Getcha Info!

The answer is Lance Ford (the man who brought Maxim to the US) and Robin Kent (former CEO of Universal McCann). Together they run an ad sales rep firm called Rebel Digital. Both Lance & Robin were part of the management team at Spiral Frog, but left after a mysterious managerial blow out and formed Rebel Digital. Unlike Spiral Frog, which only managed to license content from 2 of the 4 majors, Qtrax announced yesterday that they have licensed content from all 4 majors.

For those of you who don?t know, Qtrax is a P2P music service supported by advertising. So the fact that the ex-McCann CEO and the guy who helped generate $400 million in advertising for Maxim over 5 years are helping sell advertising is pretty exciting.

Furthermore, the New York Post reports that the parent company of Qtrax (Brilliant Technologies) plans to spin Qtrax out and take it public. If investors bite, Qtrax may have a war chest of cash to pay for licenses and wait for one of the most credible ad sales teams around to grow their ad supported music business.

While I?m personally excited to see serious contenders in the ad supported music on demand arena (Go Rukus! Go We7! Go iMeem!), I also love the idea that Rebel Digital is a separate ad rep. If Lance and Robin can successfully build an advertising business for Qtrax, they can easily extend that business to folks like Rukus, iMeem or any other innovative new ad supported music concept. Rooting for Rebel Digital is rooting for the success of ad supported music. Oh, and while you?re at it, put in a hurrah for Ronning Lipset Radio. Their work is essential to helping Internet radio survive ridiculous CRB rulings.

Like so many others, I recently received an invitation to a mysterious party at Pandora. I?ve heard tons of rumors swirling around the reason for the meeting. The worst rumor I?ve heard is that Pandora has decided to shut down. I think that one is BS.

Pandora has money in the bank and Joe Kennedy is a fiscally responsible guy. If he was going to wind down the venture, I suspect he would try to return as much money as possible, and not waste any money on a farewell party. Not to mention that Tim Westergreen is a hell of a fighter. He didn?t keep the company alive on fumes after the last crash just to give up the ghost without seeing if Inslee?s new Radio Equality Act can make it to law.

But if they aren?t shutting down, what are they announcing?

My guess would either be 1) an ancillary business that depends less on streaming music and more on generating page views 2) a cool device partnership or 3) an acquisition. Although I think #1 and/or #2 are the most likely.

So now comes the fun part; completely uninformed speculation. I?m gonna take a wild guess and say that Pandora launches a beefed up social networking service that matches folks based on musical tastes AND a partnership with Xbox that allows Xbox live folks to stream Pandora radio straight to the living room. I say Xbox because Pandora?s Jessica Stoner already negotiated a deal with MSN, and clearly has access to the Microsoft organization. I say social networking, because Pandora has already dipped their toe in the water here, and serving up non music dependant page views could help them subsidize ridiculous radio royalties. For good measure let’s throw in some kind of portable device deal. Let’s call it a Zing powered SanDisk player.

Guess I?ll just have to wait to find out what, if anything, is true.

Our online pharmacy is the perfect resource for people to get their drugs without any hassles or awkwardness. buy cialis We work hard to make sure you save money every time you shop with us. buy levitrabuy soma At our online store, you pay less and get more. buy viagra

I just finished chatting with Dan Kantor over at Streampad about a new version of his desktop software that is a lot easier to set up and gets through firewalls. It’s in a limited beta, but I’ll hook the first 50 people to send me an email (ebauman at gmail dot com) with a link to download the software.

For those of you who don’t remember, Streampad allows you to listen to your local music (and/or music from 5 friends) from any PC.

Aside from this nice new functionality, Dan also told me about a way to play the Hype Machine’s top songs through the embeddable Streampad player. Just go to Streampad, click on “web”, click on “open url”, type in “w2” and hit “submit”. Then you can click on share and embed the top Hype Machine tracks in your blog.

I should mention that this page on the Hype Machine let’s you embed their top 10 songs on your site, but Streampad lets you embed over 50 songs.

Check it out:

If you believe Polyphonic HMI, music producers can use an algorithm to identify if a new song will be a hit. Or put another way, if the song doesn’t have “optimal mathematical patterns” (there phrase, not mine), it just ain’t gonna be a hit.

The implications are pretty dramatic for the majors, as their operational costs make them very dependant on artists who can go platinum again and again.

But before you rush out and license Plyphonic HMI’s technology you might want to read this study recently published in the New York Times Sunday edition. (Actually Paul Lamere informed me that the study has been floating around since last Feb. 2006. Note to self; never try to scoop Lamere. That goes for you too, NYT.)

The study essentially found that social influence plays as large of a role in determining a hit song as the song quality.

Now this doesn’t mean that Polyphonic HMI is wrong, (or right), but it does mean that social networking will be one of the most important promotional channels for music within the next 10 years. Or perhaps sooner when you consider that My Space accounted for 6% of Amazon’s music category traffic last October (according to hitwise data I pulled from 17dots).

It also means that if you’re making a site to promote music, and you aren’t incorporating some easy to understand notion of popularity, then you’re not promoting your artists to the fullest.  And if you read the article, you’ll find that which music actually becomes a run away hit is pretty tough to predict.

Quoting from Duncan J. Watts, the professor of sociology at Columbia who ran the study:

In our study…more than 14,000 participants registered at our Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants. This second group — in what we called the “social influence” condition — was further split into eight parallel “worlds” such that participants could see the prior downloads of people only in their own world. We didn’t manipulate any of these rankings — all the artists in all the worlds started out identically, with zero downloads — but because the different worlds were kept separate, they subsequently evolved independently of one another.

This setup let us test the possibility of prediction in two very direct ways. First, if people know what they like regardless of what they think other people like, the most successful songs should draw about the same amount of the total market share in both the independent and social-influence conditions — that is, hits shouldn’t be any bigger just because the people downloading them know what other people downloaded. And second, the very same songs — the “best” ones — should become hits in all social-influence worlds.

What we found, however, was exactly the opposite. In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.

If you’re like me, you’ve downloaded and installed a bijillion little applications from music web services that look at your listening behaviors and do something cool with it. (There’s the iLike application, the Mog-o-matic, Last.FM’s audioscrobbler, and on and on…)

Songbird may put an end to the days of having all those little applications sitting in your system tray. Since Songbird is built on the Mozilla stack with open API’s, any web service can extend Songbird’s functionality and get information about your media consumption behaviors (if you allow them to).

Why is that cool?

It means ticket sites can show you when artists in your music library are coming to town, your favorite social network can broadcast your top music and videos to your friends, your favorite CD/DVD retailer can offer better recommendations based on your existing collection and play behavior, etc. Not to mention that Songbird can also pass all this information to your portable device of choice, from the Squeezebox sitting in your living room, to your new MP3 player.

It’s kinda embarrassing to think that before I met with Rob Lord and Chris Otto at Songbird, I thought of their downloadable media player as just a cool tool for adding any streaming song or video I found on the web to my music library.

In reality, Songbird is trying to be the Rosetta Stone of the digital music ecosystem.

Of course, I have my concerns with Songbird’s revenue model. Guys like Microsoft, Apple, Real Networks and Yahoo are all giving away free desktop software, which they struggle to monetize. Songbird’s CEO, Rob Lord, has several ideas about how to generate cash. For example, they can make some money from their search box and Google Ad Sense, or from up-selling music subscriptions or other services. Although generating money is not their focus right now.

Rather, Rob & Chris are going to focus on making a great product and then getting developers, web services, and device manufacturers to build cool extensions.

I’d love to see them (or help them) cut deals with distribution power houses like Amazon, My Space or Google/YouTube. It would be a win for Songbird, but also for the consumers at those sites.

There are some UI issues I think they should fix as well, but since this is version 0.25, I’m not gonna harp on those. Instead I just filed some bugs to the Songbird team, who for the record, got back to me in less than 24 hours with explanations and status updates. That was very cool.

Big shout out to Rob Lord & Chris Otto for taking the time to talk last week. These guys are true believers in the digital music revolution, and struck me as wholesome to the bone.

That’s right, you can play the main stage at the Warped Tour if you and your band sign up for the right service.

A number of web sites have tried to improve on Rob Lord and Michael Robertson’s original idea of a consumer facing web site meant to promote independent artists (Remember MP3.com before it was C-Net? How about IUMA?)

But with promotional heavyweights like My Space and Last.Fm, how are the smaller players attracting artists to their sites?

Here’s a quick list of the services an artist gets when they sign up with a consumer facing artist promotion site. Most of these services offer artists the ability to set up a promotional page or two, and in many cases, they allow fans to do so as well to facilitate social networking.

UBL: Ability to have an artist web site and pay for promotion (seems like a 1997 feature set, guys! On the other hand, they’ve been around a while, so maybe it is working).

Garage Band: Get your music recommended to iLike users, ClearChannel exposure, and feedback on your songs from artists/fans.

Music Nation: Post your music video in an American Idol like contest where the winner gets a record deal with Epic and exposure on Clear Channel.

Indie 911: Use an embeddable widget to sell music anywhere or let your fans sell your music for a cut of the dough. They also offer marketing & licensing services.

Amie Street: Sell your music downloads with variable pricing so when you start off your music is free. The price rises as you and your band gain popularity. You’ll also get air time on Amie street radio.

Pure Volume: Win a chance to play the Warped Tour, sell your music on their site.

Fuzz: Win $2,000 for signing up in the first 30 days. Sell your music on their site. Use Fuzz tools to manage the online marketing of your band.

Disk Revolt: Design physical cards redeemable for downloads. Then sell or give away these cards at your merchandise table at a live show. Get 100 free cards for signing up. If you sell cards for $5/ea that’s a $500 value. Thanks to Paul Lamere for pointing this site out over email.

Of course, the best lure in my opinion is the most plays to the most ears, so the site with the most traffic wins.

The CTIA’s (Cellular Telecom and Internet Association) conference kicked off in Orlando FLA today, and numerous juicy tidbits have been hitting the wire.

Sprint made two announcements that caught my eye, including a decision to lower the price of over the air (OTA) music downloads from the ridiculous ($2.49) to the acceptable ($.99). Combine that with the news (via GigaOm) that they are rolling out WiMax to 19 US cities (Chicago, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, Washington D.C., Austin, Dallas, Denver, Fort Worth, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Antonio and Seattle), and you can start to get pretty rosy about the “wireless music everywhere” scenario. Of course lowering the price of downloads and building out wireless connectivity doesn’t complete the picture. You still need the right device and the right software/UI that make the experience easy and enjoyable for the consumer. Not to mention that consumers will want downloads from their phones to work on at least their ipods and their PCs, so those nasty DRM issues still need to be worked out. Hopefully the iPhone will at least elegantly deal with phone to iPod to PC issues elegantly. Still, until high speed wireless networks are as pervasive as broadband, I’d expect to see sideloading music from the PC to the phone remain the dominant consumer behavior. Ultimately, it makes so much more sense to have your music living in the cloud and available to stream to any device rather than shuffling downloads between devices. Than folks like Wider Than wouldn’t have to download songs to your phone and your PC simulatenously.

Speaking of “device + software + wireless service”, anyone who buys a Samsung Synch or Black Jack plus a two year wireless contract with AT&T wireless get’s Naspter to go for free for 1 year (via Digital Music News). Congrats to Laura Goldberg and the team at Napster. The funny thing about this deal is that AT&T also extended it to it’s internet broadband offering.

Why is that funny? Well, the service is called AT&T Yahoo High Speed Interent Service, but the music service you’ll be getting when you buy a 2 year contract is Napster. Now this could be because Napster gave AT&T a much sweeter deal than Yahoo Music Unlimited was willing to offer, or it could be because David Goldberg’s departure from Yahoo Music is temporarily disrupting things while Ian Rogers assumes control, or it could or it mean that Napster took bad deal terms, or perhaps this is a signal that Yahoo isn’t interested in investing heavily in Yahoo Music Unlimited anymore. (Ah, the open ended speculaiton, so tantalizing, yet not very informing or responsible I know). I’ll see if Ian Rogers or someone over at Yahoo will comment.

Right around the time that the CRB issued their royalty rate hike decision, imeem and SNOCAP quietly announced a partnership. Like the rest of the bloggers and press, I was so busy being outraged by the CRB’s decision, I didn’t pay enough attention to this important step forward in the creation of a digital rights marketplace.

Before I defend that assertion, let’s take a crash course in SNOCAP’s history.

Back in 2002, SNOCAP planned to facilitate peer to peer (p2p) networks’ transition from illegal services to legal services. They had some cool technology to do this including digital fingerprinting to identify a song on a p2p network and the SNOCAP Registry, which was essentially a list of songs and their associated rights. For example, SNOCAP could tell eDonkey that an Outkast song was being downloaded and that the record label was OK with people downloading the song if it was protected by DRM and sold for $.99.

Think about that for a second.

SNOCAP can do what Audible Magic does (identifying content on a network). However, instead of focusing their product on infringing content identified in take down notices, they’ve focused their system on helping artists make money from their music…wherever it may end up.

That’s wholesome.

Unfortunately, the p2ps didn’t jump at the opportunity to become retailers, so SNOCAP turned its attention to My Space and the social networks.

The SNOCAP/My Space deal got tons of hype, because, well, it’s My Space. Aside from a huge distribution win, the deal allows independent artists to sell music through their My Space pages. SNOCAP makes money by collecting $0.39 for every download sold (probably less since My Space is taking a slice). They may also end up charging artists and labels an annual fee (from $30 to $100) for using SNOCAP.

Certainly making an embeddable widget that lets small artists sell their music directly to their fan base is a cool feature, but it would be a mistake to think of SNOCAP as a simple retail storefront.

The imeem deal really drives homes the juicy stuff.

Imeem allows it’s customers to build and stream playlists. Using SNOCAP, imeem can make an offer to all of the artists in the SNOCAP registry. In this case the offer was, “let me stream your song in a user generated playlist and I’ll share some percentage of my advertising revenue with you”. Artists can opt in or out of the offer depending on how badly they want the promotion and/or the money.

Doesn’t a marketplace sound so much nicer than those nasty CRB rulings?

On the down side, the majors are pretty likely to uniformly opt out of imeem style offers today. But as the labels become more sophisticated about on-line marketing they may allow their up and coming artists to participate in order to win visibility. Meanwhile, streaming music services will have more levers available to them for mixing new and known artists together in streams to drive down licensing costs. Not to mention that they can protect themselves from copyright infringement claims by keeping unlicensed content off their networks using SNOCAP’s fingerprinting technology. Finally, consumers will benefit, because they can easily discover new music through free, ad supported streams rather than a 30 second sample or paying $.99 for a download.

A skeptic might say that only the crappy artists or artists looking for exposure will be willing to experiment with new licensing models. I’d refer those people to eMusic. The eMusic team has built an impressive catalog of artists who are willing to consider creative licensing terms and has managed to sell over $100 million worth of music. If SNOCAP had as many artists willing to entertain percentage of revenue based streaming, (hello back catalog) the future of innovative streaming music services could be very bright indeed. That said, I’m not entirely sure how the SNOCAP digital rights marketplace coexists with Soundexchange and the PROs in the case of streaming radio.

I’d love to see SNOCAP’s Registry become a viable rights marketplace. Of course, it would be even cooler with built in variable pricing mechanisms, so that consumer demand, not corporate negotiations, determined the final price.

Also a quick shout out. Thanks to SNOCAP’s CTO Dave Rowley, who spent 45 minutes patiently letting me pepper him with questions for this blog entry. If you want to help empower independent artists and be a part of the team that builds the digital rights marketplace, apply for SNOCAP’s open product management position.

Let’s face it. This digital media revolution is a bloody affair. In the past couple of weeks Viacom dropped a billion dollar lawsuit on Google, the CRB (tried) to hike web casting rates, the RIAA began fresh raids on colleges and set up a $3k a pop settlement web site. (How long before they add social networking? I can see it now; “You have 4 new lawsuits waiting! See other people in your area who have infringed similar content!”)

Will there ever be a world where the technological innovators, the consumers, the pirates, the content rights owners, and the artist all feel like they get a fair deal? Or will we continue to bicker over the incredible shrinking market?

Call it utopian, call it visionary, or call it naivety, but I believe that the music industry can figure out a way to take all the content floating around the net today and use it to promote bands, delight listeners, and expand their business.

“Haha. Good one Ethan, have another drink,” you may say.

But I’m serious. Before launching into the numbers, let’s clarify the problem at hand. The labels are watching their music sales plummet, and are responding by trying to prevent the spread of unprotected/free digital music. Since their business model has largely depended on selling music to consumers, they’ve been looking to suplement their revenue by selling digital stuff like ringtones, subscriptions and downloads. While I understand this approach, it doesn’t fully take advantage of the new behaviors and expectations around music on the net. My thesis is that the labels could cease selling music all together (yes, give it away for free) and make more money from advertising.

Here’s a look at the numbers that make me think this way. First, how big do you think the advertising market was in the United States last year (2006)? The answer, according to Kagan , was $240 billion dollars in 2005 and forecasted to be $255 billion in 2006. According to the RIAA, the 2005 US market for pre-recorded consumer purchased music was $12.3 billion.

In other words, the sale of music is 2005 was about 5% of the total US advertising market. In 2006, the advertising market grew and the music business shrunk, so it should be a little less than 5%.

Now here’s where it gets really interesting. Over 80% of the US population listens to music on a weekly basis. A friend of mine slipped me this data, I can’t list the source, but it’s from a reliable one. Now for the golden question:

Is it reasonable to think that 5% of the total US advertising budget would be spent to reach over 80% of the population?

Seems like an amazing deal for advertisers. Better yet, such spending levels, in constant dollar terms, could completely make up for a total loss of income from selling CDs and digital downloads. If the ad sales forces at media outlets do their job right, they can take a far larger share of the advertising market than 5%, which would mean this digital music phenomena actually has the potential to expand the US music market.

Now there are some problems with this thinking as well. The first problem is today’s online advertising market size. The total size of online advertising was $16.8 billion in 2006 according to PwC/IAB’s internet revenue report. So the online market is not ready to make the shift today. The good news is that neither are consumers. Sure they are “stealing” lots of music and/or accessing free streams on the net. But they also bought 634 million CDs in 2005 ($10.5 billion worth)! Also, the enabling technologies like high speed wireless networks that enable all this content to be beamed anywhere need time to be deployed and adopted.

Still brave folks like SpiralFrog have already seen the vision. If they actually make it to market (Q1 ‘07 has only 15 days left), they’ll attempt to use advertising to fully subsidize music. I think it’s a tough sell to ask someone to sit through a bunch of advertisements just to download 1 free song. It’s easier to just steal it, so I’m pessemistic for the ol’ froggers.

On the other hand, companies like Zing and Slacker and public wifi aspiring cities like London, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are harbingers of great changes. When everyone is carrying around connected devices and you can stream personalized radio or better yet, music on demand, then you might put up with 3 commercials every 15 or 20 minutes. Not to mention that if you don’t like it, you can always subscribe and kill the commercials. The major labels benefit because the music market grows well beyond what it is today. Independent artists benefit because they can submit their music to recommendation engines that feed new music to people based on their tastes. And that’s a world I could really get use to.

While the main stream press and the public are rabidly hyping/consuming downloadable music (especially iPod + iTunes) a fascinating ecosystem has sprouted up on the Internet. The diversity and quality of music streams (or really any content) boggles the mind. From mash-ups to mixtapes, from up and coming Indies to the hit makers promo streams; it’s all out there. When wireless networks support faster transmission rates (not just carriers, but public Wi-Fi or WiMAX networks too) all of that streaming content will be available wherever you go.

That’s why applications like Streampad are so cool. Dan Kantor had the vision to build a product that helps take advantage of all that great content, and organize it using a paradigm with which the consumer is already familiar (the media player). It’s a nice simple UI with some handy tools, especially when you consider that it was built by one guy. His widgets are exceedingly easy to use and embed, which is also nice for hack bloggers like myself.

I have a few feature requests as well. All though the UI is clean, it hasn’t been built out to support some specific tasks. For example, I wish it were easier to add multiple songs from a website to a playlist (without adding every song on a web page to the playlist). Or I wish that you could could have streams integrated directly into your music library instead of (or perhaps in addition to) having them on a seperate “web” tab. I think Songbird does a better job at that stuff, but you’ve got to download some software. That said, the product is an impressive one man show.

TechCrunch’s December 2006 post billed the primary customer benefit as being able to stream your iTunes music library to any computer. I’m pretty much always with my laptop or portable music player, so that didn’t resonate as much for me. Rather, the primary benefit was having a clean way to keep track of music being posted on mash-up sites and music blogs. I also dig how easy the Streampad widget is to embed in my blog. I’m kind of a broken record when it comes to recommendation, but think it would be fantastic if Streampad used my existing music library to find streams I would love on the Internet. But enough about what I think, let’s hear what Dan has to say.

Ethan: In this post you say “I would like Streampad to be your default listening application on the computer”. It seems like Streampad is a great solution for folks who are actively discovering music through streaming sources like music blogs or artist websites. On the other hand, there’s tremendous momentum behind iTunes + iPod. Why would an iPod customer use Streampad instead of iTunes?

Dan: Streampad cannot compete against iTunes when it comes to purchasing music and syncing with the iPod. Those two events are done very well by Apple and there would be no point in competing there. But those two events are isolated from listening to music. The amount of time we spend listening to music far outweighs the amount of time we spend purchasing and syncing music (thankfully).

Streampad can compete with iTunes in areas that iTunes does not do very well in. iTunes is a heavy app that consumes a lot of resources. In comparison, Streampad is lightweight and runs inside a browser that is open all the time on most computers. While iTunes allows you to connect to other instances within your network, Streampad extends this concept to the internet and allows you to access your library from any computer that contains a browser. Streampad also blends in many other great web services to enhance the listening experience as well as a social aspect to listening which iTunes does not have.

Ethan: So it sounds like you expect consumers to use iTunes for buying/synching music and Streampad for remotely accessing their music collection, organizing their favorite on-line streams, enhancing their listening experience and discovery through social networking. It seems like the mass market isn’t likely to use multiple media players for their music collection, but certainly music enthusiasts might. What’s your take?

Dan: Music enthusiasts is an interesting term. It seems like most people I know I are enthusiastic about music, including groups of all ages. I think that many people would be willing to give Streampad a try if they found out they can just browse to a site and have their entire music collection there. It certainly comes in handy when you are in an environment where you cannot download or run programs.

Ethan: I’ve noticed the “friends” section, but it’s not clear to me how you actually find and add people to your friends list. How do you find and add people?

Dan: The friends section is somewhat under-developed at this point. There are a few ways to find people. The first is do a search. Of course, this requires prior knowledge of someone else’s username. Another way is to look at who is listening to the same song as you are. This does not work too well now though since there are not enough people on. Another way is to search for a web song, play it and see who created the playlist it is on. I’ve found a number of cool people this way.

Ethan: Got, it. I love the context you provide in the Now Playing window by showing recent blog posts for music you are playing. How did you implement this feature?

Dan: This is the beauty of APIs! We utilize both Flash and Javascript to call multiple web services and get some great data back about the current song. As for recent blog posts, consider that a part of our secret sauce!

Ethan: Awwww. I was really asking about the blogs, but I guess you need to have some secrets. You’ve hinted that you will be layering in recommendation soon. How might you implement recommendations and when can we expect to see it?

Dan: Not too soon unfortunately. Recommendations are the heart of any great e-commerce site. Automatically offering content, products or services based on what you know about your customers is a great way to make them happy. Streampad is heading toward a future where it can offer new music to its customers based on music they already own and listen to, as well as what trusted friends are listening to. But to accomplish this, we need a lot more data than we currently have. This includes more play histories as well as better metadata about the web songs out there.

Ethan: What about using someone like MusicIp, Media Unbound, or SoundFlavor for recommendation? Or are they too expensive?

Dan: I haven’t looked too much into those services. We very well may end up using a third party for this. Being the bootstrapped, cheapskates that we are, we’ll probably look for a free solution. I know last, yahoo and even aol offer some stuff via their APIs.

Ethan: Your concert feature is cool too. It looks like you find on-line postings of concerts by any band in my music library. Are you are matching up my music collection with artists in etree.org’s Live Music Archive. Is that right?

Dan: Actually, that’s just a coincidence. I manually went to the Live Music Archive and picked out my favorite artists. They do not offer an API, so it is a slow process to add concerts. I would love to link to all of them and even do some cool filtering as you mention. Some day…

Ethan: That’s too funny. I thought you were reading my collection and offering me live gigs. OK, so moving on, when you think about potential new features or directions for Streampad, what ideas get you the most jazzed?

Dan: The short-term goal is to get the Desktop application working right out of the box. We are almost there yet, but not quite. Firewalls still give us trouble, but we soon will be breaking through them 100% of the time.

Streampad is a native web application. This means that it has the potential to link to and from every piece of music content out there, both online and on the desktop. Just thinking about that blows my mind. We have this incredibly distributed platform that has so much content that it’s scary. Presenting all of this content in a meaningful way to people is a huge challenge. We are trying to layer an application on top of this content that is everywhere you want it to be - whether that is at Streampad.com, in a widget on a music blog, on your personal start page or on other devices.

Ethan: Yes, this is one of the reasons I am excited about what you do, as well as Hype Machine and Yotta Music. I’d love to see all three services mashed up into one. Anyway, let’s talk stats for a moment. How many monthly visitors do you have? How many people are using Streampad widgets?

Dan: We have a shade under 10,000 registered users and see about 3000 log in at least once a month. The widget is on about 500 sites, although we do not have great tools to track this yet.

Ethan: What are some of the most effective ways you’ve found to promote and grow traffic to the Streampad application?

Dan: The two best ways so far have been through the widget and through bloggers’ reviews. Every now and then a large blog writes about us and we see a huge jump in traffic. After it dies down a few people stick around. The widget is a nice way to attract people. Most people who come in through the widget are interested in getting one. As soon as they discover the app, they stick around.

Ethan: What’s Streampad’s revenue model?

Dan: We are currently exploring ways to bring in revenue. There are some obvious choices such as ads and affiliate codes. We will probably mix in affiliate codes soon. I do not think it is out of question to directly charge users. I believe that if you offer a service that people want, they will be willing to pay a reasonable price as long as they do not feel like they are being ripped off.

Ethan: What new or emerging services in music (or media) are you excited about right now?

Dan: The number of cool music apps has just exploded over the past year or two. I love the usual suspects - last, hype, yotta. I recently got a Wii and think the Finetune Wii player is simply amazing. I also love Stumble Video on the Wii. Cable was out the other night and we watched Stumble Video for a few hours. Didn’t miss cable at all.

Ethan: What music are you really enjoying right now?

Dan: My favorite music of the moment is Ben Kweller, The Notwist, Kenna and Jack Johnson.

Ethan For some reason I couldn’t get the Notwist to play through Streampad, but listen to Jack Johnson, Kenna and then Ben Kweller and see if you share Dan’s taste in music. It’s also worth noting that I looked for Kenna on Rhapsody/YottaMusic and could not find the band there, but got plenty of hits at the Hype Machine. Come on Luke & Anthony….gimme that integration!

Update Dan is super fast on the draw. He sent me a link to a Notwist song through Streampad, so you can listen to all of his favorites now. Pretty cool.