The first free on-demand music service I ever encountered was Songerize. The page was a simple white box on a red background. Enter the name of a song, and it would scour the Seeqpod database of user-posted content, find the song, and begin streaming it immediately.
Pick a song, any song.
There were no fancy playlist features like Grooveshark, no social-networking features like Imeem, no embedded player or song locker like LaLa, just instant gratification. Unfortunately, Seeqpod declared bankruptcy and around the same time, Songerize became useless.
Now, Songerize creator Will Johnson is back with a second take on the same concept: Songite. The interface looks almost identical to its predecessor, and the concept's the same: instant gratification.
There are two important differences between Songite and Johnson's last work, however. First, you can now arrange songs into playlists, then share those playlists via simple URLs. Second, Songite now draws content from YouTube and Imeem, two sites that have more or less received the blessing of the big record labels and are in no danger of being sued out of existence. Bookmark it for the next time you've got a song stuck in your head and simply have to hear it right now.
The rumor mill has been all atwitter about a link from Seeqpod's newly sparse home page to the search page for Microsoft's Web site. (Not to be confused with Live Search, Microsoft's Internet search engine.)
Seeqpod was a playable search engine for music files--essentially, its crawlers scoured Web sites looking for MP3 files, then it transformed those MP3s into streamable audio files. It offered its own user-facing Web page, as well as APIs for third-party sites, and was used as the back-end for Songerize (which no longer works) and Bandloop. After being hit by copyright infringement lawsuits from several of the major record labels, Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy last month. Now, the company is apparently seeking some big player to buy up its assets, and apparently Microsoft has expressed interest.
Microsoft is set to launch the next version of its search engine in the next month or so. I've seen some test versions, and I don't think it's giving too much away to say that one area where Microsoft hopes to gain ground on Google is by improving its specialized or "vertical" search in areas such as product search.
The rumors say that Microsoft is interested in Seeqpod primarily for people and technology. But if Microsoft really wants to differentiate itself from Google, it should integrate playable music search directly into the next version of its search engine--just as it did after acquiring Farecast, which predicts whether airfare prices for a particular trip are rising or falling.
But Seeqpod may not be the best bet for integrating music search. I think Microsoft should be looking at Grooveshark. It's delivered almost flawless results in my tests, the interface offers a lot of interesting features such as album cover art and on-the-fly playlists, and so far it hasn't been targeted by the labels for copyright infringement, although I don't know enough about law to say if it's on solid legal ground or not.
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.
I've often praised JamBase, which lists tens of thousands of shows across the United States. If you want to know who's coming to town or who's playing tonight, it's infinitely more convenient than scanning the listings in your local paper.
23 minutes of "Crosseyed and Painless"? If that doesn't get you excited to see Phish this summer, what will?
(Credit: Bandloop)Now it looks as if JamBase has some strong competition in the form of Bandloop. It's hard to improve upon JamBase's near-perfection, so Bandloop works in basically the same way, with a few improvements here and there.
Artists and fans populate the show database, which keeps it up-to-date--the site has more than 50,000 gig listings, the company claims. Once registered, fans can search among more than 500,000 artists and add any of them to their "loop" by clicking a big plus symbol--a bit easier than the similar tracking method on JamBase, which requires you to enter band names in a blank field.
Once you've added 20 bands to your loop, you can become a VIP member, which allows you to post your own listings. To encourage participation, Bandloop is offering gift cards for Amazon.com, iTunes, Ticketmaster, and InSound.com. The more shows you list, the more VIP rewards you earn.
I still think JamBase has a much better story with local listings: it automatically lists all shows happening tonight in your area, while Bandloop only lists shows from artists that you've selected. I guess that prevents you from getting overloaded--JamBase can be a bit daunting, if you're in a city with lots of live music--but what about serendipity? I simply can't remember to list all the bands I might be interested in seeing.
But Bandloop tops JamBase with its on-site song samples. JamBase uses an embedded control from Lala.com which won't let you fast-forward to a specific point in a song. This is a problem if, for instance, you're checking out Phish and want to skip through the applause at the beginning of its cover of the Rolling Stones' "Loving Cup."
Bandloop's audio samples are powered by Seeqpod, which scours the Web for fan uploads. This might lead to some bad title information--this Phish songlist displays a couple of incomprehensible garbles--but it also leads to some great finds, like a 23-minute cover version of the Talking Heads' "Crosseyed and Painless" (I'm still reeling from seeing David Byrne play that song earlier this week, but it wasn't anything like this).
And if you get bored with the space jam breakdown in the middle of the song, there's a slider that lets you fast-forward it to the part where Trey starts mumbling the lyric "still waiting" again and again.
I'm guessing that the Lala.com control is hampered by business rather than technical limitations--the U.S. record industry for some reason continues to resist the experience of easy on-demand music, and Lala is attempting to work legally with the industry.
Seeqpod's just a search engine, and it doesn't seek any approval from the record industry--which, unsurprisingly, landed it a lawsuit from Warner Music last year.
Lala.com has a history of coming up with innovative ideas that don't quite conquer the world. The company is best known for its online used-CD trading service, which is an interesting idea but works well only if you have a large list of CDs available to trade.
Lala.com will let you stream any song once at no charge, and an unlimited number of times for $0.10 per song.
(Credit: Lala.com)It also offers a music "locker" service that allows you to upload your music then listen to it from any computer with an Internet connection...but it only works with MP3 files, so you're out of luck if you've been using (for example) iTunes to rip your CDs to AAC for the last four years. The site was also early to experiment with offering free streaming files, but has apparently shuttered that service because the numbers didn't work out.
Now the company's beta-testing another streaming service that lets you select any song to stream once. Then, if you want to stream it again, you can pay a one-time fee of $0.10 and get perpetual streaming rights to it.
Unfortunately, this pay-per-song streaming model occupies a weird space halfway between all-you-can-eat subscription services and the free streaming files available elsewhere. If I'm a hardcore music fan who likes to discover and listen to lots of new music online, I'll probably subscribe to a service like Rhapsody--one monthly payment gets me streaming access to all the music I want. But if I just want instant gratification--say, for example, I need to hear Iron Maiden's "Run to the Hills" right now--I can turn to Imeem, or Last.fm, or the Songerize site (which uses the Seeqpod search engine to discover music files all over the Web, then provides a simple embedded player).
So who would pay $0.10 for unlimited rights to stream a particular song? Probably people who are already using the Lala.com digital locker and want a cost-effective way to add new music to it without having to seek it out online or rip it from a CD and then upload it manually.
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