Laskys E-Zine

“Just let your love mflow”

http://www.mflow.com/

I have a number of music devices and services in my life, in particular, 3: my own music collection, Spotify and last.fm. All of these perform a specific task for me, and they do that rather well, so when a new one comes a long, it always takes me a while to discover if it’s something I actually want to use and, if so, how it’s going to fit in with my listening habits.

So, today, this is what I’m going to attempt to do with mflow.

What is mflow?

Always a good starting point – I’d actually read a couple of articles / reviews on mflow before getting hold of it myself (it’s on an ‘invite only’ system at the moment, though it’s fairly easy to get an invite) and it seemed straight forward – you gather followers who you ‘flow’ music to and follow people who ‘flow’ music to you. So far, so not unlike twitter. When someone flows a track to you, it appears in your inbox, and you have the option to listen to it once in full. For all other tracks, you can listen to a 30 second preview, or you can buy it. Here’s the best part – if someone buys a track that you have flowed to them, you get 20% of the money. Only to spend on mflow tracks mind you, but that’s not so bad, right?

And that is pretty much all there is to it, so let’s have a look…

The first thing you are presented with is the friendly ‘find out what this thing you’ve installed does’ screen:

Normally, I’d just skip straight past this and dive into the software but, in the interests of doing a proper and complete review, I thought I’d go through it – turned out to be a complete waste of time. If you’ve read the paragraph above, you know all of it, all it does it point to various parts of the interface the lead you to these various functions. But as you’ve probably already guessed, they’re not really that hard to find anyway.

How can I play some music?

This is likely to be the first question you ask when opening any new music software. If you have been paying attention so far, you may have picked up on the fact that you can only listen to a full track once you’ve followed someone and they’ve flowed some music, otherwise it’s just 30 second previews… Fortunately, mflow has realised this, and set you up to automatically follow 3 of the ‘mflow’ accounts. Coupled with that is the fact that once you start following someone, their most recent 5 flows are sent to your inbox. So, immediately, you have 15 tracks in your inbox to listen to. Or, if you’re like me, and you left it a week between signing up and actually installing and running the software, you might have 50 there.

Don’t like any of the songs they’ve sent you? This is not beyond the realms of possibility, so how can you listen to something? Well, as I’ve said before, when you follow someone, their most recent 5 flows appear in you inbox, so all you have to do is find someone with the similar music taste to you, and follow them – voilà, 5 tracks to listen to.

If, at this point, you’re thinking to yourself “but I just wanted to listen to music, never mind this ‘following’ rubbish”, well I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place. Unless of course you dive straight into buying some…

OK, I’ve got last.fm on the background, how do I find people to follow?

This is simple to a certain extent, as you can probably see on the screenshot above, there are a load of people on the home screen who you can follow straight away, including the likes of Phil Jupitus and Zane Lowe – I chose the former initially, and 5 tracks appeared in my inbox.

You’ve also got a selection of ‘top recommendations’ and new people to choose from on the home screen. This is all very well and good, but soon enough you’re going to want to actively seek out people with similar tastes in music. The easiest way to do this, is to search for the music. Once you’ve found an album you like, you can see you who has recommended this the most, as well as the most recent flows. Clicking on one of these people will show you all the tracks that they’ve flowed and, if you like the look of them, you can follow them

Hang on, remind me again why I want to go through all this following malarkey?

Simple – this is the key to this service, it’s all about sharing music. These people you’re following will (if you’ve chosen well) have similar music tastes to you. Get following enough people and you could have an inbox stuffed full of new music all the time that you actually want to listen to.

Brilliant, so I’m now getting all this music to listen to. So why do I actually need to flow?

Well here’s the first problem – this service is all about discovering new music and, once you’ve got an array people to follow, that’s all you need, so why should you flow? Clearly there’s the whole social element here, where you contribute to the community by sharing the music you like so people can follow you and discover said music. Other than this, as far as I can tell, there are 2 reasons to flow: To validate / show off your taste in music.

1. To validate / show off your taste in music.
   This is not dissimilar to the whole twitter ethos. Let’s be honest here, if you’re not a celebrity, no-one actually cares what you are doing with your day, so why should they care about your music tastes?
   Well they won’t – they’ll only care if it’s a song they like and, if that’s the case, chances are they won’t care who it came from, just that it’s a good song. (See previous social / community point).
2. Money.
   Yes, that’s right, you can actually get money using this – as I said right at the beginning, if someone buys a track that you’ve flowed, you get 20% of the price they paid – that’s 15.8p for a 79p track. As far as I know, this is only to spend in mflow though.

The obvious question now is why would someone choose to buy something here rather than on whatever their current online music store is?

I guess one theory is that this is all cyclic – people buy because someone has bought 5 tracks they’ve flowed, so they’ve got enough money to buy one. Of course, this isn’t sustainable, people (including you) will have to feed in actual money at some point, at the very least, at the beginning of the cycle, otherwise it’ll just run out. This raises a similar question – will people actually put money into this or will they just join in the hope that people will buy what they flow and get them some free music? My vote is for the latter.

Couple with that the fact that not all music is on here – iTunes, for example, has a far wider selection – and once people realise they can’t get all the music they want here, they just go straight back to iTunes (other online music stores are available).

Free music? I’ll have some of that… so how do I get people to follow me?

I’m not sure… I flowed a few tracks this morning, after checking at 4, I still had no followers… From what I’ve seen, the best way to get yourself noticed is a flow a load of songs that people like (for hints, look at the current charts) and, in amongst that, flow a load of tracks from a really popular album. This will put you up on the ‘top recommenders’ list for the album – make sure you don’t flow  loads of tracks from the same album in a row otherwise people will see those in your most recent flows and think you’re a loser.

That all sounds a bit artificial…

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. Or I have, I’m not sure any more. If you accept that the only reason to flow is to make money to get more music, it soon becomes apparent that there’s no reason to flow music that you actually like – just flow the stuff you think people will buy. When it comes to the discovering new music, you can follow people who haven’t realised this yet, and are still flowing music they like. Spotting the problem here yet…? If everyone picks up on this, people will only be flowing the popular music, the whole ‘finding new music’ bit goes out the window (unless you’re into all that popular stuff) and people just start using to target teenagers with mummy’s credit card to make them some money.

Conclusion

OK, so this review has taken a slightly cynical direction, so I’m going to attempt to round up the main points here.

The principle here is a good one – it picks up on one of the main reasons people still use last.fm in conjunction with Spotify – there’s no easy way to discover new music through Spotify. The concept of following people with similar music tastes to find new music is brilliant and should work really well.

Unfortunately, there are too many reasons why the implementation just isn’t that great:

• The big difference between this and other free services is that you can’t listen to what you want, when you want to unless you buy the music.
• If you’re buying music, most other online stores have a much wider selection – after just an hour, I came across several CDs I own that weren’t on mflow. This is the kind of thing that will make people just go back to their preferred music store when they want to buy something.
• The ‘paid’ incentive model works against the ideal of sharing what you actually like vs. sharing what you think people will buy.

So, as I said, while the concept is brilliant, the implementation just isn’t. The fact that there’s no incentive to tweet and people still do it means the whole paid model is unnecessary. My current set up involves last.fm, and a twitter search for ‘spotify’ to discover new music, and this works well for me. If Spotify implemented a similar sharing model, I could see that working, but as for this, I’m not a fan.

If you do want to follow me, search for ‘eambrose’ – I can’t promise I’ll actually use it any more though…