Vienna, Austria-based tunesBag is opening up the public beta version of its social music service today, after allowing access by invitation only for the past year or so.
The launch has been a long time coming, considering the fact that the startup has already produced a fully functional web client, and Adobe-AIR powered desktop client and applications for iPhone, Facebook and Boxee since its founding in late 2008. → Read More
I’ve been tracking the progress of Vienna, Austria-based music startup tunesBag for a while now. It’s essentially a social music player that can best be compared to the likes of Lala, imeem and Anywhere.fm in the sense that it allows you to upload your entire MP3 collection, stream it from anywhere over the Internet and share it with your friends. It’s completely free and claims to be perfectly legal under Austrian law, which I’m not sure will be enough of a shield against sue-happy music labels should it become popular.
TunesBag doesn’t bring anything truly innovative to the table, but it’s always nice to know there are alternatives available, and tunesBag is a strong contender that too often remains under the radar, even if you need an invite code to get in for now.
Today, the company is hoping to change that with the release of an Adobe AIR-powered application (hence available for Windows, Mac and Linux) that brings some of its goodness to the desktop. You’ll still need an invitation code to access the service for now, but hopefully they will open up to the masses soon. Update: TunesBag came through with 500 invites. Sign up here or use the code TECHCRUNCH. → Read More
If you like the idea of listening to your music collection on whichever computer you choose but aren’t satisfied with the plethora of music lockers out there (including the very nicely designed Anywhere.fm which was acquired by Imeem recently), check out the streaming music service JukeFly as an alternative. JukeFly looks a lot like Anywhere.fm but there’s a crucial difference: instead of uploading all of your songs to JukeFly, as you would with Anywhere.fm, you download a 1.5mb client (currently only available for Windows) that will turn your computer into a streaming music server. If you leave your computer on and connected to the internet, you can go over to your friends house or a local internet cafe and play all your songs through the JukeFly website for free. Because JukeFly has opted to leave the heavy lifting to users’ own broadband connections, the company doesn’t have to deal with the costs associated with serving up audio files. But it also doesn’t assist in distributing your files to others, resulting in a limit to how many people you can share your music with at a given time (currently only one friend). To remedy this restriction, the company is working on the ability of users to upload their JukeFly playlists up to a server so they can at least share songs in them with multiple others. JukeFly supports MP3s, iTunes unencrypted formats (AAC and Apple Lossless/m4a), and Ogg Vorbis. The service should appeal to users with very large music collections since they won’t have to deal with uploading all of their songs. The two entrepreneurs behind JukeFly previously founded Tukaroo, a desktop search product that competed with Google and Yahoo’s desktop search offerings and was acquired by Ask in June 2004 (support for it has since been dropped). Development on JukeFly started in early 2007; the founders post regular updates to their blog. CrunchBase Information JukeFly Anywhere.FM Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
After less than a year in operation, the team at Anywhere.FM reached an early payday today when veteran social music service Imeem gobbled them up for an undisclosed sum, most likely in a cash and stock mix. The iTunes-style web music player had raised under $100,000 in financing from Y Combinator and angels, making an early exit likely below $5 million possible. Anywhere.FM with its 60,000 users and over 9 million uploaded songs will continue to exist as is, but the founders will be joining Imeem to complete their earnout and continue work on their iTunes-style music player at Imeem’s San Francisco office. Both Imeem and Anywhere.FM saw a lot of synergy in the deal. Anywhere.FM has the best upload and player interfaces I’ve seen, but lacked a solid monetization method. Imeem will bring its music deals and sales team to bear on the service and hopes to leverage Anywhere’s client side iTunes sync uploader, buddy radio, and recommendation technology in particular. Anywhere’s uploader can upload your entire iTunes, WinAmp, or Windows Media Player libraries, including personal playlists, song ratings and play counts, with a single click. In an email correspondence, Imeem’s CEO Dalton Caldwell hinted at the company’s future saying, “I think that an excellent and complete product that is fully licensed will win vs. the fragmented market we are seeing out there right now.” I couldn’t agree more. Although not currently announced, Anywhere.FM will likely have access to the same licensing deals Imeem struck with the major labels. The deals allow users to stream any of 5 million songs from their friends for free. Being included on the deals would mean Anywhere.FM could avoid web broadcasting rules that placed limits on how often and in what order songs could be played. Inking deals with all the majors marked a major turn around in Imeem’s history by ending the lawsuits that earlier dogged the site. But the deals came with at least Universal exacting a pound of flesh in form of some stock and a large upfront cash payment. The Financial Times said the payment was $20 million, although Imeem disagrees. Michael Robertson of MP3tunes.com, and earlier MP3.com, called it a death sentence. While the ad supported model by their executives own admission has yet to be proven, Imeem has a major leg up over the competition. They’re legal with a large library and currently have over 20 million → Read More
Musana, a digital music locker service based in France, has offered to allow the first 100 of our readers who email this address into its private beta. I’ve tried Musana out and it’s quite bare-boned. Upload MP3s from your computer and you can listen to them through the service’s simple browser-based player wherever you go. Musana is free, storage is unlimited and there are no advertisements. Both French and English versions are available. Other French music startups include Deezer and RadioblogClub. Music locker competitors include Anywhere.fm, MP3tunes, Ezmo, Maestro, and MediaMaster. CrunchBase Information Anywhere.FM Deezer Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
We’ve come a long way since the record industry sued MP3.com in 2000. Listening to copies of your digital music online is quickly becoming commonplace and Norway’s Ezmo is another web application helping push the trend. Ezmo, like Anywhere.FM, is a clone of iTunes on the web that just came to the United States. Their Flash based player lets you upload your music to the web, organize it into playlists, and share with your friends (just 10). Unlike Anywhere.FM, Ezmo lets you not only pull music from iTunes, but upload music from your Windows Media Player and Winamp music collections too. However, Anywhere.FM still wins out in my mind for the time being. I find it easier for me to use because its user interface stays truer to iTunes. Their buddy radio is also an easy way to consume new music on par with Last.FM. Ezmo only lets you share music with ten friends. The two companies compete with a host of other online music locker/streaming services like Mp3tunes, Maestro, imeem, Streampad, Songbird, and MediaMasters. However, as labels and artists free themselves from DRM, sites like these open up a way around iTunes’s stranglehold over digital music sales. DRM-free music is compatible with the extremely popular iPod, which could turn these sites into another point of sale for digital music on the device (unless they become free). Anywhere.FM has already let listeners buy songs they listen to through Amazon’s new digital downloads service. Add to that a compelling simplicity missing from older online sites (Yahoo Music, Rhapsody) and these might be the type of convenient services Ian Roger’s is looking for. → Read More
Y Combinator held their fall bi-annual Demo Day today at their Mountain View office. The fall demo day featured a whopping 19 companies giving lightning fast 7 minute elevator pitches to a room of press and potential angel investors. The companies were earlier selected during their Summer application drive. Paul Graham started off the event briskly after an initial mixer, encouraging investors to close deals fast on the 11 week old companies. Here’s a look at the presenters (note, some of the 19 companies declined mention in this roundup): Anywhere.FM We announced Anywhere.FM’s launch earlier last week. They compete in the online music locker space. However, I find a lot of these sites are more a niche segment of the storage market than a full application. Anywhere.fm is a more consumer friendly music storage solution and has set dead aim at being an online version of iTunes. Anywhere.FM’s site lets you upload your music collection onto their site, create playlists, and play them back anywhere from the web. You can even listen to your friend’s music on a “Buddy radio station”. You can easily start your library with an iTunes uploader. Over the past two weeks, they have received over 125,000 visits and had over a million songs uploaded to the site. Today they expanded on their monetization plans, which include advertising, affiliate sales, and premium accounts. They plan on inserting audio ads into your music stream and are in talks with TargetSpot to supply local audio ads. The player’s Buddy radio feature will serve as a discovery engine, which they can sell music through and generate affiliate fees. Finally, a paid premium account will provide higher quality bit rates and other TBA features. ClickPass ClickPass is making OpenID one-click consumer friendly. They declined to state greater details for now. DropBox DropBox is another entrant into the online storage market. They are creating a transparent file management system (Mac/Win) that aims to: sync your desktop files on the web, back up files, provide access anywhere, and make files easy to share. Although they are still in private beta, they showed an example of their product for the Mac. For the demo they showed how files stored in their desktop Dropbox folder were accessible and synced online. Your Dropbox files are backed up online, with a version history to provide easy rollback, and recovery in case you delete them from your → Read More
Anywhere.fm has launched a new online music player that looks and feels a lot like a web based version of the iTunes player, sans the music marketplace. Like iTunes, you can load maintain a music library, reorganize your songs into play lists, and veg out to visualizations. Anywhere.fm’s iTunes bulk uploader makes it easy to get up and running with your existing library. The company leverages the web to add portability and a social layer to their music player. There is currently no cap on the number of songs you can upload to the player, so you can create a potentially unlimited music library you can listen to anywhere. Streampad is a nearly identical product with less polish. Like a host of other social music startups, Anywhere.fm has also added music discovery features. While not as robust a discovery engine as a Last.fm and company, users can find new songs by listening to their friends’ play lists and will soon be able to find new friends based on a music compatibility score. However, due to copyright concerns, playlists from other users can only be streamed as radio stations. Playlists must be a couple songs long and played in a random order. Although, Anywhere.fm isn’t following official online radio play guidelines like Lala, which require station play lists to be at least three hours long before publishing. The company competes in the increasingly crowded online music locker services like Mp3tunes, Maestro, imeem, Streampad, Songbird, and MediaMasters. The service does benefit from being simple, free, and social, but incumbents have a steady head start. Hype Machine, RadioBlogClub, and Blogmusik are also other low hassle ways to listen to music at work. Anywhere.fm is looking to make money outside of charging users for their service. They are considering the obvious step of affiliate music sales for songs you don’t own, inserting audio ads in radio streams, and selling music directly. Currently the player lists indie music from Garage Band.com, which could turn into a direct point of sale. Anywhere.fm is a Y Combinator startup. Update: Good video review is here. → Read More
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