I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
I felt to compelled to share my thoughts on Beats Music since it launched this week and invitation emails are being/have been sent out.
I've spent the past week setting up my profile/account and building playlists and these are my first impressions.
I'll start by talking about what I enjoy about the service.
The quality of the music and metadata is good, I am unsure of the specific bit-rate but MOG was 320/256 kbps.
The catalog is comparable to Spotify and Rdio from my perspective - this might not be the case for others since the breadth of content I've been consuming isn't touching electronic music. The only noticeable holes I have noticed in their catalog is hip hop mixtapes.
The iPhone app is very well done. The interface is clean and the functionality is clear and it seems stable, as it has yet to crash. Good use of lean-back experiences, lots of pre-seeded playlists - with a good emphasis on situational listening, which lends itself to discovery.
What I don't like.
The website is secondary to the mobile application. The functionality isn't 1:1 - even basic features like the ability to edit your user photo.
You cannot start a new playlist, or edit an existing playlist on the web - you can only add a song to a previously existing playlist. Even adding something to a playlist isn't without it's shortcomings, as the songs don't always appear on the playlist once you've added one from the web.
The interface for adding an item to a playlist is vague, and I found myself accidentally adding entire albums at first, which is problematic because you cannot remove tracks from a playlist on the web, only through the app. You are also unable to upload a cover for a playlist or edit the title, description or song order via the web.
Finding friends is very difficult - there no address book or 3rd party social search. Even once you are able to find another user you know, there is little value in the act of following another user since there doesn't appear to be an activity stream.
Speaking of activity stream, there also doesn't appear to be a Facebook content bridge (i.e. Frictionless sharing to the activity stream on Facebook... like Spotify, Rdio, and Myspace all have on Facebook) - which means the one and only social feature of Beats Music is the ability to follow another user, and adding another user's playlists to your library.
So it seems to me that Beats Music is lacking is 2 major places.
1. Social functionality - which is find if you like to stream music in isolation, as many people do.
2. Overall web experience - though it's a fact that traditional internet usage is down, the service feels abbreviated on the web, and that's frustrating for playlisters and other people who want more of a lean-forward music discovery, curation, and consumption experience.
Even though there doesn't seem to be a rhyme for the reason... You can follow me on Beats Music, my username is Seanmichael
For the sixth straight year, more vinyl albums were sold than in any other year since SoundScan launched in 1991. In 2013, 6.1 million vinyl LPs were sold -- up 33% compared to 2012's haul of 4.55 million. 64% of all vinyl albums sold in 2012 were purchased at an independent music store (3% less than compared to indie stores' share in 2012). Notably -- and not surprisingly -- 75% of all vinyl albums sold in 2013 were rock albums.
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