The Urge

  Once again, MTV is revolutionizing the way that we discover new music.  Last week, the network announced its most ambitious music distribution service yet, a partnership with Microsoft called Urge.

  Essentially, Urge is a service that can fill your iPod with a professionally programmed mix of music in any genre you choose, from alt-country or hip-hop to rock or zydeco.  It also provides podcasts of MTV content, like news and editorial features, and celebrity-chosen playlists.  The download of the Urge program includes the beta version of the new Windows Media Player 11, which was specifically designed to work in concert with Urge.

  Its features are almost too numerous to mention.  It’s like Pandora, MTV, Napster and Windows Media Player all rolled into one.  It’s like sharing your computer with the person who programs your favorite radio station.  And speaking of radio stations—yeah, they’ve got those too.  They’ve got 130 of them, to be exact, all in CD quality and every genre imaginable.

  Urge puts more than two million songs at your fingertips.  The service has incorporated the music library of MusicNet, the world’s largest catalogue of digital music.  With the fast download time of the requisite broadband connection, sometimes it’s hard to tell if the song you’re listening to is from your own library or from MusicNet’s.  If you listened to every song in MusicNet’s current library, averaging four minutes per song—and you listened around the clock—it would take you fifteen years.  And the library’s growing by the minute.

  But while Urge allows you to listen to almost any song, anytime, it’s not a free-for-all, and it’s not free.  There are three pricing tiers.  The first (and cheapest) allows you to play or download any of the songs in MusicNet’s library, as well as access to the 130 radio stations and more than 500 playlists.  It costs about $10 a month, but you can only listen while you’re sitting at a computer.  If you want to transfer any of your newly acquired music to an iPod, you’ll need to subscribe to the “All Access To Go” package, which will run you an additional $5 a month.  And if you want to burn any of the songs to CD, it’s going to run you 99 cents per track, which is pretty much the going rate for digital downloads.

  In my opinion, it’s not the access to the music that’s impressive; it’s the editorial content and the compilation of the playlists.  It’s the downloadable and automatically-updating feeds from MTV, CMT and VH1.  Urge will also feature genre-specific blogs about new music, fully integrated with the MusicNet library, allowing readers to instantly hear the music that they are reading about.  The “This Week In…” feature will cover almost every genre of music, provide an accompanying blog that tells you about the tracks, and continuously updates on your computer, allowing you to stay up-to-date with the latest music.  I mentioned celebrity playlists earlier; the service is already boasting playlists compiled by Green Day, Rihanna, Roseanne Cash, Tony Hawk, T.I. and more.  Where else can you listen to the same music your favorite celebrities are listening to?

  With the long weekend coming up, you may want to surf on over to urge.com and get started.  MTV is currently offering a free two-week trial, with unlimited downloads and no credit card is required.  See how many of MusicNet’s songs you can get through in three days!

 -From Pulse
   May 25, 2006

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Pandora

Originally, I intended to write this week’s column on the Oprah Winfrey/James Frey stir. But thumbing through this week’s Rolling Stone, I found something that, to me, is far more interesting than its controversial Kanye cover. Flipping through, I came across a short article on customizable Internet radio stations—stations designed to turn the listener on to new music.

A little research led me to Pandora.com, a music-streaming website founded by the Music Genome Project, which exists solely to expose you to music that you didn’t know you love. Of course, Pandora is but one of many similar websites which, collectively, are being hailed as the next great viable threat to traditional, terrestrial radio (a la the iPod and Satellite Radio). As a music director for a terrestrial station, I wanted to investigate to assess the credibility of this threat.

The Music Genome Project operates on the belief that “every individual has unique musical tastes, and that music discovery tools need to have a rich understanding of music to account for this diversity,” according to a statement on their website. It was with this understanding that they undertook the most comprehensive analysis of music ever attempted, and the results are staggering.

Every day, professional music-listeners with advanced degrees in music theory sit around an office in Oakland, CA and analyze music from almost every genre imaginable. Spending twenty minutes with each song, they categorize up to 400 different components of each song, from the vocals to the syncopation, the influences to the vamping and tonality. If may help to think of it as DNA analysis of each particular song. “It’s ridiculously academic,” MGP co-founder Tim Westergren told Rolling Stone, “but the premise is to find out what you like about music and give you more.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But do long, tedious hours of hard work from these music geeks pay off? I hit up Pandora, and typed in the name of my favorite song of all time: “Life By The Drop” by Stevie Ray Vaughan. Because of the licensing agreements that apply to streaming audio stations, they are not allowed to play any song on demand. In other words, Pandora can’t play “Life By The Drop” right away, but apparently, if you listen long enough, it will eventually be played. Instead, Pandora introduced me to a band called Campfire Girls, with their song “P.F.A.M.G.” Not bad. Pandora said I’d like the “mellow rock instrumentation, the acoustic sonority and extensive vamping.” I don’t know what all that means, but the song was cool and sounded a little like “Life By The Drop.”

Next I heard “Baby Left Me,” by surf-guitar legend Dick Dale. I’d never heard it, but I liked it. Then came Portastatic with the acoustic version of “San Andreas.” I’d never heard any of these songs, and I’d only heard OF Dick Dale, but Pandora was working for me. It also gave me links to iTunes to buy the songs I like, and Amazon to purchase the whole CD.

Pandora’s ability to cross genres to find music that you may like gives it an advantage over your favorite FM station. Its charm is that it’s all about you, the listener. But it falls short where the iPod does: a lot of terrestrial radio’s appeal is generated between the records, in its other content. In short, Pandora’s a fun toy, but I’m not ready to give up my radio altogether.

-From Pulse
February 2, 2006

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