Streaming music services like Spotify and Rdio are transforming the way we listen to music, but spotting differences in their catalogs is nearly impossible for the casual listener. The licensing landscape is constantly shifting, with songs appearing and disappearing as labels try to make up their minds.

To help you decide which service is right for you, I’m using the developer APIs provided by each service to go crate-digging into each catalog to see which service comes out on top.

Last time, we looked at 5,000 critically loved albums on both services, with Rdio barely edging ahead of Spotify. That’s great for music geeks who can’t live without “Marquee Moon,” “Bitches Brew” and “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” But it leaves more mainstream, single-oriented music fans out in the cold.

If you love pop music, this is your week. We’re digging into 56 years of Billboard charts, searching Spotify and Rdio for every year’s top 100 from 1955 to 2011 — from Elvis Presley and Dean Martin to Rick Ross and Waka Flocka Flame.

How It Works

The Billboard chart data comes from the Whitburn Project, a group of obsessive music collectors who have been quietly compiling historical chart data on Usenet since 1998. Originally intended to help complete their MP3 collections, they used multiple sources to create a spreadsheet of over over 38,500 songs dating back to 1890, with 112 columns of raw data, including each song’s duration, beats per minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart position.

Here’s a sample of the most recent Whitburn spreadsheet from November 11, 2011, so you can see the fields they entered.

With the spreadsheet, I selected the top 100 songs that stayed at the top of the charts the longest each year starting in 1955, and pulled it into a database for easy manipulation.

With these 5,700 songs, I then wrote a script to search the Rdio and Spotify APIs for each track. To standardize artist and song names, I used the Echo Nest’s Song.search API. As before, I’m only checking U.S. availability, since Rdio is limited to the United States and Canada only.

Disclaimer: Variations in artist and song names can lead to some missed results, and false positives can crop up due to karaoke versions and tribute bands. I’ve tried to weed out most of the bad results, but didn’t check all 5,700 results by hand. That said, it doesn’t seem like any error favors Spotify or Rdio, so the results should be fair, if imperfect.

Results

Of the 5,700 songs in the top 100, 5,026 (88 percent) were available on both Spotify and Rdio. An additional 81 (1.4 percent) were only on Spotify, and 100 (1.7 percent) only available on Rdio. If we limit it to only the 570 top-10 singles, 518 songs (over 90 percent) were available on both Spotify and Rdio.

The chart below shows the percentage of the top 100 available per year on Spotify and Rdio. At a glance, you can see how deep both of their catalogs are. It’s very rare for either service to have less than 80 percent of the top 100 in a given year. (Note that the Beatles singlehandedly lower their coverage in the mid- to late-1960s.)

Here’s the average percentage by decade:

Let’s start by looking at the holdouts, the top-charting artists that aren’t available for streaming on either service. As in the album analysis, The Beatles top the list with 35 missing hits, but the rest of the list is very different. All 11 of the Eagles’ top hits are unavailable, Bob Seger fans will be bummed to hear his 10 (!) charting singles are missing, and most of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ post-1991 hits are unavailable for streaming. The Dave Clark Five’s eight hits from the mid-1960s are all missing, and Aaliyah’s estate is apparently protective of her work, blocking access to her eight big singles.

Other surprising holdouts: Hootie and the Blowfish, Joan Jett, and Roberta Flack. A handful of one-hit wonders are missing entirely, depriving the world of songs like Another Bad Creation’s 1990 debut “Iesha” and Rick Dees’ “Disco Duck” from 1976.

The Exclusives

Both services stream virtually every song every to appear on the Billboard charts, but they don’t overlap perfectly. Each have secured different licenses with record labels, giving each exclusive access to some songs and artists.

If you want to hear the 14 singles released by Paul McCartney, solo and with Wings, you can only hear them on Rdio. Same for LeAnn Rimes, Monica, and Fergie. Spotify, on the other hand, didn’t have exclusive access for any artist with more than two charting singles in the yearly top 100 charts.

Below, I’ve listed the top 20 tracks exclusive to each service, ordered by their overall yearly ranking.

Only on Rdio

Only on Spotify

Paul McCartney — My Love (#3, 1973) Paul McCartney — Say Say Say (#4, 1983) Monica — The First Night (#4, 1998) Christina Aguilera — Lady Marmalade (#6, 2001) Kyu Sakamoto — Sukiyaki (#7, 1963) Monica — Angel Of Mine (#7, 1999) Fergie — London Bridge (#7, 2006) *NSYNC — It’s Gonna Be Me (#11, 2000) Paul McCartney — Coming Up (Live At Glasgow) (#12, 1980) LeAnn Rimes — How Do I Live (#12, 1997) Fergie — Big Girls Don’t Cry (#12, 2007) Wings — With A Little Luck (#13, 1978) Divine — Lately (#13, 1998) Red Hot Chili Peppers — Under The Bridge (#20, 1992) LL Cool J — Loungin’ (#20, 1996) Monica — For You I Will (#20, 1997) Enrique Iglesias — Hero (#21, 2001) Paul McCartney — Band On The Run (#22, 1974) Merril Bainbridge — Mouth (#23, 1996) Wings — Listen To What The Man Said (#24, 1975)

Mariah Carey — Don’t Forget About Us (#7, 2005) Steve Miller Band, The — Abracadabra (#9, 1982) Patti Austin — Baby, Come To Me (#10, 1983) Dr. Dre — Nuthin’ But A G Thang (#14, 1993) Shocking Blue, The — Venus (#20, 1970) Mike & The Mechanics — The Living Years (#24, 1989) Salt ‘N Pepa — Shoop (#29, 1993) Ashlee Simpson — Pieces Of Me (#33, 2004) String-A-Longs, The — Wheels (#36, 1961) Irene Cara — Fame (#38, 1980) Climax Blues Band — Couldn’t Get It Right (#42, 1977) Yael Naim — New Soul (#43, 2008) Madonna — Don’t Cry For Me Argentina (#48, 1997) Dr. Dre — Dre Day (#49, 1993) Technotronic — Move This (#50, 1992) Erykah Badu — Love Of My Life (An Ode To Hip Hop) (#54, 2003) Paperboy — Ditty (#55, 1993) Johnny Thunder — Loop De Loop (#57, 1963) Tee Set, The — Ma Belle Amie (#59, 1970) Gerry and the Pacemakers — Ferry Across the Mersey (#61, 1965)

Conclusion

Both services do an extraordinary job at including music history’s most popular songs. Virtually every song was available on Spotify and Rdio, a huge change from the previous album-oriented analysis. Again, much to my surprise, Rdio comes out slightly on top. Spotify’s international catalog fills most of these gaps, so expect things to heat up rapidly over the next year as they secure more of those licenses for the United States.

Have any questions about this analysis, or anything missing you’d like to see? Leave a comment and let me know.

(Note: This was originally published for my column at Wired.)

The new generation of streaming music services like Spotify, Rdio, and MOG have more music than you could consume in a lifetime. But how much of it would you really want to listen to?

There’s no shortage of great roundups and reviews showing the pros and cons of each service, but they rarely talk specifically about the different music you can find on each. They’ve all built impressive catalogs, but it’s nearly impossible to tell from casual browsing which artists and albums are exclusives for each.

Fortunately, both Rdio and Spotify offer powerful developer APIs, making it simple to compare the two. (Sadly, MOG doesn’t offer an API, so isn’t included.)

For this test, I needed a large set of popular, well-loved albums to test. I used the top 5,000 albums from Rate Your Music, the quirky 11-year-old online community dedicated to rating and reviewing music. These albums span all genres, from klezmer to chiptune, with a total of 2,282 different artists across 70 years of recorded music.

I used the Spotify and Rdio search APIs to look up each album, and checked their streaming availability in the United States. (Rdio uses the IP address to determine country of origin, making it impossible to query other countries. Spotify, on the other hand, returns a list of every region the album’s available.)

Note: The results aren’t perfect. Spotify and Rdio often have slight differences between artist and album names, which can deliver false positives. Let me know if you spot anything amiss and I’ll correct it.

Results

Of the top 5,000, about 44% were available on both Spotify and Rdio. 4.8% of the albums were only available on Spotify, while a further 6.8% were only available on Rdio. Overall, 56% of the albums were streamable on at least one of the services.

Labels are still withholding most or all of the albums from many popular artists. The Beatles, King Crimson, AC/DC, The Eagles, Tool, De La Soul, Peter Gabriel, Led Zeppelin, and Metallica are nowhere to be found, as well as most of the best albums by The Kinks. Music geeks will be sad to discover that Frank Zappa, Coil, Spacemen 3, and Joanna Newsom are all missing, as well. This landscape will constantly shift as labels change their minds; Arcade Fire was added to Spotify yesterday, and more than 200 indie labels left the streaming services last month.

But what about albums that are exclusive only to one service? The results surprised me. Spotify has a reputation for having a deeper catalog, but at least for historic critically-regarded albums, Rdio has a better selection of both popular and obscure artists. More albums in the top 5,000 were available on Rdio, and they offer exclusive access in the U.S. to huge acts like Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, the White Stripes, and Queen.

Top Exclusive Artists

Here’s a list of the top 20 artists exclusive to each service, with the number of exclusive albums in parentheses.

Only on Rdio	Only on Spotify
Bob Dylan (12) Pink Floyd (8) Bruce Springsteen (7) Miles Davis (6) The Gathering (5) Blind Guardian (4) Can (4) William Basinski (4) Iced Earth (4) Stars of the Lid (3) The White Stripes (3) John Williams (3) Queen (3) Nevermore (3) Thelonious Monk (3) Charles Mingus (3) Bill Hicks (3) John Coltrane (2) Camel (2) Keith Jarrett (2)	My Dying Bride (4) Miles Davis (4) Candlemass (3) Funkadelic (3) The Pretty Things (3) Current 93 (3) Darkthrone (3) Underworld (3) Katatonia (3) CunninLynguists (3) Charles Mingus (2) Mahavishnu Orchestra (2) The Jesus Lizard (2) The Misfits (2) Klaus Schulze (2) John Coltrane (2) Galaxie 500 (2) Silvio Rodríguez (2) Secos & Molhados (2) maudlin of the Well (2)

Note that artists like Miles Davis and John Coltrane appear on both lists because of how prolific they were. Both are well-represented in Spotify and Rdio, but some critically-adored out-of-print albums are unavailable on both.

Top Exclusive Albums

Digging into the albums, Rdio wins again. Nine of the top 100 albums are only found on Rdio, while only one is exclusive to Spotify. In fact, there are only 32 albums in the top 1,000 available on Spotify alone. Below is the top 30 for each service, along with their Rate Your Music ranking.

Only on Rdio

Only on Spotify

Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited Bob Dylan – Blonde on Blonde The Clash – London Calling Bob Dylan – Bringing It All Back Home Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks Pink Floyd – Animals Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan Bob Dylan – Another Side of Bob Dylan Bob Dylan – The Times They Are A-Changin’ Dr. Dre – The Chronic Stars of the Lid – The Tired Sounds Of Camel – Moonmadness The White Stripes – Elephant Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago John Williams – Raiders of the Lost Ark Popol Vuh – Hosianna Mantra Jethro Tull – Nothing Is Easy: Live at the Is… Albert King – Born Under a Bad Sign Keith Jarrett – Vienna Concert Dead Kennedys – Plastic Surgery Disasters Thin Lizzy – Black Rose: A Rock Legend Magic Sam – West Side Soul Bob Dylan & The Band – The Basement Tapes Eric Dolphy – Out There Blind Guardian – Live Devin Townsend – Terria Strapping Young Lad – City Pretenders – Pretenders

The Zombies – Odessey and Oracle Candlemass – Nightfall Funkadelic – Standing on the Verge of Getting… The Jesus Lizard – Goat The Pretty Things – Parachute The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra – The Jazz Comp… Klaus Schulze – X Sodom – Agent Orange Danny Elfman – Edward Scissorhands Galaxie 500 – Today Current 93 – All the Pretty Little Horses Secos & Molhados – Secos & Molhados maudlin of the Well – Bath Sun Kil Moon – Ghosts of the Great Highway Anathema – Alternative 4 Darkthrone – A Blaze in the Northern Sky The Byrds – Fifth DimensionMost Popular The Gun Club – Miami Autopsy – Severed Survival My Dying Bride – Turn Loose the Swans The Jesus Lizard – Liar Vektor – Black Future maudlin of the Well – Leaving Your Body Map Jean Michel Jarre – Oxygene 16 Horsepower – Secret South Riverside – Out of Myself Darkthrone – Transilvanian Hunger Nino Rota – Amarcord Suede – Suede Darkthrone – Under a Funeral Moon

Unless you’re a huge fan of Norwegian death metal, it’s hard to see this as anything but a win for Rdio. The fact is that both services have done a tremendous job of building the celestial jukebox — with a couple of high-profile exceptions, nearly everything you’d ever want to listen to is available at your fingertips.

Now, one huge drawback of using the Rate Your Music list is that it skews towards older album-oriented music geeks. That’s great if you like Ornette Coleman and Galaxie 500, but not so great if you like Drake and Katy Perry.

Next week, we’ll set the controls for the heart of mainstream music: the Billboard charts, analyzing every charted single in the top 100 from 1955 to the present. This will give us a completely different view of their catalogs, focused on pop singles, past and present, instead of classic albums.

Want more? Ed Summers did his own fascinating deep-dive into Spotify and Rdio uses top album lists from Alf Eaton’s Album of the Year list collection, and published the results on Google Fusion Tables. Also, try Matt Montag’s Music Smasher, a tool that searches Rdio, Spotify, and Grooveshark.

(Note: This was originally published for my Wired column.)

On October 26, a YouTube user named crimewriter95 posted a full-length version of Pulp Fiction, rearranged in chronological order.

A couple things struck me about this video.

First, I’m surprised that a full-length, 2.5-hour very slight remix of a popular film can survive on YouTube for over six weeks without getting removed. Now that it’s on Kottke and Buzzfeed, I’m guessing it won’t be around for much longer.

But I was just as amused by the video description:

“The legendary movie itself placed into chronological order. If you’d like me to put the full movie itself up, let me know and I’ll be glad to oblige. Please no copyright infringement. I only put this up as a project.”

These “no copyright infringement intended” messages are everywhere on YouTube, and about as effective as a drug dealer asking if you’re a cop. It’s like a little voodoo charm that people post on their videos to ward off evil spirits.

How pervasive is it? There are about 489,000 YouTube videos that say “no copyright intended” or some variation, and about 664,000 videos have a “copyright disclaimer” citing the fair use provision in Section 107 of the Copyright Act.

Judging by his username, I’m guessing crimewriter95 is 16 years old. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of those million videos were uploaded by people under 21.

He’s hardly alone. On YouTube’s support forums, there’s rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no “intentional copyright infringement.” Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID.

YouTube’s tried to combat these misconceptions with its Copyright School, but it seems futile. For most people, sharing and remixing with attribution and no commercial intent is instinctually a-okay.

Under current copyright law, nearly every cover song on YouTube is technically illegal. Every fan-made music video, every mashup album, every supercut, every fanfic story? Quite probably illegal, though largely untested in court.

No amount of lawsuits or legal threats will change the fact that this behavior is considered normal — I’d wager the vast majority of people under 25 see nothing wrong with non-commercial sharing and remixing, or think it’s legal already.

Here’s a thought experiment: Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote.

What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office? (Maybe “I downloaded but didn’t share” will be the new “I smoked, but didn’t inhale.”)

Remix culture is the new Prohibition, with massive media companies as the lone voices calling for temperance. You can criminalize commonplace activities from law-abiding people, but eventually, something has to give.

Update, February 11: Everybody’s singing the YouTube Disclaimer Blues.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Occupy Wall Street first started on Twitter. As the New York Times reported Monday, the #occupywallstreet hashtag was conceived in July, a full two months before the first tent was pitched at Zuccotti Park.

As it grew from a single camp into a movement, Twitter was essential for getting real-time updates out as events unfolded, for both supporters and local government.

Particularly in the last month, some city officials have used Twitter as a tool to keep people informed. Even as they were dismantling camps, the mayors of New York City and Portland, Oregon were posting real-time updates and responding to citizens directly.

While city officials have actively communicated their positions, the response from the federal government has been muted, at best. The Occupy movement’s concerns are much larger than city politics, with most proposed demands requiring cooperation from Washington.

So far, official statements are isolated and infrequent — an early endorsement from the president, a couple of statements from the White House press secretary, and a range of opinions from individual members of Congress.

But maybe the situation’s different online? Twitter is much more casual and conversational, and social media-savvy federal agencies often respond directly to queries and complaints from their followers. It’s possible that federal employees are addressing questions and concerns about Occupy on Twitter instead.

I decided to find out.

Data Wrangling

I originally gathered this data to build the Federal Social Media Index, a weekly report that compares federal agencies using Twitter, which I’m happy to release today as part of my work at Expert Labs.

Starting with an index of over 450 U.S. government departments and agencies, I asked the anonymous workforce at Amazon Mechanical Turk to find official Twitter accounts for each one.

Three workers researched each agency, and I approved the ones they agreed on and hand-checked the rest.

When I was done, I had a list of 126 official Twitter accounts representing a wide swath of U.S. government, from the Secret Service to the Postal Service. (Browse them all on the Federal Social Media Index or in the spreadsheet below.)

To collect all the tweets, I used ThinkUp, a free, open-source tool for archiving and analyzing social-media activity on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ that I work on at Expert Labs.

With this dataset, I could easily tell which federal agency is the most popular (NASA), the most prolific (the NEA), and the most likely to reply to you personally (the US Census Bureau).

It also makes it very easy to see who’s talking about Occupy, and who isn’t.

Occupy Silence

Since the Occupy protests started in mid-September, nearly 15,000 messages were posted by the 126 federal Twitter accounts.

Of those accounts, only three have mentioned the Occupy protests in any way — Voice of America, the Smithsonian, and the White House.

For those unfamiliar with it, VOA is a radio and television news network broadcasting in 100 countries in 59 languages, but banned from airing in the United States because of propaganda laws. As part of their daily news coverage, they’ve tweeted about Occupy nine times since the protests began. (Here’s the most recent.)

Second, the Smithsonian responded to a tweet by Complex Magazine, refuting rumors of an OWS-themed museum exhibit.

The only other mention of the Occupy protests: one tweet from the White House nearly two months ago.

Opening Up

The obvious reason for the silence is that the federal government doesn’t yet have a position on Occupy. If they haven’t issued a formal statement, blog post, or press conference, then why Tweet?

For starters, it’s a humane and natural way to open a dialogue with a generally forgiving audience. Some of these agencies have tens or hundreds of thousands of people who care about what they have to say, or they wouldn’t be following them.

Proactively talking about potentially challenging issues like Occupy is an opportunity to bring some humanity to government, and maybe even help shape policy.

(Note: This was originally published in my column in WIRED.)

I was stunned and appalled by the UC Davis Police spraying protestors, but struck by how many brave, curious people recorded the events. I took the four clearest videos and synchronized them. Citizen journalism FTW. Sources below.

Best viewed in HD fullscreen.

Top

briocloud, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8Uj1cV97XQ

jamiehall1615, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuWEx6Cfn-I

Bottom

OperationLeakS, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjnR7xET7Uo

asucd, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4