White than David Lowery or me?

Unlike WAVU the college station that I advise still maintains a large CD and LP library, and it certainly seems to me that the student DJs still spin lots of plastic and vinyl, in addition to streaming from their iPhones and laptops. And, certainly, we hear about it quickly and loudly whenever a turntable stylus needs replacing. But I have not actually surveyed the students to find out if they’re actually spending their own cash on music.

It’s important for this debate and discussion to happen, and especially vital to hear from artists who are or are attempting to make a living with their music. Like many others, I was also a little surprised that White’s piece was published on NPR’s All Songs Considered blog, which is ostensibly a very artist-friendly and supportive venue, that is also directly supported by music label advertising. But, perhaps the editors were interested in airing this viewpoint in order to spark debate, in addition to providing an example of how many young adults regard and consume music.

I will be curious to see if All Songs Considered publishes a follow-up or response to Lowery’s critique.

The post Rocker David Lowery chides NPR music intern who didn’t pay for her 11,000 song collection appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Regular Radio Survivor readers are doubtlessly aware of Turntable.fm, my colleague Matthew’s favorite online music site. Turntable lets users join a room, pick an avatar and play DJ for all the other listeners in the virtual club. Matthew likes the “Classical of all kinds” room, but there are rooms dedicated just about every other genre or subgenre out there.

Inc. magazine recently published a profile of Turntable’s two founders: Billy Chasen, the passionate and creative coder, and Seth Goldstein, the marketer and rainmaker. Turntable debuted with a splash last year, but has seen its traffic slowly decline since. Recently the site announced a new deal with the major labels just ahead of last month’s SXSW festival. Writer Burt Helm accompanies both men at Turntable-sponsored events, documenting the waves of tension between them.

Helm observes,

"In the green room before Turntable’s first SXSW panel, it’s easy to see how months of this personality friction has worn on these two. When Goldstein arrives, he asks to see Chasen’s 10-minute presentation, the one he wanted to make alone before the panel discussion and Q&A.

“Chasen barely looks up from his laptop: ‘You can watch it onstage. I have work to do.’”

The article also reveals Chasen’s plans for a more passive-listening experience with a project called “Kiwi,” intended to go after users who want something more like Pandora. Instead of creating your own customized station, Kiwi would provide playlists based upon the recommendations of your friends.

It seems like this feature would fulfill a desire expressed candidly by Goldstein back in February. He told a panel at Social Media Week that

“I wish it was more background. …

"In a way I think there are a lot of passive services that aim to be more engaging. We have the opposite problem. It’s really engaging for a small community. Because typically, if you use Turntable, you go in and you get addicted, and spend four days of your life not doing much of anything else. And then you say, ‘I just can’t do this any more. I’ve got to get back to my life.’ Right?

“So our challenge is how do we open up Turntable to make it easier for passive listening.

"The reality is that I love Turntable. My kids love Turntable. (But when making dinner) I’ll put on Pandora and just put it in the background.”

The post The rocky ride and kiwi-flavored future of Turntable.fm appeared first on Radio Survivor.

It only makes sense, really, that a medium often referred to as the aether should now be associated with the cloud. For those who haven’t been paying attention to the interwebs for the last couple of years, the cloud refers to idea of data being available on nearly ubiquitous servers, anywhere on the internet. Gmail is email in the cloud, and in 2011 online music truly moved into the cloud, too.

Of course, easily accessible online music has been with us since the early 2000s. Apple’s iTunes Music Store first opened in 2008, and the Rhapsody subscription service has been with us since 2001. But it took until 2011 for the idea of an always available music service to hit critical mass.

The European service Spotify made its eagerly anticipated US debut in July of this year, providing access to an enormous catalog of music, featuring all the major labels, from a PC or mobile device. Spotify offers a free version of its app-based player for computers, while a paid subscription is required for mobile access. Then in October another European-based service, Rdio, answered Spotify’s challenge by offering its own limited free service that provides immediate access to specific songs, albums an artists in the browser.

While the likes of Spotfiy and Rdio attempt to offer the equivalent of a global jukebox, the major internet powerhouses Google, Amazon and Apple jumped in to offer their own cloud music services intended to let you access your own tunes anywhere there’s ‘net access. Amazon fired the first shot in March with the introduction of its Cloud Drive and Cloud Player platforms. When you subscribe to the service Amazon lets you upload an unlimited amount of music files that you can then play back on any computer or mobile device with an internet connection. Additionally, any music files you buy from Amazon can be automatically added to your Cloud Drive.

In May Google jumped into the fray with the public beta of its Google Music service. Like Amazon’s Cloud Player, Google lets you upload music files to its servers for playback anywhere. Google Music is free, but limits you uploading a mere 20,000 songs. The service went out of beta and became available to all in November. At the same time Google introduced its own music store, which also makes your purchased music available in the cloud.

Apple’s iCloud service opened for business when it released its newest iPhone in June. Like Google’s and Amazon’s services, iCloud lets you store the music you purchase in Apple’s iTunes music store. But Apple’s adds a unique twist to how it stores the music you already own. Instead of uploading your music files, iCloud scans your iTunes library and then provides you with a copy of any track that’s available in the iTunes music store. If you have an old, poorly encoded or low bitrate MP3 file you end up with a higher-quality iTunes music store version, which is a nice bonus. Then the only files you have to upload are ones that aren’t available in the iTunes store. Apple lets you store up to 25,000 of these songs, in addition to whatever new music you buy from their store.

Finally, I would be chastened if I did not mention Matthew’s favorite service, turntable.fm, which went public in May. As Matthew notes, turntable.fm is an interactive service built on a much more social experience than just listening to music by yourself. Instead of seeding a playlist or selecting tracks outright, turntable.fm lets you play DJ for virtual rooms full of listeners. Or you can be one of those listeners and let other online DJs take over. Either way, all of the music is delivered from the cloud.

What I find amazing is that, aside from Apple’s iCloud, a free version of all these services is available, provided you’re willing to put up with certain limitations on storage or mobile device access. I’ve been using all four of the free services this year, and find each of them useful for different reasons.

As I mentioned in my reviews of Spotify and Rdio, while each service’s catalog is impressively large, for my tastes there are a sufficient quantity of omissions to keep me from ponying up for their paid plans. I have uploaded some music to both Google and Amazon, though nothing close to my whole collection (which, admittedly, runs into hundreds of gigabytes). While both companies offer a desktop app that will upload your music in the background, it’s still a slow process. However, it is nice to make a portion of my collection available for anywhere listening, especially using a browser-based player that works on almost any computer.

Admittedly, in many ways I’m nitpicking with my criticisms of all these services. Ten years ago it was a pipe dream that we could access so much music, whether from our own collection or from an enormous online library, from just about anywhere in reach of a wi-fi or cell signal. Even if such a service existed, the cost would have been much greater, and certainly not free.

At the same time, these services face real limits not of their own making in the mobile space. The days of inexpensive unlimited mobile bandwidth are over, with the top three carriers all setting limits of about 2 GB per month for their basic data plans. At the common music data rate of 128 kbps, this works out to about 34 hours of listening in a month. The premium services and Apple’s iCloud offer higher quality files that use more bandwidth, reducing the listening time to more like 17 hours a month.

If you do most of your listening on a wi-fi connection, like I do, then this limitation isn’t much of a concern. But for folks looking to listen while in their cars or otherwise on the go where there isn’t wi-fi, these limits have more impact. Someone with a hour of commuting a day will probably make it through a month of listening, but much more will require upping the data plan.

Nevertheless, when you add in the services that debuted in 2011 to those already available, like Pandora, Rhapsody and last.fm, there’s an amazing array of customizable music available to play over the internet. While we may not yet be at the point where there’s global jukebox containing every recorded song and album, there’s an awful lot to choose from. The question for 2012 is if mobile bandwidth can keep up with the demand to listen to all this music anytime, anywhere.

The post 2011: The year radio entered the cloud appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Spotify is an online streaming music service that has been available in parts of Europe since 2008. It differentiates itself from popular US music services like Pandora and last.fm by permitting users to actually select the specific artists and songs to hear, rather than only relying upon an algorithm to choose music similar to a particular artist, song or style. In that way Spotify is more like a big online jukebox or iTunes, also permitting users to create playlists which can be shared with other users.

American music lovers who’d heard about the service waited anxiously to experience the kind of instant music availability enjoyed by listeners in Sweden, France and the UK. It took nearly three years, but after long negotiations with the major record labels Spotify became available in the US on July 14.

At first blush it certainly looks like Spotify poses a significant threat to streaming music services like Pandora, last.fm or Slacker, as well as subscription services like Rhapsody which also let listeners choose specific artists, albums and songs. I managed to swing an invitation to try out the free version of Slacker right after in launched stateside. After taking it for a test drive I can say that Spotify indeed does give these other services a run for the money, but I’m not certain that Spotify is ready to top them all.

As a free service it’s too limited to become someone’s go to music source the way that many people rely on Pandora, last.fm or internet radio. And I’m not yet convinced that Spotify’s paid service is complete enough for a lot of listeners like myself. Furthermore, it’s not really a radio service, so much as a very big jukebox in the cloud. Certainly there’s a lot to recommend that idea, but it’s also difficult to live up to.

Continue on to read my full detailed review of Spotify and find out what’s great, and what’s not.

Will it scale?

Most importantly, Spotify isn’t ready to become #1 because the service isn’t ready to take on enough free users to match the scale of Pandora or last.fm. Right now a free account is only available by invitation, whereas a free account with Pandora or last.fm is open to anyone. I presume this is because Spotify wants to scale carefully, rather than deal with a deluge of millions of new users crashing their systems. In fact, while free Spotify accounts were available to anyone for a while in the UK, the service is presently still only available by invitation there as well.

Prior to its US launch Spotify had 10 million users worldwide, with about 9 million of them free, ad supported accounts. By comparison Pandora has 80 million users and last.fm has 40 million. By user count alone Spotify has a way to go to beat the big two.

The Spotify difference

If you’re lucky enough to score a free Spotify account the experience indeed is different than Pandora or last.fm in several significant ways. First, Spotify requires its own application to run on your computer, with versions available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. For many users hoping to listen to music at work or school, places where one might not have the permission to install an application, this will be a barrier to using Spotify right away.

Pandora and last.fm both work inside your web browser. Now, this doesn’t mean that these services are available everywhere. Some schools and employers restrict access to streaming audio and video services. But if you’re currently a Pandora or last.fm listener at work or school it’s possible you won’t be able to install the Spotify app to enjoy that service.

MacOS Spotify app

At the same time there are advantages to having an app for Spotify. The app itself is pretty intuitive to use, borrowing quite a bit from the iTunes experience. Anyone who has used that nearly-ubiquitous Apple app or other music management software should have no problems getting started with Spotify’s quickly. Also, by not working in a browser Spotify minimizes the changes of dragging down your system or crashing your browser. The app also integrates with your iTunes library, giving you access to these tracks and playlists, too.

It’s very easy to search for artists, songs and albums. Just type in your search terms and hit enter. You’ll receive your results nearly instantaneously. Double-click on a track and you can be listening just as quickly. Compared to the web interfaces of Pandora and last.fm, Spotify is downright speedy. I’ve certainly been frustrated with Pandora and, especially, last.fm taking a long time to load a station, or failing to load altogether, sometimes requiring multiple page reloads.

Building a playlist is as easy with Spotify as in iTunes. Just click “new playlist” then select and drag songs to that playlist. It really seems like having a nearly limitless iTunes library at your fingertips. However, while Spotify has some 15 million tracks, it is not truly limitless.

A deep, but not bottomless, catalog

Just like other services there are some artists who are notably absent. Search for the Beatles, AC/DC, Frank Zappa or even King Crimson and you’ll only come up with covers by other artists. Bands like The Who or Pink Floyd have only a couple albums or a smattering of tracks available from their deep catalogs. These gaps aren’t limited to major artists either. In searching across many different genres I found that many artists only have some of their albums represented, or in some cases just a few songs from certain albums. I tried to see if missing albums were all on the same record label, but found that wasn’t necessarily the case.

Complaining about the catalog gaps in Spotify feels a bit like looking gift horse in the mouth, at least when you’ve got a free account and not paying a dime for the access and convenience. I must admit it’s nice to easily check out artists, albums and songs I’ve been interested in hearing rather than making do with thirty second clips.

The ad experience

Of course, just like its competitors (including commercial radio), Spotify isn’t really free. That free account is paid for by advertising that displays in the Spotify app and plays during the music stream. I was jarred by the first few ads I heard because they were for artists and albums that had no relationship to the music I was listening to. I just heard a whole different song start playing, making me think I’d accidenally clicked something. The first one I heard had no voiceover either, just a song snippet accompanied by display ad in the Spotify app. But because I had Spotify in the background I didn’t realize it at first.

I’ve gotten more used to the Spotify ads, but still find them to be more jarring than the last.fm and Pandora ads. On balance, the ads on the latter two services sound more like ones you hear on radio or television than the ones on Spotify.

Spotify has its (listening) limits

Like Pandora, Spotify’s free account sets a limit to how many hours you can listen to in a month. However, Spotify only offers 10 hours while Pandora offers four times as much. Especially if you listen while you work on other things, those 10 hours can run out before you know it. Last.fm does not limit listening time at all, giving it an advantage over the other two services.

Spotify offers unlimited listening on a computer in its Unlimited plan for $4.99 a month. At $9.99 a month the Unlimited plan offers “enhanced” sound quality and mobile access (more about that below). Pandora’s limitless listening is less expensive at $36 a year. This plan also includes higher quality audio, no ads and a desktop application rather than a browser-based player. Alternatively, for just 99 cents a user can keep listening past the 40 hour limit for the rest of the month, but without any of the other subscription benefits. There is no paid last.fm service — it’s completely free.

You can go mobile, for a price

Mobile devices are an area where the free Spotify service doesn’t compete at all. The mobile app is only available as a paid service with the Premium account at $9.99 a month. With that subscription you also get unlimited listening, higher quality sound files and an offline mode that lets you cache playlists on your computer or mobile device so you can listen without internet access.

Both Pandora and last.fm have free mobile apps. Pandora’s free mobile listening limits vary depending on your device and mobile service. Its $36 annual subscription removes any limit. Again, last.fm doesn’t have any limits in mobile, either.

It’s good to share

Despite the paranoia of the recording industry, sharing has been an important aspect of experiencing recorded music for decades. While Pandora and last.fm allow you to share a station that you’ve assembled, it’s not like sharing a mix CD or mix tape, since you can’t pick all the songs and artists. Spotify, on the other, let’s you share a full playlist with other Spotify users.

I think this is Spotify’s killer feature, because it most closely emulates the experience of a mix tape, as easy to assemble as making an iTunes playlist. Certainly there are other ways to share a playlist of tunes online, but most require you to either just share the list of songs which the other person would have to assemble herself. Otherwise you have to upload the song files yourself, which is something that exists in a legal grey area, at least in the US.

Share a Spotify playlist

Every Spotify playlist has a big “share” button underneath the playlist name. Click it and you can send a link to facebook, twitter or Microsoft Messenger with one more click, or just copy and paste a URL that you can send in email or post to a blog. For an example, click here for a playlist of Weird Al Yankovic polka medleys I created.

I really saw the appeal of this feature when a few of my friends first started posting playlists to facebook. It really was like distributing a mixtape to all your friends simultaneously. Well, all of your friends who have Spotify accounts, at least.

And therein lies the limitation of Spotify’s sharing. Since not everyone who wants a Spotify account can have one yet, you really can’t send that playlist to everyone you know. Also, there will probably be songs you wish to include–such as anything by the Beatles–but aren’t available in Spotify’s catalog.

The Spotify experience: a little too limited, not quite radio

I have been a Pandora and last.fm listener for about two years. I don’t use either service every day, or even every week, but there are times when I want background music with a minimum of effort and a minimum of interruption. This is when they fit the bill. I’m not a Pandora subscriber, and have only run into its monthly limit a few times. In these few cases I’ve just switched over to last.fm, even if my stations are different due to each service’s unique algorithms and music libraries.

So far Spotify has become part of my mix of services. However, I use it differently, since I can create playlists of artists and tracks that I specifically want to hear, rather than the more randomized selection I can expect with Pandora or last.fm. In that way I’m likely to use Spotify more like I use my own iTunes library. Of course, I can choose to listen to Spotify’s artist radio and get a similar experience. But as a free user I’d rather not use up my 10 hours getting an experience similar to Pandora or last.fm which have a higher and no limit, respectively.

The big question, of course, is, would I buy a Spotify subscription? I can see the attraction of the service. Having that enormous library of music available on demand, online and off, is appealing. Yet, for someone like me, that library isn’t quite enormous enough. The missing artists, albums and songs are quite tolerable for a free service, but less so when I’m coughing up a monthly fee.

Frankly, if I’d wanted a paid music service I’d already be Rhapsody subscriber. That service costs the same as Spotify Premium, offers similar desktop and mobile features, and has been available in the US for much longer. However Rhapsody also has gaps in its catalog, missing artists like the Beatles and AC/DC which aren’t found on Spotify, either.

Is it radio?

Pandora and last.fm are most appealing to me because they are radio-like and free. If I want to control the playlist, I’ll build one from my library. I listen to Pandora and last.fm when I want to relinquish some of that control and maybe be surprised. But I’m not particularly ready to pay for the experience.

I will admit that Spotify’s free service is nice to use, but 10 hours is a pretty low limit. Based on that alone I think it will have a tough fight to unseat Pandora or last.fm from a lot of music lovers’ daily listening routine.

Spotify shows promise, but is not ready to be a mainstream service accessible to most internet users. It also doesn’t quite scratch that radio itch. A jukebox is not the same thing as a radio station. For me the radio music experience is marked by a combination of predictability and surprise. I know the genre of the stations or the specific show, but I don’t know what song will come next; often it will be something I’ve never heard before. Both Pandora and last.fm provide something much closer to that radio experience, combined with a level of control that lets you filter out sounds you don’t want to hear.

While Spotify has a radio option that resembles Pandora and last.fm, there isn’t much reason to use it compared to its unique playlist building feature. There are times when you want a jukebox, and for many of us our iTunes library is actually pretty satisfying, given that it contains only music I’ve selected and acquired. Spotify comes close, but not close enough for me.

There may be many music lovers ready to just rent their music through a paid Spotify account, provided their tastes don’t stray too far from Spotify’s catalog too often. However, I truly do not know how many. I do know I won’t be one.

The post Spotify in the US – a review: Is it a Pandora & last.fm killer? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Into the Radio Survivor e-mail box this week came an announcement from Future Perfect Radio that you can now build your own indie station over at the site. And indeed you can. One of the many things I like about FPR is that it has all these neat regional channels, including:

Coachella
Georgia
Portland
Seattle
San Francisco
Austin, TX
Great Lakes Soundtrack
Chicago
L.A.

There are also all these genre channels with intriguing names, including “Flux,” “Twee-pop,” and “Post Rock.”

The other good thing about this service (from my perspective) is that you don’t have to log in and register to get and/or combine the music. On the other hand, it means that, beyond cookies, the site won’t keep track of your choices and preferences.

Anyway, the music is great. I’ve got a west coast channel going right now with L.A., Portland, San Francisco, and Coachella in the mix.

Ah, Coachella. I went to the festival about a decade ago and I was easily the oldest human being for miles. Wonder what they’d think of me now? But that’s another story.

The post Building your own indie station at Future Perfect Radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

It was 1975. I was 20 years old. I had just left home. I worked and went to college in Manhattan, and lived with my girlfriend in the Bronx.

Meanwhile, Kool and the Gang‘s hit tune “Jungle Boogie” jumped to one of the most requested songs on the radio. Transcriptions of the lyrics to this enduring hit don’t really do it justice, but here goes:

“Get down, Get down, get down, get down, get down, get down . . . .
Ahhhhhhhhhhh !
Jungle Boogie
Jungle Boogie
Get It On
Jungle Boogie
Jungle Boogie
Get It On”

I did not experience the lines as such. Here’s my version of the chorus:

JUNGLE BOOGIE
(deedly-up! deedly-up!)
JUNGLE BOOGIE
(squawk! squawk!)
JUNGLE BOOGIE
(deedly-up! deedly-up!)
JUNGLE BOOGIE
(squawk! squawk!)

Anyway, you get the idea. I saw Jungle Boogie as the archetypal Disco song with the archetypal Disco message. Forget the Sixties. Forget all that Woodstock crap. Just dance, wiggle, screw, then dance some more. Be yourself. Be your identity, no matter what it really is. Don’t be afraid. Just be.

Most political types I knew in college strongly disapproved of Disco. They thought it wasn’t radical enough or something. Gay people, black/Latino people, and women loved it—especially if they fit into all of those categories. As for me, I did not have the New Left sophistication to resist Disco’s charm, although I more often listened to classical music at the time.

Back in those days, to get to a train into Manhattan, I took a bus that ran from the northern Little Italy area where I lived through the South Bronx. This was quite an experience. The latter region was falling apart. Landlords and tenants took turns torching their residences. Drug use skyrocketed. The place was a mess.

So riding the bus meant touring some pretty mean streets. Kids threw objects at these vehicles with great gusto. The projectiles included rocks, cans, and soda bottles. Once during my ride somebody tossed a glass milk container filled with vodka through the window. The vessel landed on my lap. In addition, since the city rarely repaired South Bronx roads, the buses rocked up and down like rough water motor boats, tossing the passengers about in every direction.

On top of that, I was often the only white person on the car. This meant that some disgruntled type would periodically try to start a fight with me. These confrontations usually began with my antagonist angrily yelling something that I didn’t understand, since he was generally drunk or stoned. I responded to these gestures by quietly sitting in my seat and looking very confused. Once the fellow realized that I wasn’t going to stand up and defend my racial honor, he stood down. But it wasn’t a very relaxing way to commute to school and my job.

One very hot summer evening that year, a quartet of high school kids boarded the bus taking me home. Although these vehicles had air conditioning, it rarely worked, so they ran around the carriage snapping open the car’s small upper window panels.

After that, two of them tuned their radio cassette machines to a station playing “Jungle Boogie.”

“Get Down Say Ugh
Get Down Say Ugh
Till You Feel It You’ll
Get Down You’ll
Get Down
Get Funky Ya’ll
With The Get Down!”

As the music blared, the youngsters danced—ecstatically, I should add. I will never forget how happy they looked. They sang along with the broadcast, mostly intoning the “get down get down get down” part, and putting extra vigor into the chorus. When the tune ended, one expressed great dismay. But not to worry, his comrade declared, and popped a Kool and the Gang cassette into his box. Thus, “Jungle Boogie” boogied on.

Needless to say, most of my fellow commuters did not appreciate this degree of frolic, especially the older ones, who quietly glowered at the spectacle. To be fair, it wasn’t as if the dancing was obtrusive. The revelers took pains not to bump into anybody, and mostly just sort of narrowly shimmied against passenger poles with their hips and knees. But the music was loud. The bus driver did nothing to object to the celebration. And nobody else on board was going to tell the celebrants to put a sock in it, least of all my wimpy white self.

So the party went on. Through the hot evening we trekked—us working stiffs and the Jungle Boogie Dancers. The bus rocked back and forth and up and down, as usual. A couple of objects hit its caboose. Politically incorrect thoughts crossed my mind. “Is this The Jungle?” I wondered. Or: “Am I in The Jungle?” Then: “Is this the beginning of the End of Civilization?” and “Will it be fun?”

In retrospect, I’d like to say that the whole thing felt like a Spike Lee movie. But Mr. Lee was about four years younger than me at the time, and wouldn’t release his first film of influence, She’s Gotta Have It, for another decade, so I don’t have that cinematic cliche to fall back on.

Eventually the kids’ stop came. They secured their gear, nimbly leaped from the bus, and ran off into the evening. We survivors of this experience exhaled with relief, grimacing and gesticulating towards each other. I glanced at the bus driver, who grimly shook his head, but not too obviously, perhaps for fear that if he showed disapproval, someone would ask why he hadn’t done something about the scene.

An elderly woman looked at me—as usual the only pale face around. She offered a sympathetic laugh. Thirty-six years later I still remember her smile.

What brought this memory on? I’m sitting here on a San Francisco to Berkeley BART train and the young lady in front of me is having a little solo sit-down dance party with her iPhone. She’s got the volume pumped up so loud that I can hear the tune through her little ear buds. Yup, it’s Jungle Boogie. She’s gracefully shifting back and forth on her seat with her eyes closed, moving and grooving to the pulsating sound of the Disco beat.

Now I’m wondering which techno-musical world I like better. Is it the nice, neat hermetically sealed one that I live in today, with serene moving trains carrying scores of jacked in travelers, each sequestered in her own audition room? Or is it the scary, ecstatic landscape that I remember from 1975, with its roving bands of audio box marauders, spreading anxiety and joy across commuting trails?

I can’t decide. I don’t even understand how we collectively decide to move from one ubiquitous device to the next: first transistor radios, then cassette machines, then boom boxes, next CDs, iPods, and iPhones. Do we choose them, or do they choose us?

The post My Jungle Boogie moment appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Radio Show to Mix Tape

For me, mix tapes and radio shows have a lot in common; as they both make an attempt to compile a collection of pieces of music in order to share a particular mood, highlight a specific genre, or communicate a special message to listeners (or to the object of one’s desire).

I used to do thematic radio shows, often with hidden messages (intended for my crush) and it was very much like a public mix tape for me. After my show I would dub a cassette copy, craft case art and jot down track names and titles before presenting the mix to the one who I was trying to impress.

A few years later I took my mix-making to the online world, penning playlists for a start-up called Uplister. What made that site unique was that our playlists had room for liner notes built in next to each track. Although we only had 30 second sound clips for each piece of music, what really brought the lists to life were the accompanying narrative written by each playlist-maker. Suddenly mix tapes compiled after a break-up took on new meaning, when the story was shared along with the music selections.

At the time (2000-2001) we had big plans for Uplister, with our founders boldly proclaiming that the playlist was the “next unit of global music consumption.” I’m not sure that’s happened, but playlists have become a common method for people to understand and group music from their collections.

Brown University graduate student Ben Nicholson takes a look at the modern day mix tape in his paper, Playlist: 21st Century Mix Tape, published in a recent issue of Technomusicology: A Sandbox Journal. Ben writes about how music collecting and sharing has changed since the advent of digital music, arguing that:

“Music has largely moved from the shelf to the hard drive in the 21^st century. Digitally-encoded mp3s have made the storage and transportation of music more efficient and, once one has acquired a computer, less expensive than ever before…Ten years ago, a CD collector might sort their music collection by hand, organizing their CDs into an alphabetized archive located either on a shelf or in a CD tower. The acquisition of a new CD could require a reorganization of the entire collection in order for the CD to physically fit into its proper place…For an mp3 collector, however, these organizational headaches are remedied by software; iTunes will sort all of your music for you.”

I was also interested in Ben’s discussion about technologies that attempt to replicate personalized mix tapes, including Apple’s Genius Mixes. He writes that an evaluation of software that attempted to group playlists thematically found that:

“Listeners preferred playlists with an organizing principle, playlists that were more like mix tapes…Though it is unlikely that automated mix software and corporately sponsored playlists will replace manual/amateur mix construction, the fact that software developers are attempting to perfect their playlist algorithms and that iTunes is opening a playlist market indicates that the concept of the personalized mix is important to digital music distributors.”

What do you think? Do computer-generated mix tapes hold the same allure as a mix tape passed from person to person? Is it the one-to-one connection from sender to receiver that makes for the power of the mix or is the collection of songs enough? And how do services like Pandora fit into the equation? Or hand-curated radio shows for that matter?

Although it makes sense that music recommendation services would attempt to replicate hand-made mixes, I can’t imagine that people will be wooing potential mates with Genius Mixes or Pandora playlists or that those lists will end up in shoe boxes along with old love letters. But then again, in decades to come the artifacts of a courtship may all be housed in digital files or on remote servers. Yesterday’s ticket stubs, photographs, and saucy letters written in cursive will probably be replaced by files full of racy text messages, You Tube videos chronicling first dates, and romantic blog posts.

The post Modern Day Mix Tapes: What's Next after the Cassette? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

In case you haven’t noticed, last.fm has a cool new feature, a list of upcoming music festivals in your area.

“We know from experience that many of the best music memories happen when you’re rocking out in a field with thousands of other sunburnt/soaking wet compatriots,” Last’s Robin Lisle wrote in a recent blog post. So it looks like the application grabs your IP address and tells you about whatever’s happening in your region.

A lot going on in mine, actually, including the Health and Harmony Music and Arts Festival  at the Sonoma County (CA) Fairgrounds on June 11. Bands will include Lauryn Hill, Steel Pulse, Slightly Stoopid, and The Expendibles.

You can also search the app for events across the United States, North America, London, Paris, and even Helsinki.

“This is just the beginning,” Lisle promises. “Over the next month we’ll be rolling out additional features to help you find up and coming artists you should check out (so you can say you saw them before they were big), find festival buddies and easily share your festival picks.”

The post Keeping up with music festivals on last.fm appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Each week I’m going to post a few songs, music videos and websites that  have caught my eye at some point. I should mention that many of the links to “songs” will probably be on youtube (aka they may include videos that I don’t consider to be particularly good) and that I’ve chosen the “music videos” based more on the music video than the audio track, although I will try to pick catchy and/or relatively “good” music. Enjoy!

Songs

1) Patsy Cline’s “Crazy“: I know that music like this tends to elude my generation, but Patsy Cline is, in my opinion, simply amazing.

2) Boys Like Girls’ “Love Drunk“: Just another pop/emo catchy track. I don’t know how mainstream these guys are now, but their self-titled album was pretty good.

3) 3Oh!3’s “Don’t Trust Me“: This song is admittedly pretty catchy, although I have to say that the thing that caught my attention was the phrase “Do the Helen Keller.” Intrigued (I normally am by new “hip” phrases), I decided to run a search on Urban Dictionary which managed to spit out a few definitions that I’d rather not retype. Feel free to check it out here.

Music Videos

1) OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass“: I honestly can’t think of a better way to describe this video than the word “awesome.”

2) MGMT’s “Kids“: Having listened to this song LONG before seeing the music video, I became quickly surprised by how disturbing the video was. Regardless, it’s a song that I enjoy.

3) Saturday Night Live’s “I’m On A Boat” featuring T-Pain: This is almost a year old, so it’s sort of fallen out of popularity, but I still find it amusing.

4) Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance“: If you haven’t seen this yet, you might as well do it now. I doubt that it will be going away anytime soon. I’ve actually read some very in-depth articles on this video, like this, which have actually somewhat improved my opinion of her.

Websites

1) xkcd: This is easily one of my favorite webcomics. I particularly enjoy the strip’s physics comics, such as this and this, but all of the comics tend to be consistently humorous.

2) One of my friend’s posted this on facebook a while back (I think that it might have been Nigel?), and I found the video to be quite interesting. The video is a recording of a lecture given at Yale University by Professor Shelly Kagan titled “How to Live Given the Certainty of Death.” It’s admittedly somewhat morbid (it IS a discussion of death), but I strongly suggest taking the time to watch it.

The post Yamamoto's audio picks: On Patsy Cline, Lady Gaga, and Death appeared first on Radio Survivor.

As someone who dislikes long commercial breaks and hearing the same songs over and over on the radio, I’ve always had an interest in finding alternative ways to discover new music. Since it has now been a few years since I began this quest, I’ve decided to list some possible alternatives to “mainstream” radio (in no particular order).

Internet Radio

I absolutely love the concept of Internet radio, although my experience has admittedly been limited to Pandora Radio and Last.fm.  Summarized, they’re customizable radio with limited commercials (that you can mute if you feel the need). Awesome, yes?

Since I’m studying multiple languages for graduate school, I’m constantly searching for what I consider to be “good” music from other countries in an attempt to assist with my learning process by increasing my exposure. To test the effectiveness of these websites to help with this goal, I searched both websites for three different bands that perform in three different languages: a Japanese metal band named Dir en Grey, a German band named Wir sind Helden (We Are Heroes), and a French artist named Yelle.

I was thoroughly impressed by the fact that Last.fm not only had each group that I searched for but also managed to remain in the same genre and, almost always, the same language, including a limited amount of similar music in English. Pandora appears to be less conducive to expanding one’s international musical horizons, failing to provide any music for Wir Sind Helden and initially returning only English results.

That said, here are some general notes: I like that Last.fm provides you with a list of recent songs and radio stations while Pandora only allows you to look at recently played songs for a currently playing radio station (the history is cleared if you switch). I was  surprised to discover that Last.fm allows you to maintain a “library” of tracks that you’ve listened to, although I suppose the trade off is that users are unable to pause (as far as I can tell) songs (the alternative is to leave the radio station) and can only structure their stations around entire bands as opposed to both songs and bands (Pandora allows both options). I’m more familiar with Pandora, which is probably why I prefer its layout. I also like having the option of structuring a station around a song as opposed to an entire band because occasionally you stumble upon those amazing songs from, unfortunately, horrible albums that you really don’t need to subject your ears to again (Ex: Matt and Kim’s “Daylight” and most music from the ’80s, like this).

Music Websites

1) If you enjoy any of the following genres, I STRONGLY suggest visiting purevolume.com which is an amazing way to discover new bands and genres (I’ve been regularly visiting it since at least high school). The website generally has limited free downloads, allows you to occasionally stream entire albums (many of which are new), and lets users listen to sample tracks from each band (some of which are available to download for free). The number of bands that I have learned about through this website is ridiculous.

• Acoustic (as it applies to the other listed genres)
• Alternative
• Christian (like Relient K)
• Club (generally with some rock or pop influence)
• Death Metal (nothing that I find particularly interesting)
• Electronica (see the next section of this article)
• Emo
• Experimental (generally pertaining to these other genres)
• Folk (not in the traditional sense)
• Hardcore
• Hip Hop (like Gym Class Heroes, not 50 Cent…)
• Indie
• Jazz (typically mixed with rock or pop)
• Metal (nothing that I particularly enjoy)
• Metalcore
• Pop
• Pop Punk
• Post Hardcore
• Powerpop
• Progressive
• Psychedelic (typically mixed with more modern rock)
• Punk
• Reggae (More like Sublime and less like Marley)
• Rock
• Screamo
• Southern Rock (I’m impressed/intrigued with people who are familiar with this)

2) For all genres of electronic music, my friend Amy (seconded by Morgan) suggests Beatport, which seems to be amazingly organized and  provides example tracks from each genre, a number of charts, and various DJ mixes. Specifically, Beatport covers the following:

• Breaks
• Chill Out
• Deep House
• DJ Tools
• Drum and Bass
• Dubstep
• Electro House
• Electronica
• Hard Dance
• Hardcore/ Hard Techno
• House
• Indie Dance/ Nu Disco
• Minimal
• Progressive House
• Psy-Trance
• Tech-House
• Techno
• Trance

3) Another type of website that can be extremely helpful is a lyrics website. They tend to list upcoming or popular albums and/or songs. Here are a few examples:

• plyrics (standing for “punk” lyrics)
• azlyrics (stands for lyrics from A-Z; covers multiple genres)
• darklyrics (metal)

4) Myspace, quite surprisingly, isn’t dead yet. The website has a distinct music section which can thankfully be accessed without an account. Browsing is relatively easy, and the music homepage displays charts for top artists, songs, albums, and videos and features a number of playlists posted by Myspace and various artists. Users can also access the New Releases page which has “New This Week” and “Recent Releases,” both of which can be separated into songs or albums. I was actually pleasantly surprised to see a mention of the Melvins and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony.

5) My friend Thor recommended Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archives which arguably boasts the largest database of metal albums and allows users to browse the website by letter, country, genre, or reviews. To test the quality of the site, I ran searches on a few metal bands, specifically Children of Bodom, Wintersun, and Judas Priest. Each search returned information on the band’s specific genre, lyrical themes, origin, year of formation, current label, status, current line-up, former members (if applicable), additional notes, links to purchase the band’s merchandise, a complete discography (or extremely close), and relevant links. Absolutely amazing!

6) Metal Underground was suggested by my friend Jake and features updated “Metal News Headlines”, recent interviews and reviews, upcoming releases, and thousands of band pages with general information on each band along with reviews and news. After a few minutes of just poking around this site I learned that a folk metal band that I saw in San Francisco a while ago, Eluveitie, is coming out with a new album, a singer for a band that I was planning on seeing had to leave the band’s current tour (Killswitch Engage), and that Mike Portnoy, the drummer for Dream Theater, just finished filling in for The Rev (RIP) on Avenged Sevenfold’s newest studio album. The website also has a “Best of 2009” list with some fantastic suggestions.

7 + 8 ) Daytrotter, suggested by my friend Miguel, has a relatively large archive of acoustic performances for a number of underground indie/alternative bands (similar to purevolume), a small collection of reviews, another small collection of concert videos, and a list of shows being promoted by the website. He also suggests Beatcrave, which appears to cover a number of different genres, although both websites tend to be dominated by indie and/or electronic.

Music Blogs

Although I don’t regularly read any music blogs, some of my friends have suggested the following:

1) Delusions of Adequacy (DOA), suggested by my friend Justin, features a number of album, song, and concert reviews and also includes “interviews, features, and more.”

2 + 3) My friend Addy suggests Pitchfork and “i guess i’m floating.” As someone who favors rock/alternative/etc, I immediately recognized a number of bands from purevolume on “i guess i’m floating,” which looks pretty awesome from my perspective. I also recognized a few bands listed on Pitchfork, such as The Morning Benders and Caribou, although I’m not sure what genres it covers.

4) Hype Machine, or hypem.com, suggested by my friends Rebecca and Morgan, is a music blog aggregator, which means that it consolidates a number of music blogs into a single website. As hypem states, “Every day, thousands of people around the world write about the music they love– and it all ends up here.”

5+ 6) My friend Jomar suggests The Silent Ballet, which features a number of articles, reviews, and charts, and TheSirensSound, an “unstoppable blog about great music.”

7 + 8 ) Miguel suggests “music induced euphoria,” which appears to be a true music blog, and “mindset,” which creates a “cut the crap” playlist each month of some decent/good-sounding tracks (see the archive here).

Some general suggestions

1 +2) Honestly, the best ways to discover new music are to go to shows (listening to each band) and to simply talk to people. Bands tend to tour or book shows with groups with a similar sound or fan-base, so, chances are, if you go to a show for one of your favorite bands, you’ll probably like at least one other band that’s playing. Open mic nights or bars and other venues that regularly have live music are also great ways to support local music and to get acquainted with local bands, such as Wave Array (East Bay, CA), Luke Franks or the Federalists (East Bay, CA), and D.R.A.M.A. Kings (Washington DC). Also, some venues, like the DNA Lounge (metal) in San Francisco or Yoshi’s (jazz) in San Francisco and Oakland, generally only host a specific type of genre, so you can always look at their calendars for upcoming shows. Talking with friends who have a similar taste in music is another fantastic way to learn about new bands and genres.

3) Amazon.com also has a feature listing related purchases. So, for example, if I were viewing The Best of The Ink Spots, I could scroll down to “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” and see suggestions for The Mills Brothers and The Andrews Sisters.

4) Wikipedia pages for bands tend to, if they’re any good, list some of the band’s influences. For example, Children of Bodom’s page lists Yngwie Malmsteen as an influence for their album Something Wild. Wikipedia pages also tend to list “epic” and/or memorable tour lineups, such as the Wacken Open Air 2008 tour discussed on Children of Bodom’s page which mentions Iron Maiden, Sonata Arctica, amd Avantasia.

5) Look at band labels. For example, Fueled By Ramen has signed a number of prominent and underground alternative, indie, and punk bands, such as The Cab, Cobra Starship, Friday Night Boys, This Providence, The Academy Is…, and A Rocket To The Moon. Jomar also suggests Metal Blade Records, which features bands like Cannibal Corpse, GWAR, and As I Lay Dying, Relapse Records, which features bands like Dying Fetus and Mastodon, and Southern Lord Records, which features a number of bands that I haven’t heard of but am now interested in.

Anyway, I hope that this was helpful! I should note that, due to my own musical interests and subsequent musical knowledge, this collection somewhat neglects a few genres. Please feel free to expand upon anything that I missed or to contribute some information towards a genre that I was unable to provide specific information for (off the top of my head: opera, classical, country, jazz, R&B, and hip hop).

I would also like to thank some of my friends for their suggestions which I have attempted to incorporate into this article.

The post The Radio Survivor Guide to escaping mainstream radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

source: wikipedia commons

A recent survey performed by Princeton senior Sauhard Sahi under the supervision of Edward Felten attempted to discover the types of files available on BitTorrent, a popular file distribution website. According to the study, 10 percent of the  shared files contained music:

“For the music category, the predominant encoding format for music was MP3, there were some albums ripped to WMA (Windows Media Audio, a Microsoft codec), and there were also ISO images and multi-part RAR archives. There is still a bias towards recent albums and songs, but it is not as strongly evident as it is for movies—perhaps because people are more willing to continue seeding music even after it is no longer new, so these torrents are able to stay alive longer in the DHT. In descending order, we found that 78% of music torrents in our sample were in English, 6% were in Russian, 4% were in Spanish, 2% were in Japanese and Chinese each, and other infrequent languages appeared 1% each.”

The survey analyzed a uniform, random sample of files “via the trackerless variant of BitTorrent, using the Mainline DHT.” The files, totaling 1021, were then organized based on their file type, language, and apparent copyright status. Before providing their results, Sahi and Felten also explain that their results only apply to the Mainline trackerless version of BitTorrent (admitting that “other parts of the BitTorrent ecosystem might be different”) and that “all files that were available were equally likely to appear in the sample.”

Depending on your personal experience with BitTorrent, the survey’s results may or may surprise you. With regard to file types, Sahi discovered that non-pornographic movies and shows comprised 46% of the sample, games and software 14%, pornography 14%, books and guides 1%, and images 1%, leaving only 10% of the files as music files followed by an unclassifiable 14%. Of these categories, each classification did not necessarily have a dominant file format, although each group was dominated by files in English.

Each file was also analyzed based on apparent copyright status and was classified as “likely non-infringing” if it “appeared to be in the public domain, [was] freely available through legitimate channels, [and was] user-generated content,” an admitted judgment call. Based on this definition, Sahi and Felten concluded that only 10 of the files in the entire sample were “likely non-infringing,” meaning that roughly 99% of the entire sample was illegal with each of the total 98 music files classified as “likely infringing.”

Although Sahi and Felten deserve to be commended for their work, the study either omits or ignores a number of important factors. Because the survey focused only on the trackerless version of BitTorrent, it’s likely that the users are knowingly distributing copyright-infringing files, so the percentage of “likely infringing” files is not very surprising. The post, including only a summary of the survey’s results, also fails to provide an accurate time frame or a geographic focus as well as specifics regarding the surveying process, all of which could be very helpful in further analyzing the available data.

Furthermore, although this survey (well, at least the summary) provides a decent amount of information about file availability on BitTorrent, it should not be considered representative of torrents or “likely-infringing” material as it offers a very limited scope of information and fails to mention torrenting websites completely dedicated to a specific file type (all music, all movies, etc).

The post 10% of BitTorrent users download music – 99% of it is "likely" illegal appeared first on Radio Survivor.