Guvera Isn't Perfect But It's Pretty Damn Good

Australia's music streaming service Guvera was finally available in Indonesia last Tuesday following a few months of beta period and the service was given a full refresh which included the debut of listener profiles and celebrity playlists. How does the service fare so far?

I've been using Guvera on the iPhone and iPad and I have to say that it's pretty damn close to how I would expect a music streaming service to be. It's definitely not perfect, which is what this post is all about, but it's a far better proposition than most offerings I've checked out in the past.

Basic UsageWhen you sign up for Guvera you can choose between using Facebook or email address. The benefit of using Facebook is that you can look up other friends on Facebook who may have already signed up and follow their playlists if you're interested. I went with email.

Guvera has dozens of preset playlists for your to follow and perhaps use as a guide for your own future playlists should you choose to create some yourself. Having Iga Massardi, formerly of the indie band The Trees and the Wild, and Seringai's Arian Arifin as music directors certainly helped Guvera to deliver the kinds of playlists that fit the different moods that you might have during the day or the week.

As for the mobile apps, it's pretty easy to use. I don't use Guvera on the computer though but the experience is identical, you can do pretty much the same things. Anyway, the app lets you create and edit your profile and song playlists, easily add and remove tracks from them, search for songs by artists, albums, and track titles as well as categories. It even automatically downloads tracks for offline access and you can set how much space in your device Guvera is allowed to use for offline storage.

Because each track takes roughly 2 MB, I don't set a maximum limit since they won't take up that much space anyway. Audio quality is pretty good but not audiophile level, so don't kid yourself.

20 million tracks, still can't find iconic songs Faced with a library of about 20 million songs can be daunting if you're not prepared, so take it easy from the start. The collection may be massive but it's not exhaustive, especially when it comes to older songs or the less popular collections. Songs from Saturday Morning Cartoons soundtrack album for example, one of my favorite albums, aren't there.

Forget about looking for classic Metallica albums. Or The Beatles. Or Rolling Stones. Or AC/DC. It's slim pickings for those bands and live performance CDs don't count. These bands and their songs may not be there but there's tens of millions of songs in Guvera's collection and dozens of albums get added all the time, so the collection is definitely growing.

Given that the majority of Indonesian music consumers listen to Indonesian songs, it's important for any music service to have local artists on board. Guvera works with many local music labels, both major and independent, which means it's able to deliver many Indonesian songs, but unfortunately the library isn't that comprehensive.

According to Arian Arifin, local labels face the issue of not having digitized their entire music catalog all the way back to the early days of recorded music in Indonesia, and then there's the issue of missing master recordings and so on. This limits Indonesian music availability to the more popular and the more recent ones.

Other Issues with the service For the general enjoyment of music, Guvera's mobile app is pretty awesome but not without issues. Playlist is one aspect that could be improved while sharing is another. There's also a scroll jump issue which will be explained a little later

Let's deal with the playlist first. Despite having the tracks on the right order as listed on the main library, when you add an album to your own playlist, the tracks get randomized. If you look at your album collection in your personal library, the tracks in that album gets sorted alphabetically and there's no way to sort them based on original listing. This can be problematic with albums that are meant to be listened to in sequence.

When it comes to music, people love to tell their friends what they're listening to, what their favorite albums or artists are, and whether there's a great new music that they should check out. In this ultimate age of sharing you'd expect a music streaming company would understand that.

Guvera is practically anything but social at this point. The only way you can tell people what you're listening to is by sharing it to Facebook. Well, many of us prefer Twitter over Facebook and in a country like Indonesia where Twitter activity is through the roof, you need to make that option available.

There are frameworks within iOS that allows sharing to both Facebook and Twitter. Why the Guvera team did not take advantage of this is puzzling and shortsighted especially given the commercial possibilities it can bring. It should also be able to share them at least through email and text message and I'm dumbfounded that these aren't available.

There's hope though. According to Skybee CEO Pontus Sonnerstedt, who heads the Guvera operation in Indonesia, concerns about lack of sharing options has been made loud and clear to the company executives down under.

The one major social element that Guvera seems to have yet to implement is to be able to find certain people or their custom playlists. You can follow Guvera's own playlists and the celebrity playlists it creates, but you can't yet follow your friend's playlists if you don't sign in with Facebook.

Thirdly, the scroll jump. When you're scrolling through an album or a playlist, for some reason the screen will jump and snap back to the top several times, making it an unpleasant experience. This seems to happen only within the first several seconds of loading any list, but it's still distracting nonetheless.

Overall very promising and worth subscribing to Whether you're a music enthusiast or a casual listener, it's worth checking Guvera out despite the issues mentioned on this post because they're primarily software issues and bound to be fixed or taken care of eventually. The service offers a five day trial if you're not willing to jump right in with a subscription and if you are, it doesn't cost that much compared to buying one full album a month for the entire year.

Of course, once you decide to stop subscribing, you'll lose access to all the songs including the ones you've stored offline since it is a subscription service and you're paying for access to the songs, not for the songs themselves.