The top 20 streaming(free) music sites

Posted on May 15, 2008 by marc meyer

According to compete, here is the latest list of the top 20 streaming music sites. Some interesting things to note about the list and what you should know: All of these sites now have some sort of social aspect to them in order to grow and kepp its user base. With that being said this list also shows that users like to listen to their music, they just do not like to pay for it very often as this graph will attest to.

So what’s new there? I had previously posted about the top 44 social music sites awhile back, but that list has expanded and changed since that posting.

Here is the latest list:

Imeem Imeem’s expensive label deals, which allow it to offer on-demand music from all four majors, plus indies — combined with emphases on social networking and reaching out to blogs — have paid off handsomely. The site’s unique U.S. visitor count rose 58 percent over the previous March to 10.3 million.
Yahoo Music Yahoo, which had acquired large music sites like Broadcast, Launch Media and Musicmatch in order to become the top-ranked music-streaming site in the country, has slipped into second place.
AOL They’re still around? Actually I’m kidding, based on their #3 standing in the top 20!
Myspace Music
Project Playlist One of my favorites
MSN Music
Hypem A site that everyone should bookmark
Pandora– Used to loop alot but getting better
ILike Integrates lots of nice social network features
Last.Fm Updates a lot and sometimes has an odd mix but maybe thats not so bad?
Jango Has a very simple interface
Live365 A pioneer, been around a long time, always good to have in the rotation
Qloud very strong social media integration
Mog Great tag line, but is it any good?
ReverbNation Little bizy
HypemThe Hypem1500 presents aggregate traffic to the more than 1500 music blogs tracked by the Hype Machine, a popular blog aggregator. The Hype Machine itself is ranked separately from its network at #16
Deezer In 2007 launched a free on-demand music playback service
Songza– Great clean and simple and easy to use interface
Seeqpod The oddest name of the bunch but still pretty cool
Muxtape

In conclusion, let me paraphrase Alex Patriquin : “As the music industry seeks to reassemble in the wake of digital distribution, it should recognize social streaming communities as the fastest growing opportunity in its evolution”

The top 10 Social Music Widgets

Posted on November 13, 2007 by marc meyer

In an effort to help you streamline your ability to find and listen to and share the music you want, we are including some widgets that may help you:
Mercora Music Matrix-This widget allows you to select nine (9) artists to be displayed in the matrix. Each artist image is linked to a biography type information page with links to their music and other useful information.

Pandora Widget-Stream Pandora from your desktop. Pandora is a pretty nice app. The music is free and is tailored towards your tastes. Just hope that Congress eases up on them.

Qloud– This one is going to have some steam behind it. The Qloud My Music application is a revolutionary music service that delivers online music to users how they want it – legal, cost-free, on-demand and linked to their personal music libraries – and where they want it – inside social networks where they can share music with and discover it through their friends. By supporting OpenSocial, Qloud will dramatically expand its availability on social platforms and accelerate adoption of its popular music service.

Qloud delivers free, on-demand music directly from a web browser, leveraging an iTunes plug-in to connect users to others in the community with similar musical tastes, and provides a Qloud Facebook application for sharing music with friends. The company’s investors and directors include Revolution Chairman and CEO Steve Case and former AOL, Yahoo!, Warner Music Group, EMI Music, and Island Records music executives.

Mini Streampad Music Player for your blog-The Streampad Player Widget allows you to put a mini Streampad player right on your blog. All you have to do is put the url of your blog and it will find any mp3 files you have posted.

Sonific-Dive in! Find the music you like, create your playlists, make your widgets, grab the code and add it to your profile page, site, blog or photo album. Artists, Labels and Producers can also add their own music to sonific’s catalog.

Tourb.us-Ever find out the day after one of your favorite bands played a show you didn’t know about? We’ve had that happen too often and we hate it. Now you can find out ahead of time so you’ll be laughing at your friends when they find out the show is sold out. Every fan gets their own custom RSS feed for all the shows they’re attending. And every band and venue has their own feed for all of their upcoming shows.

LastFM Share your music anywhere, Last.fm widgets for MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, your Blog, a website, the possbilities are endless!

Seeqpod-Currently in Beta, SeeqPod’s first consumer site empowers users by allowing them to search and discover music and video all over the Web. Our intelligent software robots work with targeted crawling systems to auto-submit content to the site. This, combined with user submissions, results in a large and rich search and discovery index. This process can be viewed in real-time via the PodCrawler.

Yourspins-YourSpins is a new kind of music community for fans who want to immerse themselves in world of remixes. Within YourSpins, you’ll be able to share your mixes of top songs with others, rate and comment on other mixes – and chat, mail and IM other people too. Plus you can make your own unique ringtones to be sent to your phone. Each user gets their own homepage, with all their mixes and ringtones listed. Soon, we’ll introduce blogs for each user, but for now, all mixes can be exported to your own blog by pressing ‘Blog this mix’ on the mixpage.

Snocap We love the premise of this site. SNOCAP’s products include:

SNOCAP MyStore – allows “stores” to be embedded anywhere on the Internet where html can be edited
SNOCAP Linx – a flexible solution for those who wish to seamlessly integrate content sales into a website
P2P Plug-in – allows P2P technology to be used in a copyright respecting manner

Lastly, we realize that the likelihood that every social music site may have a widget, it takes a while to review them. So Just crunch on these for awhile and let us know about some that you think we need to check out.

Britney Spears’ new compelling song titles

Posted on October 25, 2007 by marc meyer

Taking branding to the next level and the fact that her name was searched on a cumulative 14 million times last month. Britney has released her new album art. A quick note. a) albums don’t exist anymore and b) CD jewel case art is almost non-existent as well. So having said that, we can always steer towards a crotch shot if need be. So without further ado, here are the titles of her new songs. Beware the spelling and the emotional depth of these tracks amazing. In parentheses are the authors comments.

1. Gimme More (Of what? )

2. Piece of Me ( which part, we’ve seen most of it already)

3. Radar ( Something she could use for her camera friendly friends)

4. Break The Ice ( Something needed when she sees her kids)

5. Heaven On Earth ( The current state of her affairs?)

6. Get Naked (Enough already)

7. Freakshow ( Any time she leaves the house)

8. Toy Soldier ( Her perception of the war)

9. Hot As Ice (Seemed like a good idea for a song title)

10.Ooh Ooh Baby ( Seemed like a really cool title for a song, dontcha think?)

11.Perfect Lover (KFed?)

12. Why Should I Be Sad (Let us count the ways)

DRM, The music business has to change, again.

Posted on October 8, 2007 by marc meyer

I have a friend who has a site called Howzitsound. He wants to change the way we listen to music. But he wants to be unlike all of the others… Where have we heard that before? If you must know, I’m still in favor of changing the way we listen to, access, and share music, as it stands today. But by no means do I think the current model works. The system is still flawed. In fact there is a great blog post about it right here by Ian Rogers, who seems to understand that, we as listeners and purveyors of music are tired of being played<—pun intended.

What my friend wants to do is open up Howzitsound to the best and the brightest, to build the model that works best for them. He wants Howzitsound to contribute something positive to the music industry. Something sustainable. His problem is, he just doesn’t know what it is. What that ideal model is. I got news for him, neither does anyone else. Think things are ok? tell that to the woman who just lost a court case against the RIAA to the tune of<—pun intended, $200,000! Thats right she was made the poster child for anyone who has downloaded music illegally. Oh and she has 2 children too. I’m thinking the 10-20-life law might apply here, what do you think? What message did they send by doing that? Was it necessary?

So back to what would a viable web 2.0 music model look like? What would it need to have in regards to having a large scale buy in<—-pun intended, from all of the labels as well as the current keepers of the keys to the kingdom?

What do users want? What I do know is that what they want, is to play their music on any device, access the music from any site, and have it be compatible with anything; Car, house, device, you name it. They don’t want to have to jump through hoops time and time again, and they want access to the largest catalogue possible. I hear you led Zep and Radiohead fans!

Now I’m getting excited, look how it’s now we and not they… 🙂 We want widgets, we want contextual apps, so that we can listen to similar music, we want to be able to share our playlists and we want it to be affordable. The only problem with that limited wish list is, that like Ian Rogers said, we’ll have to wait, roughly 8 years for even the smallest of miracles in regards to headway.

Tell me what we need to do!!! Lets help my friend at Howzitsound. Someone turn him on to someone else…and lets change the music business again, lets let the users decide for a change!

Update on the State of Internet Radio

Posted on August 23, 2007 by marc meyer

Update on the State of Internet Radio

Update on the State of Internet Radio

Written by Josh Catone / August 17, 2007 / 9 comments

By 2020, eMarketer estimates that Internet radio will have 180 million listeners and generate $19.7 billion in ad revenue. That can’t possibly happen, however, if prohibitively high royalty fees in the United States force the bulk of net radio stations to stop operating in the US or shut down completely.

We’d be remiss not to post an update on the fate of Internet radio during our Online Music Week. When we last wrote about the face off between Internet radio companies and the RIAA’s SoundExchange, the organization charged with collecting royalties, a late-night deal had granted radio operators a last minute reprieve. The group decided not to collect on the new royalties, which some have estimated would cost radio stations as much as $500 per listener, per year, giving time for net radio stations to negotiate lower rates.

Since that time, not much has changed. Negotiations between SoundExchange and webcasters are scheduled to begin again in the next week or so. When they resume, the negotiations will be carried out with the prospect of potential Congressional action in the form of the bipartisan Internet Radio Equality Act looming. In a statement issued last week, IREA co-sponsors Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote, “If great progress toward a fair solution for webcasters is not made by Congress’s return to Washington after Labor Day, then we plan to take expeditious steps toward passage of the Internet Radio Equality Act.”

Webcasters, however, are confused as to why the royalty rates from the Copyright Royalty Board were so high to begin with. “One theory is that there is just a misunderstanding about how much money there is in internet radio right now,” Pandora founder Tim Westergren told The Age. “It’s a fast-growing sector in terms of consumers participating but it’s not very profitable. Maybe the RIAA thought we were all making a lot of money and hiding it from them.”

Bridge Ratings estimates net radio will pull in $500 million in ad revenue in 2007, but with 50-70 million monthly users in the US, at fees running up to $500 per user, per year, it is easy to see how the numbers don’t line up.

For now, net radio broadcasts on, but the threat of eventual silence hangs ominously over webcasters’ heads. The National Association of Broadcasters keeps a counter on their site, counting off the days since they made a “good-faith offer” to SoundExchange and have not received a response. That counter now reads 72 days. The fate of online radio may come down to Congressional action in the fall, but webcasters still hope that an amicable agreement is reached over the next month.