SpiralFrog has just announced the site is up to over 1 million uniques each month and expected to end this month with over 1.2 million uniques. SpiralFrog, for those of you who don’t remember, is the free (as in ad supported, not P2P) legal music service that unlocks over 1 million songs to their users as long as they log back in to their site at least once every month (an easy task if you update your library frequently). The songs are downloads and played as WMA files under DRM controls. While you’d think the main advantage of a download is portability, most people won’t be able to take songs off their computer because they use iPods that can’t play the WMA files. See more details in our earlier coverage. The songs come from some pretty unique deals with the big labels UMG, EMI, and BMI. In exchange, labels get a share of the ad revenue and affiliate song sales on the site and the comfort of control through the service’s DRM. However, SpiralFrog was over a year in the making and only officially launched last September. A lot has changed since then. Music prices have dropped, DRM is dead (for paid tracks at least), and new legal/questionably legal sites have popped up to serve up free tunes. Competition includes HypeMachine, RadioBlogClub, Deezer, InTune.fm, Mog, Last.fm, Imeem, and a bunch of other sites. One key difference is that users on these sites stream music instead of downloading it, but that doesn’t seem to be slowing down their growth rates. Imeem, which follows an ad splitting model similar to SpiralFrog, did over 3 million monthly uniques around the time SpiralFrog launched last year. Lets not forget that Yahoo may be treading in this territory as well. CrunchBase Information SpiralFrog HypeMachine Deezer MOG Imeem Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Those familiar with Paris-based RadioBlogClub were greeted with a service outage this morning. You may remember it from the comments in our coverage of the web iPod emulator, Blogmusik, which is also down. The music streaming service’s traffic has busted the seams of their old web server and they’re moving on to a beefier one. It’s easy to see why. A quick glance at the Alexa stats shows them in Pandora’s ballpark. While the original intent of the site is to provide easy song streaming embeds for music bloggers, I have a feeling RadioBlogClub is so popular because it’s also an easy way to get free music. The service works by acting as a hub, linking the music stored on various members websites (kind of like the inverse of HypeMachine). Bloggers feed the site links to their music by running their songs through a converter before uploading them to their site. The converter changes MP3s to the site’s RBS format and registers the songs with their database. All the songs registered on the site can be played individually or in user generated playlists on the main site or in embedded widgets like the one below. http://stat.radioblogclub.com/radio.blog/skins/mini/player.swf While the site streams and doesn’t explicitly promote downloading, sites have already popped up to enable them. This is the same lesson YouTube learned when we released our own YouTube movie downloader and got slapped with a take down notice. It hits home on the same content control problems we’ve ranted about before. Any content streamed to your system can be captured and DRM systems have a bad habit of getting cracked. Bill Gates is understandably dissatisfied with the state of DRM and Steve Jobs publicly called for the its death. The music (TV/Movie) industry needs a new revenue model fast (not a music tax). We like Amie Street’s model so far, especially their free Barenaked Ladies album. TechCrunch France broke the story. UPDATE: Ouriel Ohayon of TCF reported RadioBlogClub has been forced to move their hosting provider (currently OVH) under pressure of the French version of the RIAA, called SACEM. → Read More
Keeping with the theme of Mike’s Online Photo Editing Overview, I wanted to cover some of the entrants into social music. Music was probably the first type of rich media to really go “Web 2.0″ and it’s become a pretty popular place for startups. As a result, there are some great Rich Internet Applications built around social music. Anyone who makes music a part of their daily lives has no shortage of options when it comes to finding new music and sharing with friends. FineTune Finetune is a relatively new application written in Flash. It’s my favorite out of the bunch and I covered it on my ZDNet blog. What makes Finetune stand out is that in addition to the standard “artist radio”, it allows users to build playlists of specific songs. The minimum playlist is 45 songs and you can have up to three songs per artist. With custom playlists, you can make sure you’re only listening to songs you want. Finetune also gets points because in addition to the web version, it runs on the Wii and there is an Apollo-based desktop client. Pandora Pandora is the granddaddy of the bunch and it’s one of the Web 2.0 applications that Mike can’t live without. It is built using OpenLaszlo and provides the cleanest experience out of all the applications on the list. Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to generate a stream of songs that you’ll like based on how you rate previous tracks. You create stations around artists, songs or albums and you can provide feedback (thumbs up or thumbs down) on the songs Pandora chooses. Tech Crunch’s coverage of Pandora is here. Last.Fm last.fm is another Web 2.0 veteran and is more socially-slanted than the others. Tagging is a big part of the last.fm experience and you can tag any song that comes along in addition to being able to listen to “user tag radio” which is based on tracks that users have tagged with a specific genera. last.fm has a separate desktop application that “scrobbles” the songs you listen to and generates a music profile that you can share with friends. See Tech Crunch’s coverage of last.fm here. MOG MOG is all about a music community. It’s very blog-centric and revolves around user pages, or “Mogs”. You build your Mog around songs you’re listening too and artists you like. That builds something like a profile → Read More
