Streaming services and digital music: What’s next?

10 years ago, on 28 April 2003, Apple released their game changing service iTunes Music Store. It has been growing ever since its release, reaching 7800 million downloads in 2012. The digital music store has been blamed and praised for the changes the music industry has gone through over the last decade.

“Apple will probably find a way to own it all. But that’s the thing with pirates; they don’t ban the pirates because they make money selling computers for people to go pirating on. We are owned by Apple now, aren’t we?” asks music journalist and musician John Robb. It was in 2001 that the first iPod was released and made the music consumers able to store their music catalogue on a portable device instead of carrying folders of CDs with their Discman. Releasing iTunes Music Store in 2003 gave the iPod users the first legal way to download music, but label owner Paul Gallagher still blames Apple and their iPod for piracy.

“Internet has killed music and I blame Apple with their mass store devices. Kids were wondering where they could fill their iPods with music and peer to peer networks emerged,” says Gallagher.

Apple iRadio and Radical FM

With 24 million iPods sold since 2001 and with iTunes as the market leader for digital sales, it has also been rumoured that Apple has developed a streaming service ready for release. The press has written about Apple making deals with Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, needing only Sony Music Entertainment on board for Apple to get their streaming service iRadio packed with music. Thomas McAlevey, creator of the personalised new streaming and radio service Radical FM, believes Apple will wait a bit longer before releasing their streaming candidate.

“iTunes is diminishing and they are working on a Pandora type streaming service, but they will wait to release it so it won’t eat into their downloads right away,” explains McAlevey who is also the man behind radio stations like Bandit Rock and Tomsradio.com, the forerunner to Spotify and Pandora.

“If there’s anyone in the world who doesn’t know it yet, let me make it perfectly clear: Streaming music is the future,” says McAlevey who doesn’t think Apple’s iRadio will be a threat to Radical FM, which their website claims is: “programmed by hand by human beings.”

“Spotify and Pandora are essentially huge music databases hooked onto a search engine, and that is easy to copy and I think Apple can do that very well. The good personalised radios are harder to copy, so we feel less threatened because of that,” says McAlevey. Radical FM is a combination of Spotify’s playlist function and Pandora’s radio and will be add free and receiving income from donations. They recently closed the beta test they were running in Sweden, the birthplace of Spotify and Pirate Bay, at the end of last year. Being surrounded by such innovative businesses surprisingly gave them some challenges. “It was considered a bit too popular. It got quite a lot of attention right away and it scared the labels. The labels thought we were much bigger than we were and feared that we would cut into Spotify too much, so the labels restricted us,” explains McAlevey.

Discovering music

Digital music and streaming services are here to stay. What seems to be the next step in the industry is to provide guidance through all this access towards the right music for each individual. Radical FM has several functions in their service to help you discover music. Not only is it a personalised station for your taste, but you can also listen to your friends’ stream, or anyone who shares their playlist with you, in real time. “Radcast will let you listen to your friends’ stream and then chat together. You can’t control your friends’ stream, but you can add songs you like to your own playlists,” explains McAlevey. He and his team are also encouraging indie artists to create a radio station to broadcast their music through TALK. “TALK will let you speak to your listeners in-between songs, so we are giving everyone a radio station,” he says.

The creators of Spotify have also understood the future that lies in music discovery and intelligent music players. They announced at their 2012 press event that a tab named Spotify Discover will be launched in 2013. This will tap into what you are listening to and recommend music you might also like. At the same event Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify, claimed that we prefer to take musical advice from people with similar taste. Based on that, Spotify will allow you to follow users, and their playlists will show up on your Discover stream. This means that you yourself will get Spotify followers, writing and sharing music to their Discover stream. Thus Spotify moves towards social media, and will share similarities with Twitter.

At the same time Twitter will be incorporating a music app. Their app, Twitter Music, will recommend songs to the user based on whom they are following, and also make the songs available through streaming on Soundcloud, which is a site musicians upload music onto.

“Certainly Spotify is not the finished article. There must be something better coming along. I think it’s quite limited. If I think of an obscure one hit wonder from 1981, which got to 37 in the charts, it’s probably not there. It’s also missing big acts like Led Zeppelin and so on,” says Simon Price.

“I imagine it will be a continuation of streaming services. There is always something around the corner. Maybe something can come up from nowhere. Just like Facebook,” says John Robb.

Graveyard of dead formats

There are several apps available to aid you in your music discovery. Mixcloud has become a popular radio station where podcasts are being uploaded, letting the listener discover new music in that way. Sonarflow is an Apple app that scans your music library in either iTunes or Spotify and recommends music based on that. Or you could browse through Richseam’s catalogue of connections in the music industry, which maps collaborations between artists. Browsing through your favourite artists might lead you to new music. But if that is too much trouble you can get the ‘mico’ headset, which scans the brainwaves of the wearer and finds music suitable for his or her mood.

“Musical history is a graveyard of dead formats,” says Price. Minidisk, a-track cassettes and normal cassettes are all formats that have become obsolete. “Do you remember the play buttons? There was a format called play button and it was basically a button badge that you pinned to your clothing and it would contain an album on mp3 and a socket where you pugged your earphones into. And the idea is that you would have the artwork on the badge so you could proudly walk around and show the world what you were listening to,” says Price about another forgotten format in the graveyard. Now CDs are facing the same fate.

“CD was a horrible, unloved and unlovable format with its disgusting plastic cases that always broke, and the disc itself was supposed to be immortal but was very mortal indeed,” says Price.

“The music industry is basically hanging on by its fingernails selling CDs to people my age, and that is how it survives,” says Robb.

Free music

The development in consumer behaviour must be blamed on the labels themselves, claim Price and Gallagher. Since piracy entered the arena, the new generations have been developing an attitude towards music as a free product.

“If people today think that music is supposed to be free, it’s nobody’s fault but the music industry, because they overcharged for compact discs for too long. There was this one Oasis album that they charged 18 pounds for and when they released another album after the Internet boom, they charged 6 pounds,” says Price.

“It started with Napster. Record labels could not get their head around it, and the Americans started suing people and putting people in prison so it would not reach more people. Nobody buys music today because of that, but if the music industry had made a deal with Napster, you’d have a music industry today. You don’t have that because of kids thinking it’s for free. But it would not be like that if they had just dealt with it at the time,” says Gallagher.

The industry might have won against Napster, but new download services have popped up in great numbers since then. The Pirate Bay has, like Napster, been sent to court and the creators were sentenced to prison and a fine of more than 4.5 million pounds. The site is still running and downloading keeps happening.

Social to private, then back

Music consumption was always as a social act. Religious music, moving on to secular concerts and also slave music are obvious examples. People also listened to the radio and vinyls together. “Radical FM sees that music consumption has become more private. With classic radios you know that someone else is listening at the same time as you. That is why we are working on the TALK and the Radcasting to try to make it more social again,” says McAlevey.

Music consumption has steadily moved towards the private sphere, and when the Sony Walkman was introduced to the music listener in 1979, music was served directly into your ear. The development in streaming services is moving back on that scale, making the act of listening more social again. Facebook teamed up with Spotify in 2011, allowing your friends to see what you were listening to.

“It can possibly lead to people being inhibited to listen to certain things because they don’t want to look uncool. And that inhibits people from the freedom that should come with the Internet,” says Price.

“People always want to be cool and listen to the right music, but that’s stupid. The concept of guilty pleasures is ridiculous. It’s pathetic because music is a personal thing. But the Internet has made people scared of mob mentality picking on them,” says Robb

Eruptions of music

Sharing music on social media can also have positive outcomes. “It’s good when people are tweeting about music and recommend music because you get these eruptions of music happening that never really could have happened in musical culture otherwise. But that is how bands get big without playing the press game,” says Robb, who also believes the infinite access to music has broadened our taste in music.

“You can listen to 60 or 70 years of musical history on Spotify in your pocket on your headphones, which I think is great. Culture is fast forward now. It is too early to know what the Internet has done to us. In a 100 years we might see it and go ‘wooow’ that was insane what happened there,” says Robb.

The next ten years of musical history might just see a development in intelligent music players finding music for your taste. But will it be iRadio, Spotify, Pandora or Radical FM that will conquer the consumers and the music industry? Intelligent music players and means of discovering new music will surely continue to develop, offering free music to be consumed socially over the Internet.

 

 

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“All the world’s a stage
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– William Shakespeare, “As you like it”

Enjoy the show!

Wherever I go, whatever I see, I compare it to my home.

When the weather clears, when nature unfolds – Its blinding. Home to lights like you never seen. Warmth of the midnight sun, breathtaking Auroras, and moonlit mountains and fjords. The polar day lasts 12 months: The sun is up all night in the summer, and complete darkness in the winter.

Imagine the sun setting outside the island of Senja, the aurora borealis just starting to flicker, and a light drizzle of shooting stars.

Makes you feel like you just found serenity.

The internet is flooded with claims that Spirulina will improve every thing from heart health to your mood. Believers of all things seen as alternative will sing you the gospel on its virtues, but is there a darker side to that deeply green and bad tasting alleged miracle Algae? At the core of this question are a variety of nasty substances called Cyanotoxins. Cyanotoxins are created during certain seasonal Blue Green Algae blooms in both fresh and salt-water environments. Cyanotoxins are not just nasty, they have long been held to be some of the most toxic substances known to man. They have been observed as far back as 1878 when the journal “Nature” published an article detailing the rapid and terrible deaths of Australian wildlife that consumed contaminated water from Murry River estuaries.  Cyanotoxins are such a toxic group of substances that they have even gained prominence by the Indian Ministry of defense research and development division as being candidates for biological weapons programs.

Microcystins are among the most lethal of the many known and studied Cyanotoxins. They can cause rapid death via respiratory failure in directly lethal doses, massive liver damage and death in smaller doses and in low but regular doses they are linked to liver and colorectal cancer. There are many well-documented cases all over the world of the deaths of various mammals due to them entering the body. In 1996 a hemodialysis center in Brazil reported that during a three-day period, 101 out of their 124 patients suffered acute liver injury of which 50 died. The resulting investigation discovered that the deaths were a direct result of Microcystin contamination of dialysis water. Needless to say the potential of Blue Green Algae blooms in public drinking water to be contaminated with Microcystins has been a well establish pubic health risk for decades.

Fortunately, ingestion of Microcystins in either concentrated or low but regular forms is unlikely in nature for two reasons. Most mammals refrain from openly consuming and/or drinking obviously contaminated water and Blue Green Algae blooms are a seasonal events, therefor seasonal ingestion of highly diluted Microcystins are as stated, seasonal, giving the body sufficient time to recover from what is essentially a low level environmental stressor. There is however, a possible exception to this general state of nature and that is the industrial concentration and consumption of a Cyanobacterium we commonly refer to as Spirulina.

Upper Klamath Lake in the Northwest United States is one of the most abundant natural sources of Blue Green Algae in the world. Produce harvested is marketed and sold as health supplements such as Spirulina.  In 1996 it was found that Upper Klamath Lake in southern Oregon was experiencing what is a quite regular bloom of a toxic variation of Blue Green Algae named Microcystis Aeruginosa. Rightfully so, the Oregon Health Commission issued a general warning to the public about contact and consumption with the water. In light of the fact that many varieties of Blue Green Algae harvested from the lake were being consumed via supplementation the Oregon Health Commission and the Oregon Department of Agriculture established a regulatory limit of 1μg/g (one millionth of a gram) for Microcystins Aeruginosa contamination in Blue Green Algae products.

Subsequently, a study was commissioned testing a variety of products on the market. Of 87 products tested, 85 showed the contamination of Microcystins and of these, 67 (or 72%) showed concentrations above the 1μg/g regulatory limit with some showing results at 10 times that (10.42μg/g). Its worth taking into consideration that the regulatory limit was based on guidelines comparable to the ones for drinking water which was 1μg/L and based on a 2 liter water consumption per day. If one is to look at a random sample of the dosages recommended by Spirulna manufacturers world wide it can be up to 20g per day giving an exposer 20 times this regulatory limit. Even this is highly optimistic, as worse case contamination being 10.42μg/g would represent a 200-fold dose of the toxic contaminant in question if one were to follow some top end recommended dosages.

Of course this is only one example of “naturally” harvested groups of Blue Green Algae supplements. Not all Spirulina supplements are harvested in open environments that have seasonal Algae blooms across a variety of potentially toxic species. A large percentage of Spirulina consumed is produced under conditions that are “theoretically” controlled using purified water and specific cultures to attempt to create mono species environments and the above study shows that the presents of Microcystins in these cultured environments is in fact lower. The reality is however, that unless this is done under 100% laboratory conditions it is near impossible to guarantee. It is generally done in man-made open water environments with full exposer to potentially harmful contaminants in low cost locations such as China and India. What’s more is that Spirulina supplements in many cases around the world lay far outside the regulatory authority of the various government bodies that pharmaceuticals are so highly regulated by and in these cases the industry is left only to regulate its self.

Lets take a general example of an un-named Australian company that markets and sells a Blue Green Algae product under the generic name Spirulina. When questioned via email on the origins and quality practices they provided a loosely put together information sheet and a marketing pamphlet on their product. Reading between the lines it was evident that the product was not in fact manufactured by them and was produced by a variety of manufacturers globally. When pushed further on the quality testing in place they provided a “Certificate of Analysis” made by one of the producers them selves with a clear disclaimer stating, “The information contained herein is, to the best of our knowledge, correct. No guarantee of their accuracy is made and the product is sold without warranty, expressed or implied which extends beyond the description.”

Of even more particular concern is the fact that the “Certificate of Analysis” did not involve any testing regarding the threat of Cyanotoxin contamination. Further attempts were made to source information on the location of production and name of the manufacturer to no avail, with only statements refusing to provide the origins of the manufacture of the product.

The contamination of Blue Green Algae products presents a unique and overlooked way for Cyanotoxins to enter our bodies as opposed to the historically much more publicized risk of through contaminated drinking water. This is compounded by many complex reasons both legal and social. In many countries, supplements such as Spirulina lay outside the framework that pharmaceuticals are regulated by meaning that regulation is left largely to the industry themselves and consumer discretion. Therefor the industry can also be freer to advertise in ways more regulated pharmaceuticals are not. Putting aside the huge list of health benefits claimed and marketed as being the direct result of Spirulina consumption, lets look at the first line of the marketing pamphlet provided by the un-named Australian Spirulina Company, “Imagine a vegetable source with more iron than beef, and more protein than beef and soy (on a gram per gram basis).”

A quick calculation will tell you that to obtain as much protein from Spirulina as a standard T-bone steak will require the ingestion of 400 regular Spirulina tablets. This in turn equates to 200g or most likely your whole bottle. Looked at with an even more skeptical eye it can also represent 200 times the 1μg/g regulatory limit set for ingestion of Microcystins set by the Oregon Health Commission and the Oregon Department of Agriculture in the study mentioned earlier. This is classic Orwellian Double Speak aka, deliberately misleading marketing that slips through a legal loophole of many western nations.

Culturally consumers in many western nations have developed a want to embrace alternative eating habits. It’s obvious this is a growing market and companies happy to avoid regulatory overview are pushing to sell products that can be potentially extremely harmful. Those who are dissatisfied with the state of government recommended dietary guidelines and modern agricultural practices have been focusing too heavily on their dissatisfaction with the establishment to spot the developing problems right under their noses. These are just as sinister and in a somewhat ironic fashion, cloak themselves in alternative dogma.

There is no firm answer on the question of whether Spirulina is, or is not on the whole good or bad for you besides the recondition of the next fact. Whether provided by established drugs and pharmaceuticals firms under heavy regulation or alternative supplementation companies with little or no regulatory oversight, potentially dangerous substances such as Spirulina, need to be viewed with heavy skepticism by the consumer.

“After a surprise appearance by Edward Snowden at TED2014, Chris Anderson said: “If the NSA wants to respond, please do.” And yes, they did. Appearing by video, NSA deputy director Richard Ledgett answers Anderson’s questions about the balance between security and protecting privacy”. – TED TALKS

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