Good news for Project Playlist: Sony BMG strikes deal

Project Playlist has struck a deal with Sony BMG to bring the label's catalog to its streaming-music service. It's the first major-label deal for Project Playlist, which recently brought former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta on as CEO but has been dealing with legal problems that have seen its widgets banned from social network MySpace.

Currently, Project Playlist has been sued by Warner Music, EMI, and Universal Music Group, as well as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), because of the amount of unauthorized content that members have uploaded to the service. Industry rumors have persisted that Project Playlist was interested in a merger with Imeem, a similar service that has deals with all the major labels.

Reports had surfaced in April that unlike the other labels, Sony BMG was negotiating with Project Playlist rather than seeking legal action against it. Now, months later, that deal has come to fruition.

"Collaborating with Sony BMG is a significant milestone in our effort to improve the access and quality of content on Project Playlist, and enhance the overall user experience," founder Jeremy Riney said in a release. "We hope that we soon will be able to provide our users with ready access to even more of the music they want in the way that they want it."

There are a ton of social music sites out there, but Project Playlist is growing fast: Traffic firm ComScore pegs its user base at 40 million.

[randycsi]

40 million? What comscore report are you looking at. They're under 12 million!

[karpenterskids]

I use playlist.com all the time---it's a GREAT resource for music, even though I'll admit sometime you can listen to some songs that aren't officially out yet.

Myspace's music library is rapidly getting better (they've been uploading every single song off of every single album from the artists I listen to), but a lot of times Playlist has artists that I can't even find on Myspace, so I still end up using it a lot more.