MediaMaster Announces That Consumers Show Strong Demand for More Flexible ”DRM-Free” Digital Music Experiences

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–MediaMaster.com, the leading web-based music service that offers consumers instant, on-demand access to their “DRM-free” music collections from any PC or internet connected device, is showing rapid adoption during its beta test.

“This is a very exciting time for music lovers as more and more record labels and retailers are now selling digital music in unrestricted DRM-Free formats,” said MediaMaster founder and CEO Neil Day. “DRM-free songs form the building blocks for MediaMaster’s new generation of music tools and services designed to give music owners full control over when, where and how they enjoy their music collections.”

MediaMaster hosts and stores member’s music collections online. Members can easily upload their songs and albums ripped from CDs or purchased from a DRM-free music service or retailer. Members then can:

• Listen to and manage an entire music collection from any web browser
• Stream music to a mobile phone or connected device at home
• Publish handpicked lists of songs from a collection to a blog or social network profile page
• Let friends and family browse and sample music from a collection
• Consolidate and backup a valuable music collection in a fully accessible environment
• Organize songs and artists through MediaMaster’s visual album-art dashboard

“Like many people I have built up a large music collection over the years with music bought on CDs and DRM-free tracks recently downloaded from iTunes, emusic and Walmart.com,” said Eric Hixon, MediaMaster founder and Chief Technology Officer. “Not only does MediaMaster mean these songs are now organized in one place and no longer scattered across CDs, my laptop, PC, and iPod - but MediaMaster allows me to listen to my entire collection on any PC or even at the gym or in my car via mobile phone.”

How MediaMaster Works

Upload From Anywhere

MediaMaster lets consumers easily upload DRM-free digital music they ripped from CDs or have purchased from a variety of services ranging from iTunes to WalMart.com. MediaMaster also supports automatic upload of songs, playlists and ratings from a member’s iTunes library.

Access Anywhere

Members can listen to their music from any computer with an internet connection - all from within a web browser. They can also stream instant, on-demand songs and playlists to internet radio devices such as the Roku; mobile phones including the Treo and Windows Mobile phones; as well as game consoles including PSP and Playstation 3. Support for additional devices is planned.

Self Expression Through Music

MediaMaster allows music fans to express and identify themselves through their music by letting friends browse and sample their entire collection.

Secure Backup

Once songs are uploaded to MediaMaster, music is safely backed up in case members hard drive crashes or CDs are damaged.

Free and Unlimited

MediaMaster is entirely free during its beta period. A premium service with enhanced features will be offered in the future. Members who sign up during the beta period will get all future premium features for free.

About MediaMaster, Inc.

MediaMaster, Inc. has created a music service that gives you flexible access to listen to, manage, and publish your existing digital music collection. By hosting and storing your music for you, MediaMaster lets you stream your music to any PC or any internet connected device. MediaMaster is a privately-held company based in San Francisco Bay Area. The company was founded and is run by music lovers for music lovers to put consumers back in control of the music they own. Sign up today at www.mediamaster.com

Today we released a new version of the software with some significant upgrades.  In addition to a ton of miscellaneous bug fixes, we’ve made significant upgrades to the following parts of the site:

•  We’ve replaced the radio subsystem with a much more scalable and stable system.  This should address many of the mysterious stalls and timeouts that the previous version had on occasion.
• MyRadio now publishes song information metadata!  You can see the track name and artist in the stream info.
• iTunes playlist import now works reliably.
• The Advanced Uploader now extracts image data from MP3’s properly.  If you have album art in your files it will now show up in your account.
• We’ve improved the UI and look of the Facebook application.

Please give these new features a try!

We love hearing from you. Your feedback has inspired us and guided us.

There have been a lot of requests for a public feedback forum, and we’ve finally released one. You can find our brand new forum at:

http://forum.mediamaster.com

We’ve decided to have a fresh start with our newest release. Many of the requests in our old private forum have been addressed, so we decided not to import the thousands of posts we received. If you have a question, comment or suggestion, please add it to the forum.

We’re working on integrating the forum with the MediaMaster account system, but until that’s done please register with the same email address you registered for your account with.

We’re about to release a new version of MediaMaster this afternoon!

There are a ton of improvements:

• You can directly import your iTunes Library
• There is a “List view” for songs (Beta version)
• We’ve improved performance and reliability
• There’s a nifty “secret” feature - see if you can find it

Stay tuned!

We’ve had an exciting week here! The TechCrunch posting got a lot of attention and generated some great discussions - I’d highly reccomend reading the comments. Thanks again to Michael & Nick for the coverage.

There have been a number of other postings that have followed the TechCrunch coverage that are worth taking a look at:

AcousticDad has a nice overview and some interesting thoughts.

Musmo likes our interface and approach, and has some constructive criticism.

Las Crónicas Del Cuervo has a good writeup (translated).

Tomblog’s author clearly spend a bunch of time with us as well (translated).

..you should really try out the latest offspring of Mozilla: Camino. I like Firefox well enough - its a nice browser but it has always had a slightly cluttered and sluggish feel to me, but I love their page rendering and the cool extensions.

While I was testing out our Advanced Uploader a few weeks ago, I was trying to determine if a bug existed in our code or the browser, and so I decided to give Camino a try to figure out if we were seeing a Mozilla/Gecko problem.

I was blown away. Camino is much cleaner, and more importantly much faster for network operations. I’d estimate that it improves the performance of the Advanced Uploader by 30% or so. It also speeds the download of images into the player by about the same amount. I haven’t had the time to figure out exactly why, but I suspect that the network stack its providing to the applet is much better optimized and more responsive.

It’s worth taking a look!

Camino is becoming my Mac browser of choice, though I’m still a Firefox devotee on Windows/Linux.

Its been a busy couple of days for us here at MediaMaster.  TechCrunch did a writeup about us on Friday morning, and the registered user counter and uploaded file counter has been spinning ever since!   You can see the posting and comments here.  The response has been tremendously positive, and we’ve received tons of great suggestions.

There are a few recurring themes I’d like to address here:

• People want a list view of their collection.  We’re already working on this, and should have a version out in early May.
• We will give you the ability to import your iTunes playlists and ratings.  This one is coming in early May, too.
• Public message boards will be arriving in the next week or so.
• We do not currently allow you to re-download your collection once you’ve uploaded it to our service.   We plan to offer this feature shortly, but we need to do it in a way that doesn’t promote file sharing yet doesn’t place annoying restrictions on our users.   We know you want this (we want it too!), and we’ll have something for you soon.

There are a couple of bugs folks have pointed out, and we’re working on addressing them as quickly as possible.

• We have a problem that requires  us to restart a server one or twice a day.  Our increased traffic is making this worse, and we’re highly motivated to fix this quickly so we stop getting woken up in the middle of the night by our monitoring software.   For the most part playback and uploads continue without a hitch, but you might have to refresh a page.
• Some songs playback too fast or too slow (the Chipmunks effect).  We’re chasing this one down and should have a fix this week.
• Problems with the Advanced Uploader.   A few people are reporting problems with really big upload sessions (more than 5000 files), we’re looking into the issue.  There are also reports of some timeouts that we’re investigating.
• My Radio starts slowly sometimes.  Our streamer takes a few moments to get its act together the first time it plays a song, we’re working on shortening the start up time.

We’ll keep you posted on progress…

We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how to build an experience that drives people toward using our site repeatedly and for long durations.  Clearly we have to enable certain basic features in our service to make it work properly and usefully.  For example, an easy “fire-and-forget” uploading experience and an intuitive user interface that allows one to get started instantly.  While these things (and many others) are foundational, they do not necessarily represent break-through functionality.  We are excited about our design and have received lots of positive feedback, but we want to do more. 

Enabling the interplay of our users and the ability to actually listen to each other’s music are our next set of goals.  Common statistics (e.g. songs in two collections, most played songs, most collections containing a particular artist) are interesting, but really being able to enjoy and discuss a friend’s music is where we’re headed.  How a service does that, LEGALLY, is just as important as how easy that service is to use.  We have some pretty interesting ideas we’re implementing that we think you will love.  We are building a whole new paradigm for social discovery.

As we mentioned in the posting below, we upgraded our infrastructure on March 14 (5 days ago as I write this). Since we came back online, we’ve been hearing from some of you that our site is not accessible. As it turns out, this problem is due to a DNS propagation problem with some of the cable and satellite provides (particularly Hughes) and some telcos in Mexico and Europe. As you can imagine, we are very anxious to allow in anyone who wishes to use our service. We apologize if you are frustrated by this experience.

If you took the time to read through some of the explanation of how DNS works (okay, I know you didn’t), you will know that the current situation is beyond our control. But, the good news is that it should be getting better – or even corrected – by now. As an interim “shortcut”, you can go directly to our IP address here.

On 3/14 we moved to a new data center and did an extensive upgrade of our hardware, software and networking. We’re now fully redundant and have a jumbo-internet connection for your uploading and streaming pleasure.

A big thanks to Slava, Eric, Misha and Igor for lugging, plugging and upgrading! A heroic job, well done. This was the smoothest data center move I’ve ever seen.