Radio Survivor

Today Apple CEO Steve Jobs made his now-annual announcement for the new version of the company’s top product. While there were several surprises in store, like the addition of video conferencing and HD video recording, there wasn’t anything unexpected for radio enthusiasts.

Jobs confirmed the debut of multitasking with the new version 4 of the iPhone OS which already had been revealed last month. What’s nice about multitasking is that audio apps like Pandora, Slacker, last.fm, AOL Radio and the Public Radio Player will play in the background while using other apps, just like listening to iPod music.

For a hard core online radio listener multitasking may indeed be the “killer app” that makes it worth spending the $199 to upgrade to the 16 GB iPhone 4 from a first generation iPhone or the 3G. Owners of the 3GS will get multitasking, too, which also makes for a cheaper upgrade for owners of earlier models, at $99.

Apple says the new iPhone has a bigger battery offering up to 40 hours of music listening time and up to 6 hours of 3G web browsing. Listening to streaming radio over 3G is quite a bit more data intensive than simple web browsing, so it’s doubtful you’ll get 6 hours of 3G audio streaming.

Unfortunately, new iPhone owners starting contracts with AT&T will no longer have an unlimited data plan available to them, with the biggest data plan topping out at 2 GB per month, with $10 for each additional 1 GB. It’s unclear if a current iPhone owner can continue to have an unlimited plan if she starts a new contract upon buying an iPhone 4, though I should expect so.

Still missing from the iPhone is an actual radio capable of receiving traditional analog or HD broadcasts. When the radio-equipped iPod Nano debuted last October rumors starting swirling that there was a latent radio receiver inside the iPhone. One would think that if the rumor were true, that radio would have come out with the introduction of the iPhone 4. Since we’ve seen no sign of an iPhone radio with this major update of its OS, I’m guessing we’re unlikely to see one in the near future, if ever.

Last week AT&T announced that new smartphone customers will no longer be eligible for the unlimited data plans that current customers enjoy. Instead, two somewhat less expensive plans will be available. For $15 new customers may download 200 MB of data per month, with a charge of $15 for every additional 200 GB over the limit. 2 GB per month will cost $25, plus another $10 for each 1 GB after that. Current data plan customers pay $30 for unlimited data. For its part AT&T says that either of these new plans provides enough data to satisfy 98% of their customers.

While it may be true that the vast majority of AT&T customers use less than 2 GB of data in a month, I would argue that’s because data-hungry mobile streaming media is just starting to take off. But the these new caps threaten to stunt that growth just as mobile internet radio is gaining steam.

The 200 MB of data offered by the least expensive plan covers only about 200 minutes of streaming stereo music at the common bitrate of 128kbps. And that’s without any other data usage for email, web browsing or anything else. Even listening to a lower-quality mono talk station at 32 kbps will only stretch listening to 800 minutes, or 13 hours.

The 2 GB plan will cover about 34 hours of stereo music and as much as 136 hours of low-bitrate mono talk. At first blush that seems like a fair amount of listening time, but how does it measure up against real-world radio listening? Someone whose commute lasts about an hour each way will easily listen to over 40 hours of radio in a month. If that commuter wants to use her iPhone or Blackberry to listen to Pandora, last.fm or another streaming music station she’ll be over her limit by the last week of the month.

Without access to hard statistics on how many hours the average mobile Pandora or last.fm user listens it’s hard to say for sure how many new AT&T customers are likely to be affected. However, I do think it’s fair to say that these limits will make many smartphone users cautious about how much time they’ll spend listening to internet radio on the go, especially in order to avoid overage fees.

Of course, AT&T is not the only wireless data carrier in the US. As long as you don’t have your heart set on an iPhone there are lots of other carriers to choose from who still offer unlimited data plans. But for how much longer? Computerworld quotes several analysts who predict that Verizon, the nation’s second largest carrier, will set caps in as soon as six months. While there may be some pricing competition on these plans, I’m guessing they’ll offer pretty similar amounts of data for prices that only vary by a few dollars a month.

With a cost between 75 cents and $4.50 and hour, listening to mobile internet radio on an AT&T smartphone starts to look pretty uncompetitive compared to traditional broadcast, which is free, or satellite radio which offers unlimited listening for $10 – $20 a month. While it may be inevitable that the days of unlimited data plans will come to an end, I hope that the metered pricing quickly becomes more reasonable, permitting a reasonable amount of streaming radio listening. If not, this vibrant new way of listening to radio might be stunted before it has a chance to blossom.

Happy news for Last.fm scrobblers. Now if you’ve deleted some artist or composer from your profile, you can restore it via the Last.fm scrobble restore tool.

“Being in charge of the database that stores everyone’s scrobbles is a great responsibility and one I don’t take lightly,” explained self-proclaimed Last.fm ‘Scrobble Overlord’ Ricky Cormier (aka ‘evilrix’) on his blog on Tuesday. “One thing that I get asked now and again is, ‘I’ve accidentally deleted Artist X from my profile, can you restore it please’?”

“Well, the simple answer is, ‘yes I can’ but up until now I’ve not had anything that allows it to be done with the click of a button or two. I decided enough was enough and the result is this Playground app.”

For those not initiated into the wonderful world of scrobbling, it’s basically a means by which you can communicate your musical preferences to Last.fm. You automatically scrobble to Last when you pick and choose songs and composers on the site. But you can also download Last’s scrobbler application, which will allow you to convey to Last your iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, and Foobar 2000 tunes.

Cormier explains scrobbling and this new restore app further.

“When you delete anything from your library we don’t actually delete it, we move it to a different table in your database. We need to do this so we can keep track of what you’ve deleted to make sure we don’t keep offering it to you as a recommendation.

All this Playground app does is allow you to review what’s in your deleted tracks table and if you choose to restore them it just puts them back into your main scrobble table.”

(more…)

In case you haven’t noticed, last.fm has a cool new feature, a list of upcoming music festivals in your area.

“We know from experience that many of the best music memories happen when you’re rocking out in a field with thousands of other sunburnt/soaking wet compatriots,” Last’s Robin Lisle wrote in a recent blog post. So it looks like the application grabs your IP address and tells you about whatever’s happening in your region.

A lot going on in mine, actually, including the Health and Harmony Music and Arts Festival  at the Sonoma County (CA) Fairgrounds on June 11. Bands will include Lauryn Hill, Steel Pulse, Slightly Stoopid, and The Expendibles.

You can also search the app for events across the United States, North America, London, Paris, and even Helsinki.

“This is just the beginning,” Lisle promises. ”Over the next month we’ll be rolling out additional features to help you find up and coming artists you should check out (so you can say you saw them before they were big), find festival buddies and easily share your festival picks.”

As an iPhone user I can say with full knowledge that one of the things that holds the device back when it comes to listening to online radio is the lack of multitasking. While the iPod app allows you to play your audio files in the background while surfing the web or using other apps, you can only use third-party apps one at a time. Since listening to online radio, Pandora, last.fm or Slacker requires a third-party app, there’s no reading facebook or playing video games.

This restriction is sort of tolerable on a small mobile device like the iPhone, but it’s far more annoying on the iPad. Imagine if your laptop or netbook wouldn’t let you listen to streaming stations while word processing or web browsing. In fact, for work I use a Palm Pre which does permit multi-tasking. I do occasionally listen to Pandora on the Pre while answering emails, even though it kills the battery more quickly.

Wired’s Gadget Lab has a sneak preview of a beta of the forthcoming iPhone OS version 4. Top on the feature list is real multitasking. When the new OS drops later this summer iPad and iPhone 3GS users finally will be able to run their favorite streaming audio app in the background while using other apps. You might even be able to run two audio apps at the same time to test your bandwidth and tolerance for cacophony.

Unfortunately multitasking will not be available for first generation iPhones or the 3G. I guess our puny little processors can’t handle it.

 

Getting bored with Last.fm or Pandora? Interested in exploring other internet radio options? Check out Slacker Radio.

Recently featured in several commercials for Verizon’s Droid, Slacker Radio serves as another fantastic means for discovering new music and enjoying radio. For example, I was pleasantly surprised to have Riley Kilo and Rogue Wave pop up in my Say Hi To Your Mom radio station (I hadn’t heard either of them for quite a while, and they’ve never popped up on my Last.fm or Pandora stations of the same name). I haven’t started to fully explore its musical offerings, but I definitely haven’t been disappointed yet.

Like its counterparts, Slacker Radio allows users to create customized radio stations based on either an artist or a song. Unlike its counterparts, it also lists recently played songs and stations based on genre, which is a nifty perk, and even offers a “Top Stations” section consisting of “top hits” and a number of genre-specific stations. Slacker Radio has also developed a number of applications for smart phone, portable, and home use, including the iPhone and iPod touch, Android, Blackberry, Sony Walkman, and a number of streaming options.

As someone who has been keeping their eye on Slacker Radio’s development (via their website) for the last few months, it’s nice to see that they’ve already developed a piece of hardware called the Slacker G2, an alternative to the iPod that syncs up to a user’s personalized Slacker music station using a wireless signal. The website also offers Slacker Radio Plus, which gives users the option of ad-free listening with “unlimited skips, song lyrics, mobile station caching, and more” for either $4.99 per month (billed monthly) or $3.99 per month (billed annually at $47.88). Unfortunately, this wouldn’t be necessary if the website’s layout was more user friendly and visually appealing, so it’ll be interesting to see where this goes. I also find it interesting that each track gives the user the opportunity to “GET RINGTONE” as opposed to the actual track, which is generally the case, but the website is still relatively new, so, again, we’ll have to wait and see.

For you more tech savvy users, the online store offers a number of Slacker accessories, including an FM transmitter and a number of add-ons for the G2. The store also offers an assortment of Slacker-related t-shirts and baseball caps.

The website’s forum section appears to be quite active and features a number of threads, ranging from artist suggestions to personal radio player feedback. This portion of the website appears to be well-organized and should be able to answer any remaining questions that you may have. Enjoy!

After announcing some changes to their “scrobbler API” last week, the developers at Last.fm have decided to pay closer attention to user feedback on their blog, various discussion forums, and “elsewhere.” As a result, Last.fm recently announced a series of improvements to their website in an article titled “The artist feedback loop” on the blog portion of their website. Before elaborating on these changes, here’s how Last.fm actually works.

What’s “scrobbling?”

scrobble: skrob-bul

[verb] To automatically add the tracks you play to your Last.fm profile with a piece of software called a Scrobbler.

As explained on the Last.fm website, “the scrobbling API defines how data gets transmitted to Last.fm every time you listen to a song. Scrobblers are incredibly important to us. They’re the building blocks of your music profile, and put together, they power basically everything that Last.fm knows about music.”

Essentially powering the entire website, the Scrobbler depends on a community of users who use the software to fill their music libraries on Last.fm with music that they’ve been listening to on their computers or ipods. If this sounds appealing to you, the software can be found here.

To be a little more technical, another name for Scrobble API is “submissions protocol,” which defines “scrobbling” as “the submission of now-playing and recent historical track data to Last.fm user profiles.” The protocol consists of three stages: handshake, now-playing, and submission, and Last.fm states, “Typically a client should perform the handshake once at the start of a listening session and then use the values returned to perform as many now-playing and submission requests as required (i.e. the handshake does not need to be performed for every track submitted just once).” (more…)

The new issue of Rolling Stone now on newsstands features “40 Reasons To Be Excited About Music.” Though I might argue with a lot of the reasons (Black Eyed Peas are reason #1?!), I’m pretty convinced by #40: “Because You Really Like Music.” One of the factoids backing up that claim is the breakdown of how surveyed readers say they listen to music.

Out of eight formats FM radio comes in at a very respectable third place, with 59% of readers saying they listen to it for music. That comes behind 87% of readers who listen to CDs and 72% who listen to legal downloads (readers could choose all the formats they listen to). Satellite radio comes much further down the list at #7 behind cable TV, vinyl records and illegal downloads, surpassing only online subscription services. There aren’t a lot of details given, so I don’t know if Pandora or last.fm are considered online subscription services or if they’re lumped in with “legal downloads.” Also missing from the list is online radio; maybe that’s part of “legal downloads,” too?

Admittedly, at this point in history Rolling Stone doesn’t have a reputation for being at the cutting edge of music or technology. But with a circulation of 1.4 million the magazine isn’t fringe either. A 20-something Pitchfork reading indie rocker might think of a Rolling Stone reader as an aging boomer willing to pay $200 a seat for Eagles tickets, but the mag’s actual demographics show a reader’s median age to be 31, with 63% having at least some college education. So we can’t assume that the average RS reader is necessarily behind the times, as is also evidenced by the fact that 72% of readers listen to legal downloads.

All this goes to show that radio hasn’t yet been abandoned by rock music fans, like the Rolling Stone readership. Then again, 59% does not indicate a medium at its peak. I haven’t been able to track down any similar stats from an earlier year, if in fact RS has conducted such a survey before. But I reckon the percentage of radio listeners ten years ago would have been much closer to CD listeners.

What this tells me is that music radio still has a chance to hang on to listeners, and maybe even grow a bit. But I think it’s clear that the direction of commercial (and, unfortunately, some noncommercial) radio towards tighter playlists, national programming and strict, homogenized formats will not do anything to aid this cause. I’d love to see a breakdown of what kind of radio the Rolling Stone readers listen to, but alas I don’t think they asked that question.

As someone who dislikes long commercial breaks and hearing the same songs over and over on the radio, I’ve always had an interest in finding alternative ways to discover new music. Since it has now been a few years since I began this quest, I’ve decided to list some possible alternatives to “mainstream” radio (in no particular order).

Internet Radio

I absolutely love the concept of Internet radio, although my experience has admittedly been limited to Pandora Radio and Last.fm.  Summarized, they’re customizable radio with limited commercials (that you can mute if you feel the need). Awesome, yes?

Since I’m studying multiple languages for graduate school, I’m constantly searching for what I consider to be “good” music from other countries in an attempt to assist with my learning process by increasing my exposure. To test the effectiveness of these websites to help with this goal, I searched both websites for three different bands that perform in three different languages: a Japanese metal band named Dir en Grey, a German band named Wir sind Helden (We Are Heroes), and a French artist named Yelle.

I was thoroughly impressed by the fact that Last.fm not only had each group that I searched for but also managed to remain in the same genre and, almost always, the same language, including a limited amount of similar music in English. Pandora appears to be less conducive to expanding one’s international musical horizons, failing to provide any music for Wir Sind Helden and initially returning only English results.

That said, here are some general notes: I like that Last.fm provides you with a list of recent songs and radio stations while Pandora only allows you to look at recently played songs for a currently playing radio station (the history is cleared if you switch). I was  surprised to discover that Last.fm allows you to maintain a “library” of tracks that you’ve listened to, although I suppose the trade off is that users are unable to pause (as far as I can tell) songs (the alternative is to leave the radio station) and can only structure their stations around entire bands as opposed to both songs and bands (Pandora allows both options). I’m more familiar with Pandora, which is probably why I prefer its layout. I also like having the option of structuring a station around a song as opposed to an entire band because occasionally you stumble upon those amazing songs from, unfortunately, horrible albums that you really don’t need to subject your ears to again (Ex: Matt and Kim’s “Daylight” and most music from the ’80s, like this). (more…)

The Slacker mobile radio team sent us a press release this morning saying the service is now available in Canada. “Turning Canada on to personal radio has been some time in the making, and we are proud to unveil our Canadian Slacker Radio experience,” declared Slacker marketing Veep Jonathan Sasse in the  statement. “Whether it’s from the web or a smartphone, Slacker takes the work out of listening to your favorite music wherever you want.”

And the release continues:

“Canadian music fans will have access to the free Slacker Basic Radio for up to 30 days. After 30 days, they can upgrade to Slacker Radio Plus, featuring all the same great benefits of Slacker Basic Radio along with station caching for supported mobile devices, ad-free listening, complete song lyrics*, unlimited song skipping, song requests and more. Station caching enables mobile listeners to store their personal stations on selected smartphones for listening anywhere, anytime, uninterrupted.

Listeners can store a station by simply selecting “Cache Station” from within the supported app. The station can then be downloaded via Wi-Fi, over USB or through the cellular network. Cached stations are stored on the smartphone and can be accessed on planes, subways and everywhere in between requiring minimal battery usage and eliminating the need to access the mobile carrier network to play music.”

One question we had about the statement. It calls Slacker “the first personal radio experience to service Canada.” Hey Canadians, is that the case? We know that you can’t get Pandora up there (except maybe by proxy). What about last.fm? Here’s a comment from a disgruntled Canadian. What are the  availabilities?   Send us your comments.