Guitarati: Tapping Into the Touchy Feely Side of Music Sales

We already had iTunes plugin Moody, a way to tag and color code your music according to your mood in iTunes. Now Guitarati wants to take the Moody philosophy to a paying Web 2.0 concept. Since not everyone thinks of moods as colors, it will be interesting to see if Guitarati is able to succeed where Moody hasn't yet.

The first thing that stands out with Guitarati is its business plan. It is a Web 2.0 company that actually wants to make money instead of just offering a service for free. While free services are nice, and a limited free service is a great way to draw interest to a product or service, they are not sustainable in the long run. At some point, you have to make money to survive.

Unfortunately, while Guitarati has the concept of long term survival down pat, it doesn't seem to have the selection needed to sustain interest. Without a catalog that is big enough to keep a variety of users interested, Guitarati is starting off against huge odds. It's catalog looks especially slim in comparison to two other music services that are all the rage right now, MuxTape (free) and Grooveshark (fee based).

Is anyone really going to care about a slim selection of music sorted by color and mood tag when they can dump the color wheel and find a complete music catalog elsewhere? I'm guessing not. Other services either offer a full catalog of their own to go with their monetization plan, or a way to access your own catalog for free. I'm not convinced Guitarati can compete.

Going from color to color on the colored dot image (designed to look like a collage, but reminding me more of an ugly 1960s era shower curtain), I found not one song I knew. This is a huge deal - I have eclectic tastes from all genres. to not know any song or artist is highly unusual for me, I tend to know at least a handful everywhere I go for music online. That will definitely affect Guitarati's popularity. Even the most adventurous music lover wants to see a few familiar names here and there.

Each song is accompanied by an arrow set that lets you play a sample of the song or pay to play or download the full version. It costs a user $.01 cent to stream a full song. The cost for a download varies, as the site allows the artist and label to set their own prices. I saw some as high as $2.50 a song and many at the now traditional $.99 cents. To Guitarati's credit, it is avoiding any potential legal hassles by only uploading the songs it has a definite contract for with the label or artist. The label or artist receives 75 percent of any revenue generated on Guitarati and there is no fee to have your songs for sale there.

The songs are all DRM free, another positive for Guitarati, and the MP3s are in 192 Kbps encoding, giving you a decent sounding song file to listen to. Another feature I really liked were the lyrics, available for every song. For a music junkie like myself, I love being able to see what the artist is actually singing, as opposed to what my concert-abused hearing thinks I'm hearing. Music is poetry, and every word matters, so lyric sheets are firmly in the plus column.

Overall I think Guitarati is hobbling its own potential for success. It needs to do something about the selection, and fast. It needs to make it possible to search by more than mood for those of us who don't think about feelings in colors. It needs to set a single price of $.99 cents a song, because that is what music lovers have come to expect. Those things would help it find its footing in a crowded music Web 2.0 space.

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