Trust me…

The online music locker service and more - Psonar

If you’re looking for a place online to store and stream your music from why not give Psonar a try? I will admit up front that it’s built mainly by a few of my friends so I may be a little biased but I’ve been using the service for while and I think it’s really quite good.

Psonar are in the business of storing your music on the Cloud, that way it’s backed up - no dropping your iPod in the sea on holiday can destroy your music, all you have to do is log back in and download it - so that’s the basic locker service covered. There’s also streaming so you can listen anywhere, this even works on mobile devices which is very cool. The search features are getting there so you can find other music that’s in the cloud that you might like and finally there will be social features so that you can share music with your friends and others.

It’s still at quite an early stage but most of the core technology is there and they just need people to use it in force so that they can tune the interfaces and make sure they are building exactly what people want, why not give them a try? It’s a chance to really influence how the system works. It doesn’t take two minutes to signup and get started - the more music they have in the cloud the better the service becomes.

Good Hunting

Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.

So Rage Against the Machine made Christmas number one ahead of the X factor winner - should that have a capital ‘F’, I’m not sure. Horay for music in general I say, better an old classic holding the top spot than an unproven guy who from what I’ve heard hasn’t even written anything of his own - not to mention what it sounds like.

With sales of 500,000 to it’s name Killing in the Name beat Joe McElderry’s by 50,000 apparently [1], that’s a lot of downloads from lets face it, people who already own the song. There is a funny bit in the bbc article that Charlie pointed out where they are trying to say that the bad weather may have stopped people buying the X factor single - but there wasn’t a Rage single out - and it wouldn’t have stopped downloads. There’s also a “great” piece about the track here. What does this say other than half a million people in Britain are up for a laugh?

Well I think it does say something, the other day there was the news that people were still downloading music illegally and that all the legal services hadn’t made a huge dent in this activity. Perhaps this is because music isn’t what it once was and people want to buy decent music? Who want’s to pay premium prices for music that they either already own or know is years old? With the loss of Woolworths and Virgin/Zavvi from the UK highstreet there aren’t that many places to pick up older music other than HMV which I wouldn’t class as cheap in any reality.

Give people the justification to buy music and they will - people aren’t afraid to use the music services, as we’ve seen here, it’s just that the content isn’t great or isn’t value for money - I think the second point is the more likely. I think that the music industry needs to turn into more of a mass market, more for less you might say. Or it might all just be a lot of people hate Simon Cowell. It’ll also give the Daily Mail something to rant about.

Good Hunting

[1] Rage Against the Machine beat X Factor winner in charts, BBC