I love music and computers. Because of that, a lot of luck and a great team, a pretty sweet music store called Amie Street exists.
I love music and computers. Because of that, a lot of luck and a great team, a pretty sweet music store called Amie Street exists.
Reading the post on wired.com yesterday got me thinking again about playdar. If you haven’t heard about it yet that’s ok. But, you’ll probably be hearing about it a lot soon because it really is one of those really big ideas (like toilet paper and soda) that can change things considerably.
From a user prospective, think of it as Spotify (think of a song, find it, listen to it, engage with it more if you want) with an unlimited catalog. From a dev perspective, think of it like Songbird (a sweet ass API you can pretty much do anything you want with). From a business perspective of someone running a music service (ahem) you can worry about doing something cool rather than dealing with paying for bits (storing/serving) and licensing. You worry about the presentation and UX, playdar takes care of the rest. Did I mention it has a sexy, powerful API you can do whatever you want with? Pretty neat eh?
One of the features which breaks down in practice however, is the idea of an unlimited catalog. As a lot of folks have suggested, sure you could write a simple resolver plugin for a subscription service (ie Rhapsody, emusic, etc) which includes an auth mechanism to make sure you’re an active subscriber. But this is really suboptimal because music is supposed to be social, consumable by any device, and location/medium agnostic. To accomplish that, you really need a download to your local network.
Playdar breaks down on the edges. That is, you and every single one of your friends has a copy of Aha Shake Heartbreak or The Richest Man in Babylon. But what do you do for rarities and really new stuff? That’s when you need a way to fill in the gaps. Say you stumble across Day Old Belgian Blues by KoL. It would be pretty simple for Amie Street to show you the option to buy the album download. After you go through Amazon payments to use your credit card, it kicks off a download to your local machine. But, you say I want to listen to it right now and I want to do it with one click. That’s fine. You could easily have the Amie Street Resolver (below) have it serve it up to you while you wait for the full download and you could take advantage of stored credit balance/stored credit card info to purchase in one click. Best of all, by downloading, you fill the gap in your network for that album AND you can have it on your iPod in a snap.
I’m not suggesting that a resolver plugin for a subscription streaming service and getting a download are mutually exclusive, just that subscription streaming is suboptimal to a download. If you already pay 20 bucks a month for Rhapsody you SHOULD be able to do that if you want. In fact both solutions side by side would be great (consider it an upgrade to pay for the download in exchange for having it fill the hole in your local network AND you can get it on any device). I use Amie Street in my example just because I know we already have the capabilities to do this. Another big step (for playdar and music services in general) would be a universal “where can I buy this and where is it cheapest” resolver, but that’s for another day. Playdar can really change things, but the challenge is on us music/tech people to recognize what’s going on, support the project, and start integrating it. Or, you know, we can just keep maintaining this really, really broken system which we all hate.
Here is plugin script to handle playback on Amie Street through playdar and a simple resolver for Amie Street from about 5 months ago that I wrote that gives you a basic overview of how to hook in. For more info, check out the playdar site.
Playdar Greasemonkey Script for Amie Street (note: CSS selectors probably need updated)
