James Norton
Sonicnet.com -- the best (legal) option for free music on the Internet
Napster has scared the music industry, and the industry is beginning to jump. Reaction has varied wildly from company to company – while some have chosen to take the competition to court, others have begun building Web sites that may or may not embody the future of music distribution on the Internet.
Ultimately, new models of music distribution will be key in providing legal alternatives to the sort of wholesale music piracy that Napster has spawned. One of the most promising of these models comes from an unlikely source: MTVi, the Internet-savvy offspring of MTV, the once-innovative channel that is now something of a seedy, lowest-common-denominator dinosaur in the world of music television.
MTVi's most promising offering is a Web site called Sonicnet.com. What Sonicnet presents is a shockingly fresh new model for radio. Its interactive vision for online music broadcasting achieves a delicate balance: It fits the legal definition of a radio station by not providing its listeners with music "on demand," while still providing an unprecedented amount of user input and power.
Sonicnet has a number of competitors (including major sites like Broadcast.com, Spinner and NetRadio), but what it offers is unique.
Sonicnet lets users design their own custom stations, choosing minor classes of music (like Brit pop, indie rock, or chamber music) from lists grouped according to major genres (like pop, rock, or classical). I was able to build a personal format featuring randomly-chosen tracks of ambient techno, traditional jazz, indie rock, ska and 80s pop – a music cluster not often programmed by traditional AM/FM stations.
You can also "tune" your station by commenting on specific artists that appear on your own personal airwaves. For example, when REO Speedwagon crept into my bandwidth, I was able to throttle their rating down to "0," ensuring that their unique musical stylings would never again intrude upon my peace of mind. On the flipside, I was able to tune artists like Orbital, REM, and the Magnetic Fields up to "5," ensuring that they return often.
Bands that receive little or no commercial airplay crop up regularly on Sonicnet, which is extremely heartening. There's something deliciously subversive about being able to tune in and hear groups like Archers of Loaf, Guided by Voices, and Mu-Ziq without having to pay for it. At the same time, by including jazz in the mix of things my station plays, I'm receiving a musical education in a genre I've never really explored. Before hearing Dizzy Gillespie's "Night in Tunisia," I wasn't really sure jazz held much that interested me. Now, I'm getting hooked.
To some extent, Sonicnet seems too good to be true: It has very few audio ads (all station identification spots run 30 seconds or less), has a very clean and comfortable interface, and is free. It's hard to understand how MTVi is making money from this particular model, and it's easy to imagine that Sonicnet will evolve into something considerably more commercial (and obnoxious) in future incarnations.
Also, some of the technical details still need to be worked out. Since I started listening to Sonicnet (about a month ago) I've heard Anton Barbeau's "Please Sir I've Got a Wooden Leg" about six times. It's not a bad song, but there's no reason it should be my own personal #1 hit. There is also a problem whenever Bad Manners comes up on my station – instead of Bad Manners's 2nd-wave ska, Sonicnet inexplicably plays an unidentified CD of Latin pop.
Additionally, once a listener has discovered the power of Sonicnet's personalized radio broadcast, there's no reason to mess around with the dull preset channels and guest DJs that clutter up its main page. It seems safe to say most people won't care what Duran Duran or XTC are listening to, when they can choose to listen to their own unique blend of songs instead.
These minor (and infrequent) glitches pale before Sonicnet's advantages. In addition to allowing users to choose the genres they listen to and select for groups they particularly like, Sonicnet allows users to skip and pause their tracks, an incredible blessing for listeners used to traditional radio's frustratingly inflexible linear structure.
As innovative as Sonicnet's programming style is, it's already under attack by traditional record companies. According to Sonicnet's SEC filing, "Some record companies, acting alone and through the Recording Industry Association of America, assert that some of the customizable features of our Internet radio business make the music used by that portion of the business ineligible for the compulsory license."
It's frustrating (if unsurprising) that the music industry is so aggressively trying to attack one of the most promising new models for online distribution. If record companies succeed in strangling alternative models like Sonicnet, they will pay the price in the long run as more and more users turn to piracy for their music.
For now, however, Sonicnet.com is simply the best (legal) option for free music on the Internet.