"Workflow" change ideas for Magnatune
I had an "ah ha" moment the other day, that the workflow at Magnatune needs to shift from the traditional albums-sales approach (i.e. Magnatune's way of moving you through music is still based on the paradigm of trying to get you to buy an album), to one that is based on "plenty" and "all you can eat".
And… the best model to copy in "this world of plenty" are the DVD-by-mail clubs, where you pay a set price per month and can get all the DVDs you can watch for that set price. Ie, netflix, lovefilm.co.uk, and whatever the equivalent in your country is. The main worry those sites face is that your queue is empty, and so you cancel your membership because you've got nothing to watch.
The workflow at these DVD sites looks something like this:
1) spend a few hours initially building up a "to watch queue"
2) receive first DVD, send it back
3) don't visit web site for a few months, as DVDs you want magically appear in your mailbox
4) revisit web site when queue gets low, go back to step 1
Ie, there is a very clear shift from "things I want to eventually watch" to "now watching" mode.
I think that this could be copied at Magnatune, specifically:
1) on your first visit to magnatune, read the magnapedia text ("magnapedia" is what I'm calling my wikipedia-like introduction to music, which is the subject for a future blog), then listen to samples of various genres, adding albums to listen to in the future, or if you like a genre ("renaissance", say), be able to say "add 5 renaissance albums that you would recommend to me, to my to-listen queue"
2) on 2nd and further visits to magnatune, go to listening queue, and work through the albums. Very little research, most of your time is spent listening.
3) as you listen, possibly notice "if you like this, you'll also like" suggestions to your "to listen queue"
4) keep listening to albums
5) rate albums and/or add to your own playlists as you go.
6) the long term Magnatune listening experience thus alternates between 3 states:
6a) adding to the to-listen queue,
6b) listening to the to-listen albums
6c) listening to your own favorites and your playlists.
6d) either cycle back to 6a or stay with 6c if you're happy enough already
Your thoughts?
-john
Posted by John Buckman on May 25, 2012 at 02:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Wow, Whoops, Whatever
I'm in Budapest today, to give the keynote speech at the annual Audio Engineering Society (AES) conference.
The speech is entitled "Wow, Whoops, Whatever" and is about my personal approach to designing and making things that succeed. The video stops at 20 minutes (which is about 2/3rds) because (sigh) my iPhone filled up. I'll post a complete copy of the video when I obtain it from the AES.
The slides are available here as a PDF, on slideshare.net, or you can see them here.
Posted by John Buckman on April 25, 2012 at 12:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
New design for home page
Two weeks ago, I blogged about the progress designing a new Magnatune home page, and how I wasn't entirely happy with the direction it was going. I asked people who were graphic designers to contact me if they wanted a shot at being Magnatune's next graphic designer.
I heard from several people, but the mockup from James at Messiah Studio (in New Zealand) really impressed me, as it pulled off a bunch of goals I had in mind.
What do you think?
Here's what I like about it:
- the integration of the hand-drawn character is nicely down
- the background is is interesting, textured, but not over-the-top
- the tabbed dialog of genres is attractive
- the main benefit we provide is clear, as is the price, and the small text below it (No DRM, etc…) is still readable while not being intrusive
- the "misc" things are below the fold, where they probably should be, as they're just not that important.
James emphasized that this was a 1st pass, quickly done. When we spoke, he made a bunch of suggestions for further improvement that I liked, so hopefully in a week or two I'll be that much closer to something I'm pleased to go with.
This all comes out of a blog entry a few months ago, where I showed our competitor's pages, and a mockup I (the amateur) made.
-john
Posted by John Buckman on April 25, 2012 at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)
New Magnatune Home Page Progress
I've been working with my current graphic designer to come up with a new Magnatune home page. I blogged about this a few months ago.
I like some of the things we've come up with, but I'm not falling in love with it.
So… I thought I'd blog about where we are i the process, and ask that if you are a graphics designer, you might want to put together a mockup of what you think could be done, with a chance that you could become Magnatune's new graphics designer.
Here is the current home page mockup I'm working with:
Here are some things I like about the new page:
1) we've change the "hot right now" top albums to be by-genre, rather than listing all genres together as we do on the current Magnatune home page.
2) this change allows us to make a lot more recommendations for the genre you ilk
3) the change also allows us to get rid of separately listing the genres, as we do on the current home page
4) "what we do" and "what we cost" is much clearer now
5) I like the headphone-wearing illustration
6) overall, it's less visually busy than the current magnatune home page
7) it's far more contemporary looking than the current Magnatune home page.
Some things I don't like about this mockup:
1) the color scheme -- it's quite 80s
2) the tabs don't look like tabs
3) the overall feel leaves me a bit "blah" -- not excited. I want to be excited about a new site redesign!
If you're a Magnatune fan, I'd love to hear what you think!
If you're a graphic designer, and think you can do better, please email me at john at magnatune.com. The resources you'll need can be downloaded here.
-john
Posted by John Buckman on April 14, 2012 at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Have I mentioned BookMooch?
BookMooch is a web site I run which helps people swap their used books with others.
It's been wildly successful: over 800,000 books are exchanged (mooched) each year (almost 4 million total), across 91 countries. The site is fully localized in 8 languages.
I just realized this week that except for the day of its launch (back in 2006), I have neglected to mention this other major site I run, to those of you who know Magnatune. These are the two facets to my life: music and books, and I really should cross-fertilize a bit more!
How BookMooch works
On BookMooch, once you finish reading a book, and you don't see any reason to store it perpetually on your bookshelf, you list it for giving. When someone wants it, you postal mail it to them. That earns you one book point, which you can use to get a book from anybody else on BookMooch. There is no money exchanged and no cost associated with the transaction (other than the postal costs).
There are no fees to use BookMooch: it is supported by voluntary donations and the occasional book-related ad (which you can choose to disable if they annoy you). I do all the technology work, and a network of volunteers do all the support.
The are other dimensions to it as well, such as:
You can read more about BookMooch at its Wikipedia Page or visit BookMooch yourself.
If you're a Magnatune fan and discover BookMooch through this blog entry, I'd love to hear from you in the comments below!
-john
Posted by John Buckman on March 23, 2012 at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Assembly TV interview with John Buckman and Peter Sunde
This is a relatively long, thoughtful interview session with me and my friend Peter Sunde, the rather infamous cofounder of the Pirate Bay. We were both in Helsinki, Finland, to speak together at the Assembly Conference there (a very cool demo scene conference).
I talk about the EFF and Magnatune, and Peter talks about The Pirate Bay and Flattr, though the discussion veers into lots of other topics.
or watch it on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CarZkX37fJ8
Posted by John Buckman on March 16, 2012 at 12:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Excellent Article about Libraries and Music
Excellent Article about Libraries and Music, you can read it here:
http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2012/02/media/qa-with-sarah-houghton/
from the "amazingly informed and therefore properly opinionated" Librarian in Black. God, I love bad-ass, rock & roll librarians!
I was very pleased with the last paragraph:
| What are some best-case-scenario solutions we in the field should be thinking about? You’ve mentioned Spotify and Rdio communitywide licenses. What about the Ann Arbor/Magnatune deal where the library pays the vendor a flat fee for unlimited patron access to over 900 albums I’d like to see libraries be able to purchase a certain number of streaming concurrent licenses so that users can log in to services like Spotify or Rdio with their library cards and access the premium offerings that way for free. [And it looks like Rdio is making moves in this direction.—Ed.] If the library hits its max, the user would be told what happened, and the library would be notified of turnaways on a weekly basis to evaluate whether to increase its concurrent licenses. We’d have to be careful about implementation, e.g., would users be encouraged to buy tracks, and, if so, how and is that OK with the library? I think that the Ann Arbor/Magnatune example is stellar, and I congratulate them on their work to create another model, one that recognizes the needs of both artists and consumers. |
Magnatune offers Libraries an extremely low cost flat fee approach to all our music (streaming and downloads), at just $0.10 per library cardholder, per year. More at: http://magnatune.com/info/libraries
I've blogged about this before:
http://blog.magnatune.com/2011/05/library-uses-magnatune-for-all-you-can-eat-music.html
Posted by John Buckman on February 29, 2012 at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Impressive Alt Magnatune Player
Mathias Panzenböck, a student at the technical university in Vienna, Austria, has been working an entirely Javascript-based Magnatune audio player. Mathias is already notorious for his "Browser Ponies" javascript hack (MUST BE SEEN TO BE BELIEVED!), which draws way-too-cute animated ponies all over your web browser.
I've been talking to Mathias for some weeks now, and I think his project is solid enough for me to show it to you, and for you to give it a try. It's pretty impressive, and very useful as an alternative way of finding and playing Magnatune's music.
You can try his Magnatune player at this URL:
http://tinyurl.com/magnatune-player
There is a "take a tour" link which shows you the various features, including a nicely done drag-and-drop playlist feature. I do recommend it.
If you're a member, be sure to click the "[ ] Member" box toward the top and give the player your name and password. You can then listen advertising-free.
There is a collapsing genre-browser on the left side of the page, which shows you artist info (and their albums) when you click on an artist, and then more info about the album when you click on an album. You can play albums directly, or add them to a playing queue.
Here are some screen pictures from Mathias' player:
Mathias' project is open source, based on SQLite, and is an impressive example of what you can do with Javascript these days. Note that some web browsers (such as the iPhone/iPad, and IE) still have some visual glitches). We're also unsure whether his server is up to the task of lots of Magnatune fans using his site at the same time, so this is a good beta test!
-john
Posted by John Buckman on January 30, 2012 at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)
All MP3 tags redone
As of today, all the MP3 files are tagged using the same 10 genres as Magnatune uses.
Previously, we tried our best to label music using the ID3 genre which seemed most appropriate.
However, we ran into problems all the time, as the available ID3 genres were defined years ago by Winamp, aren't the most consistent, and there are only 80 of them, with odd choices made.
For example, there are ID3 Genres for "Sound Clip", "Pranks", "Dream", "Bass" and "Trailer", but none for "Electro Rock" or "World", which are two main genres at Magnatune. To work around this in the past, we've identified our World music albums using the ID3 tag "Ethnic", but that doesn't seem all that great a compromise.
Sometimes, where the ID3 tags seemed more nuanced than our "main ten genres" we would assign that genre to the mp3, so some MP3s from us might be labelled "Classic Rock" or "Death Metal". However, when this was all loaded into iTunes or an iPod, there were too many genres too look at, and they were too inconsistently applied.
So... as of now all the MP3 files at Magnatune are assigned the same top level genre that you'll find them in at Magnatune. On my iPod, this makes for a much cleaner organization of our music, and I hope you'll agree.
Thankfully, 8 of our main genres can be found (albeit with slightly different spelling) in the ID3 Genre list, and these are:
32 classical
10 new age
52 electronic
26 ambient
8 jazz
7 hip-hop
40 alternative rock
79 hard rock
two of our main genres (World and Electro Rock) aren't available in the ID3 genre list, and so are assigned custom "other" tags, using the ID3v2 standard. That should work fine with iTunes, Winamp, and any modern mp3 player.
However, some mp3 players that only support older style id3 tags might see "Pop" instead of "Eletro Rock" and "Ethnic" instead of "World".
-john
In case you're curious, below is a table of the 80 genres built into the MP3 id3 genre standard. Extensions are possible by using an "other" genre, which works with newer mp3 players (iTunes/Winamp) that support that, which is what we've used for World and Electro Rock.
The standard 80 genres that are part of the ID3v1 standard:
| 0 | 'Blues' | 20 | 'Alternative' | 40 | 'AlternRock' | 60 | 'Top 40' |
| 1 | 'Classic Rock' | 21 | 'Ska' | 41 | 'Bass' | 61 | 'Christian Rap' |
| 2 | 'Country' | 22 | 'Death Metal' | 42 | 'Soul' | 62 | 'Pop/Funk' |
| 3 | 'Dance' | 23 | 'Pranks' | 43 | 'Punk' | 63 | 'Jungle' |
| 4 | 'Disco' | 24 | 'Soundtrack' | 44 | 'Space' | 64 | 'Native American' |
| 5 | 'Funk' | 25 | 'Euro-Techno' | 45 | 'Meditative' | 65 | 'Cabaret' |
| 6 | 'Grunge' | 26 | 'Ambient' | 46 | 'Instrumental Pop' | 66 | 'New Wave' |
| 7 | 'Hip-Hop' | 27 | 'Trip-Hop' | 47 | 'Instrumental Rock' | 67 | 'Psychadelic' |
| 8 | 'Jazz' | 28 | 'Vocal' | 48 | 'Ethnic' | 68 | 'Rave' |
| 9 | 'Metal' | 29 | 'Jazz+Funk' | 49 | 'Gothic' | 69 | 'Showtunes' |
| 10 | 'New Age' | 30 | 'Fusion' | 50 | 'Darkwave' | 70 | 'Trailer' |
| 11 | 'Oldies' | 31 | 'Trance' | 51 | 'Techno-Industrial' | 71 | 'Lo-Fi' |
| 12 | 'Other' | 32 | 'Classical' | 52 | 'Electronic' | 72 | 'Tribal' |
| 13 | 'Pop' | 33 | 'Instrumental' | 53 | 'Pop-Folk' | 73 | 'Acid Punk' |
| 14 | 'R&B' | 34 | 'Acid' | 54 | 'Eurodance' | 74 | 'Acid Jazz' |
| 15 | 'Rap' | 35 | 'House' | 55 | 'Dream' | 75 | 'Polka' |
| 16 | 'Reggae' | 36 | 'Game' | 56 | 'Southern Rock' | 76 | 'Retro' |
| 17 | 'Rock' | 37 | 'Sound Clip' | 57 | 'Comedy' | 77 | 'Musical' |
| 18 | 'Techno' | 38 | 'Gospel' | 58 | 'Cult' | 78 | 'Rock & Roll' |
| 19 | 'Industrial' | 39 | 'Noise' | 59 | 'Gangsta' | 79 | 'Hard Rock' |
Posted by John Buckman on January 26, 2012 at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
New iPhone app version
Version 1.61 of the Magnatune iPhone/iPad app is now available.
You can download it here:
http://magnatune.com/iphone/
The main reason for this update is that paid members who couldn't get the advertising-free mode to work, will now be able to make it work. Also, there was a problem with ios5 devices not being able to download the latest new releases lists.
The first problem was that previously, following Apple's guidelines, we asked for your member name and password in a "settings" page, as part of the general iPhone/iPad settings. The trouble is, Apple doesn't let you do anything from that page, other than save the settings, so if you didn't type your username/password exactly right, you weren't told so, and the advertising.
As of this version, we now have a "settings" tab where you can enter your membership info:
after you click the "login" button it changes to "logged in" if everything worked fine. This "login process" will happen automatically every time you run the app from that point on.
Note that I have heard of a few cases where a valid Magnatune member still can't get their iPhone login to work. If you have this problem, please drop us a note, and we'll "twiddle" your account to fix that.
There was also a problem with the previous iPhone app, with getting an updated list of albums (ie "new releases") under ios5. This is now fixed.
You can force the app to get the latest songs from this page:
Posted by John Buckman on January 7, 2012 at 05:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
