New Spotify Radio lets you skip unlimited tracks

Now Spotify has announced a new version of its radio feature that is available with the preview version of the Mac, Windows and Blackberry apps. The company says it has a an “all-new intelligent recommendation and multi-million track library.” But the thing that sets it apart from the likes of Pandora and last.fm is the ability to skip an unlimited number of tracks. By comparison the other services only allow a limited number of skipped tracks.

This difference stems from the different types of licenses the services operate under. Pandora and last.fm operate under the same license terms as internet radio station, which restrict the ability of listeners to select specific artists and songs, in addition to restricting the number of tracks by an artist or from a single artist that may be played in a row. Spotify, on the other hand, has worked out individual agreements with all the labels that provide music to the service that allow the service to permit listeners to select the artists, albums and songs they want to listen to. However, these agreements cost Spotify much more in licensing costs than what Pandora or last.fm pay.

While this would seem to give the competitive advantage to Spotify, it results in gaps in the service’s catalog where labels or artists will not license their music at all. Pandora, on the other hand, takes advantage of a statutory license which does not require individual deals with labels. For the Pandora listener this means she can hear bands like the Beatles and Metallica which are absent from the Spotify roster.

Another difference is that Pandora and last.fm have many more station building options, allowing you to specify additional artists and songs to add to an existing station, or use your own music library as a seed. As far as I can tell Spotify offers none of these options. You can simply select an artist to use as a radio seed source and that’s it.

In my limited listening to the new Spotify Radio I find that the range of artists is still not as broad or varied as Pandora. Spotify seems to stick pretty closely to genre and style. While there are times that I may want to listen to some music closely related to an artist, it’s doubtful I’m going to listen for more than an hour or so without getting bored. Pandora does a better job of holding my attention with variation and tunes I’m less familiar with.

Clear Channel may have been too focused on scarfing up stations in the early 2000s to construct anything resembling an internet strategy, but the company has been making up for lost time with its iHeartRadio service. When it went live in 2008 it was primarily a site and mobile app to provide access to the live streams of Clear Channel stations. Since then iHeartRadio has morphed into a competitor to the likes of Pandora and last.fm, especially with the addition of custom stations in September which provide Pandora-like experience of music based upon a seed song.

Back in September Clear Channel promised that the stations would be commercial free through the end of the year. This week the company announced that they will stay commercial-free through April 1, 2012.

This is obviously a move intended to lure Pandora and last.fm listeners who want to avoid the free services’ commercials, in addition to hooking users already using iHeartRadio to catch terrestrial stations. However, when a Pandora user jumps ship she also loses the stations she has created and all the curating she’s invested by giving tracks the thumbs-up or thumbs-down. That user investment is one of the things that keeps Pandora users loyal, though a new user to iHeartRadio can make the same investment in Clear Channel’s platform.

Working in Clear Channel’s favor is that if a listener tires of her custom stations she can easily navigate to a broadcast station–that will have plenty of commercials–or one of iHeartRadio’s curated or themed stations, like CBGB Radio or Eagles Radio.

I must admit to being a strong critic of Clear Channel and the destruction it wreaked on the radio industry through its consolidation strategy that hemorrhaged staff and homogenized programming across the country. So there definitely is a part of me that wants to find fault with iHeartRadio, on principle, if nothing else.

But after spending the better part of the week listening to the service I must be honest and give it due credit. It’s kind of a jack-of-all-trades for internet radio listening. It offers a lot of options, even if none of them are class leading. But, as I’ll explain, the sound quality of iHeartRadio is probably its weakest attribute.

The customized stations work like last.fm or Pandora. Feed it a song seed and iHeartRadio starts serving up similar artists and songs. One aspect I like is the “Station Control” feature which lets you decide whether you’re interested in hearing more familiar artists or “more discovery” which plays artists you are less likely to have heard before. When I first tried the custom station feature I wondered if I would be limited to artists actually played on Clear Channel stations. So I entered the 1980 Swiss experimental metal band Celtic Frost as a test. And quite dutifully iHeartRadio created a station full of extreme and harsh sounds that are rarely found on commercial radio.

However, the custom stations are more limited than Pandora’s because you can specify only the initial seed. By comparison Pandora lets you finely tune a station by adding additional artists and songs as seeds. So if you like the 70s power pop of Cheap Trick, you can further refine it by adding in the more ragged punk edge of the Replacements, for instance.

iHeartRadio’s curated channels remind me most of satellite radio, organized around a genre, such as hair metal, the music of a particular artist, or songs ostensibly chosen by an artist, like Radio Weezer. Of course the terrestrial stations on iHeartRadio are just that. I’m not sure how much the rock station in Waco, TX will differ from WZZO in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. But if it matters to you, then you have the choice.

Fidelity is what I find to be iHeartRadio’s greatest limitation. I’ve listened to the service on my iPhone, iPad and two different Mac laptops. At home I’ve used both my MacBook Pro’s built-in headphone jack and two different USB audio devices. Across all devices I found that the custom stations sound the best. While quality does vary some from song to song, overall fidelity is roughly equivalent to Pandora’s free service. In general that’s equivalent to a 128 kbps MP3 file, which is considered the minimum for decent sound.

By comparison, the custom stations all exhibited perceptibly lower quality sound that would indicate a lower bitrate is used. No matter the station I chose the high end exhibited the shimmery quality of a poorly encoded MP3. There’s an overall graininess to the sound that I find fatiguing when listening on headphones for more than 10 or 20 minutes. These deficiencies are quite audible over speakers, too, though less bothersome at low volumes.

The broadcast stations are all over the map, in terms of fidelity. While some approach the smoother quality of the custom stations, most had a compromised and grainy sound like the curated stations. However, I found most of the broadcast rock stations to be even more fatiguing than the curated stations due to the heavy compression and processing evident in these streams. Most mainstream commercial stations use compression and other sound processing to make their stations sound louder and stand out when a listener is scanning the dial. This comes at the expense of dynamics, as the volume of the sound varies very little, with much less change than you’d hear when listening to the original recording.

Listening to most broadcast stations on iHeartRadio with headphones was tiring after 10 minutes or less. In all cases my local analog and HDRadio broadcast signals sounded much better than their internet stream counterparts. In particular the treble was overly pronounced and distorted on the internet streams, while the broadcast signals sounded smoother and more natural to my ear.

I recognize that I’m probably more sensitive to sound quality than many listeners, however I’d frankly rather listen to a decent AM signal than have to hear many iHeartRadio stations over headphones for more than a half-hour. Using cheap computer speakers at low volume the fidelity limitations are less perceptible, and I’m certain that’s how many folks experience internet radio. But I think the sonic flaws of even the curated and genre stations are obvious enough for an average listener to recognize, especially if she compares it to the custom stations or a broadcast signal.

That said, I can see the appeal of having all of these options in one app. I’m not sure it’s enough to keep me from using Pandora, Spotify and other services. The field is getting pretty crowded, and while each service offers something unique, none of them is sufficient to take over the majority of my online listening time. I may be a freak that way, with tastes that run decidedly outside the mainstream. Then again, isn’t the promise of the internet supposed to be infinite choice?

I’m curious to know what Radio Survivor readers think about iHeartRadio and other internet radio services. Let us know in the comments.

Kindle Fire with Pandora and speaker

My Amazon Kindle Fire arrived in the mail on Thursday, and I’ve been fiddling with it ever since. Got my Facebook going, read a whole lot of newspapers via the Pulse application, and downloaded a free edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. After several days of downloading and noodling with various apps, however, I’m inclined to agree with Casey Johnson over at Ars Technica. The Kindle Fire is not a tablet.

“As a vector for Amazon’s video and music stores and huge e-book selection, it’s great,” Johnson writes. “As an e-reader, it’s merely OK. As an Internet and app portal, it falls short of Amazon’s promises.”

But what I also discovered is that the Kindle Fire is almost perfect for my favorite kind of media: Internet radio. Its relatively small size, nice WiFi interface, attractive display, and simple speaker outlet make it a great dedicated broadband radio device.

The scaled down advantage

When most writers review general purpose broadband gadgets, they don’t say much about radio. This is understandable. What we look for in a computer or tablet are office tools, social networking apps, and live and prerecorded video. Because the iPad is so good at providing those features, it’s hard to imagine just setting it aside as an Internet radio machine. But the Kindle’s smaller dimensions (7.5″x4.7″) and comparatively smaller capabilities and cheaper price ($199) make it something a consumer can reserve for particular uses.

And the most popular radio apps display well on a Kindle Fire. In fact, Pandora looks much classier on the device than it does on either my Droid X or my desktop screen. Leaning the Kindle horizontally against a paper book (oh the irony) just above my keyboard gives me easy access to the standard Pandora choices: like, dislike, skip, pause, and next. There’s plenty of blank space across the screen—no visual crowding, even with the ads. And I can easily switch to Pulse or the web if I want to check the news, which makes my desktop computer experience less complicated and cluttered.

Kindle Fire playing TuneIn radio

Ditto for TuneIn radio. The app that gives you access to thousands of radio stations across the United States and the world looks and sounds great on the Kindle Fire. For me, TuneIn’s desktop interface is too big and its smart phone interface is too small. But on Kindle Fire it looks just right—just like an Internet radio interface ought to display. I can easily switch between my preset radio stations and TuneIn’s browse categories: Local Radio, Recommended, Music, Talk, Sports, By Location, By Language, and Podcasts.

Last.fm and Turntable.fm

I don’t listen to Last.fm much on my mobile because it is now a pay application. But I have a few free selections left on my account, so I took a peek at the service on the Kindle Fire. Like Pandora and Tune In, Last looks very good on the device. Same for Rdio, which also offers you a limited glance at the mobile service for a limited period of time.

As for my favorite on line radio listening device, Turntable.fm, alas, it doesn’t entirely lend itself to the Kindle Fire environment. The turntable deck feels pretty scrunched. If you enlarge the type too much, the visual components collide into each other. If you reduce the type, the live chat rolls down just a bit too small for my comfort. The service certainly works, but I think that TT.fm is best enjoyed on a desktop or laptop screen.

If you’re wondering about Spotify and Grooveshark, I couldn’t find them in the Pandora app store. Hopefully they’ll turn up eventually. But with Pandora and Tune In working, I feel like my Kindle Fire is a full fledged Internet radio. Who knows, maybe I’ll even read a book on it from time to time.

It’s vitally important to recognize that every time a new audio distribution technology comes along, the word “radio” comes along for the ride. When the first live audio streams went online in the mid-90s, did everyone call this “streaming internet audio?” No, they called it “internet radio.”

In the early 2000s when Sirius and XM first lit up their satellites hovering above the earth did they call it “satellite audio?” That’s right, they called it “satellite radio.”

Sure, “podcasting” doesn’t have the word radio in it. But the one-time neologism was built upon the conflation of “iPod” and “broadcast.” The latter word is certainly very related to radio, which was the first form of electronic broadcasting.

What this all means is that we see radio as a thriving, evolving and growing set of media united by the common application of distributing–or, broadcasting–audio programming to masses of people. Radio is the transmission of audio entertainment, information and art across a variety of media and formats.

Reading this one might wonder, “well, then, doesn’t that make records, CDs, audiobooks and album downloads some kind of radio, too?” My answer is that they’re close to radio, but don’t qualify as radio.

While services like Spotify and Rdio have blurred that line between listening to an album and listening to radio, radio is still a different experience. Music radio, in particular, is about delivering a curated experience that is more spontaneous, less processed, and more ephemeral than an album, which is comparatively crafted and composed. Sure, progressive rock radio often featured album sides, but the more frequent programming were carefully chosen DJ sets. Music radio is about the mix. And even though Pandora and last.fm deliver a mix programmed by an algorithm, the listening experience is more like that progressive rock station than a CD.

It’s not for nothing that Spotify calls its automated music streams “artist radio,” and Rdio is a semi-contraction of “radio” that needs to buy a vowel.

A point that’s hard to avoid is that these forms of radio all hearken back to the modes of presentation first pioneered in broadcast. The DJ, talk show and music set all originated with broadcast. Internet and satellite radio unambiguously crib these forms with the only big difference from broadcast being their method of transmission.

Podcasting is a particularly curious case, because in my opinion its invention reignited interest in radio forms by making it so much easier to distribute programs. Podcasting also gave listeners a kind of radio TiVo by relieving them of having to tune in to a station or stream at a particular time. The clever innovation of the automated download freed radio from the tethers of the cable and the electromagnetic wave, be it FM, AM, wi-fi or cell.

In fact, the rise of podcasting breathed life into forms of radio programming that had barely been heard from since the 70s, like radio drama and long-form comedy. Turns out that the international reach of podcasting means a particularly esoteric show can find hundreds or thousands of listeners, even if there may barely be a dozen potential fans in the broadcast radius of a single station.

This is just my long-winded way of saying that here at Radio Survivor we take all forms of broadcasted and transmitted audio programming. We think that makes our website unique. There are plenty of sites that do a good job of covering the broadcast industry, a particular radio personality or music and radio. But we haven’t found any that consistently look at the whole wide world of internet, satellite and broadcast radio. To us, it’s all RADIO.

This also means we intend to keep expanding our coverage, writing more about new online services, ways to improve the listening experience, new radio technologies, along with our continuing coverage of broadcast. In particular I hope to see us write more about podcasts and podcasting, since we’re seeing more artists, personalities and producers make the decision to completely bypass the broadcast and satellite gatekeepers, self-producing and distributing podcasts directly to audiences.

Back in August we made a call for writers and contributors, and we’re still looking. If you’ve considered writing about podcasting, satellite radio, internet radio or other radio forms–not just broadcast–then drop us a line.

A graphical indicator at the top of the page shows how much free listening time you have left. However, the indicator does not display the actual number of minutes or songs, but rather leaves the listener to guess how much time the green bar is equivalent to.

Unlimited Rdio listening from a computer or browser is priced the same as Spotify at $4.99 a month, while $9.99 a month extends unlimited listening to mobile and media player devices on both services. By comparison Pandora is $36 a year for unlimited listening, but does not offer the on-demand selection of songs and artists that Rdio and Spotify do.

It’s a crowded market for online streaming music services. And although Rdio has been available in the US for longer than Spotify, the latter service has been available elsewhere for longer and received much more publicity when it hit the American shores.

I just signed up for the free Rdio subscription, so I’ll be posting a review of it soon.

Turntable.fm extensions give you more playlist power.

First a quick refresher. The way turntable.fm works is that you join a room as either a listener or a DJ. As a listener, you just listen. If you can get in as a DJ, you pick songs. Then you can search for tunes and queue them up with the rest of the group.

You can interact with the other DJs via a chat board. You can become fans of them. You can rank tunes as “lame” or “awesome.” And you can add various extensions that give you more knowledge and power over the social network.

Turntable.fm extended

Turntable.fm Extended is developed by Mark Reeder and Adam Creeger and adds a bunch of neat components to TT.fm. Among its features:

• You can now tag songs in your queue, then filter by tag. This allows you to quickly figure out what you’ve got in the current list of songs that you’ve compiled.
• You can view a complete list of room users that identifies the moderator and the current DJs.
• Users can set up a variety of notifications, including chat, song, vote, and DJ change messages. You can also filter out unwanted content.
• You can enable scrobbling of your selections to last.fm. And you can export your song queue in XML.
• Turntable.fm Extended will even offer you suggestions based on what was already played.

Turntable Plus and Turntable Playlist

Turntable plus (beta) was written by Michael Frick, who I mention in my Ars Technica article about Turntable.fm. Turntable plus will give you a nice big chat pane to the left or right of the central turntable deck and listener room. There you can more easily follow the discussion and song announcements.

The extension will also notify you when certain keywords are typed (like your user name), when new songs are about to be played, when there is an open DJ spot, or when users are voting on a tune. And it provides you a large, attractive song log to keep track of what has been selected.

Turntable plus can be configured to harmonize with Turntable Extended and with Turntable Playlist manager (written by Gil Barbara). As the title suggests, this very good extension allows you to create playlists and quickly insert items at the top of your song queue. The Playlist manager helps you find content in your queue much more quickly.

Turntable Tube

Last on our list is the Turntable Tube extension. The app places YouTube music videos related to the song you are playing in the large space to the left of the Turntable.fm deck. The music videos change as you shift songs or move from room to room.

This last application is lots of fun. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether it harmonizes with the earlier mentioned extensions, however.

There are other Turntable.fm extensions being developed for Chrome. I haven’t even gotten around to the ones available for Firefox yet. Any recommendations from our readers would be welcome.

Spotify is an online streaming music service that has been available in parts of Europe since 2008. It differentiates itself from popular US music services like Pandora and last.fm by permitting users to actually select the specific artists and songs to hear, rather than only relying upon an algorithm to choose music similar to a particular artist, song or style. In that way Spotify is more like a big online jukebox or iTunes, also permitting users to create playlists which can be shared with other users.

American music lovers who’d heard about the service waited anxiously to experience the kind of instant music availability enjoyed by listeners in Sweden, France and the UK. It took nearly three years, but after long negotiations with the major record labels Spotify became available in the US on July 14.

At first blush it certainly looks like Spotify poses a significant threat to streaming music services like Pandora, last.fm or Slacker, as well as subscription services like Rhapsody which also let listeners choose specific artists, albums and songs. I managed to swing an invitation to try out the free version of Slacker right after in launched stateside. After taking it for a test drive I can say that Spotify indeed does give these other services a run for the money, but I’m not certain that Spotify is ready to top them all.

As a free service it’s too limited to become someone’s go to music source the way that many people rely on Pandora, last.fm or internet radio. And I’m not yet convinced that Spotify’s paid service is complete enough for a lot of listeners like myself. Furthermore, it’s not really a radio service, so much as a very big jukebox in the cloud. Certainly there’s a lot to recommend that idea, but it’s also difficult to live up to.

Continue on to read my full detailed review of Spotify and find out what’s great, and what’s not.

Will it scale?

Most importantly, Spotify isn’t ready to become #1 because the service isn’t ready to take on enough free users to match the scale of Pandora or last.fm. Right now a free account is only available by invitation, whereas a free account with Pandora or last.fm is open to anyone. I presume this is because Spotify wants to scale carefully, rather than deal with a deluge of millions of new users crashing their systems. In fact, while free Spotify accounts were available to anyone for a while in the UK, the service is presently still only available by invitation there as well.

Prior to its US launch Spotify had 10 million users worldwide, with about 9 million of them free, ad supported accounts. By comparison Pandora has 80 million users and last.fm has 40 million. By user count alone Spotify has a way to go to beat the big two.

The Spotify difference

If you’re lucky enough to score a free Spotify account the experience indeed is different than Pandora or last.fm in several significant ways. First, Spotify requires its own application to run on your computer, with versions available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. For many users hoping to listen to music at work or school, places where one might not have the permission to install an application, this will be a barrier to using Spotify right away.

Pandora and last.fm both work inside your web browser. Now, this doesn’t mean that these services are available everywhere. Some schools and employers restrict access to streaming audio and video services. But if you’re currently a Pandora or last.fm listener at work or school it’s possible you won’t be able to install the Spotify app to enjoy that service.

MacOS Spotify app

At the same time there are advantages to having an app for Spotify. The app itself is pretty intuitive to use, borrowing quite a bit from the iTunes experience. Anyone who has used that nearly-ubiquitous Apple app or other music management software should have no problems getting started with Spotify’s quickly. Also, by not working in a browser Spotify minimizes the changes of dragging down your system or crashing your browser. The app also integrates with your iTunes library, giving you access to these tracks and playlists, too.

It’s very easy to search for artists, songs and albums. Just type in your search terms and hit enter. You’ll receive your results nearly instantaneously. Double-click on a track and you can be listening just as quickly. Compared to the web interfaces of Pandora and last.fm, Spotify is downright speedy. I’ve certainly been frustrated with Pandora and, especially, last.fm taking a long time to load a station, or failing to load altogether, sometimes requiring multiple page reloads.

Building a playlist is as easy with Spotify as in iTunes. Just click “new playlist” then select and drag songs to that playlist. It really seems like having a nearly limitless iTunes library at your fingertips. However, while Spotify has some 15 million tracks, it is not truly limitless.

A deep, but not bottomless, catalog

Just like other services there are some artists who are notably absent. Search for the Beatles, AC/DC, Frank Zappa or even King Crimson and you’ll only come up with covers by other artists. Bands like The Who or Pink Floyd have only a couple albums or a smattering of tracks available from their deep catalogs. These gaps aren’t limited to major artists either. In searching across many different genres I found that many artists only have some of their albums represented, or in some cases just a few songs from certain albums. I tried to see if missing albums were all on the same record label, but found that wasn’t necessarily the case.

Complaining about the catalog gaps in Spotify feels a bit like looking gift horse in the mouth, at least when you’ve got a free account and not paying a dime for the access and convenience. I must admit it’s nice to easily check out artists, albums and songs I’ve been interested in hearing rather than making do with thirty second clips.

The ad experience

Of course, just like its competitors (including commercial radio), Spotify isn’t really free. That free account is paid for by advertising that displays in the Spotify app and plays during the music stream. I was jarred by the first few ads I heard because they were for artists and albums that had no relationship to the music I was listening to. I just heard a whole different song start playing, making me think I’d accidenally clicked something. The first one I heard had no voiceover either, just a song snippet accompanied by display ad in the Spotify app. But because I had Spotify in the background I didn’t realize it at first.

I’ve gotten more used to the Spotify ads, but still find them to be more jarring than the last.fm and Pandora ads. On balance, the ads on the latter two services sound more like ones you hear on radio or television than the ones on Spotify.

Spotify has its (listening) limits

Like Pandora, Spotify’s free account sets a limit to how many hours you can listen to in a month. However, Spotify only offers 10 hours while Pandora offers four times as much. Especially if you listen while you work on other things, those 10 hours can run out before you know it. Last.fm does not limit listening time at all, giving it an advantage over the other two services.

Spotify offers unlimited listening on a computer in its Unlimited plan for $4.99 a month. At $9.99 a month the Unlimited plan offers “enhanced” sound quality and mobile access (more about that below). Pandora’s limitless listening is less expensive at $36 a year. This plan also includes higher quality audio, no ads and a desktop application rather than a browser-based player. Alternatively, for just 99 cents a user can keep listening past the 40 hour limit for the rest of the month, but without any of the other subscription benefits. There is no paid last.fm service — it’s completely free.

You can go mobile, for a price

Mobile devices are an area where the free Spotify service doesn’t compete at all. The mobile app is only available as a paid service with the Premium account at $9.99 a month. With that subscription you also get unlimited listening, higher quality sound files and an offline mode that lets you cache playlists on your computer or mobile device so you can listen without internet access.

Both Pandora and last.fm have free mobile apps. Pandora’s free mobile listening limits vary depending on your device and mobile service. Its $36 annual subscription removes any limit. Again, last.fm doesn’t have any limits in mobile, either.

It’s good to share

Despite the paranoia of the recording industry, sharing has been an important aspect of experiencing recorded music for decades. While Pandora and last.fm allow you to share a station that you’ve assembled, it’s not like sharing a mix CD or mix tape, since you can’t pick all the songs and artists. Spotify, on the other, let’s you share a full playlist with other Spotify users.

I think this is Spotify’s killer feature, because it most closely emulates the experience of a mix tape, as easy to assemble as making an iTunes playlist. Certainly there are other ways to share a playlist of tunes online, but most require you to either just share the list of songs which the other person would have to assemble herself. Otherwise you have to upload the song files yourself, which is something that exists in a legal grey area, at least in the US.

Share a Spotify playlist

Every Spotify playlist has a big “share” button underneath the playlist name. Click it and you can send a link to facebook, twitter or Microsoft Messenger with one more click, or just copy and paste a URL that you can send in email or post to a blog. For an example, click here for a playlist of Weird Al Yankovic polka medleys I created.

I really saw the appeal of this feature when a few of my friends first started posting playlists to facebook. It really was like distributing a mixtape to all your friends simultaneously. Well, all of your friends who have Spotify accounts, at least.

And therein lies the limitation of Spotify’s sharing. Since not everyone who wants a Spotify account can have one yet, you really can’t send that playlist to everyone you know. Also, there will probably be songs you wish to include–such as anything by the Beatles–but aren’t available in Spotify’s catalog.

The Spotify experience: a little too limited, not quite radio

I have been a Pandora and last.fm listener for about two years. I don’t use either service every day, or even every week, but there are times when I want background music with a minimum of effort and a minimum of interruption. This is when they fit the bill. I’m not a Pandora subscriber, and have only run into its monthly limit a few times. In these few cases I’ve just switched over to last.fm, even if my stations are different due to each service’s unique algorithms and music libraries.

So far Spotify has become part of my mix of services. However, I use it differently, since I can create playlists of artists and tracks that I specifically want to hear, rather than the more randomized selection I can expect with Pandora or last.fm. In that way I’m likely to use Spotify more like I use my own iTunes library. Of course, I can choose to listen to Spotify’s artist radio and get a similar experience. But as a free user I’d rather not use up my 10 hours getting an experience similar to Pandora or last.fm which have a higher and no limit, respectively.

The big question, of course, is, would I buy a Spotify subscription? I can see the attraction of the service. Having that enormous library of music available on demand, online and off, is appealing. Yet, for someone like me, that library isn’t quite enormous enough. The missing artists, albums and songs are quite tolerable for a free service, but less so when I’m coughing up a monthly fee.

Frankly, if I’d wanted a paid music service I’d already be Rhapsody subscriber. That service costs the same as Spotify Premium, offers similar desktop and mobile features, and has been available in the US for much longer. However Rhapsody also has gaps in its catalog, missing artists like the Beatles and AC/DC which aren’t found on Spotify, either.

Is it radio?

Pandora and last.fm are most appealing to me because they are radio-like and free. If I want to control the playlist, I’ll build one from my library. I listen to Pandora and last.fm when I want to relinquish some of that control and maybe be surprised. But I’m not particularly ready to pay for the experience.

I will admit that Spotify’s free service is nice to use, but 10 hours is a pretty low limit. Based on that alone I think it will have a tough fight to unseat Pandora or last.fm from a lot of music lovers’ daily listening routine.

Spotify shows promise, but is not ready to be a mainstream service accessible to most internet users. It also doesn’t quite scratch that radio itch. A jukebox is not the same thing as a radio station. For me the radio music experience is marked by a combination of predictability and surprise. I know the genre of the stations or the specific show, but I don’t know what song will come next; often it will be something I’ve never heard before. Both Pandora and last.fm provide something much closer to that radio experience, combined with a level of control that lets you filter out sounds you don’t want to hear.

While Spotify has a radio option that resembles Pandora and last.fm, there isn’t much reason to use it compared to its unique playlist building feature. There are times when you want a jukebox, and for many of us our iTunes library is actually pretty satisfying, given that it contains only music I’ve selected and acquired. Spotify comes close, but not close enough for me.

There may be many music lovers ready to just rent their music through a paid Spotify account, provided their tastes don’t stray too far from Spotify’s catalog too often. However, I truly do not know how many. I do know I won’t be one.

The end result is fun images like this one for “blues”:

And this for “soul”:

“What’s most striking for me about these [tag clouds] is not how much they differ,” Clegg notes, “but in fact how often some of the words appear prominently across genres. Almost everyone sings about love, for example, with the exception of Rap and Hip-Hop, and time comes up… time and time again.”

One more. Here’s the cloud for “goth”:

As so:

The image to the left is a representation of the Kool and the Gang tune “Fresh”:

“As you might expect from a classic disco song, Kool & the Gang‘s hit ‘Fresh’ doesn’t have much rhythm variety going on: the red rhythm petal is quite slim,” Last.fm’s Mathias Mauch explains in a blog post.

“This is not to say they don’t groove, it’s just the rhythm pattern does not change much over the course of the piece. There is some melodic and harmonic variety going on on small time scales—the green harmony petal is quite thick close to the origin. Towards the tip the green petal goes very thin though, which indicates that the general tonality does not change much over the whole piece—no cheesy key changes there.”

If you are registered with Last.fm, you can even vote on the relative variety of selected songs, then see how Last.fm visually measures that diversity. To the right below is an image for Motorhead‘s song “Overkill.”

The translucent portions of the image represent a mean average. “When this is bigger it usually means there are very significant, but rare changes going on,” the instructions disclose.

Why are Last.fm’s users being given the ballot in this instance?

“We think this visualisation could be used by other people who’d like to find out about the complexity of music, and that’s why we want to publish the technique at an international scientific conference later this year,” Mauch says.

“But here’s the problem: although we’re quite happy with our signal processing magic (which automatically guesses the amount of structural change going on in the music), we don’t know yet if human beings like yourself feel the same way as the computers… and we need to know that in order to convince the scientists to publish our results.”

In a textbook example of the abusive power of a near-monopoly, the ‘net was set ablaze yesterday upon the news that major internet backbone provider and content distribution network (CDN) company Level 3 called out cable-modem internet service provide Comcast for demanding additional fees for delivering video and other content to Comcast customers. Comcast’s demands come on the heels of Level 3 inking an agreement to become the exclusive US distributor of Netflix “watch instantly” streaming movies and television programming. Quite obviously, Comcast is also in the television business, causing many a public interest advocate to see this action as an anti-competitive move, and just the sort of thing that happens when there are no network neutrality protections for internet content.

While this case has to do with video content specifically, how things turn out will have implications for all types of content on the internet, including radio.

You see, the internet has historically operated based upon peering agreements. That is, one service provider connects to another under the agreement that each will transmit content that originates on the other’s network. As a backbone provider, then, a company like Level 3 would agree to freely transmit content that originates on an ISP’s network in exchange for the ISP delivering Level 3′s content to its customers. At its core peering is supposed to be non-discriminatory, where bits are bits, and it doesn’t matter whether those bits are text, graphics, audio or video. But with Comcast one can only conclude appears that the fact that Level 3 is transmitting video is at issue. In fact, industry expert Dave Burstein tells ArsTechnica’s Nate Anderson that, “As far as I know, no primary backbone provider like Level 3 has ever been required to pay to deliver traffic to another major carrier.”

Level 3 says that it “believes Comcast’s current position violates the spirit and letter of the FCC’s proposed Internet Policy principles and other regulations and statutes,” and therefore is asking for scrutiny by regulators and legislators. For his part, on Tuesday FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski told reporters that, “It would be premature to comment on it without knowing what the facts are. The staff is looking into it.”

While streaming a Netflix movie consumes anywhere from 5 to 10 times the bandwidth of listening to an online radio stations, a victory for Comcast in this matter might cause the company to start looking to hit up services like Pandora or last.fm–which each have significantly larger audiences than Netflix–for additional fees. Such fees could seriously affect the ability of these services to continue to offer free options, or raise the cost of their pay service.

More significant is the threat to smaller webcasters, whether they’re noncommerical stations like WFMU, commercial stations like Indie 103, or a large streaming radio host like Live 365. Even though most stations won’t deal directly with Comcast, any that serve a sizeable online audience use a third-party streaming host or CDN that will have to deal with Comcast directly or via a third party. Eventually any additional fees that Comcast charges will get passed along to the station.

Netflix and Level 3 are big enough companies that they can ill afford to walk away from Comcast’s nearly 16 million internet customers. But such fees might be enough to make it too expensive for a smaller webcaster to serve Comcast customers, forcing them to limit or eliminate service to them. This could lead to Comcast internet customers having less diversity to choose from. Of course, households that can choose a different ISP would be able to do so, but too many broadband consumers in the US don’t have a second ISP to choose from.

A more damaging outcome would be if other ISPs decided to follow Comcast’s lead, driving up costs for all webcasters. One of the most revolutionary aspects of internet radio is its low barrier to entry. Any effort by ISPs to impose fees on audio or video traffic delivered to their customers would threaten this advantage, likely harming noncommercial and smaller webcasters. Large, corporate-backed webcasters, like Pandora, will probably withstand the fees, just like it seems Netflix will. But the overall diversity of web radio will suffer.