Convenient Alternatives to Internet Music

Tech Hero

» by michael penner, mj penner consulting - www.michaelpenner.com

Since the 1990’s the Internet has posed a serious threat to the music industry. Instead of embracing the technology, the industry has assumed an adversarial role that continues to this day. Three websites may change that. Magnatune.com ®, Lastfm.com ®, and Pandora.com ® are on the cutting edge of music licensing / downloading, while providing a superior listening experience to anything offered by already-great software like iTunes®. Illegal file sharing hurts artist profits, diminishing their ability to continue producing the very music we enjoy. But the websites presented here don’t work on a file sharing premise, and getting your hands on the music they deliver is something even “the machine” (as artists call the mainstream music industry) can appreciate.

These sites boast extremely high quality audio streams, full songs (not just 30 second clips), and unique ways of customizing your listening / purchasing experience.

First up is www.magnatune.com, a website that caters to unsigned, independent artists. With the tagline “We Are Not Evil”, Magnatune is by far the most impressive in terms of its music licensing / download offering. They definitely turn the music industry’s standard way of charging for music upside down. Artists get 50% of the revenue from a purchase. That’s about 40-47% more than the industry lets its signed artists have. Magnatune lets you select from a range of prices at purchase so you can decide what you would like to pay for an album. You can then download perfect quality WAV files, MP3 files, or both. To really make it sweet, they give you a gift link so that your friends can download the same music for free. As a web marketer, I find this tactic brilliant. Instead of you sending the downloaded files on to your friends (piracy), Magnatune would rather your friends simply visit their site and get the music free. They know you’re going to share the music, so why not send your friends to Magnatune and do it from there? Once at the site, your friends are likely to explore and perhaps buy albums on their own. Very smart, but it’s just the beginning. Visit the site and see all it has to offer, including its commercial licenses for business use of music in film / ads. If you want to support an independent artist, www.magnatune.com is an excellent choice.

Next up is www.lastfm.com. This website is an Internet Radio site with an impressive library of free streaming music from commercial artists. My musical tastes are extremely eclectic, and I was surprised to find entire albums from both known and obscure bands. Lastfm delivers a streaming radio experience based on the band you have selected and then uses an algorithm to deliver songs by other bands the system thinks you will also like. My impression of this site is that if the band is not in its library, it never existed.

Finally we come to www.pandora.com, an Internet Radio website that is home to the “music genome project”. This site offers a customizable Internet radio experience that is uncanny in its accuracy of figuring out what you like. You pick a genre, and it starts to play a song. You give the song a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” and it references a vast knowledge repository to determine what might be a better song to play next. It stores that information in your profile, and uses your feedback to ad to its vast database decision-tree of genre specific music selections. It is so accurate, that for one genre it played almost every song I have in my own CD collection…and this collection is some pretty off the wall stuff! Pandora is also available as an installable iPhone app.

The music industry may never adapt as it should to the reality of the web, and file sharing will always kill the profits of the musicians who work so hard to entertain us. But Magnatune, LastFM, and Pandora may at last make listening and downloading music so convenient and affordable that piracy becomes more trouble than its worth.

Michael Penner is CEO of MJ Penner Consulting, a web marketing firm in Visalia that also built the website for this magazine. He can be reached at michael@michaelpenner.com

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