On-demand site Fizy offers huge rock selection
Just days after the news broke that EMI is suing Grooveshark, another contestant popped into my in-box. Today, it's Fizy, which offers essentially the same features as Grooveshark, Meuzer, and JustHearIt: search for a song name, and Fizy will compile audio and video results from public sources around the Web. Today, Fizy relaunched with a handful of new features such as the ability to save playlists and the ability to post all played songs to your Friendfeed account. (Friendfeed? Where's the Facebook app?).
The new features are nothing special, but in a quick test, I did find that Fizy offers the best selection of rock songs of any on-demand streaming site I've tested. It offered me a fairly full complement of Roy Harper songs, including the lost classic "Nineteen Forty-Eightish" (with Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page on electric guitar)--and had no problem finding tracks from Pink Floyd, Animal Collective, and the lysergically inspired new "Two Weeks" video from Grizzly Bear.
Fizy delivered Roy Harper's dystopian classic from 1984, which I've never found online before.
It's not so good in other genres--its selection of Mingus tunes was weak compared with the full array offered by Grooveshark. Its search results could also be organized better--the not-exactly-obscure query "Stairway to Heaven" returned various instrumental and piano cover versions above the original Led Zeppelin classic.
But Fizy's a worthy competitor in an increasingly crowded space. More important, it shows that on-demand audio streaming sites are becoming like mushrooms--whenever the copyright owners shut one down, two new ones will pop up in its place.
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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. 
