Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Just Way Too Monopolized (Part 2)

Apple has a monopoly on the music industry as it is right now. At least that's the way it appears. With everything that they have their fingers in though, it's really not that surpriseing to assume or hard to assume. Josh posted this comic back in September about the state of the music industry. With the mass amounts of apple products it is just easiest to fall into what I like to call the itunes funk.

Itunes has been my pal for a long time. We go way back. Then I discovered playlist.com. I abandoned it when the website just looked outdated and songs were deleted from the playlists I made. Then I moved on to Pandora. A hecka lot of fun but I was bummed that I couldn't really choose the songs I was going to listen to. Now I really only use Pandora when I'm doing something else and need some music in the background. Then Spotify entered my life. It was a glorious love affair. It really stole my sister's heart though. I wanted better recommendations though and missed some features of Pandora. I have now become what we call a "fickle mistress."

A fickle mistress flits around from one thing to another and can never make up her mind. I still like itunes because all of the music I own is in that one central location. But I like Spotify because I can add songs that I don't have to playlists that I already do have. The downside? Spotify is a little mean. Certain artists refuse to have their music available on Spotify because they don't get enough of a cut from it. Songza is great because it makes playlists based on the time of day and what you're doing and it has a great interaction aspect. But it can get a little too long tail for me sometimes. Noisetrade is fun because you can discover totally new artists. But there's not a super good way to sort through the artists and it's completely hit and miss. Topblip and Reverb Nation kind of have the same problem as Noisetrade.

Here's what I want. I want all my music in one place. I want recommendations based on what I've listened to. And I want these recommendations to actually be good recommendations. I want the artist to get a good cut of what I'm paying. In fact, I want to get it straight from them if at all possible. I want to hear new artists but I want to hear the popular ones sometimes too. I want my music player to get inside my head and know what I want and when I want it. I want a cloned version of myself whose job is strictly to identify my mood and what I'm doing and give me a soundtrack based on all that. Is that really to much to ask?!

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