Scoring with Zune Part2 - Finding Music.

As promised, here's part two of the seven part series – "Can a Junkie Score with Zune." where I'll see if Zune, and Zune alone, can help me satisfy my music habit. As I broke it down in the first post, for me, listening to music is just about a full time obsession and I go through a lot of effort to satisfy that need. The most time consuming part of my habit is finding *good* music not necessarily *new* music.

I rely on a number of sources to help me discover what next to listen to. Most of it I consider editorial. This is information in the form of reviews (whether professional or user created), recommendations, community pages and favorites. Some of the sources I use as analytical engines where I pick a starting point and the recommendation engine guide me through the selections. The rest comes from shows, performances and the industry. Here's a breakdown of each of those functions and how Zune helps or doesn't.

Editorial and Community Features –

The editorial and community sources I use range from mainstream social networking sites and periodicals to niche websites and blogs. The best method is to find other people who share a common interest in a band/artist and discover what they are listening to. I use a combination of sites for this but I almost always go to MySpace during a search regardless of where I start and end.

MySpace is by far the best source for community based discovery. It has an advantage in this regard for a few reasons. First, every profile lists a favorite music section and almost everyone completes it. Second, it's very easy to browse and search everyone's profile. Third, the users on MySpace are typically younger and/or more connected with a scene involving music. Fourth, MySpace itself is now the predominant method for new artists to make announcements.

It's such a powerful recommendation engine that I am surprised that no one has struck a deal with them. Microsoft is the only one that's even trying to replicate that capability. I have to commend the team for this. I think people missed the point with the whole "join the social" concept. Or rather we played up and released the wrong aspect of it when we launched. The power of the social concept isn't about beaming songs to people who don't have a Zune(which is always the joke) rather it's connecting with people who have similar taste. That's why the best new feature in Zune is the Zune Social Network.

It is actually very helpful for discovering new music. What's cool is that is keeps a running total of what you are actually playing and displays that along with your favorites to the community. If you elect to make your play history public everyone can see exactly what you are listening to and it's very similar to Last.FM in that regard. The concept might scare some people, and it would be nice to be able to edit out those embarrassing songs, but there are a fair amount of people who want to share (show off?) and will embrace this. However, until there are more people on the site and there are better searching tools it's still not going to replace MySpace (or Last.FM) for me.

As for other editorial sources, I frequently skim through the major music mags – Rolling Stone, Spin, Billboard, etc. but I don't ever rely on them for a major find. By the time something makes it into one of these you probably already know about it. However, it's great for knowing how your favorites are fairing, if they've made it into the mainstream or not, so I do look at the charts and note the headlines and look for major tour dates.

This is another opportunity missed in my opinion. Why do none of the services integrate editorial content into their products? Why not have syndication deals in place so that when I download an album or song I can also get articles, pictures, TOUR DATES!?, latest news, etc. Zune and the other major services have bio sections but that's it. So looks like I'll still need to go to Blender, Brooklyn Vegan and others for that type of stuff.

Podcasts and blogs are increasingly more important as part of my discovery. It is amazing to me (and just about everyone else) that the rev one Zune's didn't support podcasting. This is the biggest reason I've stuck with i-Tunes and i-Pod . I am so happy that with the latest upgrade even my soviet-era styled rev one Zune supports downloading podcasts. Too bad the catalog still lacks any good sources for new music , but that's a minor issue considering I can just add my own at will like I did with NoisePop.

Analytical Features–

What I call "analysis" most would call "listening to the radio." The great thing about internet radio is that you can "tune" into sub genres so specific that it's essentially only a handful of artists. When I want to go on cruise control I'll listen to a couple different radio sites. AOL, I-Tunes, Yahoo and such are all good for main stream listening. Shoutcast, via either i-Tunes or WinAmp offers the most variety. Given the fact that the Zune is one of the few devices that has an actual radio receiver built into it, it's a bit odd that it has no support for any Internet radio stations.

There is a second class of radio stations that are more like analytical engines. Pandora and Last.fm (some may consider last.fm more a social toll but…) are probably the best known but Pandora, I think, does the best job. The magic comes from an amazing effort called the Music Genome project. The project is an incredibly manually intensive endeavor where music experts actually break down each song along a number of dimensions giving each song a type of signature (Genome). If you tell it you like a certain type of artist, it averages those signatures and finds other artists with similar averages.

I use regular radio stations and Pandora together. First I go on cruise control and pick a genre. While I'm listening if something catches my ear I switch over to Pandora and plug in that band. I then listen for more songs by that artist and others that are similar. If I'm still interested I'll switch over to Rhapsody (for reasons you'll understand later) and check out a few of their albums. If it's all good, I then switch to Zune and download a few songs.

It's a lot of work. If Zune had the ability to play internet radio and used Pandora's engine (like we do with MSN) I wouldn't have to go through all this trouble. (as long as I had a Zune pass, which we'll also talk about in the next post).

Touring and Industry Info -

The last major source of discovery for me is by way of live performances and industry sites. Unless you live in a major city and are connected with a scene it's really hard to suss out good music this way. The chances of stumbling into your next band crush at a bar are pretty slim. However, it still happens, and opening acts are highly likely to be interesting to you. Just knowing which artists are opening for who can help you find new music. Ever hear of the band Annuals? Sound interesting? If you knew that they opened for Band of Horses would that seem more interesting? My guess is that if you are a Band of Horses fan it would.

Tour dates and information are scattered all over the Internet. I usually go to the MySpace pages of the band because they seem the most accurate. I also subscribe to Ticketmaster alerts and a few venue email lists. Given the shift in focus from record sales to touring and merchandising I'm surprised that the record industry hasn't done a better job allowing integration of this information into any of the major services. If I'm listening to American Steel I should know, as part of the track info, where and when they are playing next. Zune, nor any other service does this.

Speaking of the industry, one of the best, and overlooked sources for new music are the labels themselves. Outside of MySpace some of the best info I get is by going directly to sites like lookoutrecords.com, downtownrecordings.com or emirecords.co.uk and such. The labels have done such a poor job of developing and/or maintaining brand affinity that these names have no meaning to the consumer. Some hold value, mostly in the hip-hop space – Jive, Def Jam, etc perhaps Sub Pop and Epitaph in the alt/indie/punk rock space, but most mean absolutely nothing to people. For instance, did you know who Lookout Records or Downtown Recordings where? How about Green Day and Gnarls Barkley? who are on each on those labels respectively.

The fact is that most of these sub-labels are owned by one of the big four(Warner, EMI, Universal, Sony-BMG) anyway. It's like Gap Inc owning Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy. The labels divide up their inventory into groups of similar products and market those groups toward specific consumers (or so the process should go). In this way labels act as the uber expert in that they are not only recommending but they are bundling the products into one mass marketable product.

This is rarely good for music lovers because of this mass market "problem" but if you are looking to tap into a vein of a certain type of music than the labels do provide a great discovery mechanism for this. Back in the day Rhapsody had sections dedicated to the labels. I'm not sure which version this dropped out of but I think that was a mistake. Zune of course does not have any label sections or groupings, I'm not even sure if you can search by label. If the music labels would like to be relevant to the average consumer this would be a good way to develop some brand awareness. It would be great to see the Zune Marketplace have more label information and groupings.

Conclusion –

Bottom-line is that none of the pay download services do a good job of helping you find the music you want. Discovering what other people are listening to is a big part of this and Zune goes further than the others in making this happen. However, although it's moving in the right direction, the capabilities are limited today. Quite frankly, they all are, so I'm going to have to keep my list of tools longer than I wanted to. But I also have to look at it this way- if it was that easy, it probably wouldn't be as interesting to me. Knowing that I took the extra time to find something that others overlooked is part of the attraction I suppose.

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