MOG joins the subscription-music fray

There must be something compelling about the subscription-music business model that the public just hasn't grasped yet. No matter how many companies give up on it because they can't attract enough subscribers, new ones always arrive to try to make it work.

The latest is MOG, which launched a $5-per-month version today. I've lost count, but I think we're now on the fourth iteration of MOG -- it started as a music-blogging outpost, then added music videos, then integrated Rhapsody to allow a limited number of free songs on demand. Now, after a long delay (the all-too-familiar cause: licensing issues with the major labels), MOG is rolling out a subscription layer that adds unlimited streams on demand, personalized radio and a rich trove of user-generated playlists.

The price puts it in line with Napster's listen-only offering, although Napster also lets users download an MP3 for every dollar they spend on subscription fees. In other words, Napster treats the streams as a free throw-in to an eMusic-like subscription downloading service. (Another good analogy: Netflix.) Armed with a library that's similar to its competitors, MOG is betting on the strength of the content generated by its staff and users, which turn the site into a one-stop shop for music news, reviews, commentary, social networking *and* listening. The integration of crowd-sourced playlists and blogs give MOG more powerful music-discovery tools than other services provide as well as more (and more unique) content than its rivals.

Yet the question lingers: Are people willing to pay for access to music, especially when there's so much available free (e.g., Grooveshark, Imeem, MySpace Music, Lala, Slacker -- and that's not counting  unauthorized sources)? I've been a fan of subscription services for a long time. On the other hand, I'm a voracious consumer of music -- especially when it's being created by someone I've never heard of before. That makes me well-suited for a service like Napster or the new MOG, but not terribly representative of most consumers. Said consumers tend to have one giant problem with subscription services, aside from the sense of getting nothing permanent in return for their money: They don't work on iPods. (Rhapsody, at least, works on an iPhone.) All the same, MOG's announcement reinforces Napster's bet that $5 a month is the new price point for subscriptions, not $13 to 15 (a la Rhapsody or Zune Pass). And that's much less of a leap for consumers to take, even if their musical appetites aren't as large as mine.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Review: DJ Hero is a standout in overcrowded field of music video games

Like the Guitar Hero games it's based on, "DJ Hero" requires gamers to tap a colored button at just the right time. Credit: Activision

Grandmaster Flash. DJ Shadow. Z-Trip.

Most hip-hop heads revere these names as turntable legends. But it’s likely most video gamers have no clue who these guys are.

Activision, the publisher of the highly successful Guitar Hero franchise, is hoping to change that with its new title, DJ Hero.

The music and mixes of these notable turntablists are featured in the game along with more than 100 licensed songs, which make up more than 90 unique mixes.

Having a familiarity with actual DJing is not necessary to enjoy DJ Hero.

In fact, DJ Hero replicates the work of a real DJ about as much as Guitar Hero replicates what a real guitarist does -- which is to say not much at all.

But that’s not the point.

Simple, straightforward is what DJ Hero is about, and it succeeds in...

Music streaming app Spotify comes to the U.S. early next year

Perhaps the most-hyped music service coming out of Europe is making its way to American shores early next year.

Spotify's desktop software lets users stream from a massive catalog of music for free.

The ad-supported service is hugely popular in the six European countries it currently operates in. And for good reason.

The program is in many ways more sophisticated than similar services, like Napster and Rhapsody. The interface is simple and lets users arrange playlists that automatically sync between machines. And it's free -- supported by ads.

The premium version, which costs 10 euros per month in Europe (U.S. pricing hasn't been announced yet), lets users stream via mobile apps and store songs in playlists using digital rights management (DRM) on a computer or smart phone for offline listening. The application also sells many songs in its catalog.

We've been testing Spotify for the last few weeks, and it's absolutely blowing us away. Check out our impressions of the service on Pop & Hiss: Spotify plans to rock the U.S. digital music landscape early next year.

-- Mark Milian

Guvera, a place for advertisers to give away music

After SpiralFrog's collapse and Qtrax's repeated misfires, I'm skeptical about any online music service that says it will give away advertiser-supported downloads. But Guvera, an Australian start-up launched by former advertising executive Claes Loberg, is different enough to make me think it might actually work.

Admittedly, I also liked Uplister, Echo and dozens of other ill-fated online music services. But Guvera, which is expected to announce a licensing deal this morning with Universal Music Group, has at least one thing going for it that SpiralFrog didn't and Qtrax has yet to demonstrate: a model that's friendly not just to consumers, but also to advertisers.

More on Google music search

After I wrote about Google's new music search feature last week, several readers pointed out that Google already offered searchers an easy way to stream songs: YouTube. Clips from YouTube have been featured prominently among the search results on Google and Yahoo for some time. If Lala, MySpace Music and Google's other partners in the new search feature are going to see much benefit, they'll have to offer a more compelling experience at the top of the search results than YouTube does nearby.

With that in mind, Google is rolling out the first upgrade to music search today: semi-exclusive content. I say "semi" because the content is actually being made available by Lala and MySpace and can be found by going to those sites directly. Anyway, the booty includes new material and free MP3s available for a limited time only. Among the artists contributing MP3s are Phoenix, Tim McGraw and Mos Def; exclusive tracks will be available from Snoop Dogg, Kings of Leon, Lady Gaga and Linkin Park. It's not clear whether this will be a regular feature or just a gimmick to get people to try out the new search feature. But if artists and labels really want to draw people into the experiences provided by services such as Lala and MySpace Music, they'll need to keep the freebies and/or extra features coming. Otherwise, what's to keep Google users from clicking on the links from YouTube in lieu of the ones at the top of the page?

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Sony sales slide 20% as global economy erodes profit

Sony saw sales drop nearly across the board in its fiscal second quarter as the consumer electronics and media giant continued to struggle with a withering global economy.

As shoppers around the world cut back on buying televisions, cameras and computers, Sony's revenue plunged 19.8% to $18.5 billion from the same quarter a year ago. Bargain pricing also eroded profit margins, leading Sony to swing from a $200-million profit last year to a $292-million loss.

Sales slipped in all of Sony's divisions except for its financial services business in Japan. Sony's consumer products and devices division, which includes its Bravia TV and Cybershot camera businesses, plunged 36.5% to $8.9 billion as consumers bought fewer electronics and at lower prices. Still, the unit eked out a $99-million operating profit.

Its networked products division, which includes Sony's PlayStation video game and Vaio computer businesses, also saw a steep 24% drop in sales to $3.9 billion. Losses for the unit widened substantially to $654 million, accounting for the bulk of Sony's operating loss in the quarter.

Sales of its PlayStation 3 game console jumped 33% to 3.2 million units, thanks to a $100 price cut that brought the price down to as low as $299. But that was not enough to make up for a 24% slide in sales of the PlayStation 2 and a 6% decline in sales of its handheld PSP console.

Consumers appeared to also have cut back on other types of entertainment. Sales for Sony's music labels, the second largest in the world after Universal Music Group, fell 3%. But the decline was cushioned by a surge in the popularity of Sony's catalog recordings of Michael Jackson, leading the unit to post a $96-million operating profit on $1.4 billion in revenue.

Sony's movie business also took a hit. Sales declined 30% to $1.5 billion as consumers bought fewer DVDs and curtailed trips to the movie theater. Sony Pictures posted a $71-million loss for the quarter.

On a brighter note, the company said it now anticipated lower losses than it had initially projected for its current fiscal year ending March 2010. Sony credits the improved outlook to the ability for its consumer products business to turn a profit, thanks in part to aggressive cost-cutting, and the health of its Japanese financial services business. File under: It's not as bad as we thought.

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

Google's bid to save the music industry, one search at a time [UPDATED]

Google's new "music search feature" -- that's the official name, although some folks have been calling it "OneBox" -- is like a relief pitcher arriving in the middle of a game with his team trailing. It can help expose millions of people to legitimate Internet music outlets, which will help those companies compete with free (and, in many cases, unauthorized) sources of music online. Whether consumers will actually spend more on music than they've been doing, however, is a whole 'nother question.

The rap against Google from label executives and online music companies has been that its search results seem indifferent to legality. For example, searching for a legitimate site often yields sponsored results for unlicensed ones; Googling an MP3 will call up dozens of free download sites and probably some unauthorized lyrics outlets, too. The new music search initiative won't scrub the unlicensed sites from the search results, but at least it tries to steer people to sites that compensate copyright holders. The hope, according to Thomas Hesse, president of Sony Music Entertainment's global digital business, is that music fans will have a significantly better experience on a MySpace or a Lala than they would on an illegitimate site.

No doubt they will. Three of the five music services that Google is working with initially -- Lala, Rhapsody and Pandora -- are far easier to use and are much more entertaining than BitTorrent or LimeWire. I'm not a huge fan of the user interfaces at the two others -- MySpace Music and imeem -- but they're far better tools for sampling music and discovering bands than the illegal downloading sites are. And it's certainly true that with the exception of iTunes, which is notably absent from this initiative, legitimate online music services have been woefully undermarketed and underexposed. So the considerable traffic Google is likely to send their way should be a tremendous boon.

Having said that, I think it's still an open question whether the new search function leads the masses to buy more music. It's likely to lead people to listen to more songs -- Google and its streaming partners will enable searchers to play any given song once, in full and for free, right from the search results page. And if they follow up a sample by diving further into MySpace Music or Lala, they'll certainly discover more artists that they like. But if they're accustomed to acquiring music for free online, it's not clear to me why they wouldn't continue to do so after sampling to their heart's content on MySpace or Lala. Alternatively, they may be happy to stick with the free ad-supported streams on MySpace or imeem, or the 10-cent "web songs" on Lala, instead of plunking down 89 cents or more for an MP3. That's fine only if there's enough volume to make up for the lower margins.

At least Google's pushing people in the right direction, or at least some of the right directions. The search sovereign needs to learn how to work more subscription-music services into the mix, too, for the sake of eMusic, Napster and Microsoft's Zune Pass. And you have to wonder how innovative new services will find a way to get a piece of the traffic that Google's search initiative will generate for its short list of partners. R.J. Pittman, who led Google's efforts to develop the new search function, said the company would consider adding partners to the list, but they'll have to be "online, Web-based, easily accessible and offer some interesting approaches to music discovery." Lots of companies fit that bill, so it will be interesting to see how Google decides who's in and who's out.

Updated at 4:43 p.m.: Now that I've played with it a bit, I see that Google still has some work to do on the new feature. The intelligence it applies to search results -- for example, guessing the right band or song name despite errors in the search -- haven't been integrated into music searches. So if, for example, if you search for "Martha Muffins," Google will guess that you were looking for Martha and the Muffins, and return a bunch of links to the band and its work. But it won't trigger a chance to stream songs from the band via MySpace or Lala. Similarly, if you go looking for "the angels want to wear my red shoes," you won't get the chance to stream the song on the search page. But you will get lots of links to the song on other sites. Searching for the song by its correct title -- "Red Shoes" -- won't help, 'cause the new feature doesn't recognize that as a search for a song. It's similarly befuddled by searches for songs covered by multiple artists, such as "Moon River."

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Google launches music search with Lala, Pandora, Rhapsody, imeem and MySpace

Google this afternoon began rolling out its widely rumored music feature, which lets users search for and listen to entire songs for free.

The search engine banded together with several music service sites that are responsible for streaming the songs on Google's search results pages. Searching for Coldplay, for example, will yield the band's album cover art, alongside four popular songs that users can play once for free. Once a song has been played by a user, they will only be able to hear a 30-second sample of tune. (The feature is being gradually rolled out over the next 24 hours, so some folks may not see the feature until tomorrow.)

Google itself isn't paying record companies for the rights to play millions of songs on its search page; its partners are. Those include Lala, Pandora, imeem, MySpace Music and Rhapsody, a subscription service from Real Networks. All have licensing agreements with record labels to stream or sample millions of songs online.

The Mountain View, Calif., search company said it's not interested in competing with digital music retailers such as Amazon and Apple's iTunes.

"We're not in the music business per se," said R.J. Pittman, Google's director of product for the music search project. "We don't license the music nor sell the music directly on Google. We are merely a music search feature."

But in steering millions of Internet users to these sites, Google is indirectly boosting their ability to compete with iTunes, which was responsible for 69% of U.S. digital music sales in the first six months of this year, and 35% of all music sales, including physical albums, according to market research firm NPD Group Inc. Amazon, the second-largest player, accounted for 9% of digital music sales and 10% of overall music sales.

Google says it's only interested in helping people find and discover music. Whether it can help revitalize the music industry is another question that Times editorial writer Jon Healey addresses here.

Millions of people already use Google to ...

Grooveshark and virtual music collections

Subscription music services have struggled to persuade consumers to pay for access to unlimited virtual collections of music. But what if the collections were virtual and free?

That's one of the intriguing questions raised by Grooveshark, a streaming music service that offers advertiser-supported music on demand (the ad-free version costs $3 a month). Fresh from its settlement with EMI, the company rolled out a slick new version of its site today, one designed to look and feel something like iTunes (or the much-anticipated Spotify). In addition to a cleaner user interface and more seamless playback, the upgrades include a much easier way to add songs to an online locker without uploading them from your computer -- or paying for them. It's similar to something imeem offers, but I found Grooveshark's version quite a bit easier to use.

You might wonder what's the point in having a personal collection on a site that lets you play any song you wish on demand. For starters, a virtual collection helps manage the huge amount of material available online. Grooveshark relies on users to supply many of the tracks in its library, so it may have multiple versions of a song. Virtual collections also simplify the process of creating playlists. And the fact that it costs nothing to save tracks in an online library encourages people to save tracks they're curious about but not committed to. Sort of like dating. And that's what Grooveshark really is about -- enabling people to sample and discover new artists, then share their discoveries with friends. One shortcoming, though, is that Grooveshark (like imeem) doesn't make it easy to save an entire album to a personal collection. And if you want to save a lot of tracks, you have to upgrade to the paid version.

Still, it's easy to see where these things lead. Throw in a mobile application and you've got a comprehensive service -- one that starts to look like a substitute for a conventional music collection. Why assemble (and pay for) your own stash when you can rely on thousands of other people to share theirs with you? Granted, it's no match today for Napster or Rhapsody, which are more comprehensive (especially when it comes to new releases) and offer an editorial layer (descriptions, bios and the like) that's missing from Grooveshark. And it may never be -- those services keep improving too. Nor does Grooveshark, whose automatic playlisting function is a great alternative to radio, provide much help in the car. But it's free, and that price is hard to beat.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow his intermittent Twitter stream: @jcahealey.

Coming soon to a PlayStation 3 near you: Netflix streaming [Updated]

Better late than never. Sony today said it will add Netflix's free video streaming service to the PlayStation 3 in November.

The announcement comes a year after Microsoft gave its Xbox Live Gold members access to the Netflix service in November 2008. That move helped turbo-charge the number of subscribers to Microsoft's online service from 14 million last year to more than 20 million today.

Jack Tretton, head of Sony's PlayStation business in the U.S., said what sets Sony's version of Netflix apart is that subscribers won't have to pay Sony any membership fees to take advantage of the service. In contrast, Xbox 360 owners who want to stream Netflix must pay a $50 annual fee for the Gold membership.

(Sony and Microsoft require users to subscribe to Netflix's movie-rental service, which costs between $5 to $29 a month.)

"We see the PlayStation 3 as the ultimate entertainment device," Tretton said in an interview.

Funny, Microsoft said the same thing about its Xbox 360 game entertainment console earlier this year.

The two companies serve up similar fare. Sony's online service, called PlayStation Network, currently has 2,300 movies and 13,800 TV shows. In November, it will add 17,000 Netflix titles to the tally. Microsoft's Xbox Live features more than 20,000 movies and TV shows, including Netflix titles. As for music, neither offers a way to buy tunes. (Xbox Live comes close, letting its Gold subscribers stream Last.fm, an Internet radio channel.)

What about Sony, which owns its own music label?

"My personal opinion is if you're going to do something, do it right," Tretton said, when asked if Sony would introduce a music service to the PS3. "Doing things right is more important than doing them first. But this would be something that would definitely be well received."

-- Alex Pham

*This post has been updated to add the number of Netflix titles Sony said it will add to its PlayStation Network in November.

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.