Big news in Dan Kantor-land. I’ve started a new job - at AOL! My official title is “Sr. Web Technologist” which loosely translates into front-end web developer. It was a tough decision to leave working on Streampad full-time, but one I had to make. When I left Yahoo in May of 2006, I gave myself a year to try and get Streampad going. While Streampad has been a success in many ways, it has not been one commercially. I got sick of pizza and street meat (NYC’s version of Ramen noodles) and decided it was time to make a salary. It also helped that I just got married (yes to Isabel!)

Where does this leave Streampad? I am still going to work on it in my off hours. There are still a lot of you out there that enjoy listening to your own music at work every day. And a lot of bloggers that use the widget to stream music to their audiences. I am not going to ditch you guys. In fact, I have been working on a huge re-design which I believe will make the experience a lot better.

This past year have been a huge lesson for me in what it takes to run a (small) company. I have learned so much. I have met so many amazing people who truly care about helping others and fostering innovation. I look forward to continuing to work with all of you in our combined goal to make life easier and more entertaining through the web.

At this point, my hope is to turn this blog more personal. It is something I have wanted to do for a while. So stay subscribed! You’ll be the first to hear about a cool AIM mashup I am working on!

Best,

Dan

It’s no secret that the Streampad Desktop has been difficult to set up. In addition to requiring an advanced networking degree, you also needed to make sure the Java on your computer was in a good mood.

Well, that’s no longer the case!

I’d like to announce the Alpha release of the new Desktop, done in Adobe Apollo. In addition to being easy to install, this Desktop does not require you to open ports on your router or disable any software firewalls. It just works.

The current release requires you to have iTunes. Future releases will scan folders for music but for now this one piggybacks off your iTunes library.

Another major feature is that it is now multi-user. Many people have requested that they be allowed to add their wives, husbands and/or kids to the Desktop so they can all access the household music remotely. You can also run a Desktop from multiple computers in your house and access them all at the same time on the site.

If you would like to get your hands on the new Desktop, email me (dan at streampad.com) and I’ll send you instructions on how to set it up.  Happy listening!

Well that didn’t last very long. Apparently Warner Music did not realize what AnywhereCD was doing and pulled their catalog within hours of launch. You can no longer buy MP3 albums for $12. You can still buy CDs for $15 and you possibly get the MP3s, although I am not sure how that works.

Warner Music is probably the most DRM-happy label of the bunch. But seriously, this is just plain stupid. At $15 for a CD (plus $2 shipping), I will not buy from AnywhereCD. The MP3 album was revolutionary and just the spark needed to sell music to people like me; people who will not purchase DRM music. I much rather buy a used CD for $6 and rip it myself then pay $17 for the ease of AnywhereCD. Damn! Just when I thought things were getting better…

Michael Robertson is at it again. For those who don’t know him by name, Michael is the guy that founded mp3.com, sold it for a lot of money and subsequently started a few great companies since. His latest venture in music is MP3Tunes. If you haven’t checked out MP3Tunes, you should. It’s an online locker where you can store an unlimited amount of mp3 files for free. They have an easy to use API which powers the locker inside of Streampad. I currently have 10 gigs of music in there which play perfectly in Streampad.

Michael just announced his newest venture - AnywhereCD. AnywhereCD is an online store that sells MP3 Albums. You cannot buy singles. But these are albums from very well known artists - The Shins, Death Cab, Chili Peppers, etc. I guess he got some studios to agree to sell in mp3 format by only offering albums. Most of them cost $12.

I just bought 9 from Damien Rice. After my purchase, I received an email telling me my album was available inside a locker. Yes, AnywhereCD automatically put my purchased album inside my MP3Tunes locker! Incredible. I refreshed my locker inside of Streampad and it was just there! This was by far the EASIEST PURCHASE I HAVE EVER MADE. No downloading. No ripping. No tagging. A few clicks and I was listening.

2007 is definitely shaping up to be the year that DRM falls.

UPDATE - it looks like it was too good to be true.

Last year for my birthday, Isabel took me to see Handsome Boy Modeling School at Irving Plaza. They were great, and so was the opener - K-OS. He reminded me of The Roots - rapping over live instruments. I remember some covers as well as some original stuff. I left the show wanting to check him out, but forgot to.

A few days ago, I came across “Sunday Morning”. The beat immediately stuck in my head and after listening to it a bunch of times, I knew it was going on this blog. You can buy his albums from his website (linked above). He even streams a full-length version of this song. And he is also on EMI, so in a short time we can (hopefully) link to an MP3 download!

Play this song in Streampad - http://www.streampad.com/#playsong:w1099800

Subscribe to Streampad blog as a podcast - http://www.streampad.com/rss/weblists/158

For a while now you could get a direct link to any song or playlist inside of Streampad. This meant that you could send a link to someone which when clicked on would open up Streampad directly to a song or playlist.

I’ve started adding direct links into every section. Most of the sections are done, although there is still a lot more to do as I drill deeper into the app. Here is a direct link to my profile - http://www.streampad.com/#profile:dan

The nice thing here is that you can copy the link directly from your broswer’s address bar. In the past, you needed to grab it from some text on the page somewhere
Building an AJAX app is very different from building a traditional web app. I realize the somewhat ridiculous nature of this post. LINKS TO PAGES?? HOW ORIGINAL! But the truth is that it is not very easy to do for an AJAX app. You have to map strings (URLs) to states inside an application. But it is absolutely critical to do this. People send links to each all the time. Links are the currency of the web.

EMI has just announced that their entire catalog will be made available DRM free. This is huge news and something many of us have been waiting 8 years for! Here is the press release. Some of the take-away points:

• The catalog will be available to all retailers
• Retailers can choose to sell in AAC, WMA or MP3
• Steve Jobs quote - “We expect to offer more than half of the songs on iTunes in DRM-free versions by the end of this year”.
• Songs cost 30% more (on iTunes) but are double the bit-rate (256 kbps)
• Albums still cost the same?? (still need to confirm this)

If you are reading this blog, you most likely already understand the importance of this announcement. Many people do not buy digital music because it has DRM wrapped around it. Their only choice is to download illegal DRM-free music. Up until now, the labels have tried to fight this by offering an inferior product that cost a lot more than free. Now, they can at least compete straight up from a product standpoint, although I believe they will have to offer a little more value to offset the price difference. Either way, this is a huge first step and one that I hope most labels will follow.

Ethan Bauman has recently started a new blog called Getcha Info! which has quickly become a great resource for emerging music tech and interviews. I recently met Ethan in NYC where we chatted about the new music tech scene over some ridiculously huge sandwiches at Carnegie Deli. Ethan was at Microsoft for a few years working on MSN Music and before that was at a startup doing similar things to Pandora, before they were acquired by MS.

Ethan interviewed me about Streampad and the music tech scene and has posted it on his blog. In addition to my interview, he has interviews with Anthony from The Hype Machine and Luke from YottaMusic. I recommend subscribing to his blog if you are interested in hearing the thoughts of the creators of new innovative music services. Ethan is pretty plugged into this scene and certainly will have a ton of great stuff coming.

As you may have heard, the new copyright rates for internet radio were just announced and they are ridiculously high. So high in fact, that most webcasters will not be able to stay in business. That means you can say goodbye to last.fm, pandora, and pretty much every other radio site besides AOL and Yahoo. I won’t even begin to rant about how stupid the RIAA is, b/c it is so obvious.

Anyway, a site called Save The Streams has started a petition to, well, save the streams. It already has 10,000 signers. If you care at all about Internet radio, please sign this and pass the word around. Even though this does not effect Streampad, it still effects some awesome web services out there and seeing them go away would be detrimental to the overall new music space.
Here is an excerpt from the site - On Friday March 2nd, the U.S. government (specifically, the Copyright Royalty Board, or “CRB”) announced its determination of the royalty rates Internet radio webcasters must pay the owners of sound recording copyrights to license the music they play for the years 2006-2010. The owners of these sound recording copyrights are, in the vast majority of cases, recording companies (”labels”).

While successful webcasters which have built loyal audiences can usually cover most of their costs from their revenue (and sometimes even make a little profit), these new rates will almost certainly destroy the Internet radio industry, as they amount to well over 100% of even the most-successful webcasters’ online radio revenues. In other words, these fees are grotesquely disproportionate to any other expense a webcaster would normally face, and certain to bankrupt him or her.

I am slowly re-doing the site, section by section, figuring out how to rely less on mySQL and more on S3.

Last week I tackled the “Now Playing” section. The old way relied on sending the song ID to mySQL and returning all the data such as: artist, album, album review, album art, embed code, etc. The new way relies on the data being present already (in a cached text file from S3) and making calls directly to Amazon for the album art and review.

I just finished up the concert section. The old way requested the artists and shows from mySQL. When you clicked on an artist or show, it requested the songs from mySQL. It did cache this info in Flash, but still had to make a new request each time you clicked on something new. The new way caches all the concert info as a text file on S3, then requests that text file the first time you click on the concert section (using javascript createElement(’script’)). It is a 30KB text file. It then uses javascript to parse the data as you click around. The result is that browsing and playing concerts does not touch mySQL (or my data center) at all!

As I fully train my mind to think about S3 instead of mySQL, I find that it is a radically different way to build a webapp. I think Streampad benefits from being a single page that can utilize javascript and Flash to intelligently direct requests directly to S3. I believe I am headed toward an architecture where almost every request goes directly to data not hosted by me. The huge advantage of this is that I allow Amazon and others to do the scaling for me. S3 is definitely a game-changer. As more developers realize this, everyone will benefit as great webapps will no longer suffer from scaling issues.

UPDATE - changed the title from “Site Slowness Continued” as I just realized this sounds like the site is still slow. Oops!