Seeqpod bankruptcy will affect other sites
TechCrunch broke the story Tuesday that Seeqpod, a Web search engine for music files, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company is facing lawsuits from record company Warner and EMI because even though it doesn't post any material itself--it's just a search engine--it makes no effort to filter out copyrighted material.
Another one bites the dust.
So far, the site itself still up and running, but my absolute favorite name-it-and-play-it service, Songerize, which uses Seeqpod as its back end, appears to be broken. The labels have been targeting independent developers who use Seeqpod's API, so I wonder if the heat got to be too much for whoever was running Songerize. Seeqpod's troubles could also affect plenty of other sites, including Bandloop, an excellent and relatively new live music listing service that I wrote about in January.
If Songerize is indeed gone forever, you can turn to Imeem (although it has business troubles of its own) or, if you're lucky enough to be in a supported geographic region, Spotify. Other services also offer a limited number of streams for free--Lala.com gives you 50 before charging you $0.10 apiece, and Rhapsody lets you stream 25 songs a month without a paid subscription.
Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattrosoff. 
free things never last I guess !
Well actually, you can listen to a virtually unlimited number of streamed tracks on Lala--all tracks can be listened to once for free in their entirety. Then it's $0.10 apiece to add them to your collection for unlimited listening.
- by eddroid April 9, 2009 11:53 PM PDT
- Cyloop.com, where I work, offers radio like Pandora and free on-demand streaming like Spotify. There's no cost to create an account, create a playlist, and listen as much as you want. A new version of the site is coming out this year, but the old version is still good. Don't get turned off by the 30-sec samples all over the site. There are 100s of 1000s of full-length songs available in the U.S. and Latin America and smaller sets available in almost every country in the world (radio, which has different licensing requirements, is only available in certain countries).
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