Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Freeloader Free-for-All

There have been lots of developments the last week or so around ad-supported music services.

The question I have is... are startups like Streampad making this a moot point? You will notice that last week a Streampad widget showed up in my sidebar. I've just got it pulling what's hot on Hype Machine (which in turn is creating a playlist of MP3s from different locations all over the web). So, that playlist is dynamic and updates in real-time based on what people are blogging about and listening too. Or you can simply log into Streampad and search (a la SingingFish) - find a list of freely available MP3s and stream them to your heart's content via their embedded player. You could just as easily create your own playlist and embed that on your page - like this one:




Streampad also has some other cool features hidden in there. They (or is it just he - that being Dan Kantor, ex-Microsoft and De.licio.us developer) are working on remote-access to my own files (a la Orb). A small but potentially powerful music community. Integration with MP3tunes locker (find a song you like - copy it to your online locker). Also some other nice value-added mashups of listener maps and related information - as well as integrated reporting/scrobbling back to your Last.fm account.

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