I’ve always been a fan of free online music services like Pandora, Songza and Spotify. While I love features like finding new artists of my favorite genre, never hearing repeats of songs and having access to millions of new songs, I’ve begun to notice their shortcomings. The frequent ads, wireless fees and inability to customize playlists are a huge pain.
In response to these pesky downsides to using online services, I give you my ideal music service idea: “Stereo-2-Go”. Listeners could hand pick songs for playlists on the go but could also type in a genre and listen to similar music. And above all, the service would be ad-free.
In a perfect world, wealthy musicians wouldn’t be begging for royalties at every possible moment. Unfortunately, artists like their fancy cars, yachts and super mansions, so this is likely to never happen.
Stereo-2-Go could require payments for mobile users based on the number of songs saved to their phone. For example, 50 songs would be worth $3.00 a month and for every additional 50 songs downloaded, users pay another $2.00. Artists could be paid from the profits of the app, so they would still get royalties. More importantly, the total cost would be far less than that of iTunes.
The program would have a simple layout that could be easily read on a phone and would have different information about the music, like date of release, other songs by the musician and even cool artist trivia. When the users opens the app, there would be lists of possible playlists they would like and could save to their phone with the click of a button.
There would also be a red button at the top of the page labeled “Explore” where users could type in artists, songs, genres and other elements of music that they like to find new songs.
Stereo-2-Go could also feature a unique interface that allows for interactions with friends via social networking. For example, if a user’s friend listens to “Joe’s Hip Hop Jamz” the user could easily click on a link and listen to the playlist or similar ones.
Hopefully, a program like Stereo-2-Go will hit the market soon, because if one more jam session gets interrupted by an ad about Coca-Cola, I think I’ll go insane.
