Online Music Services Invite Collaboration
As intensely personal as music can be, it’s still a social force.
Playing guitar with a band. Singing karaoke. Spinning LPs at a party. Making your friends listen to George Jones records so they’ll appreciate how depressed you are.
That’s why some of the most compelling music services today are online, where they can take advantage of the Net’s ability to gather people into communities. Not only do these services help you find like-minded musicians or aficionados, they bring them electronically into your home.
The controversial Napster system, for instance, doesn’t just provide free copies of songs. It lets you peer into other people’s music collections, find those with similar tastes and discover new music through them.
Napster’s problem, aside from potentially crippling lawsuits brought by record labels and music publishers, is that it’s not making any money. Its service is free. But other upstarts in the online music world are hoping that people will be willing to pay for the chance to collaborate and share musically--a path that Napster executives also are trying to take.
One example is Tonos Inc., whose Web site invites musicians of all stripes to find bandmates and make music together through the Net. Launched last April, Tonos promises exposure, access to industry connections and tips for developing artists.
Like the pioneering Rocket Networks, Tonos enables musicians to upload portions of a song--a drum track, for example--to a virtual studio on the Web, where others can offer their own layers. The missing pieces can come from friends or strangers responding to Tonos’ in-house help-wanted ads.
The collaboration is powered by a software tool called Tonos TC8. The software costs about $30 and includes free use of Tonos’ Web studios for the rest of this year.
Another example is San Francisco-based Echo Networks Inc., which is developing a service that enables people to play DJ for each other through the Web.
The service starts with Echo’s player software, which enables groups of people to hear songs through the Internet at exactly the same time, no matter where they happen to be. A buddy list in the player tells users when their friends come online, so they can all tune in to the same Echo station--one of their own creations, or one launched by another Echo listener.
An as-yet unreleased version of Echo will let people store digital copies of their CDs online and incorporate those copies into their stations’ playlists.
In a similar vein, Uplister of Oakland invites people to create lists of songs--personal favorites, dinner-party music, anger-management soundtracks, whatever--and store them on the site for others to see. Today, users can hear only samples of songs, but Uplister plans a version with Dallas-based Streamwaves that will let paying customers hear entire playlists.
The problem for both Echo and the Uplister-Streamwaves partnership is that they can’t launch these services without licenses from the record labels and music publishers that own the copyrights to the songs. Those sorts of interactive licenses have been very hard to come by, but a growing number of upstarts are expected to wrap up their deals and launch this year.
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Times staff writer Jon Healey writes about the digital living room. Staff writer P.J. Huffstutter covers technology.
