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The first time I used Yottamusic, I added a comment to Luke Matkins’s home page exclaiming that his service had improved my enjoyment of Rhapsody 217%. Seems like an extraordinary claim given that Rhapsody has it’s own competing web based version of the service. So what’s so hot about Yottamusic?

Great UI Luke has clearly spent time thinking through and improving Rhapsody’s interface. For example, compare the two screen shots of an album page on both services. Rhapsody spends the top 230 pixels filling the page with cluttered UI before you get to the album art, and over 470 pixels before you get to the albums track list. Check out how this looks below:

Oh, and I hate how there’s a big yellow button (really an ad) to “Get the Rhapsody MP3 Player”. Not only do I own one already, but I also don’t appreciate ads in a service for which I pay a subscription fee. Just another example of Real putting business needs above customer needs.

By contrast, Yottamusic spends about 140 pixels on clean navigation and then rewards you with visually captivating album cover art and within 270 pixels you are at the complete track list. I’m not saying that any consumer is out there counting pixels, but rather that Luke understands how to lay out a page and present the information you care about, whereas Rhapsody clutters the UI. Judge for yourself.

Look at how vibrant and engaging the album art looks. Not to mention every track on the album manages to fit above the fold. And don’t get me started on how much I love his search functionality that auto-populates possible matches as you type. Love it, especially when trying out spellings on new bands, or looking for a song on an album.

It’s social and fun I love the functionality that Luke has decided to include. He’s added a social element to Rhapsody, so if you want to see what Pandora’s CTO Tom Conrad is listening to, you can find out easily. Same goes for Fred Wilson, me, or any of your real world friends. Better yet, you can listen along to what your friends are playing if you want to just relax and let someone you trust DJ for you.

It’s got a ton of potential I already love the service, but think about the potential and it gets even more exciting. Certainly folks who are willing to pay over $120/yr for a music subscription are serious music fans. But most services like Last.FM and iLike don’t capture their listening behaviors, probably b/c they are a quantitatively a small market. While that may be true, they are none the less an important market, and I’d love to see free listening behavior integrated into Yottamusic, or Last.FM integrate Rhapsody listening behaviors. Most of all, I’d love to see what would happen if Hype Machine listening was logged in Yottamusic. Come on Luke and Anthony….please make it happen.

What about infringement? It’s not clear to me if the service is running afoul of Rhapsody’s content licensing agreements or not. Certainly the intentions are very clean here. Yottamusic only makes money by selling Rhapsody subscriptions. Rhapsody is clearing encouraging this type of behavior with open API’s and a $15 per new Rhapsody trial affiliate pay out. However I can’t tell you if Rhapsody’s licenses allow third party services to host alternative views of their subscription services. Their terms of service make a point to say that the data is for “personal use only”. On the other hand, you could argue the Best Buy/Rhapsody player, Sonos and Sansa are all representing the Rhapsody subscription service in a new UI as well. Certainly all three are contributing to private businesses through Rhapsody integration. At best this is a gray area, though it seems that the labels would be crazy to shut down a service like Yottamusic since it’s driving revenue directly into their pockets by encouraging subscription sign ups. It’s the curse of all innovative services like Yottamusic; the law has not caught up to innovation.

OK enough raving about Yottamusic, let’s talk to Luke Matkins!

Ethan Bauman: Why did you build Yottamusic.com?

Luke Matkins: Yottamusic started out as a standalone search utility called Musicfox, which was basically Yottamusic’s find as you type search engine for local MP3 files. Once we added Rhapsody support to Musicfox, we found that it became the main thrust of the product, and we decided to focus on Rhapsody exclusively. The next step was to make it entirely web based, and so Yottamusic was born.

One of the overarching goals of Yottamusic has been to figure out how to let people get the most out of such an enormous music library. There’s enough music in there for people to listen for a lifetime, and so our challenge has been making that easy enough for people to deal with so that that can actually happen. If we want users to be able to listen to music all the time, it needs to work without a lot of thought. Just making pages simple and not too cluttered can make a huge difference.

Ethan Bauman: What problems do you feel have not been solved well in digital music or more generally in digital media?

Luke Matkins: To me, success in digital music means letting people listen to music they love whenever they want. I think one of the things holding digital music back from that is the sale-oriented pricing model. People don’t have a lot of time to spend on extra decisions, and introducing the question of “is this song worth 99 cents” is a surefire way to lose a large percentage of your listeners. Even if it’s not about the money per se, the decision itself presents enough of an obstacle that it prevents people from listening.

In the longer run, I think that’s how music subscription services can really be successful. They’re a lot harder to explain initially, but once people try them out, they end up listening to so much more music because the perpetual “is this worth buying” question finally goes away.

Ethan Bauman: Today you make money from affiliate revenue generated by signing people up to Rhapsody. What kind of business models are you considering in the future?

Luke Matkins: Currently, all of our revenue is from affiliate fees from Rhapsody signups. In the longer term we may want to try to do some sort of revenue sharing agreement with them, but our main priority right now is to continue growing our subscriber counts and adding more features to the site. One very nice thing about our partnership with Rhapsody is that they’re the ones doing all the heavy lifting in terms of getting all the music content from the labels. Our job is simple in comparison!

Ethan Bauman: What other music services do you respect out there today from a design standpoint? How about services that have cool functionality but may have missed the design boat?

Luke Matkins: I personally am very partial to anything web-based, in particular Last.fm and the Hype Machine. I really like the whole “web-based music ecosystem” that seems to have been springing up lately. The idea of having a single program for all your music needs seems really outdated when compared to the diversity of experience you can get with the web. Being able to discover a new song in Hype Machine that magically searches thousands of blog posts and then going over to play the full album in Yottamusic is just really neat.

Oh, one other one to mention: FineTune’s Wii player is awesome. I would love it if we could one day do something like that with Yottamusic. Nintendo and Real, let’s make it happen!!!

Ethan Bauman: Can you offer any hints for what’s next (from a feature standpoint) on Yottamusic?

Luke Matkins: We have a very active user community and a lot of our recent work has been implementing user-suggested features. We’ve been adding more APIs to the site and it’s been really neat to see what people are coming up with. One of our users has been working on a statistics generator for your play history that’s very cool. (Sample output at http://eminence32.net/devel/yottamusic/output.txt.)

In terms of future features, there’s a pretty long list of things we’re working on. We’re close to releasing a watch list feature that will alert you when there are new releases by artists you’re interested in. We’d really like to extend that with concert listings as well. We’re also going to continue doing more social networking features, including better profile customization, recommendation lists, that sort of thing. And then just lots more tweaks to make things easier to use and make it easier to find new music.

I want to add a shameless plug for a couple features we’ve just added in the last week or two: a Yottamusic Mini widget for start page services like Google Personalized and Protopage, and the Yottamizer, a Firefox extension that adds Yottamusic play links to artist and album pages on Last.fm, Amazon, the Hype Machine and a few others. The general idea there is to make it super easy for people to fire up Yottamusic when they find something they want to hear. That moment of interest is really important, and the easier we can make that for people, the more music they’ll end up listening to, and the happier they’ll be!

Ethan Bauman: That sounds cool. Why don’t you team up with Anthony Volodkin and layer in results for Rhapsody or Napster when the Hype Machine returns a null set?

Luke Matkins: That’s a great idea! In addition to the Yottamizer extension, we’ve been discussing some deeper integration with the Hype Machine, so stay tuned.

Ethan Bauman: I’d love to see that happen. Can you give me a sense of how many people are using Yottamusic?

Luke Matkins: Depending on the day of the week, (February 2007) we’re getting around 2-4k unique visitors to Yottamusic a day. One thing that’s really surprised us is how many non-subscribers are using the site. We designed most of the site with full subscribers in mind, and are now starting to think about other things we can offer people before
they actually join Rhapsody. As far as our subscriber count, it’s still pretty small, but given our current growth rate, we are hoping to have more Yottamusic users than atoms in the universe by the year 2024!

Ethan Bauman: Trippy…..moving from the universe to the back room, what’s your back-end system look like? What servers are you using?

Luke Matkins: Yottamusic is entirely hosted on Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services, which we absolutely love. We’re actually using S3 instead of a centralized user database, which means that pretty much all we have to do to the scale the site is run additional web server instances. Running on the “Amazon grid” has really saved us a lot of worrying about scalability, and in my opinion it (and things like it) are the future of web hosting.

Ethan Bauman: I’m sure you’ve met lots of folks in digital music by now. Are their individuals that really stand out to you in terms of their vision and intentions?

Luke Matkins: One of the best things about starting Yottamusic has been meeting so many people through the site, users as well as other developers. A couple people in particular are Dan Kantor at Streampad, who is also using a lot of S3, and Anthony Volodkin of the Hype Machine, who has built a really awesome site. I love talking to people interested in digital music, so if anyone ever wants a rambling phone conversation about music, I’m your guy!

Ethan Bauman: I was impressed by Dan as well. He’s next in line for an interview on Getcha Info. What new music (or new to you) is making heavy rotation on your playlist these days (I guess I could look at your Yottamusic profile, but what are you absolute favorites)?

Luke Matkins: A lot of mindless electronica, pretty much. It helps me get work
done! A couple artists I’d mention are Two Lone Swordsmen and the Prototypes who are not electronica but are also excellent working music. Also: you MUST listen to “Irene Goodnight” and “Santa Claus” by Joseph Spence. He kind of sounds like a goblin but just listen to his guitar!!