There’s a subtle but important distinction between what 8tracks offers as compared with what Last.fm or Pandora provide.

I enjoy both Last.fm and Pandora and have written about them in the past.  Both deliver a radio-style experience that is personalized based on one’s preferences, as captured explicitly (I enter the name of an artist) or tacitly (AudioScrobbler tracks what I listen to on iTunes).  Last.fm applies collaborative filtering to create a personalized playlist, while Pandora uses the results of the Music Genome project to do so.  This is a great way to discover new music.

8tracks also provides a passive, radio-style experience.  But the programming is done by people who love and know music, not algorithms.  In many cases, the resulting playlist contains music that is “similar” but extends beyond the sound itself to contemplate social context, era, a theme or other factors.  In addition, the human element lends the opportunity for eclecticism and serendipity that may be absent from an purely algorithmic approach.

As I mention in our About section, our basis for taking this approach is rooted in compelling shared programming of times past:  think radio in the 1970s, mixtapes in the 1980s, and DJ culture in the 1990s through today.  Everyone knows a few people who know great music — the friends that introduce you to new (or old) music, that make compilation CDs, or that are “real” DJs and play out somewhere.  Our goal is to give these people an simple way to reach a larger audience.

Which leads to another critical point:  8tracks is not about “personal listening” in the sense of a user goes to 8tracks.com and makes a playlist and then turns around and listens to it himself or herself.  That is not the objective of the service.  Rather, we seek to provide a useful, legitimate platform so that those relatively rare people with the knowledge and time to make great playlists can do so for others who love music and want to discover new artists, but who simply don’t have the time to do so themselves.

That’s what we’re about:  to help the majority of our users save time and kick back, while giving the music mavens (to use a Gladwell-ism) a simple solution to exercise their craft online.

Compete.com launched its own ranking of top music sites, probably saving me a lot of work going forward. Helpfully, the new rankings also include the music subdomains on Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, and MSN. They’re still missing a few of the smaller sites, but I reckon they’ll add the others in due course.

Upshot is that imeem now tops Yahoo, and Eliot Van Buskirk has a nice rundown on some of the reasons for the shift away from Yahoo. Here’s the ranking:

Based on the definition of total attention in my last post, I thought it’d be interesting to rank the top 10 music sites. To do so, I multiplied “visits” by “pages/visit” (both per compete.com). Assuming these numbers are accurate, the product is the total page views served up in a month and should give a sense of both the total amount of consumer attention commanded by a site and the visual ad “avails” on that site.

Here’s the rankings that result, and to provide a sense of relative magnitude, I’ve pegged Live365’s pages at 1.00:

1. imeem (550m pages / 12x size of Live365)
2. Project Playlist (378m / 8x)
3. Live365 (47m / 1.00)
4. Pandora (46m / 0.98 )
5. Napster (30m / 0.65)
6. Rhapsody (23m / 0.50)
7. Last.fm (18m / 0.39)
8. iLike (17m / 0.37)
9. Jango (11m / 0.23)
10. Qloud (6m / 0.13)

I’m still a bit surprised by this, as I’d have imagined the social networking plays in this group (Last.fm, iLike, Jango) would generate relatively more page views than the radio-focused plays (Live365, Pandora).

Note that the on-demand and primarily subscription-based services (Napster and Rhapsody, which now have an ad-based, or at least free, web offering) fall smack in the middle on this measure. As with a ranking by unique visitors, imeem and Project Playlist still come out on top, by a wide margin.

I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on these rankings, and I’m happy to send anyone who’s interested the spreadsheet I used to calculate these rankings.

I wrote on Wed about the notion of “total attention” as a useful metric by which to evaluate music or other websites — but didn’t explain my thinking or actually run the numbers.

As so many have written over the last decade, a large and growing proportion of GDP comprises products and services that are (or can be) rendered in bits. As it becomes ever cheaper to create, copy and distribute bits, scarce resources in production (broadly defined) are increasingly giving way to scarce resources in consumption – i.e. consumer attention. As an aside, this is why I’ve long believed (and Chris Anderson eloquently wrote a few years back) that the most significant driver of value for digital products is really just “matchmaking” or filtering or discovery. That is, helping people find those bits of greatest interest from the digital haystack, so to speak.

In any event, if consumer attention is the most precious resource in the digital value chain, then its proper measurement is critical. Further, I’d argue that the more attention a web offering can command, the greater the opportunity for monetization, all else equal. If a person visits more pages on a website, listens to more minutes of a webcast, or uses another web-based service more frequently, there are more opportunities to place promotional or branding messages, whether priced on a CPM, CPC, CPA or other basis.

Likewise, a user’s choice to spend more of his “disposable” hours in the day on a website/cast/service also suggests that he ascribes greater value to it, and — again, all else equal — there is a greater likelihood he may be willing to pay directly for some aspect of that product, whether priced on an a la carte (commerce) or ongoing (subscription) basis.

To measure the total attention that a web offering commands, 3 factors must be considered:

• unique visitors
• frequency of visits (e.g. avg visits/unique)
• average “stay” per visit

While average stay per visit (e.g. minutes on site) would seem a logical measure to assess the magnitude of a visitor’s activity on site — since it tracks the total minutes of attention granted — another, perhaps more practical measure is page views per visit. Page views per visit is useful b/c it (1) generally corresponds to new ad placement opportunities (with each page refresh), and (2) ensures that a user is “active” on the site and does not simply have the browser open in the background while, say, writing an email.

So then total attention can be defined in 2 ways:

• unique visitors x visits/unique x minutes/visit = total minutes of attention
• unique visitors x visits/unique x pages/visit = total pages of attention

I used compete.com to rank the top 10 music sites on the latter basis (the former really won’t make sense until online audio ads move beyond a nascent stage). As this post has gotten a bit overlong, I’ll include these rankings in a new post.

I haven’t updated the music 2.0 rankings for quite a while. There’s some very cool (albeit legally questionable) new players on the horizon (Muxtape and Mixwit), and several existing sites have demonstrated serious growth (like Qloud, just acquired by Buzznet, and Jango, which seems to have come out of nowhere).

This time round, I’ve dropped the two-point-oh designation and picked up old-schoolers Rhapsody and Napster, increasingly useful now that many services are offering legal on-demand access (e.g. Last.fm now does on-demand in addition to radio, imeem now is licensed to offer on-demand access). I wanted to include the music offerings from Yahoo, AOL and MSN but can’t seem to get subdomain data.

I’m probably still missing some sites that ought to be on here. I know that MySpace and Buzznet (and, to a lesser extent, the other big social networks, most of which have some sort of music component) could arguably be included too. I’ve kept imeem because music is such a big component to their service; MySpace is the tacit #1 service.

Lastly, I’m not sure what’s up with the retroactive change to imeem’s numbers but it’s now showing a huge increase in prior months over what had previously been reported.

Just a quick note:  from the graphs below — see my post from Dec 14th on the top 20 music 2.0 sites, including graphs that automatically update thanks to compete.com — it looks like imeem has begun its upward trajectory again and, coupled with another decline at PP, is now in the #1 position.

Other big trajectories:  MOG is now approaching the size of Live365, Qloud has jumped significantly (now at nearly  225k uniques/month), and SoundFlavor (which features a PP or Seeqpod-like streaming MP3 search engine) has seen two solid months.

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of Last.fm — it’ll be 2 years ago tomorrow since I first posted about it, and if I weren’t focussed on my own venture, there’s no place I’d rather be working. So yesterday’s announcement is definitely interesting: users of Last.fm can stream any track up to 3 times gratis, and thereafter they can either (now) buy the download or (soon) subscribe to a Rhapsody/Napster style service to continue to stream on demand.

I think the positioning of the announcement was a bit unclear, however. This is NOT a free, on-demand service like imeem or lala; rather, this will ultimately be a subscription-based, on-demand service with a free “sampling” component very much like what Napster offered a couple of years ago. In fact, Napster’s offer was (is?) actually for 5 (rather than 3) free listens before you had to buy or subscribe, and I blogged the underlying math at the time. Quincy Smith said they wanted to offer more free listening, but it remains to be seen whether the Majors will be willing to grant a much higher threshold.

Fred Wilson also suggests the price for Last.fm’s subscription will be $3, but I’m pretty sure this is just the pricing on their current premium (ad-free, personalized) radio sub service, and I seem to recall having read that the on-demand subscription will be higher. I think it’s unlikely the labels would grant Last.fm a less expensive arrangement than what Real, Yahoo and Napster get, except as part of a comprehensive deal, including upfronts (which could be the case, we’ll see).

The reasons I see a Last.fm subscription potentially faring better than Rhapsody/Napster/YMU are (1) the on-demand functionality is layered on top of a free service that is already highly successful, with a large base of users (20m registered users), and (2) the service has a core social dimension which was lacking in previous efforts.

I like Felix, Martin, Spencer and the rest of their crew and applaud their efforts to make this model work.

Just caught this on Digital Media Wire:

Project Playlist Raises $3 Million for Social Music Sharing
Submitted by Mark Hefflinger on September 26, 2007 – 7:31am.

Beverly Hills, Calif. - Project Playlist, a service that lets users share music playlists on blogs and social network profiles, has raised $3 million in its first round of funding, PEHub.com reported, citing a regulatory filing. No investor information was disclosed.

Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Project Playlist’s technology allows users to add their music playlists to blogs and profiles on social networks including MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and Gaia Online.

As regular readers of S+S will recognize, Project Playlist has emerged over the last 18 months or so to become arguably the largest music 2.0 web service. I think PP is compelling to consumers for 3 reasons:

1. It’s an easy way to tune into artists/songs you already like, or would like to hear. If I read about a new band, or hear about a band from a friend, there’s a reasonable chance I can search for that band on PP and find at least a few tracks to check out, which are readily (albeit illegally) available for on-demand streaming.
2. It’s relatively trivial to download any track that shows up in search results, eliminating the need for purchase.
3. I can use the “+” button to add searched-for tracks to a playlist, which I can then attach to my personal webpage (e.g. MySpace) to share my tastes with others in a meaningful way (i.e. other people can actually hear the full tracks).

On the other hand, PP suffers from a few shortcomings in UE:

1. Tracks that show up in search results may not always be available, or may disappear at some point in the future (this is because all tracks are hosted in various places on the internet, similar to recently-shuttered Webjay).
2. Certain artists or tracks may not be available at all, if PP’s MP3 crawler hasn’t located them somewhere on internet (Berkeley-based Seeqpod, a similar service, counts improved crawling as its differentiator).

From an investor’s standpoint, PP is interesting because:

1. Aforementioned growth. On the back of its popularity as a MySpace widget, PP has emerged from nowhere and is now, in less than 2 years, 3X-4X the size of Last.fm and Pandora.
2. Little or no marginal costs. Because the MP3s streamed or downloaded through PP are not centrally hosted, it does not have to incur the big bandwidth bills of other streaming audio providers. Further, as far as I’m aware, it doesn’t pay any music royalties (which, other than salaries, is by *far* the largest component of cost for any digital music service).

Conversely, I suspect some investors may have passed on PP because:

1. There’s little question that PP, as currently configured and sans direct licensing, will get sued.
2. Migrating the existing distributed service to a legitimate platform seems, on the surface, challenging.

But then again, I just heard that imeem signed up another Major (SonyBMG) for a direct license, and its talks with EMI are ongoing. So perhaps there is hope for a licensed version of Project Playlist down the road.

That was a quick month – I’ve not been blogging much as just moved (from SF to NYC). The top 20 sites for July are below. Highlights:

• First down month for Project Playlist (summer vacation, I’d guess)
• Pandora jumped 37%, now ahead of Last.fm — but both still trail iLike
• Also grew by > 1/3: Seeqpod, Haystack, Virb, The Hype Machine, MOG

Hack 1: Use your Google account to host MP3s

To share a track in your MP3 collection on your webpage (e.g. Facebook profile, WordPress blog), you need a server to upload the file to (or a server that already hosts that file). I’d been using YouSendIt for this purpose but a free account times-out after the lesser of a certain number of days or downloads. However, if you’re registered with Google, check out your Google Page Creator. This allows you to upload MP3s for permanent hosting (see link at bottom right of that page). Not sure what the limit is but beats YouSendIt.

On Facebook, you can then use Numair Faraz‘ handy Audio app to add your track to your profile page. Simply go to ‘Add a new linked file’ within the ‘Your Library’ section and enter the URL you see at the bottom of the page when you mouse-over the name of an MP3 you’ve uploaded to Google. Alternatively, on a blog, you can just hotlink a word or 2 and input this same URL so user can right-click to download the file. The former has the advantage of not cannibalizing potential sale although is no more legal.

Hack 2: Use a dashboard widget to download from an MP3 URL

Project Playlist, the largest online music site (bar perhaps the music sections of AOL and Yahoo, and I guess MySpace), provides a way for users to search for MP3s hosted throughout the web and then stream them. Historically, it has also provided a ready link so a user can right-click to download those MP3s (basically file-sharing but with ability to stream on-demand and make a MySpace-embeddable playlist). It looks like some of those links are no longer available; however, the URL of the MP3 is still exposed.

Not being terribly tech-savvy in this regard, I couldn’t figure out how one would go about downloading the file from that URL (but knew this should be possible). A friend pointed me to a dashboard widget called SnatchIt that allows a user to simply cut-and-paste the URL (ending in .mp3) and hit enter to download that MP3. Super simple (and again pretty clearly illegal).