The highlight of Plug.In '98, from the
viewpoint of Music Unbound, was the announcement by Dave Samuel that his web site,
recently renamed from "TheDJ.Com" to "Spinner.com," will
offer custom audio programming channels along with its 100 genre-based channels
containing 100,000 songs. Customization of personal channels (known as
"MyChannels") is done using the collaborative filtering technology from
NetPerceptions called
GroupLens.
This represents another step forward from the probability-weighting
feature of Imagine Radio within its genre
formats, which provided the first instance of user-modifiable music programming
in online audio. With a song base in 6 digits and customization able to
reach across genres via recommendation methods such as collaborative
filtering, Spinner.com comes significantly closer to the vision
outlined in our August '97 article A Modest Proposal: Audio Programming From
Online Catalogs, and we applaud this development.
Spinner.com also recently announced a partnership with
Amazon.com to sell CDs identified in audio
programming (Amazon announced its expansion from books to music CDs,
etc. in June '98), creating the tie-in between audio programming and music retail
that begins to build a smoothly integrated environment for the
convergence of entertainment, information and retail services for music
and musical acts. (Imagine Radio formed a similar partnership with
CDnow
not long after launching their service in March '98.)
It should be noted that bandwidth is still at a premium, and that
services such as Spinner.com and Imagine Radio are initially aiming for
workplace users who have access to T1 or other high-band Internet
connections, as well as the small but growing market for cable modems,
home ISDN, and various forms of consumer-grade DSL lines, especially a few
formats designed to work over twisted copper-pair phone lines at 1-1.5mbps,
announced within the last six months by companies like Nortel.
However, even if these services are not likely to reach audience levels
that compare with commercial music radio for some time yet, their current
development and testing of revenue models is the right thing at the right
time, and should prepare them for the onset of more ubiquitous highband
connections. Spinner.com's 100,000-deep songlist is especially pleasing
to see, in combination with user-based customization of programming.
- Dan Krimm, 7/98
