Monday, February 05, 2007

Radio.Blog.Club

So, I took a quick dip into Radio.Blog.Club. On the surface, it appears that Radio.Blog.Club is the flipside of The Hype Machine.

Where The Hype Machine finds and aggregates all of the MP3s that bloggers are talking about (and their readers are listening to), Radio.Blog.Club gives bloggers the ability to easily find, and embed, an MP3 into their blog (presumably with a bunch of their own editorial wrapped around it).



In honor of the a great half-time performance, here's one of my "guilty pleasures" from my youth (although I feel much less guilty about it now then I did then).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've wondered about Radio.Blog.Club - if you look in their forums, there's a lot of people trying to figure out if the service and use of it is legal or not.

My understanding, is that there is no payments being made for the music that is streamed, and that the users of the service expose the uploaded mp3s for downloading too - which is the distribution of commercial music without a license.

If you read the disclaimer, the site owner states that you the user should have the licenses in place for the music you stream: http://www.radioblogclub.com/disclaimer/

As you can imagine - maybe .02% or less of those users have probably secured the rights for the music they share, and the majority probably consider it 100% legal - like radio.

I certainly believe in artists giving their music away for free to promote themselves and their music - but it's the owner of the music who should decide this.

What's your take? Is this legal music sharing?

- Gideon

jherskowitz said...

Well, I'm No Lawyer (INL)... but I don't think Radio.Blog.Club is anymore illegal than The Hype Machine, Webjay, Streampad or any of the number of others that provide a user experience around MP3s that are posted around the web (which, by the way, many claim are illegal).

The protection that all of these services have is that they aren't hosting the content.... but just pointing to others that have. You could basically build a very similar service around a search engine that looks for MP3 files. The issue with that approach is that these guys can't guarantee any Quality of Service... a song that was there today may be gone tomorrow. Including within playlists that I may have spent hours creating....