Mike first covered Amie Street back in 2006. At the time, he was a big fan. Back then, the startup was targeting a new music model, which allowed musicians to upload their songs to Amie Street’s platform, offering those tracks to listeners for free. The more downloads the songs attracted, the price would slowly increase — the price then indicating the song’s popularity. In what now looks like a savvy decision, Amie Street sold to Amazon last September for an undisclosed amount, deciding to focus its efforts on Songza: The social Internet radio service it acquired in 2008.

Today, after much iterating and tinkering, Songza is launching free mobile apps for iOS and Android that allow users to create and share personalized music collections — in the comfort of the cloud. Songza Co-founder and CEO Elias Roman likens the service to a “music concierge”, in that it serves users with playlists created by experts (and friends) for whatever mood or musical experience you could possible want. “The future of music will be driven by the convergence of expert and social curation”, the co-founder said.

While iTunes, Google Music, and beyond offer some neat customizable playlist options, Roman has a point. We are more likely to go in for playlists created by musicians, critics, and DJs we trust — as well as those created by friends — elaborate algorithms can only take one so far. Pandora and its Genome Project being a terrific example.

Today, listeners want big, free music collections that are easy to build, easy to keep fresh, accessible anywhere and sharable with their friends. Roman said that he thinks Songza offers just that kind of solution, as it features over 75,000 playlists created by actual people (including music experts, celebrities, artists and record labels), as well as allowing any user to create their own playlist from Songza’s library of over 14.5 million songs.

And speaking of Pandora (and Spotify to boot), Songza’s value proposition is significantly aided by the fact that it is free of audio advertisements and has no monthly listening limits.

The startup also announced today that it has closed a seven-figure round of financing led by investors that had previously backed AmieStreet.com, including Deep Fork Capital as well as an “undisclosed strategic investor”. Also participating in the round was Geoff Judge, co-founder of 24/7 Real Media, who will be joining Songza’s board of directors.

The startup’s new mobile apps for iOS and Android not only allow users to create personalized and sharable music collections in the cloud but also offers social discovery functionality via Facebook by allowing users to tap into the playlists their friends are listening to and creating.

Along with social discovery, Songza’s mobile app users can take advantage of expert-curated discovery through the startup’s bullpen of playlists that run the gamut in activities, genres, moods, and cultures. Users can find playlists for dinner parties, coding, or BBQ-ing, for example.

Songza is trying to offer a music experience that is comparable in the breadth of its feature set yet distinguishable enough in concept from popular music services like Spotify, Pandora, and Turntable.fm to make a mark on the music space. A monopoly on streaming playlists seems to be the end game. But chime in and let us know what you think.

Amie Street is one of those startups that just got me – love at first site if you will. I first discovered them in 2006, calling it an awesome new music model. Artists upload songs and those songs are free to download to start. As more downloads occur the price goes up. A cent, fifty cents, etc., up to $1.

The price of the song is an indication of how good it is, as friends share the good stuff with others.

Over time a lot of artists tried out the service, songs were downloaded over 10 million times, and the company raised venture capital from Amazon and others.

And today, the company will announce that Amazon has acquired the Amie Street business. Going forward the team will focus on Songza, which they acquired in 2009.

Amazon will redirect Amie Street to a new cobranded Amie Street/Amazon Music Service site and give users a $5 coupon to purchase songs on Amazon. But while the users and the brand are being acquired, Amazon will most likely ditch the business model, say the founders (stressing that they don’t know for sure).

Much like imeem’s acquisition by MySpace, this is more of a traffic acquisition than anything else. The terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed.

The team seems bullish on Songza, which lets users create custom playlists/radio stations and share them with friends. Since relaunching less than a month ago 20,000 stations have been created and some users are listening for an average of half an hour at a time. Here’s a station that Yelp employees in Miami created, for example.

RIP Amie Street. I once had you on the list of products I couldn’t live without. Somehow, I’ll have to find a way to move on. And I’m looking forward to seeing how Songza evolves.

Last month, I published Part 1 of my Guide To Music On The Web, which covered music recommendation sites, Web radio, independent music sites, playlists, and music visualizations. Today, in Part II we’ll take a tour of music search engines, Web players, ways to share music on Twitter, and music mixing apps.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading all of your comments and insights on my previous post and of course, took them under consideration while creating this second part. Please bear in mind that I can’t list ALL the music applications out there. I really tried to find the best and the most used applications that will probably still be here to serve you tomorrow too.

So readers’ main concern was the companies’ business model. You are right. A few of the services might make an exit, and most of them are probably not going to have one, and some are just for fun. I think music services can make money by being innovative enough to get it. Anyway, I don’t want to get into the business model stuff too much, but I will tell you this: The Internet is too competitive, you may be succeed by just being simple, but you may also need to be sophisticated. The era where creating an application first, then two years later thinking how to make money from it, is bygone now, and companies will need to think how to make money sooner than later if they aim for it – This is where innovation comes in and usually wins.

Music Search Engine:

Back in 2007, SkreemR was truly my favorite MP3 search engine. SkreemR locates MP3 files on blogs and webpages, then indexes them on its site, allowing anyone to listen to their favorite music right on the spot. There is no registration required, all you need to do is to search for your desired song/artist, and browse the results. See something that you like? You can play it, rate it, buy it on Amazon, get the song lyrics, watch the video, find related photos on flickr, find concert tickets, download as a ringtone, and finally – yes – you can also share and tweet about it. Unfortunately, now SkreemR has jumping ads all over the site. I understand the need to make money, but did they have to choose the most annoying way to achieve that goal?

I remember the hype around Songza when it first launched… it is a slick Ajax-designed service, which makes it easy to stream music on the web. Well, it still does. Songza became popular for its great usability and the fact that you can easily create playlists, and share music with your friends. At first Songza aggregated music from Seeqpod, then switched to YouTube videos and imeem (where imeem = 30 seconds of a song, and Youtube = full video, low quality). Somewhere around October 2008, the service was acquired by Amie Street for its marketing potential.

Another acquired service is FoxyTunes, this time by Yahoo! in February 2008. FoxyTunes Firefox toolbar extension (launched in 2004) enables control of your favorite music player from the Firefox browser. It supports almost any media player and lets you also find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more – all from the comfort of your browser. Today, it has more than 50,000 weekly downloads, and a cumulative total of nearly 11,000,000 downloads! FoxyTunes also released an additional add-on called TwittyTunes, which allows you to post your currently playing songs to Twitter with a click. On their behalf I have to say, they where the first to offer that. Their search engine: FoxyTunes Planet, is a mashup Netvibes-like page, that gathers music information from Rhapsody, Yahoo!, Flickr, Last.fm, Youtube, Pandora, Amazon, and more.

I sure noticed the difference when I tried Mufin. Looks like they put an emphasis on the site’s usability and design. The interface is so clean and easy to use. Like other services, Mufin will search for your favorite music and will play it on the spot, via Youtube (what else?) It also lets you create playlists in a snap. But what makes it unique is its visualization tool (vision) that lets you discover more music, based on similar artists. Mufin also provides a player which can be downloaded to your desktop for free. The player will help you organize your music, create playlists, find similar music, share tracks with friends on Last.fm, Twitter or Facebook, and so much more.

Fizy’s search engine has no special feature really, it’s just built really well. The service has a simple look & feel, which allows you to listen to music that streams from Youtube, and create playlists if you are logged in. You can connect your Twitter, Friendfeed or Facebook accounts, and share with your friends’ music in realtime. There’s not much to say other than that.

Qloud has quite an impressive history since they launched way back in 2006; At first, it was just a plug-in allowing you to organize your own library better, so you would be able to find the right song at the right time. Then Qloud released ‘My-Music’: A music app for social networks (Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Myspace, etc), which led them to 1M Facebook users! And finally today, it’s all of the above, plus a real-time music search engine, and a pretty good one. You can search and find music that you like, save and organize your favorites, share music with friends, or find new friends based on shared music taste. You can also import your iTunes or Windows Media Player library, and play your playlist directly from your browser. There’s a rumor that Qloud was acquired by Buzznet last year, but I couldn’t find any formal confirmation about this at either site (Qloud or Buznet).

And finally MySpace Music: A massive hub of free music on the web. MySpace Music gathers all of its music accounts into one searchable page by genre. You can see the entire discography of your favorite artists from anywhere on the globe: view the artists’ music pages, listen to their music, track local concerts and much more. You can also search entire collections of free-to-watch video uploaded by artists or users. Read reviews by users, blog posts by both users and artists, and basically dive into an endless amount of content. Addictive.

Worth mentioning: Wearehunted, which is a playable chart of the most popular songs on the Web..

Web Players:

From your Desktop to the Web, Moof allows you to have a full back up of your own music. Export an xml file of your iTunes library, and listen to your favorite music from any computer. If you don’t want to do that, you can still browse through the Moof music library and play any song you like on-demand from the Web. Moof looks and behaves like a desktop player, with the additional ability to share and see music from friends. If your friends are on Moof, you can browse their entire collection of music, and add favorites to your own personal library. Overall, it’s a great way to find new music. Note that Moof has the coolest registration form ever

Spool.fm is so awesome, but fails to explain the service to its users. What you see when you enter the site is a Web Music Player that lets you find the music you want, then play it right away. What you don’t see is the powerful feature that allows you to see what your friends are listening to in real-time! How it works: Just sign up for the service, invite your friends to join in, and each time you play music on the site, your friends will be able to see what you’re listening to as you listen to it, and vice versa. The music streams from all kinds of free sources—not Youtube.

Like most of the Web Players, Grooveshark allows users to find any song in the world and listen to it instantly. But there are several things that makes it different than the rest; first off, the application’s UI is stunning, and the experience using this site is absolutely a joy. Other than that, there’s so much that you can do: search, find, organize, favorite and add music that you like. Also interact with people in the community, and discover new music from others’ choices. With a team of 40 people they must have a business model (or a lot of VC cash).  Grooveshark has a paid VIP version with some exclusive features, and a special interface for VIP users ($3/month or $30/year)

Youtube probably has the largest music database in the Internet, but finding music can be very frustrating since it’s not well organized. I’ve already recommended Jogli as a service that gathers Youtube music into albums in the first part of this guide. JukeFly does the same but also lets you listen to the music as if it was on your desktop music player, only it’s on the Web. JukeFly prepares everything for you, so you don’t really need to create playlists, you just need to choose from a variety of content already made for you. Additionally, JukeFly can stream music from your desktop, but you’ll have to download their plug-in to be able to do so. The player has more features and functionality, which you may or may not need, so don’t be surprised if eventually you find yourself using it as your new music center on the Web. JukeFly is working on a newer version, which will include an iPhone app, concert information, chat, fan-clubs, and Internet radio.

MixTape.me searches an entire database of songs in addition to the millions of songs indexed by MP3 search engine SkreemR to bring you the best results possible. If you sign up for the service you will be able to save your favorite songs, create playlists by simply dragging & dropping tracks into a box, and share playlists with anyone. Users can upload custom album art to any playlist, then embed the playlist at their blog/site. All from a sexy web interface.

How disappointing is it to find out that Lala works only in the U.S when everyone keeps telling me how great this service is… Anyway, I can give you a brief overview of the service from the information I picked up on the site. Windows users can move their entire music collection from the desktop to Lala on the web. Most of your music will be matched to Lala’s catalog and will be available online in minutes; The rest and unmatched music can be uploaded to Lala. If your personal music collection is not enough, you can play over 7 million songs once for free. If you’d like to add songs to your collection, it’ll cost 10 cents per song, and your first 25 songs are free.

JustHearIt plays music over a nicely done application with a great visual experience. The application was created by two students trying to change the stereotype that access to free music is an illegal activity while immersing the user in a unique visual experience. So what can you do at the site? You can listen to music you like, create online music collections & multiple playlists, and hopefully share favorite tracks with friends (it doesn’t say this anywhere, but I presume it does) – not much different from the rest of the services here, except for its nifty UI. BTW, even with their goal to show the world that music can be free and legal, they use Youtube like most services, so I’m not sure what’s unique about that.

Since Seeqpod.com’s service is mostly dead, every service that used them switched to Youtube instead. The pros: Its video ability. The cons: The music quality (but hey, at least we have free music). Same applies to Streamzy, an Ajax-based media player that lives on the web and allows users to create quick playlists from their favorite music. Streamzy says it merely provides search results for media being hosted elsewhere on the Internet – Well, I can’t argue with that. Anyhow, sign in if you want to save playlist, or use it as an alternative music player occasionally.

Post Music on Twitter:

Blip.fm is by far my favorite Twitter music service.  It is also the first service that allowed people to send music to twitter in a very easy way, which is what made it what it is today. What makes it so great is that you can use it with or without a Twitter account. Some use it via the Twitter connection, other use it as their main music playlist and enjoy the community within the site only. Anyhow, you can discover new music, and new friends based on your collections. Once you sign up to the site, you can set Twitter to send notifications each time you suggest a new song to friends. It looks like Twitter, it behaves like Twitter, but angled around music only.

Grooveshark’s project Twisten.fm, came out a bit later than Blip.fm and offers pretty much the same service. Sign-up with your Twitter credentials, and share music with your friends on Twitter. The site streams music from Grooveshark, allowing you to enjoy the quality of music played there (blip.fm streams music mostly from Youtube). Overall, it’s a cool place to save your music into playlists, and share directly with your Twitter friends. I wish that both Blip.fm & Twisten.fm would allow people to buy mixed CDs created from their playlist, instead of having to buy each song separately.

Funnel is the new kid on the block, basically the same as Blip.fm and Twisten.fm except with a killer tool—a nifty Bookmarklet! While you play songs on Youtube or Myspace, you can immediately add them to your playlist in Funnel. Another unparalleled feature is the ability to integrate your Twitter account or Tweet only the songs that you want. This way, you don’t feel bad about inundating your Twitter stream with too many of those annoying music updates. Also, you can easily comment on songs that you like.

If you wish to share MP3 links with your Twitter friends, you can do it with the help of Song.ly. Enter an MP3 link, and Song.ly will generate a small player for easy listening over the web. I have to admit that the whole process is somewhat an unnecessary hassle.  After all, who’s uploading songs these days when everything is searchable on the web already? On the other hand, you can enjoy a list of songs that’s already been uploaded by others, and are of very good quality, of course. I’d summarize it as a user generated MP3 search engine.

Another successful service, is Twt.fm which finds music that you like and posts it to Twitter in a cool way. All you need to do is to log in via Twitter, type in an artist/track and click preview. Twt.fm then generates a track page using your Twitter page design. Post it on Twitter and your friends will be able to leave you comments on the same page – Example.

Worth mentioning: Listento.fm, and Twones.

Mix & Share:

Not a pure mix service but it still falls into this category, 8tracks allows you to create a Mix (playlist) with your favorite songs. It’s actually very similar to a service that already shut down, Mixwit—so if you missed it, you might as well try 8tracks. Once you sign up to the service you can start searching for music, or uploading it from your computer to build your Mix. You can publish a Mix of no more than 8 tracks and only two of these can be from the same artist. Visitors at the site can listen to Mixes without signing into the service—but for creation and music uploads, you’ll have to become a member.

A fun service to close the list with, Jamglue brings music and fans together. Any artist can sign up for a free Jamglue account and upload music in multi-track format for others to remix. There are several Creative Commons licenses to choose from.  These licenses allow others to share and remix work, as long as they follow the artist’s restrictions. Fans can remix other folks’ stuff, and share the results.

Conclusion:
To summarize this whole guide, I have to admit that I’m somewhat concerned: Let’s say Youtube closes its doors tomorrow or decides to stop streaming music—there goes about 80% of what I’ve listed. Which brings me to my next point, the future of music on the Web doesn’t looks so bright right now. Not if every service depends on Youtube so heavily as its music source. For once, I wouldn’t mind paying a yearly fee if it meant listening to an unlimited source of any music that I like with good streaming & with awesome quality. And, I don’t even need to download the songs to my computer, all I really want is a place where I can play my favorite music based on monthly/year fee.  Is it too much to ask?  Oh wait, this is exactly what Rhapsody offers; Unfortunately, only in the U.S. . . .

For now, I suggest you try the services above and enjoy them as long as they last. For some reason, music services don’t stay around very long but I guess that’s the way they roll.

Since I can’t list them all, please feel free to add services that I’ve missed in your comments and make them handy for everyone.

Amie Street co-founders Elias Roman and Joshua Boltuch confirm that the acquisition definitely took place, and Songza co-founder Scott Robbin has since become part of the 20-headed team based in New York. Songza’s other co-founder, Aza Raskin, had earlier left to join Mozilla.

Update: more information about the deal just came in. Songza was acquired for part stock, part cash, and the total sum was in the high six figures to low seven figures.

It’s not exactly the best of times to be in the digital music space right now, particularly if you’re a startup trying to build a legitimate business around an ad-supported music streaming service (look at what happened to Ruckus and SpiralFrog), but that’s exactly where Amie Street is planning on taking Songza. Currently, the service is merely an admittedly great-looking front-end for an engine that leverages the YouTube and imeem APIs and lets people intuitively play and share music and generate custom playlists, but Amie Street says it has a much bigger vision for Songza and will release a revamped version of the service by this Summer.

Amie Street thinks it can make ad-supported, licensed music streaming work, and there’s no reason to doubt that for now. After all, the company has managed to build a nice, sustainable business with a great conceptual model (where the user community dynamically decides on the pricing of music tracks) and this in partnership with music labels.

So why did they buy Songza? Roman tells me the service had long been an affiliate partner for Amie Street, and apart from a decent revenue generator for them, they were impressed with its marketing potential, design, active and committed user base as well as the fact that the small company went out of its way not to stream copyrighted content (which sounds nice, but seems virtually impossible to avoid since it depends on third-party services for locating music). Either way, the company is now a part of Amie Street, and according to Roman and Boltuch the aggregate traffic currently exceeds 1 million uniques on a monthly basis, the bulk of which comes from Songza, since it is completely free and requires no registration for searching and playing music.

Here’s another thing I learned during my conversation with Amie Street’s co-founders: the company is currently finalizing a Series B round of funding, which it expects to close pretty soon. They had earlier raised an undisclosed round of investment from Amazon.com.

The company, which has raised $7 million in venture capital to date from undisclosed investors, is evidently doing this out of fear about the outcome of the multibillion dollar lawsuits it was slapped with by music labels like Warner Music, Capitol Records and EMI.

We reported earlier that SeeqPod has become quite the target of the music industry, which went so far as going after developers who merely leveraged the SeeqPod API. They silenced Songbeat and forced Streamzy to put itself up for sale on eBay as a result.

SeeqPod has developed interesting and powerful technology that is able to quickly crawl the web for playable media (MP3s, slideshow presentations, videos, etc.) and enables users to play it on-site. It doesn’t actually host any files on its servers, but the downside of the technology from a legal point of view is that the crawling engine picks up pirated music files from across the Web too, which is why the music labels are so eager to sue the company behind the service, especially since it spawned so many third-party services which use the engine as the basis of their online offerings.

It’s worth noting that many search engines index copyrighted material too and are shielded from legal actions against them under the DMCA, so it seems rather arbitrary that the music industry is picking on SeeqPod specifically (the startup is huddling under the DMCA protection too). Maybe this is because of the fact that SeeqPod enables visitors to play files directly, and because it has reportedly been slow in setting up negotiation talks with the labels.

SeeqPod recently started selling its source code to developers (price tag: $5,000) in the hopes of creating a legion of ‘mini-SeeqPods’ which could prove difficult for the music labels to kill one by one, but it’s unclear if this strategy has paid off so far, and yesterday’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition doesn’t bode well for the startup (or its investors, who are often wiped out in such proceedings).

To be continued.

Last.fm has a new look today that simplifies the navigation of the main site and makes finding music easier. Or at least, it would make finding music easier if the site wasn’t so buggy. (At least for me. I couldn’t even log in without getting an error. This may be due to fans rushing to check out the new features, or simply poor planning).

The new features a library of songs that you can now add to with a single click, instant recommendations based on the song you are listening to, and charts showing the popularity of each recommended song.

The site is now organized by music, videos, charts, and events. And for each song, there is increasingly the ability to play the entire song.

At the top of the page is a search bar, where you can enter a song or artist and hit play. That’s very Songza of them.

Previously Songza pulled songs solely from Youtube (by only playing the audio track of music videos). Seeqpod is an MP3s search engine that finds songs and streams them from across the Web, including ones that may infringe copyright. (Read this post by Michael to understand why this actually might be legal).

Songza is also launching a Self Promotion beta for artists who want to promote their bands on the site. For 99 cents, bands can get a song on the recommended list of Songza’s home page for 24 hours. The site gets about 40,000 visitors a day. That translates to 1.2 million visitors a month. Not too shabby for a site that launched in November. The company is working with Creative Commons to get the word out about the beta, and is populating the recommended list with Creative Commons artists. Once it builds an actual recommendation engine, which it is working on, it will pull in other songs as well.

Last month, Songza was spun off from Humanized, whose co-founders were recently hired by the Mozilla foundation. Songza will continue to be run as a separate business. It is currently seeking funding.

A new desktop application called Songbeat has been released that allows you to search the web for MP3s using Seeqpod technology, stream those MP3s, and even download them.

Seeqpod, which we covered alongside Skreemr and Songza, is a search engine for MP3s that are hosted across on the internet. Whereas with Skreemr, you can actually click on a link to download a track, SeeqPod only displays a non-clickable URL to the file so it’s not easy to download several songs. Therefore, Songbeat makes it easier than SeeqPod to proactively collect copies of MP3s from across the web.

The client is currently only available for Windows, although a Mac version is purportedly coming soon. Two versions of the Windows client are available: a free, ad-supported version and a “pro” version for 10€ per year that gets rid of ads and allows unlimited downloads.

Songbeat says explicitly on its website that it “assumes no responsibility for any copyright infringements or legal issues” and insists that you “make sure that you have the right to download the music you have chosen.” Yea, that’s going to happen.

Also check out Freemusiczilla, which makes it possible to download tracks from any streaming site, including SeeqPod.

Three that we’ve been tracking are SeeqPod, Songza and Skreemr.

All three index the web, or parts of the web, looking for music files that people have uploaded to servers. Users search by artist or song. MP3s or other non-DRM sound files with metadata matching the query are served as results.

Unlike sites like LaLa, Imeem and Pandora (and many others), which are all trying to play by various RIAA rules to deliver music to users, music search engines generally don’t pay royalties of any kind. The music itself is never on their servers, so they have significantly less copyright exposure. More on that below.

Of the three, Seeqpod is the most useful. It has an index of 8 million individual songs, auto-spell checks queries to find common misspellings, and allows users to create playlists. Seeqpod also has embeddable players, and will try to find music videos of songs you are playing. Seeqpod, by the way, was originally a project of the Lawrence Berkely National Lab.

http://www.seeqpod.net/cache/seeqpodEmbed.swf
SeeqPod – Playable Search

Songza also allows users to create playlists and provide embeddable players.Skreemr has bare bones functionality and the hit rate is a little iffy. But they have one feature that the others do not – a direct link to the file on the third party server. That means downloading the song to your hard drive is just a right mouse click away.A fourth company, Deezer, changed its model in the face of litigation in France.

Copyright, Schmopyright

There’s no reason to mince words here – the music these sites are playing is almost always copyright infringing. But it’s distributed on servers unaffiliated with the search engine itself, making it effectively impossible for the RIAA and its international equivalents to do much about it other than try to force the largest infringers to remove the content. That’s because there is little recourse against the search engines themselves.

None of those legalities affect the search engines, though. It’s unlikely that under current U.S. law the RIAA can do anything at all to stop them.

Current case law gives a lot of leeway to search engines. I spoke this evening with Andrew Bridges, counsel for Google in Perfect 10 v. Google. In that case, Google was held not held to be infringing the copyright on images just by displaying a thumbnail of the image in search results.

The same arguments are valid with the music search engines, says Bridges (with the caveat that he’d have to look much more closely at the specific facts of any case).

The services may still be liable for contributory infringement, he says, but there just isn’t any definitive U.S. case law on matter yet. And no statutes cover contributory infringement.

So for now the search engines are free to link to infringing songs, and even stream them on their site. Just so long as the songs themselves are never stored on their servers. That’s good news for Deezer, Seeqpod and Skreemr, and the users who’ve come to rely on them.