I was a pretty big lala evangelist; I told just about everyone I thought would care all about it. I really liked their approach to music, especially:

1. Unlimited space and streaming. You could upload and listen to as much as you like.
2. The music matcher. You didn’t have to upload every file you had. It would scan your files and match them to ones existing on the server. This saved you from having to upload GBs of music and had the added benefit of making the service better the more that people used it.
3. Listening to any track once for free. I’ve never listened to more new releases (or bought more) than I did through lala.
4. Web-only songs. 10 cents bought you the right to play a song as much as you wanted to but only through the web. I usually have an Internet connection wherever I’m listening, so that was just great. Would I have bought Looking Glass’ “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” for more than 10 cents?

There were some drawbacks, of course:

1. The music matcher sometimes mismatched. I have some artists in my collection that have extensive live catalogs (if you know what I mean) and often, trying to play the studio version of the song, I would get the live version instead. Nothing to do about it.
2. The player itself was Flash-based. So, absolutely no mobile support on iPhone or Android.
3. Limited catalog. There were plenty of songs that were available on iTunes or Amazon MP3 store that just couldn’t be bought from lala. Of course, you could upload them after you bought them elsewhere.

Anyway, Steve Jobs said, “Enough of people not buying music through iTunes!” and here we are without lala. What’s the criteria for its replacement?

1. Enough space. I have a lot of music. Around 90GB worth. Though, a lot of that pretty much never gets listened to.
2. Price. Lala was free to use and had cheap rates on songs if you wanted to buy some.
3. Interface. I’m a developer, so it had to have a well tuned and usable interface.
4. Mobile support. I don’t travel as much as I would like, but I do get out of town. I wanted something that would play my music over 3G (or 4 when it comes to town).
5. Ability to upload my own songs. They just don’t have enough Kleenex Girl Wonder on Rhapsody.

Here’s my thoughts on what I saw in my search for a site that would stream my music. I’m going to list them in what I think is the chronological order I tried them in.

First of all, some overall notes:

• Nobody else has the web-only song agreement with the record companies. Just get that out of your hopes bucket right now. It ain’t happening (at least not yet).
• Nobody seems to have worked out the “start loading the next song as the last one ends” thing that let the lala player roll through songs continuously. Must be a bandwidth thing, but it seems like something someone could figure out.
• Nobody’s going to give it all to you for free anymore. Take your lumps.
• None of the services have a store attached to them at this point. You’ll have to go back to iTunes or Amazon.

Maestro.fm

Maestro.fm is a service that allows you to stream your music from your home library to another machine. Meaning, it doesn’t keep copies of them and if your home computer or home Internet connection is down, your music is unavailable. Or, if your home connection is slow or spotty, so is your stream.

That said, there are no space limitations and it is free to use. But, my upstream connection is not that reliable and, really, that seems un-green to have my machine on all the time just to serve songs.

It has some interesting ideas and some cool social networking built in. The player is pretty good and there is a iPhone app.

MusicPlayer.fm

Don’t bother. #underconstruction

mSpot.com

The new guys, mSpot was featured at Google I/O this year. Seems like a promising service, but the don’t have a lot of the site working yet or even the service levels set, so I’m going to have to come back to it. For now, it is for beta testers only. It is hard to tell if Google is behind them or just cheering them on, but hopefully the big G comes up with music service or gets on board with one. Especially since they had eyes for lala before Apple did.

The player is OK, but could use a little Information Architecture and a little more contrast. They do have an Android app, which is nice.

The installable uploader and the web player have a trick, which is that the system only uploads songs you have requested. So, you can see your whole library, but the first time you try to play a particular song it will have to be uploaded (automatically) from your home machine. This paradigm could be nice since you have only a little space right now (2-4GB) and, theoretically, it would just keep the top 2-4GB or songs you have played recently. You know what, I haven’t made up my mind about this feature(?) yet.

mp3tunes.com

The old guys, these guys have been around for a while: Five years. But I’m not sure if that serves them well or not. I stuck with this fairly long, like two weeks, and I mostly liked it. It has the ability to upload video and stream that back, which feels like a great idea but I never used it.

The default player wastes absolutely acres of space with too-big fonts and too much padding. It is hard to see much once you have more than a few artists in there. They make a nice effort by having several player skins (well, they’re more complex than skins, really) but they kind of all have this whitespace problem. I mean, I’m not using the site for readability—I want to see the lists. And, if I started and stopped too much it quit queuing songs.

They do have mobile apps and an installable uploader which is nice. Plus, 10GB of space for free holds a pretty fair amount of music, or you can upgrade 50GB for $40 per year.

Grooveshark.com

This one’s got some press, too, and it is pretty good. The player and queuing system is solid but, like mp3tunes, the designers got to take too much control of this one and there is lots and lots of wasted space. So much that if you have a smaller monitor you can’t read the full names of songs. They claim that this particular problem is fixed for VIPs (paid customers) but I had a hard time believing that them based on my free account.

They have apps for most mobile platforms, but only for VIPs. The uploader is a java applet that needs a little more work, especially when getting music off a network share.

Psonar.com

I can’t remember why I left them. And, now their site is erroring to MySpace. Maybe they are connected. Oh, wait, I remembered. No mobile streaming support. If that isn’t important to you, it seems like a promising service. The player needs a lot a work and a little double-click-ability.

AudioBox.fm

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: an acceptable service. First off, it ain’t free, like I said it wouldn’t be. Well, there is a free 1GB plan, but that’s not really enough, is it?

First off: no Flash. This mother is HTML 5 though and through and therefore after my own heart. It is just getting started, feature-wise, but seems to actually be in development (which not all of the others are). The marketplace may or may not ever be coming as wells as the installable uploader. For now, you have to upload a folder at a time (which is a real pain). But the reliability of the the player, the layout of the the library, the editablity of tracks all make up for it for me. Especially after all the other sites.

It needs a viewable queue and a real uploader / syncronizer. But it has an Android streaming app that is pretty usable. It also has a full API so if you are an enterprising iPhone app developer you could make one.

The plan prices are pretty reasonable with the Basic at just $4 a month.

In the end…

I’m still looking but more slowly. I’m pretty happy with audiobox.fm at this point and don’t feel like I need to keep the full-on search.

SEACON 09 will feature the classics you love and a few that never made it to release. YOU ARE GUARANTEED TO LOVE IT.

This song was in the top 10 a few years ago:

I was listening to Once In a Lifetime this morning and was wondering the same thing.

WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO No Woman, No Cry by Bob Marley available on Legend

The recording of Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry that most people are most familiar with was recorded in the mid 70s at the Roxy in Los Angeles (that’s the recording on Legend, according to the official site).

The musicians make all kinds of right moves and even the accidental guitar feedback works in the atmosphere. The crowd is singing along through the whole song obviously enjoying themselves; half of them cheer to the opening notes, half cheer at the first lyric. You can hear the sweat and strain in Marley’s voice. It’s a prime example of both a live performance and a live recording.

Like I was saying, we’ve all heard it a thousand times, but imagine being in the audience that night hearing the song come up and stay and stay (7 minutes 15 seconds). It would be an experience, is what I’m saying – the song itself is not even that important. Here is a real connection to some dead guy who was singing a song 30 years ago.

WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO My So-Called Secret Life by Graham Smith from Final Battle.

We all know that there are parts of us that we never share with other people, right? I mean, it’s pretty regular. And, sometimes we think of ourselves as one event away from becoming something really romantic in this secret part of ourselves even though there’s no evidence to lead to that transformation. Graham Smith lays out the fantasy in all its common glory:

I guess that ultimately I’ve got nothing left to hide
Except the boring things that I have kept inside

He gets into the power-trip of keeping the people close to you out of certain parts of your life and letting them in only when you can get something out of it. He talks about nostalgia and fantasy and the way they lace into self-pity in a way that’s both honest and self-pitying.

Secretly my silent lovers come to be
One after the other, shocked by what they see
I’ve been trying to get away from them
And now they’re getting away from me

The focus on this song, and on most of album, is not rhyming in succinct verses but long streams of words and ideas that are practically carved into the recordings. You can’t move them around too much or they just don’t fit anymore, but they express quite a bit and express it quite clearly. It’s a really interesting exercise in writing songs – few immediate hooks but lots of beautiful smaller moments and tons of useful phrases.

Jason Misik, Andrew Toutant, Naomi Joy and I played a few songs last night over at Lee’s. It was a big bunch of fun. I hadn’t been on-stage in about a year and not for two years with the Scratchers. I felt at home. My brother Dan took some hhott video – watch for it here.

Every once in a while, when I was younger, I’d play three or four times a month and even if there were only, like, two people there it was great. It’s the principle of the thing.

Anyhow, it resolved me to making the Lostters a real thing. So, here comes the second album and some shows, okay?