Thursday, March 15, 2018

Music Maker JAM Seeks Social Platform for Amateur Musicians

The neat thing about Music Maker JAM (MMJ) is its ability to let users pick and choose from thousands of clips of previously recorded individual musical instruments played in various genres, and then compile them into a completely new musical production with anywhere from one to eight tracks of music play time. Authoring with it is like playing with Legos: there are nearly infinite combination possibilities and the results are bound to please someone's ears. The result from MMJ's quality mobile versions on popular platforms like Android can be exported into other musical composition software available from MAGIX (a German-based manufacturer) for the PC (Windows 7, Windows 8/10). From what I understand you can also export your content as MP3 files--at least when using the PC versions. An Apple version also exists in the iTunes store. So obviously this is a multi-platform software application that caters to amateur composers who don't want to deal with sheet music or the more complicated musical theory or experience required when producing a melody from scratch. It gives you building blocks of common prefabricated rhythms, beats, and melodies that you can then tailor. There are also hundreds of well-thought-out and arranged settings and preferences in the app that help an amateur decide how to arrange a score and effortlessly customize things like tempo, pitch, and the right keys desired for each measure. You can copy and paste parts of your arrangement and build up the score progressively over time at your leisure, play it back repeatedly, and record the final draft to post it on MMJ's social Community site--also accessible from the app. To top it off, you can also record your own custom vocals on top of the music you create. So, although detractors (usually real musicians, unlike me) may criticize the app for how it cheats the process of original musical composition--allowing true amateurs to build masterpieces that are really based on other people's recorded instruments--the app does, in fact, offer the potential for original work. No wonder MMJ's online social Community feature is teeming with hordes of brand new users making contributions daily.

Composing a musical piece in Music Maker JAM for Android. 

And that latter feature--the social outlet--is the focus of my review. It's what makes MMJ an attractive app for many users, yet at the same time somewhat sinks its value because of its grossly under-developed social and search features. People--especially in today's socially recluse Internet and electronic commerce society--long for online interaction, if not even their own fifteen minutes of fame. MMJ, with its quick, non-technical means to put together a melody, offers the general public just that: an opportunity to shine on a potentially global performance stage. There are visibly hundreds if not thousands of European, American, and Far Eastern active users from Russia and other countries constantly on the system--and you can see them daily plopping hundreds upon hundreds of imaginative new musical arrangements there. People can play their peers' scores right from this stream-capable Community page on the app, and they can click Like and comment on each. Users can even set themselves up to follow their favorite amateur artists as they contribute new content. However, your contributions can get easily lost in the shuffle! Each time you visit the Community's "Explore" news feed, the sheer number of new contributions by the hour push down your latest new jam out of mind and out of sight. Thankfully, MMJ allows users to include customized album covers as they present their jams on the in-app Community's "Explore" news feed. Employing a clever image can make listening to a user's contributions seem more enticing as folks browse the feed. You can even search using keywords and try to find, for example, all the pieces that have the words "slam funk" in their names. I myself frankly have had a lot of trouble getting that search feature to perform accurately as searches for particular word sequences appear not to be searched for in the most expected, intuitive manner; instead they result in haphazard matches on the search result list, which will include items that may have only the title "funk", or simply items where a user's name begins with the word "slam"--neither of which truly satisfies my intended search criteria.

 

The MMJ Community is a first attempt at establishing some social interaction and exposure to Magic Maker Jam (MMJ) artists. I'm especially happy with its ability to report inappropriate or abusive content on the "Explore" musical news feed. That was definitely an important inclusion in this system considering many MMJ artists are youth and they're fairly anonymously intermingled with adults.  But as far as building a healthy, thriving online community of musical artists, that's where the quality of the social interaction stops. Abuse of the system is common, with many inappropriate images pop up on some users' album covers. There is also a significant number of deceptive users trying to usurp the identities of others or ride on their coattails by branding their songs after another contributor's successful musical posts. Even MMJ's official page on the Community is hard to identify due to the mounds of other similarly named unofficial profiles. Entirely missing also are several key elements necessary for a thriving online community of multi-genre content providers. Although there are means to discover new music, there is no precise method to search by genre classification, rate songs with any meaningful musical rating system, nor is there an established quality curation process for the rapidly growing mass of unjudged user contributions. All in all, the Community feature of MMJ is just not yet at the maturity level it needs to be for a more satisfying social experience. Coupled along with MAGIX's hodge-podge of odd, disjoint, and somewhat mismanaged web-based social networks, you unfortunately get an amateurish impression of the company. I mean, there's an MMJ page on all these social networks, but none seem to directly correlate to nor enhance the in-app Community page. They just seem to all stand apart from each other with completely incongruent user authentication systems and unrelated content threads, adding to the frustration of an already inefficient and fragmented social machine for MMJ artists:
Furthermore, to add to the plethora of confusing domain names, MMJ itself appears to be hosted on a site named justaddmusic.net, while the parent manufacturing company is at magix.com. When registering the PC app, a confirmation e-mail sends you over to a URL prefixed with https://api.jam-community.com/user/confirm, yet the resulting webpage coughs up:

{"error":"The user does not exist.","error_description":"The user does not exist."}

Obviously, the background software application handling the user registrations is either under construction or simply buggy--but it's just not a good first impression especially knowing that the app already has several years out in public release. The disparate social media presence just doesn't seem to match up with the high quality of the German manufacturing behind the main Magic Maker JAM application. This main content authoring app, in terms of what it was designed to do, is both pleasing and fun, easy to use, well put together, and robust. Unfortunately, if the company continues to fumble in its uncoordinated attempts to transition its loyal user base into this highly confusing, fragmented and ineffective mix of social outlets, many may grow disillusioned and move on to other competing social music platforms.

MMJ's in-app Community page features an "Explore" tab where you can discover new music posted to the app by international users chronologically in somewhat of a newsfeed format--just that this is not the most efficient method to find the genre of music you'd like to hear, and unfortunately, the Search feature (accessible via the magnifying glass at top right) doesn't help much in narrowing that down either.

There is some light at the end of the tunnel for MAGIX's Music Maker JAM's social platform, however: currently, a chance to publish your music to the world over more popular and well-established music streaming platforms like Spotify and iTunes is being promoted at a 10% discount (oh yeah, this is going to cost you, but you get to keep 100% of the royalty fees every time someone plays your tune on those platforms). This may be interesting to individuals who'd really like to get a chance to start a musical career. The MMJ folks are partnering with another firm called iMusician to carry out this vision. Also, a new app called Loudly is expected to be released by the company in 2018 to [hopefully] bring together all the disparate social networks it currently manages. Touted by MAGIX as "the perfect streaming community for Music Maker JAM" per the announcement on the Android app, it's still kind of hard to see how it will "bring together new music talent" as the CEO claims--especially as it now adds yet another  domain name to the already too diverse MMJ musical software application and website universe. It remains to be seen to what extent Loudly will actually address the limitations and weaknesses in MMJ's current content sharing venues--or whether it will actually finally provide aspiring MMJ amateur artists a mature, more intuitive, and functional social outlet.
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