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.

[seven7dust]

damn I used to use this site a lot on my iPod touch !
free things never last I guess !

[twiceover]

hmm, I suggest to just hold on a bit - seeqpod.com updated their API quite recently and it more or less broke sites that use it, temporarily. Hopefully Songerize may be just updating their code... let's hope they're back up soon.

[sdt33]

"Other services also offer a limited number of streams for free--Lala.com gives you 50 before charging you $0.10 apiece"

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.

[eddroid]

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).