Online Music Phase II
When I was younger, much younger, I always had this idealistic technological day-dreams about how a better tech-world could look like.
One of them was about the perfect file format for music. Of course it would contain all the metadata like lyrics, BPM, or crowd-sourced genre information. While on pause it would display the cover art, while playing it would show the video (only on devices with screens that support it and only if there would be a video available).
The reason I’m thinking about this now is the recent shutdown [1] of Grooveshark in Germany, which leaves a hole unfulfilled: Rdio, Napster or simfy stream music to you as much as you want, but let’s face it, because of the costs of round about 10 €/month they shut out a lot of customers, which aren’t that music-savvy. Spotify offers a free version, but it’s also not available in Germany and it needs the desktop client.
Even if you could afford the money, a ne plus ultra-solution looks slightly different. We already see labels withdrawing their music from streaming services due to low income. And if you would want to share a tune with a friend, you have to watch out if he/she has also a subscription on this specific service.
The hypothesis: YouTube is the best player in the field to fill this gap. They already have the reputation to be the best site to play music. Let me repeat: Even not intended by the YouTube founders, it became the 1st place young people go to when they want to play their favorite song on a party or even at home.
The striking difference between Grooveshark and the YouTube of 2012 is the simple fact that a huge portion of uploaded content is legal, meaning uploaded by the artist or label themselves. Only in addition, you get a lot of fan-uploaded tracks (with often rare material). It would be interesting to see how the music catalogue of YT compares with the one from e.g. Spotify.
And it seems I’m not the only one with this thinking. Take a look at Cantio. Basically the service leverages the YT music library and wraps it into an audio player interface.
There are other services that try to do the same, but Cantio is the most promising because:
- it has good UI design
- it has its own Radio mode (based on genre)
- it lets one import playlists (in M3U format)
- it has easy sharing with custom short URLs built right in
- it has keyboard shortcuts (a hooray for the nerds)
What I miss is the integration of other services: First and foremost Vimeo or Dailymotion - because they don’t have the same strict DRM system like YT in place (yet) - and audio-only services like SoundCloud or the HypeMachine.
Nevertheless, I found my Grooveshark replacement.
[1] I think the reason for the inevitable closing of Grooveshark is and will be the deja-vu to common services: Grooveshark looks exactly like an iTunes (or other music player of your choide) version on a webpage - but for free. This is the kind of radical change major labels will never ever agree with. Maybe that’s also the reason why YT doesn’t do something like audio.youtube.com on its own.
A short addendum to my Grooveshark post earlier…
Web-Apps have advantages, but I’d like to have a music player on my desktop and not dependent on my browser. The tunes should flow no matter what.
On my Media-Center-Mac I use Fluid to generate the desktop app experience. On Windows you might want to try Prism.
Setup for Fluid is as straight forward as it gets. Four tips from yours truly:
- Use a nice dock icon instead of the default favicon. Here are my favorites: 1, 2, 3, 4
- Tick the box “only hides the window” under Behavior Preferences. This will Grooveshark keep playing even when you close the player window.
- While your at it, change the color under Appearance from Grey to Black (HUD).
- Use userscripts to enhance the experience (how to install):
- Add multimedia keyboard support (play/pause)
- Replace side banner ads with lyrics for current song
- Integrate scrobbling & loving on last.fm
- Add Growl notifications and iTunes-style track info to the dock
One last thing: Here are my public Grooveshark playlists.
I like Grooveshark. (If you don’t know what this is, think of it like Spotify without desktop client.) ((If you don’t know what Spotify is, think of it like the YouTube of audio.))
Spotify is the clear superior service in terms of features and usability, but I find myself using Grooveshark all the time. So how come?
I often want to
- listen to music on my (restricted) work PC where I can’t install the Spotify client. Grooveshark is browser-based.
- share a specific album or a song I like with my friends. They don’t have an Spotify account and maybe will never get one due to Spotify’s international rollout politics. On Grooveshark everybody can listen everything without limits, even without an account.
I understand that Spotify has to deal with legal issues that others don’t take that seriously. But evidently Grooveshark is online for many years now and seems to stay.
After all, the online music space is far from being settled. An announcement from Apple or Facebook could change the tides, once again.
