Spiff

XSPF, which when spoken sounds like spiff, is  the XML Shareable Playlist Format.

So what?  Why do you care?

Because services like Rhapsody, Napster, and Y! Unlimited are the future of the music business.

One day, everyone who enoys music will be getting their music like they get a dialtone.

Music will be a subscription service.  It is already but there are lot of technical, implementation, and business model hurdles that need to get worked out before everyone gets their music this way.

But I am absolutely convinced its going to happen.  It has to frankly. Because the current way we get music is ridiculous in a digital world.

But back to spiff, why does it matter?

Because when everyone has access to all the music all the time, sharing music is going to explode.  Everyone will be a DJ, everyone will send music to their friends and family, and it will all be legal.

Spiff is the way that will happen.

Go back to my post on Y! Unlimited.  At the end I said:

Regardless of what Apple does, here is the thing I want Yahoo!, Real, and Napster to do.  Make your shared playlist links compatible with each other.  Create a standard for sharing music legally on the Internet.  That's what this market needs most of all.

That generated a few comments and emails.  All pointing to XSPF.  When I looked at XSPF, I saw what I have always wanted.  I can blog my Rhapsody playlist of the week but you can't listen to it unless you have Rhapsody.  What if I could easily publish that as an XPSF file and you could listen to it on Rhapsody, Y! Unlimited, and Napster?  What if Steve Jobs offered an unlimited subscription offer on iTunes and supported XSPF?

That's my vision.  And it's going to happen.  Unfortunately, it's going to take a while.

Comments

[jackson]

So is this the death knoll of packaging? How am I going to know who played what on the record, what about album art? A lot of graphic designers are going to be scraping to put shoes on their kids feet. I do not see this as progress, at least the way I see it going down.

[Tony Alva]

I'm with Jackson...

I don't have anything against file shared or softcopy music as a medium, but to call a move away from packaged music progress is something I can not endorse. We're all busy, but I'll say it again, we are losing the art of listening to records with this technology. Listening to music, being a fan of music, to me means actually sitting down and listening to selected cuts from, or an entire album. Yes, you can listen to music while doing other tasks, but you cannot get lost in it unless you concentrate on it alone. If you haven't done this in along time, than I would highly recommend turning off the Blackberry (oops, I mean Treo), logging off the computer, turning off the TV and telephone, pick one the records you have posted on the left side of the screen, and fall backwards onto your bed and listen. Read the album credits, analyze the cover art work, pluck a guitar, or don't do anything but listen to the ALBUM. I'll admit that it gets tougher and tougher with my life filling up my time, but I make myself do this. These are sessions where I DON'T want, or need shuffle play.

I remember my brother, sisters, and I goofing on my grandfather (the late Gen. John D.F. Phillips and MacArthur look a like alike) while on visits to his house in North Carolina when he'd dip into his study, close the door, sit in his chair, and crank his reel to reel classical music tapes. Now, I get his drift completely. I'll bet your son listens to records this way. He knows without understanding the whole of this issue that Led Zeppelin recorded Houses Of The Holy as an ALBUM, not a series of unrelated songs to be randomized.

Again, I think it's great that technology has made it easier to take music on the go with us. It allows us to listen more, but there are two kinds of listening: passive and invested. In order to get emotionally invested in music you HAVE to listen to it with all your attention. It is worth the time to do this.

As we get older, it's harder to listen to music with friends like we did when we were kids, but if you can do it, you should. One of the most enjoyable parts of coming into NYC to record music with Jackson and Chris is the time after the session's over and we just hang around and throw on a track or two from our various collections and just listen. Listen and romance the music like a gem stone. I ALWAYS learn something from them about some artist's work that I may not be familar with by listening to these two guys talk about songs. It's like a musical Dead Poet's Society. Pure enjoyment.

Softcopy music, or whatever the correct varnacular is, is taking away some charished art forms: the art of pure listening, and the art of the album as a package. I just can't reconcile that loss, or call it progress.

[dano]

Nostalgia is great, but progress is better.

Anyway... Fred, are you going to switch to Yahoo! Unlimited? Just curious, since the switching costs appear to be limited ($60/year), and switching would be be a vote for XPSF. Or, are there things about Rhapsody that you don't see in Yahoo! Unlimited?

[Marc James]

That's bull****. Who in their right mind will pay money for music, or whatever the media may be, when you can't own it? All you're doing is renting it, and if I pay for something, I should be able to do whatever I want with it, whenever, and not risk losing it all if I miss a month. This works great for DVDs when you want to see them once, but music is something I think you want to own forever, not rent. I am an avid iTunes Music Store customer and can't see myself ever paying just to rent my music library.

[Tony Alva]

Dano,

Ain't talking about nostalgia here at all. It's about the record as a package, and as an art form. Take David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust to my right here. This is a collection of tunes he put together as a package, to be listened to as a collective experience. That's an easy one, but how 'bout Bob's Blood On The Tracks. This is a record that contains songs he wrote during a specific period of his life. By parsing it all out, you loose all the cool vibe that comes with being in that moment. It's akin to watching something like Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" edited for TV on TBS with the commercial breaks included.

Again, I have nothing against progress and technology, I just can't deal with the fact that it's turning everybody into "Greatest Hits" buyers. What a shame. I hate f'ing greatest hits records.

I like the ownership factor that Marc James points as well.

[Xavi]

share your music?

Sooo 2004.
You can publish any iTunes playlist with one-click.

Hosted by Apple. Free. People can even vote for your playlists. Over 1.3 million pp'l have.

http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/share.html

Spiff may be better, but it is not new.
And see which one is easier to use, today

[dwlt]

Xavi, I think you're missing Fred's point: XSPF offers a way for *everyone else* to compete with Apple -- which they can really only do via legal forms of collusion such as this to help build their marketshares versus iTMS as the overall market grows.

[Dave!]

Meh.

Shared playlists are great and all, but I already share music with my friends--digitally--and I don't need a shared playlist to do it. They'll have to pry ownership of the music from my cold, dead hands, because I want my music on my time, on whatever device I want it on, and I don't want to risk a service going down or changing use terms, etc.

I'm all for digital formats. I've got thousands of albums in digital format on my CDs--all of which are ripped and free to flow from my PC to my portable player to my car...

And I think the fact that in your very own sidebar, you list your 50 favorite albums, complete with cover art, speaks to the fact that an album is more than just a playlist. Playlists are mix tapes. That's great. Sharing is great. But there's more to it than just a random collection of songs. Artists do (granted, not all) but some thought into the specific songs they put on an album, along with the order, and the artwork, and the liner notes. Those things mean something to many music fans, I think.

[dano]

Tony,

I totally agree that it's great to sit down and chill to some great music every now and then. I grew up in the era of vinyl records, so to me a lot of albums (like Houses of the Holy that you mentioned) are not so much a group of songs, but a whole.

However, reality has pushed me into becoming a believer in digital music. I have stacks of CDs and albums that now just sit in crates -- still unpacked from previous moves. Cramped, itinerant apartment living doesn't mix well with true listening.

I also see great promise in "freeing" music from its physical packaging. What is to stop artists from only releasing a 45 minute "song?" In my opinion, a true artist would be more concerned about her art, not packaging it into 3-4 minute song bites that sell better.

So, I guess I see a place in the future for physical and digital music. Due to living circumstances, I'll be favoring the latter.

[Dave]

Hi - the playlist format is XSPF, not XPSF :)

-Dave

[Marv]

People- are you saying when you recommend that your friend check some bands out, you give them a taste by making them sit through entire albums? Have you never had the thrill of making a good mix? I'm more for the "album experience" than most people I know, but I also see major value in playlists I can actually use with my friends. Why is this technology so threatening to you? Albums aren't going away.

[fred]

Dave - thanks for picking up the mispelling of XSPF. i fixed it. i am terrible with acronnyms.

[Seb]

Ah, you misspelled acronym too :)

We can represent albums as playlists, too. What is lost, then?

[darby]

I think it would interesting to think about how the subscription model will affect the music industry, in terms of innovation. Just thinking aloud here...

If the major players remain in place and move to a subscription model, it seems like they would have less of an incentive to produce new music, because each new album/artist will only have a marginal impact on # of subscriptions. That is, decoupling profit from albums/artists, and linking them instead to a much larger collection of music doesn't seem like it is beneficial, in terms of providing an incentive for innovation.

So maybe the subscription model would have to be different than what it is today... perhaps, something where each subscription service pays record companies not a fixed fee for a set chunk of their collections, but a small fee for each download, making sure that the subscription fees they charge more than cover these royalties, of course. Or is this how it already works?