MOG's new Google app

The average music lover probably has zero interest in the workings of Google's Chrome apps. But based on what the subscription music service MOG is doing with its app, I'd say the technology could be a real boon to cloud-based music services.

The MOG app is a stripped-down version of MOG's site, letting users browse through a handful of charts and editors' picks or search for specific items from MOG's huge library. At its best it's wickedly fast and responsive -- searches yield results in the blink of an eye, songs start playing almost as soon as you double-click on their titles (with no need for a player to pop up in a separate window). That's a function of HTML5, the updated version of HTML used by Chrome apps, said MOG honcho David Hyman.

The faster the app responds to search and play requests, the closer it comes to replicating the performance of iTunes, which primarily plays songs from the user's hard drive (it can also tap a local network for tracks). Of course, MOG's advantage is that it has close to 10 million tracks in its library, which is, umm, a bit larger than the typical consumer's.

Missing is the rich overlay of content on the MOG site — the blog posts, reviews, videos, pictures and the like. Also absent are the site's personalization tools, such as the ability to build virtual collections and playlists. I missed the latter more than the former, frankly.

Hyman said the current version of the app is just a starting point, although it hints at where the company is headed as it overhauls its website. Future versions of the app will bring in more of the personalization features of the MOG site. They'll also take advantage of things that HTML5 can do that MOG's website can't, such as enabling drag-and-drop playlists and matching tracks on a user's hard drive with those in MOG's library.

Meanwhile, the site will evolve to look and function more like the app. "This is really going to be the new MOG," Hyman said.

MOG allows subscribers to play an unlimited number of songs from its online jukebox for a flat monthly fee. The Web-only service is $5 a month; for $10 a month, users can access the jukebox from mobile phones and cache songs to play when they're offline.

Related:

A new kind of online Rdio

MOG to launch mobile services for iPhone, Android

Waxing Rhapsodic about MOG

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

 

Apple releases new Michael Jackson song on Ping social music application

Apple Inc.’s new social networking website for music is exclusively offering a single from Michael Jackson’s yet-to-be-released posthumous album, Michael.

Fans who are clamoring for the song, “Much Too Soon,” can find it on Apple’s Ping, which is built into the iTunes app on iPhone and iPod Touch. 

“Much Too Soon” is the third tune from Michael to hit the Web ahead of its Dec. 14 release. “Breaking News” and “Hold My Hand” both appeared on Jackson’s official website in November.

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Fast Track: New Michael Jackson album is due in December

--W.J. Hennigan

Top photo: Album cover for the yet-to-be-released Michael Jackson album. Credit: MichaelJackson.com.

Lower photo: Logo of Ping, Apple's new social music app. Credit: Apple Inc.

Apple makes Find My iPhone service free for iOS devices

Who hasn't dreamed of attaching a tracking device to their keys, or sunglasses or cellphone?

Apple announced on Monday that the Find My iPhone (or iPad or iPod touch) feature -- which helps locate a missing device by way of an online map -- will be free to use without a MobileMe subscription. The service is limited to the latest-generation devices (iPhone 4, iPad or fourth-generation iPod touch) running iOS 4.2, the newest version of Apple's mobile operating system, also released Monday.

Previously, the feature was available only to iOS users with a MobileMe subscription for $99 per year. It also required the download of the Find My iPhone app, free in the App Store.

To access the service, users must go to settings after installing the iOS 4.2 update and add a new MobileMe account through "Mail, Contacts and Calendars." A prompt will ask for a user's MobileMe ID, but entering your Apple ID and password, which is also used in the iTunes store, will open access to the Find My iPhone feature.

Once enabled, users will be able to locate their Apple gadget on a map online (as well as command it to display a message or make a sound); owners can also lock or wipe data from a lost device either through the app from Apple or online.

Other new features from the iOS 4.2 include multitasking, folders and a unified in-box for the iPad, and AirPrint wireless printing and AirPlay for audio and video streaming for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

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-- Shan Li

Photo: Screenshot of the Find My iPhone device-locating map feature. Credit: Apple iTunes App Store

EMusic: Win a little, lose a little

Thursday marks another increment in the evolution at eMusic, the online music service that sells discounted MP3s by subscription. CEO Adam Klein announced on the company's blog Wednesday that not only would some 250,000 older titles from Universal Music Group be added to its extensive catalog of indie labels and artists, but also brand-new releases from Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. Thus, Warner and Sony's thinking about eMusic has come full circle: from shunning the service to letting it sell older tracks to supporting it as a full-fledged competitor to iTunes. Those tracks will start arriving on eMusic on Thursday.

Getting Warner and Sony's releases on the same day they go to iTunes could make eMusic significantly more appealing to mainstream music fans, especially given that the former charges 99 cents to $1.29 for those tracks, while eMusic has said it will charge no more than 89 cents. Granted, Amazon and Walmart charge less than iTunes too, and neither of them has been able to make much of a dent in Apple's dominant market share. But eMusic's subscription approach yields larger discounts.

On the other hand, the changes to eMusic's business model that persuaded Universal, Warner and Sony to sign on have started to drive off some of the site's most important indie allies. According to Billboard, eMusic notified subscribers Tuesday that Merge (home of Arcade Fire, Spoon and Superchunk, among other indie-rock faves), Domino (Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, Franz Ferdinand) and the Beggars Group labels (The National, Vampire Weekend, Efterklang) were pulling out of the service as of Thursday.

These are important departures ...

Apple to make big iTunes announcement Tuesday -- cloud-based music everywhere? [Updated]

[Updated, November 16th, 7:46 a.m.: Apple has announced that it will indeed carry The Beatles' main catalog, including the band's 13 studio albums. The announcement did not involve cloud-based music.]

[Updated, 4:50 p.m.: The iTunes announcement reportedly has to do with the Beatles finally making their catalog available on iTunes, sources told the Wall Street Journal.]

Apple's homepage is alerting consumers that the company will have an iTunes-related announcement Tuesday at 7 a.m. PST.

In grandiose language that is increasingly typical from the company (think its "magical, revolutionary iPad," and "everything has changed -- again" for its iPhone 4), Apple is trumpeting the iTunes change by calling it "just another day ... that you'll never forget."

Hmm ... what would it take to put the memory-making power of a new iTunes feature strong enough to compete with the great unforgettable moments of life -- the births, deaths, marriages, graduations and so on?

Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray & Co. says he believes that the announcement will be related to the long-rumored "cloud" element of iTunes, in which users can forgo storing their music libraries on a home machine (or machines) in favor of uploading their music to Apple's cloud -- and being able to access it from anywhere forevermore.

"Apple is developing a data center in Maiden, N.C., that we believe could serve as the hub for such a service," Munster said in a note to investors Monday morning. "The company has indicated that the data center is on track to be completed by the end of [this year] and it will begin using it then."

If Apple provided storage for music, that would also mean it could allow users to keep movies, TV shows and any other kind of media online. But holding such a huge repository of consumer music opens the company up to a slew of legal concerns relating to copied material. Apple has very likely been spending plenty of time sniffing out the implications there.

-- David Sarno

Photo credit: Mish Sukharev / Flickr

iTunes 10.1 debuts, iOS 4.2 still MIA

On Friday, iTunes 10.1 made a quiet debut on the Apple site. But the much more anticipated iOS 4.2 software upgrade was nowhere to be found.

The new iTunes version now supports the AirPlay technology, which can stream music, videos and other media to Apple TV and similar devices. It can also support syncing with iPhones, iPads and other iOS  4.2-equipped products.

That just leaves the actual operating system, which Apple has said it will release this month. The system will feature more than 100 new features, including multitasking, folders and printing, the company said.

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-- Tiffany Hsu

Photo: Apple

Will Twitter really be the wind beneath Ping's wings?

Haven't heard much about Ping lately?  Ping, remember? That's OK. The buzz volume has been pretty low on Apple's iTunes-based social network for music since it was launched a couple of months ago.

But when buzz is lacking, what better solution than to go direct to the headquarters of the Internet's biggest buzz machine:  Twitter.

By hooking up with Twitter, Apple looks to be trying to jump-start Ping by allowing users to broadcast their Ping-based music-browsing activities over Twitter.  If you connect the two services, your musical predilections will become very public.  When you rave about Brokencyde's new album, everyone on Twitter will hear about it; when you "Like" Cher, everyone on Twitter will hear about it, and when you post a note on Ping saying, "Why don't I have any friends on Ping?" everyone on Twitter will hear about it.

Apple is doubtless hoping Twitter will help with Ping's problem making friends.  Since Ping debuted, it's been thanklessly tedious to invite friends to the service: users have to manually enter friends' e-mail addresses -- one by one -- or search for individual names.

Most users proably aren't inclined to sit for hours inviting dozens of people to a new and unproven online product like Ping.  Thus it would greatly help Apple to let users just copy all their friends onto Ping from an established friend repository like, say, Facebook.  Trouble is, Facebook reportedly wouldn't let Apple tap into its network to seed Ping with lots of ready-made friendships. 

That's where Twitter comes in. By allowing Ping users to sniff through their Twitter friends to see who else is on Ping, Apple could theoretically be opening up a new pipeline of fresh users.

But there's a roadblock. To find your Twitter friends through Ping, your Twitter friends have to already be on Ping. In other words, once you sign onto Ping's Twitter service, you will only see a list of other Twitter-via-Ping users who have also signed onto Ping's Twitter service.  You will not see a list of everyone you follow on Twitter.

(In my case, in the three hours since Ping-via-Twitter launched, only four of the 367 people I follow on Twitter have signed up for the new coupling.)

In that sense, Twitter has offered Apple a trickle of fresh friend juice, rather than a flood.

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Will Ping ding Bing? Apple's music network name rings a bell

Apple's Steve Jobs announces Ping, the social network for music

-- David Sarno (@dsarno)

EMusic signs Universal, aims for the mainstream

The subscription-music struggles that I wrote about last week aren't confined to the digital services selling access to millions of tracks on an online jukebox. The ones selling bundles of CDsor MP3s for a monthly fee have also struggled to catch on with the masses. The last one standing, as far as I can tell, is EMusic, which launched in 1998 -- a year before Shawn Fanning released the original Napster song-swapping software.

But EMusic is in the midst of an overhaul, trying to change itself from a niche service for lovers of indie-label bands to a more broadly focused service for music lovers in general. As part of that transformation, it announced Tuesday that it has a deal with Universal Music Group, the largest of the major record companies, to add content from its labels and artists (e.g. Interscope, Decca and Island DefJam). EMusic now is home to three of the four majors (although new songs from these labels and a handful of the largest indies often aren't available until well after they've been released to other stores); the only holdout is EMI, but new EMusic CEO Adam Klein said in a recent interview that he expects the company to have all of the majors before too long.

At least as significant is the news that EMusic is changing its pricing, moving even further away from the bulk-discount model of yore. The basic subscription will still cost $12 a month. But instead of providing 24 credits and charging no more than one credit per track (with some album bundles offering better deals), the service will switch in November to a variable pricing model ...

Apple event: A litany of fail?

 

Love, in digital times, means never having to say you're sorry. All you have to do is fix it in the next release.

That seemed to be the approach Apple took last week during its new products showcase, where most of the announcements were revamps of its existing lineup.

Some of the new features were clearly new, such as a touch screen on the iPod nano and the Game Center for multi-player games on iPhone and iPod Touch. But a handful of changes could be viewed as a mea culpa of getting it wrong in the earlier iterations. Four potentially fall into the latter category. They are:

Apple TV -- Introduced four years ago, Apple TV "has never been a huge hit," admitted Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs during his presentation in San Francisco. Its price tag, $229, was "too expensive," Jobs said. So the latest version of Apple TV is $99. In addition, it's rental only. That meant no more bulky hard drive storing purchased content.

iPod Shuffle -- In its last version, the Shuffle shrank to the size of a thin USB stick. But it had no navigation buttons, which Jobs admitted "people clearly miss." The new Shuffle reverts back to the old design, a square lapel pin the size of a postage stamp with a big control button.

iPod Nano -- Apple took out the video camera on the nano, and put it on the larger iPod Touch. The problem with the nano's camera was that the device was so small (hence, nano) and the lens was placed in such a way that people's fingers often ended up covering a portion of the image. Oops.

iOS 4.1 -- The first new feature that Jobs highlighted for Apple's latest mobile operating system? Bug fixes. "Proximity sensor bugs, Bluetooth bugs, iPhone 3G performance bugs, all the bugs that we get mails on," Jobs said. "We think we've nailed a lot of them. And we think you're going to be pretty happy with it."

'Nuff said. Can we please move on now?

-- Alex Pham

Appeals court says UMG too shady on royalties

It's bad enough for the major record companies that CD sales are plummeting. Now, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is threatening to make digital downloads less profitable too.

A three-judge panel sided with F.B.T. Productions Friday in its dispute with Universal Music Group over Eminem's recordings for UMG's Aftermath label, ruling that F.B.T. was entitled to significantly higher royalties for downloadable tracks and albums sold through Apple's iTunes Store. The panel sent the case back to District Court to determine how much UMG will have to pay in damages.

UMG said it would appeal the ruling to the full 9th Circuit, and that the case wouldn't have broader implications because it hinged on the unique provisions of a single contract. Nevertheless, the victory for F.B.T. (if it stands) could embolden other hitmakers to seek higher royalties for digital downloads -- something many artists have demanded but few have obtained.

F.B.T., a team of producers that discovered and wrote songs for Eminem, sued Universal in 2006, accusing the company's Aftermath label of failing to pay sufficient royalties for the titles sold through iTunes. Its attorneys contended that the 99-cent downloads weren't "records sold ... through normal retail channels," which would carry a royalty of 12% to 20%. Instead, they argued that the sales stemmed from licensing deals that Aftermath struck on Eminem's behalf, on which the royalties should have been 50% of the net receipts.

A District Court jury agreed with Universal that iTunes sales were just like CD sales, and the judge awarded Universal more than $2.4 million in legal fees. But the appeals panel held ...