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My apologies for the use of another “2.0 meme” but after my participation in a debate on the Future of Mobile Music at the Digital Music 2.0 Conference in Barcelona this week I felt I needed to update you briefly on some new thoughts on the subject. Since my writings during the MuLiMob project, my piece on “Connecting Cultures through Music“, and “DRM, free at last!” I haven’t been writing on the issue anymore.

Last Tuesday, in a Lab on Media and Human Experience, a filosophical flow excercise in between media, technology and philospophy, we discussed about ‘connected and un-connected spaces’ … media convergence is happening but the media industry is still pretty much off-line as of now, so the question is: where’s the bridge? And where is it happening?

I must admit I was pretty amazed that during the Digital Music 2.0 Conference comments and questions coming from the audience were still of the type such as “CD’s are still the major part of the business, digital music distribution only 9% of the market”, and - a couple of times - “How can you become so big without spending budget on marketing, I mean really “0″ on marketing?” and my favourite “Will mobile phones replace MP3 players one day?”… Us speakers had a though job to bridge our message of the indepth changes that are currently happening the way we consume music and the business surrounding it.

Trying to stay humble, I realized one more time there is still a lot to do to bridge the digital connected (internet connected tools, things, people and services) with the more unconnected world of tradional TV, CD’s, DVD’s formats.

When Edgar, the organizer, asked me in November to participate to this conference, I was quite sceptical since I had my made my conclusions on music 2.0 a couple of years ago while finalizing the MuLiMob project, it would only need some time for the industry to realize the curve of the long tail and that something profoundly was changing the music industry due to the innovations happening in web technologies and the way communities were influencing the way we consume music. Communities like last.fm were adding new ways to discover and listen to music opening opportunities for people to meet others with similar music tastes. This community has now grown to 15 million users and Claire Levy had the pleasure to anounce CBS bought last.fm for $280 million, real good news for recommendation technologies and online communities involving music in general

Mobile Web 2.0 or Mobile 2.0, Music 2.0 or Mobile Music 2.0, people say these are all hype terms, in a way they are but there are some real changes and differences to be finetuned, so why this title?

In my panel with operators Telefonica and Orange, it seemed as I was coming from another planet with my presentation on the current state of Mobile 2.0 and the the next generation data services for connected devices. Understandable knowing it took them (the operators) a couple of years to outcompete the SMS Service Providers (selling ringtones and wallpapers), and the same operators have been positioning (= investing) the last couple of years as music retailers to start selling realtunes… meanwhile another range of competitors are coming in their field.

While the new generation of phones and devices - Nokia Nseries up front - a new set of opportunities to consume music is arising, with the possibility to sideload or download music directly to your phone, whatever connection is it that you use (3G, wifi, bluetooth, usb, etc). At the conference, the operators were still defending the classic model - a song downloaded on the mobile has much more value and has thus a defendable value of 3€ including restricted DRM (!), adding the argument that NSeries and iPhones as the high-end range phones that are too expensive for the masses anyway.

My argument was that those phones might be more expensive but a simple calculation of my personal consumption learns that I buy average some 3 albums online/month (approx. 30 songs). So, on iTunes at 0,99€/song makes 356,4 € a year spend on digital music… while downloading over an operators retailer shop at a 3€/song rate, the same amount of content would costs me 1.080€ + additional download costs… the difference in 1 year would pay me a new phone, think about!

Also I would like to emphasize one more time that DRM has to be free - buy once, use everywhere - as it used to be with LP’s and CD’s. Amazon.com announcing it’s latest deal with EMI and 12.000 labels to sell DRM-free that plays on any device is another major step into Digital Consumer Enablement

I think that’s another reason why Apple is going to surprise a lot of people soon again… If I can connect my iPhone over a WLAN or to my computer to buy my music, it’s another great advantage for the iPhone users, from there I can carry it with me everywhere…

2.0, 7digital, Analysis, Barcelona, Bluetooth, convergence, digita music, drm, emusic, events, festival, innovation, ioda, iphone, iptv, itunes, last.fm, mobile 2.0, Mobile Content, mobile music, Music, Operators, primavera sound, startups, Trends, web 2.0

It has been a while since I wrote on mobile music applications; not the ones as we know of them now - simple OTA downloads of ring-, real- and mp3 tones, but the ones that are just coming to the mobile market and are using new, innovative technology to create different business models for the mobile music scene. In a few years from here, buying music will be a complete digital process and the mobile is going to play a crucial part in this. For the readers missing this point, feel free to browse my archives, category mobile music.

One of the companies I discovered last year was Musicstrands. At first that time, I thought another social music service like Last.fm and Pandora, build on collaborative filtering and recommendation technologies to make you discover new music. An sich, to me, the way to go if you’re considering digital music distribution for the coming years. But MusicStrands is different in the way they choose resolutely for Mobile. I got really interested in what they do when I saw their Music Guru demo-presentation during 3GSM, a conceptual prototype of a next generation 3G/PC music player, developed jointly by Vodafone Group R&D, MusicStrands and Adobe. I wrote about that in my 3GSM Afterwrap.

Last weeks’ article from Carlo in Business 2.0 “Your Wireless Future” mentioned them again so I went to visit Musicstrands‘ website for an update. I must admit, I liked the progress and the new stuff I could do with it on my cell phone.

You can download the MyStrands plugin for iTunes, join the community, create your own playlists (or upload existing ones), tag your music and share it with others and receive recommendations form others. A lot of new stuff has been added lately like Playlist builder, tagcloud, m-charts, world map. Check it out!

Check also their MusicStrands Labs and discover their experiments with Music Discovery through Web 2.0 Mashups:

“With these collections of mashups, you are able to discover multi-media content related to your favourite artist/s. Just write down an artist name and click Go. We will fetch the artist biography from Wikipedia, photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube, posts from Technorati, personal goals from 43things, and events from Upcoming. You can then use recommended artists from MusicStrands to continue the experience and enjoy more multi-media content for those suggested artists.”

Way to go!

Discover MyStrands Mobile, it works on Symbian, Windows Mobile, Smartphones, Java phones, and soon, BREW. You can download the Windows or Java client versions here or visit mobile.musicstrands.com directly from your mobile. Here’s what you get once you created your profile. I leave the discovery process for you to discover

MuscStrands created OpenStrands Public API, a set of web services for developers interested in adding MusicStrands functionality to their non-commercial applications, the obligatory smart move for every self-respecting software development company.

I tried out probably everything I could during a weekend and got all excited about the progress, specifically in the mobile field, everything run smoothly. What MusicStrands offers the mobile industry is desktop, website, and mobile discovery solutions, that work synchronised, and work independently.

After having tried all the goodies, I wondered how MusicStrands positions itself against the ones as last.fm and Pandora including iTunes - they recommend tunes nowadays too, so I asked the guys behind MusicStrands and got in touch with Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria, Vice President, Communication at Musicstrands, he was very helpful giving feedback on my curiosity.

On the question how MusicStrands differs from VisualRadio he answered: “Visual Radio is not a personalized service. MusicStrands builds the technology to provide personalized mobile radios, based on the specific tastes of individuals and groups (plus other functionalities). So I would say these are two different services.”

Asking Gabriel about the key differences with services like last.fm and Pandora, he says:

“last-fm — offers weekly artist recommendations, based on the entire profile of a user; - last.fm does not understand the context of users, most of us have eclectic tastes in music (we may like both Mozart and AC/DC, but never listen to them together) and listen to specific artists or songs at specific moments. Last.fm fails to understand this, and contextual recommendations are critical for the mobile industry (recommend me what I want to listen to NOW, although I like AC/DC, I may not feel like listening to them now). MusicStrands recommends songs, artists and albums. Last.fm recommends artists. And they can only do that weekly. We do that instantly, whenever a recommendation is needed.

Pandora offers currently 400,000 songs and we offer today 6Million and are growing rapidly thanks to our Indy project. Pandora is a group of experts defining similarity; at MusicStrands, it is the community that decides that 2 songs are similar. Their approach is not scalable (because it requires “expert” intervention), MusicStrands’ technology has been designed to scale, to be able to recommend millions of different items to millions of different individuals.”

More on his vision of MusicStrands, as opposed to other technologies:

“It’s all about discovering music and rediscovering your own music library and manage your content.

The idea is to provide contextual music recommendations. Additionally, MusicStrands wants not just to push music, but to help people pull, decide what they may like, and therefore we provide people with tools to dig into the long tail, allowing people to guide the recommender towards the music that each of us might enjoy most. If you don’t like what you get, you can keep digging into the music universe. (by playing with “My recommendations” at the website). Additionally, any independent artist can upload their music, or information about their music, for free to MusicStrands and get discovered!

Many people have told us that their problem is not to find new music, but to manage and rediscover all the music that they already have. And that is why we have the playlist builder, as a way to help people dig into their own music library, as an easy way to fill their iPods.”

In relation if MusicStrands should consider iTunes as a ‘mobile competitor’, Gabriel was pretty straightforward:

“Our technology is scalable, reflects tastes of people, understands context, mobile+online+desktop synchronized solutions work together and independently, and is designed to facilitate the creation of mobile communities around music. I believe social recommendation and discovery technologies will become critical differentiators for online and mobile services. With regard to iTunes mobile presence, there is in fact a lot of room for improvement by building more intelligent mp3 players, with and without connectivity.”

“I truly believe we are approaching a uniquely wonderful age to be a music fan”, I believe so too!

One last thing: the first thing I did - and I normally do - when opening iTunes (now with MyStrands plugin) was playing one of my favourite podcasts in iTunes. This functionality currently doesn’t exist with MusciStrands but I think it would be great to recognise the tunes from a radio podcast and getrecommendations and find out immediately about the tunes playing. I’m sure I would buy immediately some of the weekly tunes played at the Basic Soul podcasts from Simon Harrisson.

BTW: have you noticed that a lot of the great tunes these days are available ONLY on vinyl?

… but that’s for another post!

3GSM, 43things, Analysis, basicsoul, brew, cell phone, collaborative systems, digital music distribution, flickr, J2ME, javaphones, last.fm, Mashup, mobcasting, Mobile Apps, mobile communities, Mobile Content, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, Mobile RSS, mobile social media, mobile web, Music, music search, musicguru, musicstrands, Operators, pandora, podcasting, podcasts, social media, symbian, technorati, upcoming, upcoming.org, visualradio, we media, web 2.0, wikipedia, windows mobile, youtube

It took me a couple of days to be able to digest the whole event with it’s many cocktails and parties surrounding. The best part for me were the many wonderfull people I met behind the companies, projects and blogs.

Apart from the fact that (finally) more people start noticing that there are nearly NO women working in mobile - just check for yourself here, there weren’t nearly NO American carriers or European operators present at 3GSM. Does this mean they will concentrate again on their core business or wasn’t there anything interesting to hype-up as mobile music did last year?

I haven’t seen any mindblowing stuff during the show, neither Yahoo or Google, but I noticed some interesting smaller projects and developments and there was some interesting news sometimes overlooked or who didn’t make it to the headlines…

Despite the enormous advertising effort of Motorola in the city (nearly no advertising boards were overlooked) not to be neglected as a mobile brand, none of their phones were mentioned in the Infosync’s Top Ten phones of the 3GSM Congress, the winner went to to the Sony Ericsson W950i, definately promising and mini-revolutionary design-wise but we’ll have to wait until Q3 of 2006 to see it on the market.

We could notice that (obviously) Microsoft is putting all its efforts to keep track with the pace of other mobile OS but to me the real leap ahead comes from Symbian. Last year still in a somehow hesitating position, it becomes clear that Symbian is the way to go to operate smart mobile devices. The anouncement of Nokia and Vodafone to work together to increase the use of S60 as a standard software platform is very significant.

Next to DoCoMo’s stand, S60 stand was one of my favourites. David showed me one of the most compelling prototype demo’s I have seen during the event: Music Guru, a conceptual prototype of a next generation 3G/PC music player, developed jointly by Vodafone Group R&D, MusicStrands and Adobe, promises anything you could ever imagine of social music projects such as last.fm or Pandora going mobile.

One of my personal favourites stays Minfizz who now created their Minifizz Popp’s, a beautifully designed avatar & looks builder for teenage girls to create their own avatars (mobile) online and save it as a wallpaper on their phone; on top including the possibility to create small blog-diaries to add emotional value to their avatars. The wet dream business model for operators?

But the demo I have been expecting for months now came from Berliner connection Markus Angermeier who showed me how powerfull Plazes will be on the mobile. For the insiders, some screenshots can be found on Felix Petersen’s Flickr stream.

And then the people! Mobile Sunday was so much fun and a perfect aperitif to what was yet to come. Some pictures can be found at Martin’s blog. The Mobilists gathering was too short for me to talk to everybody I would have liked to, so I suggest next time we’ll make it a longer event There seem to be quite some pictures of the evening circulating online, if you have some please suggest your link here so we can all share them. A nice photoshoot session of the evening has been uploaded to Flickr by Josep Ganyet. Thanks to all the mobilists and invitees for coming, I had a great time, I hope you had one too. And thanks also to Kelly Goto, Lisa and the people from Gotomedia for supporting this event. Many thanks to Russell Buckley for his continuous support of the gathering idea.

And final note to the best moblogger in town: without no doubt Kosmar, just check for yourself his impressive and most original collection of his 3GSM impressions here.

TAGS: 3GSM gotomobile mobile sunday barcelona mobilists plazes m-trends.org

3GSM, Cool Devices, Gathering Of The Mobilists, last.fm, minifizz, Mobile Apps, Mobile Events, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, musicguru, musicstrands, plazes, s60, symbian, Women in Mobile

MuLiMob partner Musiwave launched its Personalized Streaming Music to Phones with Smart Radio Technology.

The logical evolution of last.fm’s pioneering work with online profiled and personalised radio.

With Musiwave’s Smart Radio technology, mobile users will feel as though the world’s largest mobile music library is stored locally. The platform provides similar functionality as locally stored music. For example, basic functionality, such as skipping tracks, is provided as is the ability to review song lists and browse by genres.

While traditional streaming technologies use preprogrammed channels, Musiwave’s Smart Radio technology allows users to seamlessly create their own personalized streaming music channels. Personalized music channels are automatically created through real-time analysis of the user’s behavior with powerful profiling technologies.

Announcements, last.fm, mobile music, MuLiMob