DISQUS

"There are a number of other similar music-sharing sites"
don't forget imeem.com which launched in 2004 neatly beating all of the other alternative you mentioned, they have gone through all the legal shenanigans and came out the other side with record industry contracts. They're now the most popular streaming music site on the internet with easily twice as many users as last.fm

This is only temporary, there's one music site you didn't mention, imeem.com

muxtape is a stripped down mininmalist clone of the imeem playlist feature, and imeem is doing just fine, they host the music uploaded by users and they negotiated their way out of legal trouble.

seeqpod and playlist.com don't host the content, they use a 'search defense' and they're both getting sued.

Just a couple of points....

I believe the bitrate of most tracks on myspace is 96kbit/sec, 196kbit/sec isn't a standard mp3 bitrate, 192kbit/sec is. Yes the sound quality on myspace sucks, but it's better than what used to pass as streaming music.

Also, imeem is a private company and from what I can tell there's no official word on their profitability. The only clues I've seen in public were the quarterly financial releases from Warner Brothers who say they're invested $15 million and that this investment has grown in value over the last year, so they must be doing well given that a year ago they were suing everyone's favourite 'youtube for music'

Muxtape is a poor choice for music branding because there's no real profile information on the site so you can't really link it to any of your other instances. Plus the fact that it's of questionable legality might not be the best thing for your image in some cases.

Better choices would be imeem or last.fm, both have done their legal paperwork, and both are vastly more feature rich with proper profile pages. Both sites are also vastly more popular than muxtape which is still very small.

The funny thing is that none of those companies is properly licensed to deliver the goods in the UK right now. And in the US, the biggest market in the world, only imeem has the all important licenses.


we7 have a few small independent artists and, they've publicly stated they want to prove the revenue model before committing to pay the labels the rates they want.

imeem has licenses from all the big record companies, but only for north america for the moment.

Deezer has a deal with SACEM in France and claims this is all they need to be able to deliver music worldwide. Vivendi-Universal begs to differ and is suing them.

And Qtrax is still doing the musical equivalent of a Henry Wensleydale impersonation (look it up).

I found out about perfspot because they started heavily spamming my favourite site - imeem.com - if you go and take a look at imeem.com you'll see that many of the features on perfspot are clones of the imeem versions. imeem seems like a better site, they have big name bands and they've got deals with big record labels like Warner Brothers and Sony

I've seen perfspot.com spamming my content on imeem, multiple users all saying 'hey this site is better than imeem ' - I guess if they spam other sites enough they can say that they've got less spam on their site. Perfspot doesn't even come close to imeem, although, they do have Cat Power featured on their music page which is a huge plus in my book.

Re: BlastMyMusic Anthony
"I just thought I would make it clear. We are in no way associated with imeem. We actually launched at the beginning of October. It is just now that we are beginning our PR push."

It doesn't take a professor of liguistics to come to this translation
'we launched and nobody cared, so when it came time for the big PR push on myspace we got them to block the competition for us.'
So, the timing of myspace's censorship of imeem is more than a mere cooincidence.

I wonder if the launch of this store has any deliberate correlation with myspace blocking imeem's widgets from their site?

Typical - 'imeem explodes' - two days later myspace.com blocks them, not the first time they've done this to an up and coming site.
Perhaps all we need is a bit of user outrage, has anyone looked closely at the user breakdown for imeem.com? It looks like they're the social network for the young african-american population. This block is mainly affecting users on the other side of the digital divide - and this insult comes during black history month!!!!!!