Subscription Music Services: Who Owns your Playlists?

I'm a big fan of subscription music: I love the model of being able to listen to whatever you want whenever you want. Its all out there on the web and I don't have to be bothered with actually owning any of it. Compared to the cable TV or internet bill (or any other utility, really) $10/month seems like a small price to pay for unlimited music.

I'm an old-timer at this: I've been a Rhapsody subscriber for 5 years. If you've used Rhapsody, you probably know that it sucks. Their Windows client is built around IE. They still after all these years don't have a Mac or Linux client. Their servers often seem sluggish. Given the nature of the buisness they're in, their legal team probably dwarfs the size of their developer team. They haven't done anything innovative in years. I'm ready to get out.

There have always been other music services, but until recently, they've been about purchasing music, or have been radio format where you can't choose exactly what you listen to. But finally, Rhapsody has competition in the subscription business with services like MOG, Spotify and Rdio. MOG now has an app for my Squeezebox players, so I've signed up for a 2 week trial and am liking what I see so far. (Aside to Spotify: Facebook-only login? Really? I hear good things about you, but I'm not going to create a Facebook account to try you out.)

The problem is that after 5 years on Rhapsody, my family has hundreds of albums in "My LIbrary" (Rhapsody's term for your set of favorites) and quite a few long custom playlists. I don't want to start over from scratch to re-favorite those albums and re-create those playlists. Rhapsody owns my data and they've got me locked in. (More accurately, perhaps, Rhapsody controls my data and that's a barrier to me leaving them for a better service.)

Frankly, I'm shocked that new services like MOG have entered this market without an "import playlists" feature. Web browsers can import the bookmarks of other browsers. One of the first things MOG should have done when I signed up is to ask me for my Rhapsody credentials so that it could copy everything over. Seems like a no-brainer and a huge money-maker, so why hasn't anyone done this? Maybe there is fine-print in the Terms of Service that prevent it? Maybe all of the services are afraid they'd lose more customers than they'd gain if this became the norm?

Really, though, having MOG import my Rhapsody favorites and playlists isn't the best model anyway: then MOG controls my data and I'll run into this problem all over again if I decide to switch to some other service. The right model is that every music listener should own and control their own musical preferences. I should be able to edit my playlists using 3rd-party applications (personally, I'd like to use emacs!) and be able to sync them with any subscription services I choose. Logitech has an opportunity here to serve the owners of their Squeezebox players. Squeezebox owners (myself included) typically enter their subscription service credentials into the mysqeezebox.com site, so they are automatically in a perfect position to create a playlist transfer squeezebox app.

Really, though: this is probably a job for a trusted non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the open web: Mozilla! I imagine it would be a great project for Mozilla Labs. (I work for Mozilla, but not in Labs. I'm not speaking for Mozilla or Mozilla Labs in this post, of course.)

Technically, this shouldn't actually be too hard. Any subscription service with a Web interface (I think that is most or all of them) has an HTTP-based API for listing and editing playlists. And any service that supports Squeezebox players has a stable API that they're willing to let other devices rely upon. The Squeezebox code is open-source so it might even be possible to use some of that code. Listing a user's favorites and getting the contents of her playlists ought to be pretty easy. Adding favorites to a new service should also be relatively easy, I think. Creating and populating new playlists on a new service is probably the hardest thing. I don't think this is doable on a Squeezebox, so it may involve some reverse engineering of each service's web API.

The playlist migration and sync application I imagine would run in a web browser and would store music service credentials and playlists locally, with no server-side involvement. We'd have to write import and export modules for each music service and then also define modules for importing and exporting playlists to sharable open formats like plain-text, XML, and CSV.

I wonder if I can get something basic working before my 14-day free trial at MOG expires?
If I write any code, I'll put it up on github.

I'd love your thoughts! Please share your comments below.