Comparing Online Music Services

Since the latest launches of online music services like Musicpaw and Yobo, we have been tracking online music services that can help you search, organize, listen, share and discover music online.

What differentiates music from other media like article, photo and video is that you would listen to music you like again and again, while you won’t do this with others. And music is a bit difficult to understand, so that you probably don’t know why you like a particular song.

So application for organizing and sharing music must be different from the ones for photos and videos. Besides Musicpaw and Yobo, there’re six other services also worth looking. They are 8box, Douban, Yahoo Musicbox, Baidu Zhangmenren, We@zone and Funbox.

We first look at two search engines. They are the places to look for online music links. Although this has brought copyright issues, search engines still act as a promotion platform for artists.

• Baidu mp3 search is the most frequently used music search engine in China. One year ago, Baidu launched Zhangmenren, which is a service for users to sharing their playlist. To celebrate one year birthday of this service, they have opened several public lists where everyone can distribute their favorite songs.
• Other search engines have similar feature too. My second choice is Yahoo Music. They have human-edited profile page for artists and bands with their album release history. This is useful to music newbie like me. Their music box service, launched in June, lets users keep their own playlist. You can generate playlist more freely in Yahoo music than in Baidu Zhangmenren. Yahoo’s service is more like a private service, while Baidu’s is for public promotion. In Yahoo, you can save music into your music box directly from search result.

Some services don’t act as a music search engine or host any music files, but they provide a place to organize your online playlist, which contains music that you can play directly without downloading them to local storage. Three services result in this category.

• Musicpaw is a new service launched on Nov. 26 2006. I like their tagline, Sketch with music. Hope they really can let us describe music visually like this. Currently you can organize playlist, tag and review music in this community. I think the website is cool especially their command line console, where you can navigate the website and perform all operations of the music player.
• We@zone is in a different style, and I like its simple design. It lauched on June 26, 2006 by Andy, who is located in Beijing, now a product manager of Hexun. On its Digg style homepage, users can share music review, recommend artist, and promote music related event. On users’ personal page, visitors can listen to their music collections though a flash player.
• Funbox is a service launched in July. The main feature is to organize online music links into playlist. It doesn’t provide music review, but it does have quite a lot of embedded code in different styles to publish playlist on other website like blogs.

Although in above three services, you can also discover new music by browsing others people’s profile page or by looking at what they are listening if the service supports this. But chances to find music suitable to you are still small in this way. So you probably want to try some recommendation services.

• 8box is one of the earliest services to provide music recommendation in China. It launched in May 2006. Originally based in Shanghai, now located in Hangzhou. What I like most is the music roaming feature. You can start from one music, then it will guide you though a series of tracks with similar style. After you rating enough tracks for the system to learn about you, it can recommend new music to you based on collaborative filtering technology. We have an interview with 8box in June.
• Yobo is a Pandora like service just launched several days ago. Main part of the service is a big flash player where you can listen to endless music. While you are listening to music, by telling the system whether you like it or not, you can affect future music recommended to you. Based on my own testing, there’re too many duplicates in its current recommendation result. That’s probably because of the small media database.
• Music recommendation feature of Douban is weaker than 8box and Yobo. It launched in July 2005. As we mentioned in the beginning of this article, music is different from book. While few people would say they particularly like one chapter of a book, most of them just like some tracks in an album. On Douban you can only treat music in album level, which makes the service less flexible. But this is still a great place to find useful music reviews.

Summary

Online music is a wonderful world. After you move your listening habit from local to online, you can not only access music from anywhere but also discover more music from others.

Search engine is useful for searching online music links, but you cannot find music you don’t know in this way. Recommendation service as ongoing search will give you more personalized experience and help you find music that you like but you would never discover in other ways.

Music communities that don’t have explicit recommendation feature are also useful for discovering new music. It’s hard to tell which style is better for music community. There’re still rooms for killer applications to show up.

• Search

• About

  China Web2.0 Review is a blog dedicated to track web2.0 development, review and profile web2.0 applications, business and services in China.

• Email Subscribe

• Recent Posts

  • Apply For Web Access of QQ
  • 139.com: China Mobile’s Social Network
  • Ju690 Shows You What Chinese Users Are Sharing
  • Sogou Released Its Own Internet Browser
  • Papaya: Turning Your Phonebook into A Mobile SNS
  • Anti Opensocial?
  • Kaixin001 Has Ads on Apps
  • COO of Taobao Talked About How Taobao Tackles E-Commerce Challenges in China
  • Events: Barcamp Beijing & New Era, New TV Seminar
  • Why Lenovo S10 Social Media Campaign Is Not Good Enough

• Event

• What's Happening in China's Internet

  Follow me on Twitter
• 
  

• Hot Tags

  • 51.com 56.com Baidu barcamp blog-search Blogbus Bokee BSP censorship China cnbloggercon CNNIC CWR Donews Douban ecommerce event events FeedSky funding game Google Hipihi iAsk IM mInfo MobileMonday music Netease Oak-Pacific Podlook Qihoo QQ report RSS_reader Sina social-bookmarking Sogou Sohu statistics survey Taobao Tencent Tudou video word-of-mouth Xiaonei Xunlei Yahoo Zhuaxia

Except where otherwise noted, China Web2.0 Review is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Powered by WordPress and hosted in Dreamhost.