Interview: The creator of new meta-media player Songbird discusses the state of DRM and the most important people in online music.
Rob Lord has had a busy week.
On Wednesday morning his company, Inevitable LLC, a "small chirpy team of digital media innovators," launched a preview of their widely anticipated Web music player.
The site got dugg. Then boingboing-ed, Gizmodo'd, and Mike'd up.
The excitement was largely due to Songbird's ability to navigate the Web as if it were a playlist, organizing and culling MP3 files.
Developers and open source enthusiasts were also excited that Songbird is based on Mozilla, allowing them to contribute the Songbird experience by developing extensions.
Rob's not new to the online music marketplace. He's the cofounder of the Internet Underground Music Archive, an online music site predating the popularity of MP3s.
He was also one of the first employees at Winamp creator Nullsoft. Most recently he was a product manager for the launch of Yahoo's music software and subscription service, after his last startup, Mediacode, was purchased by the portal.
We caught up with Rob to ask him a few questions about the state of online music.
So, Songbird's in beta. What can we expect from your 1.0 release, and when is it coming?
This isn't even a beta release. It's a proof-of-concept. We're targeting a 1.0 release in late summer. We'll finish off the set of desktop features, which is rip, burn, mix, play, transfer and homeshare/landshare. That's the equivalent of any modern player out there. There won't be a lot of new things you can do if you're not connected to the Internet ... Our new features will be mostly user-driven and partner-driven.
Will I be able to transfer songs to my iPod?
Ah, that's so pedestrian! Yes, of course. We're not sure if we can provide iPod support or if that will come from a third party.
In your opinion, who's the most important person in online music right now, and why?
What Steve Jobs did. He went out and licensed the music. He built a service that aggregates the licensed music, built a desktop media player for Mac and Windows that delivers that music, built a whole line of devices that connected all that. And if you're on a Mac, he built your hardware and your operating system too. To top it all off, he made a commercial with a hipster boy or girl dancing passionately to the tune of cultural freedom.
What about DRM? Songbird tunes in the playable Web, but what about rights management? What's the state of DRM today?
We seek to be DRM agnostic, codec agnostic ... But focusing on DRM issues is a bit of a red herring. The issue is there's not an open market. I can't choose which service I want to use. The iTunes store, for example, exists solely in iTunes. A lot of people don't appreciate that when they buy a song from the iTunes music store, they're obligating themselves to a future with that hardware and software.
Ok, music man. You're stuck on the proverbial desert island. What's your Desert Island Five?
Ha, that kind of took me off guard. I wasn't really prepared for that. Let's see. Right now, Broken Social Scene, the new one, although "You Forgot It In People" is good too. Sun Kil Moon, "Tiny Cities." Stereo Total, "Discotheque." Bonobo, "Animal Magic." And Joy Division, "Unknown Pleasures."
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