Reginald Tate as Professor Bernard Quatermass - BBC Image

I think the problem is deeper – the innate conservatism (small ‘c’) of the British compared to Americans. We’re still secretly sympathetic to the Luddites and frame-weavers whose craft-based lifestyle was swept away by the Industrial Revolution and we’re suspicious of innovation – look at the furore over GM crops in the ’80s. In contrast, the USA is the land of ‘Venturesome Consumption’ to use the phrase coined by Professor Amar Bhide. Bhide’s thesis is that what gives the USA its clear productivity edge over all other economies is the willingness of both US companies and individual consumers to try out and then adopt new technology. Buying that new iPad is seen as an investment in essential new personal skills rather than a self-indulgent acquisition of a new toy. Even the smallest US business is much more likely to use IT for stock control, marketing or logistics than its European counterpart.

In the end, it’s the enthusiasm even, dare I say it, zest for life shown by people in the Valley like Robert Scoble that infects their exploration of new things and the way they evangelise about them to others. A good dose of ‘glass half full’ is what we Brits need – maybe a rainless summer might start to change the national outlook and let start-ups like Psonar make a bigger splash (if you’ll forgive the pun).

It was always a rather challenging vision – being able to stream music and movies to your phone, iPad or other 3G connected device wherever you were. ‘Challenging’ in that the networks were never up to it: too little coverage outside the metropolitan areas and too little available bandwidth even in the metropolitan areas. Spectrum is limited and can’t be indefinitely stretched by yet more clever wireless technology such as CDMA. The network operators are busily trying to get everyone to use Wi-Fi to transfer some of the burden onto fixed line broadband.

Psonar has always been about letting people access their music anywhere, any time and on any device. Sure we support streaming straight to mobile (where the phone operating system lets us) and we’re always looking to improve the quality of that experience. The reality is, however, that the easiest, quickest and free way to enjoy music and movies on your phone or portable device is to hook them up to the internet directly, or via a PC or Mac using USB, and let the wires take the strain. The Psonar SongShifter is optimised to make the transfer of music files to and from all your devices (PC, laptop, phone, mp3 player, iPad etc) as pain-free as possible.

As usual, it’s wise to be wired.

Demographics
Respondents were mostly North American (55%) or European (39%), male (84%) and evenly split across those aged 25-34 (37%) and 35-44 (36%) – although 18% of respondents were aged 14-24.

What Users Want
Most people came to the service looking for somewhere to keep their music and be able access it anywhere at any time – and 5 people specifically mentioned the demise of Lala. Nearly everyone (90%) had downloaded the SongShifter, uploaded tracks (86%) and streamed music using the player (69%). 8% of respondents had download (not streamed) music and 2 respondents (4%) had published a track on Facebook.

Comments on Psonar
The main comments were:

• color scheme too garish (update: latest release – 21 June – has reduced the amount of purple/pink and made other improvements to layout)
• “clunkiness” (update: latest release – 21 June – incorporates database access and AJAX enhancements to improve speed)
• it would be better to have a player integrated into the web page (update: we’re developing an embedded player which will allow drag to player but which can also be “popped-out” of the page if wanted)
• add shuffle play (update: due for implementation in the next 4-6 weeks);
• several people commented that a browser based upload solution would be better than the SongShifter (update: SongShifter allows access to USB connected devices, such as phones and mp3 players, and enables track downloading (as opposed to streaming) – but we’re developing a lightweight uploader which will run on Mac, Linux and, potentially, PC which would obviate the need to use the SongShifter in some circumstances)

Suggestions for Improvements
Besides these comments, other improvements suggested were:

• ablility to delete tracks;
• renaming tracks, add more metadata or edit metadata;
• Last.fm Scrobbler integration;
• greater control over SongShifter (e.g. select tracks for upload);
• include more social features, such as comments on tracks or playlists and recommendations to friends;
• add album art;
• add lyrics.

Paying for Music
On paying to listen to music they don’t own, respondents had mixed views: 39% said they wouldn’t be prepared to pay at all, 33% said they’d like to see Psonar offer access like Lala’s “web songs” (where a payment of 10c gave the right to stream, but not download, a song an infinite number of times so long as the user remained a Lala member) and 16% said they’d be prepared to pay 1c or 1p (n.b. for our non-UK users 1p = 1/100 of £1) for one or more plays of a track. Several people said that they would be prepared to listen to ads to support free streaming.

Mobile Site
A significant majority of respondents (62%) said they were very or quite likely to use (or continue to use) the Psonar mobile site.

Thanks for the Offers of Help!
Finally, we’re really grateful that so many people offered to help develop Psonar: 80% of respondents said they’d complete further user surveys and 80% said they be prepared to test new features. We’re proposing to email everyone who volunteered and offer to include them as ‘beta users’ to test new features prior to production deployment.

Best wishes and many thanks,

Martin, Rich and the Psonar team

It’s probably still a little rough around the edges, but we figured it was better to get something out there for you to use ASAP. We think it’s a big improvement.

New Playlist Panel

The main changes are:

• the playlists panel has been made smaller, giving the main tracks display area more room
• double-clicking a playlist now displays the contents in the main tracks display area
• deletion of tracks from and reorganisation of tracks within a playlist now happens on the client. When a deletion / move operation is performed, buttons appear at the bottom of the track list to allow you to either save the changes (whereupon they get persisted) or cancel them (the playlist gets reloaded and the changes are undone)
• management of tracks in the player is performed in the same way
• we’ve added a ‘new’ button at the top of the playlists panel for 1-click playlist creation

We hope you like the changes. We think it makes playlist management much less clunky.

Look out for more similar UX improvements in the coming weeks.

We also listened to what you said in the Psonar survey (please do tell us what you think if you haven’t done so already!) about the colour scheme and toned it down somewhat. We’ve also widened the scrollbars, reduced the initial load-time for large collections and added ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ buttons amongst other things.

If you like the new playlist management, colour scheme or Psonar in general, please show your support by clicking the Facebook ‘Like’ button in the header to spread the word and help make Psonar simply the best place to keep your music on the internet. Thanks!

Richard
Psonar CTO

We also hope you’ve had a chance to use Psonar recently and get the benefit of these great enhancements:

• slicker interface that reduces page loads and speeds up response time (using AJAX)
• play button on every track
• Facebook share button to post any track to your your News Feed
• redesigned and faster mobile site
• mobile player support that works on all major phones (iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia, Android, etc.)

In the next couple of months, we’re also introducing (amongst other things);

• Much improved playlist management
• Speed improvements when browsing your library of music
• SongShifter for Mac and Linux
• Last.fm scrobbling integration
• ‘tweet a track’
• Facebook playlist sharing

To make sure we’re delivering what you want, and to identify any areas where we haven’t yet got it right, please take a few minutes to complete our 4 page survey.

We’ll use it as a key part of our commitment to you: Putting the Community in the Driving Seat

Thanks for taking the time to read this and for your help in building ‘simply the best pace to keep your music’.

Best wishes,
Martin, Rich and the rest of the Psonar team.

Rage Against the Machine performing at Finsbury Park, London. Photograph: Phil Bourne/Retna Pictures

True to expectation, RATM were absolutely amazing. I can’t remember a time when I’ve seen such incredible energy either by a band or hugely appreciative, friendly crowd, although it did get a bit squeezed down at the front!

I’ll leave the fuller review to a professional journalist and to Tracy on her blog (with her fabulous photographs).

‘We Made History’, the big screens told us just before RATM launched into their seminal track. A little bit of history perhaps, but history nonetheless. And gave Mr. Cowell rather a slap in the face at the same time. If the manufactured pop industry thinks this was a blip, roll on Christmas 2010.

From their comments, blog posts and tweets, it’s clear that what upsets people most is when a Web 2.0 business fails to honor the bargain implicit in the Web 2.0 ideal: the community provides the ethusiasm, dynamism and much of what draws others to the service (and therefore the business) in return for having a real say in how the service (and therefore the business) evolves. By selling out to Apple on terms which allowed Apple to simply walk away from the service that Lala had committed to provide to its users, Lala broke this essential bargain.

At Psonar we want to build ‘simply the best place to keep your music’ but we also see ourselves as a true Web 2.0 community and business – in that order. Call us romantics perhaps, and we’re not so stupid that we don’t recognise that circumstances change, but at Psonar we believe that enabling the community to drive the shape of the service will lead to a better, more compelling user experience and a more successful business. But it can only work if we do honor the bargain implicit in the Web 2.0 ideal and, to that end, we believe that we must make these pledges:

• Keep your music safe and accessible on our servers and, if events beyond our control make this impossible to sustain, give you adequate notice of any change and an easy way to move your music to wherever you want.
• Let you access the music you have bought when you want and how you want (by download or by streaming).
• Promote the interests of artists, and those who enable artists to record and sell their music, by ensuring fair payment to access music you don’t already own and preventing unlawful file sharing.

We’re grateful to many people for their comments, tweets and blog posts encouraging us to carry on building Psonar while making sure that it really does listen to its community.

Glastonbury Tor by localsurfer

Here’s to a long weekend of musical excess (and Brothers Pear Cider!)

The challenge is, however, that word ‘share’ and how it impacts on music. While it’s the convention that journalists’ creative works (articles, blog posts etc) can be copied and re-published subject to proper attribution, that isn’t, for obvious reasons, the case with music – otherwise recorded music would have no value. Instead, music is trailed in a relatively restricted eco-system of radio stations and blogs or is available to be discovered on services like YouTube. The way music trailing on radio stations works is well-established and makes economic sense for artists and rights holders. It’s much harder to make the economics work with web services: what’s the reasonable return YouTube should give an artist for millions of plays of their music – not the $167 that Lady Gaga allegedly received earlier this year.

Part of the problem is that new web music services are too fixated with the music itself. Strange thing to say? Remember that community and collaboration are the core values of Web 2.0, so it’s what people do and say that should drive the music exploration process – at a personal level based on human communication. In contrast, the dreaded “people like you listen to music like this” algorithms of the recommendation engines run the risk of everyone ending up listening to the same stuff. Where’s the serendipity and magic of discovering the unexpected in that?

At Psonar we’re in the process of building a great ‘Social Music Exploration’ experience. Which is a way for people to navigate through music, and to new music, based on their friendships, contacts and other ways that connect the members of the Psonar Community. Personally, I’d like to know what cool, Rock Mountain girls listen to, for instance, and I’m hoping that Rich and the team are building a great way for me to explore their musical tastes (undoubtedly varied) without having to emigrate from Cambridge or join Second Life.

Why should Lala users have to waste time and effort working out what to do about the music stored on Lala’s servers which, presumably, disappears into the ether on May 31st? Isn’t it incumbent on Apple, as Lala’s acquirer, to continue to offer the service as designed to the people who had signed up for that service?

At Psonar we offer our users and prospective users this pledge – we will never do anything that denies you perpetual access to your music other than due to events beyond our control. And, if we are forced to change or take down the service, we will do all we can to ensure users get adequate notice (cerainly more than a paltry 31 days) and are given a means to transfer their music elsewhere. We believe that this is the minimum pledge that a service like Psonar should make to its users.

We’re not the only people who think like this! @Project_Felix, @derekbrown, @ItsJimD