Soundpedia is a legal Singapore based music sharing community offering a music streaming service that provides a decent Pandora substitute to users outside of the United States who can no longer use Pandora, along with the United States itself.
Soundpedia comes with the usual array of Web 2.0 music sharing functions. The site helps users discover new tunes and share them with friends. Soundpedia supports user playlists both interactively or by uploading existing playlist settings from music players. Users can chat with friends, post testimonials, make a comment on an artist, or make their own audio/ video blog.
In a different time it would be easy to dismiss Soundpedia as being yet another music sharing site entering a crowded marketplace. Yet Soundpedia meets an unmet need; it’s more Pandora than Last.fm and the world outside of the United States has been blocked from Pandora for a couple of months. Soundpedia is different to Last.fm. Sure, Last.fm music recommendations can be enjoyable but at other times you just want to listen to a particular artist or album. Soundpedia delivers with a thorough offering that may not be the most aesthetically pleasing service to use, but delivers with music. Music can be played by genre, artist or album and Soundpedia’s library is extensive. I did find the odd album that wasn’t fully included but instead songs were listed in 30 second clips. Co-Founder and NY native Gregory Gumo tells me that Soundpedia is increasing its playlist regularly; most users won’t notice any deficiency.
As non-American I’m missing Pandora’s functionality; Soundpedia just hit my Google Bookmarks list.
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yes, decent is the word!
Looks like they are reaching 1.5 million users .. quite an achievement for them..
From their developers’ blog:
“As of today we are just shy of 1.5million members. Growth has been insane, in 1 month we gained 1 million of those members, I guess you guys like us ; )”
I don`t see this site anywhere close to Pandora…
Yakito
you’re right, it actually works for me unlike Pandora
Weird, it is not even from Singapore. They say they going to move operation to Singapore which mean they are not based and developed in Singapore.
http://soundpedia.com/you/Tyrant/journal/5187
It is cool to say that Singapore can make it but it is just another side of story. These people develop the technology in other country and come to singapore to try their luck. Hope they won’t be killed by Singapore gov who afraid to offend foreigner over copyright issue. Hey, did I say that these soundpedia founders are foreigner too ?
What about its legality?
There are a couple of similar services - http://www.spool.fm and http://www.jiwamusic.com
None of them are legal (spool.fm falls in the legally gray area at best) though.
Actually I picked Singapore because I like the country a lot and have been dying for an excuse to move there. 1 of our directors is a long time resident and did manage to sway the majority of the investors into liking the idea of being Singapore based. Sean, Nori, myself (Greg), and Nendoke all plan on relocating to Singapore over the next few months. If you have never visited Singapore I suggest you try it, the place is seriously nice and offers a bit of everything for everyone. Just leave the chewing gum at home ; >
As for licensing we are licensed via COMPASS
http://soundpedia.com/info/compass.html
Any questions on that I would be more than happy to post, All I can say is I really like working with the guys at COMPASS and we all left the meetings smiling.
Being a Singaporean myself, $10 says that “mscronies” is also another Singaporean. Except that he’s on the other side of the fence — never thankful, always moaning, and forever bitter. Trust me, you can tell by the language used.
Greg, congratulations on the successful launch and booming success of SoundPedia. COMPASS is indeed the correct organisation whcih has appropriately licensed the music you stream. I wish you the very best of luck, and thank you for your kind comments on my country.
Just wondering about Finetune. No one really seems to include them when they are talking about services such as Pandora and Soundpedia. Admittedly, I have not tried Soundpedia, but I used to be a big Pandora user, and once I discovered Finetune, I never went back. I also haven’t felt a need to find any newer or better services since discovering Finetune…so perhaps I am missing out on something.
Good to know we are not left out of everything..thanks Greg..Goodbye pandora!
“Soundpedia is a legal Singapore based music sharing community offering a music streaming service that provides a decent Pandora substitute to users outside of the United States who can no longer use Pandora, along with the United States itself.”
That is some horrendous grammar.
Sweet! It has a nice web 2.0 layout and design, but also is similar to last.fm and finetune.com
What makes it better or worse than Pandora? Any feature changes that would make me think about it? Otherwise, I still have access to pandora and no reason to change.
Gal
How is this like Pandora? It seems more like Finetune in that you have to create a playlist and it plays the music back. This kind of scheme seems like a legal grey area to me. If you create a playlist and then the service plays the songs you told it to play, isn’t that an on-demand service? That is much more expensive than a radio style service.
However it works, what I like about Pandora is I just go to the homepage, enter a song I like and it plays similar music all day long. I don’t have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how it works if I don’t want to.
So, how did COMPASS negotiate licensing rates with every record label in every country in the world when so many other services think that is just so difficult to do that it is, for all intents and purposes, impossible? I didn’t see on their web site any information disclosing how much they are paying for each song played to each person. Is the money going just to record labels, or record labels and artists?
One of the benefits of the scheme established in the US by congress is the money is payed into Soundexchange and they distribute it 50/50 to artists and record labels. If each these services negotiated private deals with each record label, the artists would probably get very little, if any, of the money. The DMCA is probably a very good thing for artists - at least compared to the alternative.
Since COMPASS and Soundpedia are based in Singapore, I wonder if we will ever know where the money is going. Any artist out there have an idea how much you would be getting from COMPASS for music played through Soundpedia?
Greg and SoundPedia, very interesting site. I noticed some tracks are 30 secs only and other ones are full length. Is that due to licensing restrictions? And if you are getting licensed through COMPASS it would seem that you only have the publisher’s / composer’s rights covered, but not the sound recordings / masters which you are making good use of here (am just listening to ‘Jingo’ by Santana as I write this). So far I have not seen any on-demand webcasting service that has received a blanket license for the master recordings as you seem to allude to - at least no via any society / PRO / MRO. Can you clarify this, and is that why you are moving to Singapore (which, btw, I agree, is a great place!). Also, check out what we do at http://www.Sonific.com and http://www.sonific.net - we have 175.000 songs available as music widgets, and playlists are coming soon, as well. Cheers, Gerd
Actually you are correct Gard, we do have to buy or be given the contents not just pay for the streaming. COMPASS covers the streaming, all aspects of it, RIAS (collectively) or the labels, or even the artists. Singapore is a very interesting place in how they address the issue, basically it was made very cut and dry, we are a broadcaster like radio is, we gain the content via purchases, or promos. the difference is in the USA you would have to pay to ASCAP, BMI, Sound Exchange, and whom ever else stuck their hand out that day to collect, Singapore is a little less corrupt than that. Got to love the anti-lobbying anti-corruption laws. Ever see that page on Sound Exchange with the list of all the artists who never even got paid out but Sound Exchange pocketed anyway on their behalf, hehe.
Like your music selection actually on Sonific.com by the way, fits my personal tastes well. good luck to you, Where are you located by the way?
Greg, the webcasting license you refer to does not cover on-demand and interactive services such as yours. Therefore you can’t use a broadcasting license, imho. It is not enough to ‘just buy the record’ - that alone does not mean one can broadcast it on-demand, otherwise all the dozens of services that tried offering on-demand streams, and were sued (see imeem, or, much earlier, launchcast) would be just fine. And given you are making this service (which I like a lot, personally) available to the world at large, there is, imho, no way that any organization such as RIAS, Soundexchange, PPL etc etc could give you that license… at least not as far as I know (and I do look at this all the time!) Now, I agree with you that there SHOULD be such a license available, but right now there isn’t… and so I am afraid this pleasure will be short-lived, too….
That’s one of the scariest logos I’ve ever seen…
For music streamed to a listener in the US you would have to follow US law, not Singapore law. I would imagine that is the same for any country - you follow the law where the end listener is.
Here is some alternative for Soundpedia http://www.danceage.com
Good looking site
maybe TC is posting becuase they feel bad for missing it - or linking to it as a competitor in the pandora post(s)
That’s not true Jeremy. If so, how is the thepiratebay.org still running? The site is able to operate because the law governing the website is based on where the host is and where the company who controls the site is located. When you visit thepiratebay.org, you’re “visiting Sweeden” therefore its laws apply, same thing would apply to soundpedia I believe.
Greg, http://www.Sonific.com is based in San Francisco, and in Basel / Switzerland. We just launched the Sonific Music Network ar http://www.sonific.net btw, where labels and artists can contribute their music directly.. avoiding those licensing issues.
Hey Jeremy, Actually licensing is by where your servers are located, if you would like I would be more than happy to forward you emails I have received while researching this issue from ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, as well as COMPASS.
Just to those who don’t believe this is a decent Pandora substitute, forgive me as I had ZERO way of testing both side by side, it’s been months since I had Pandora access so it was from memory. In some ways Soundpedia is superior, the ability to play albums for example isn’t available in Pandora (for memory)
Love the site Greg. I don’t get the comparisons with Pandora - one is limited to whatever music Pandora selects for you, and we have constant restrictions imposed, one after another. Now I can’t even use Pandora.
I’ll keep using Soundpedia from here on in.
Hi Duncan,
I’m one of the developers from Buzka (in Perth Australia) who you met at Drinks 2.0. I adore Pandora and it’s an essential part of my coding process. You can still easily access it with a little tweaking, Tor and a simple pac file:
http://openpandora.blogspot.co.....ndora.html (I would have linked it in my Music Finder spot on Buzka, but then people might have though I was just making a cheap plug)
Be sure to check out my comment at the end if you have problems or don’t use Firefox.
The best part about this method is that because of the PAC file, the Tor proxies only affect http://pandora.com and nothing else, although if there are other US only sites that you want to use, then you can add them to the list too.
God bless Pandora =D
It’s a rather decent site. Offers a diverse range of music, and it streams fast enough for fluent listening.
On a side note, I think basing the operation in Singapore will give a boost to hopes the next Google/Yahoo! will come from Singapore.
Gerd, We met with COMPASS did a demo of the site for them and we obtained the license. Actually ASCAP as well offers an on-demand license only issue in the USA has been Sound Exchange put their foot down on that for now. It was made very clear to us that COMPASS is the correct agency to go with and we feel very satisfied with their answers regarding this issue. Singapore is just a much more tech savvy society and rather than fear new technology they embrace it. They see our site as a valuable tool in the combating of copyright infringement rather than an enemy of the state as web broadcasters are treated stateside. Do not get me wrong, what you have said is true for US-based streaming sites with servers based in the US. If you have time please contact me actually I would like to discuss this more with you and I do value your opinion.
Well, I just did get a chance to check out Pandora until it was too late! All I can say is that at first glance SoundPedia looks pretty refreshing.
P.S: Works well in IE, but am used to Opera, and it just gave up!
best news, thanks i insert now in my blog
Hi Gerd and All,
We have two web 2.0 music services in France, Blogmusik.net and Jiwamusic, that have authorizations from both the publishers and the records companies through deals they have signed with their representative bodies (SACEM, SCPP and SPPF).
These deals are based on sharing ad-revenues. But I think they just cover the french territory. Well, now that Jiwamusic is available as an add-on on Facebook, there is no doubt that some international issues have to be resolved.
Yikes, the sound quality of the music I listened to on Soundpedia was downright unlistenable — it was like I was being assualted sonically. Sure, you _can_ listen to it, but it’s like putting on a blender while trying to listen to a clasical masterpiece — it just completely destroys the experience.
At first I thought it may be my Altec Lansing 641 speakers doing a poor job at playback, but upon listening to some music on my Sennheiser HD580s (suffice to say that these are very expensive, high quality, audiophile-quality headphones that do a very good job at sound reproduction), I found it was just the sound quality of the music (I’d say it was probably less then 128 kps MP3 quality… that’s pretty damn bad if you really want to “listen” to the music and actually enjoy the sound/experience).
For the record, I didn’t listen to an exhaustive amount of tracks, but I didn’t have to — just hearing what I did was enough to make me not want to use Soundpedia again (or at least until they do somethign to improve the sound quality of the music they have available). Even if there were a few songs in there of decent quality, I don’t think it’s worth the time/effort to sort through all the other low quality music that seeks to punish you for your hearing ability.
The rest of the Soundpedia service seems pretty solid, but as someone who used to frequently use Pandora, there really isn’t much of a comparison. Pandora offered a simplistic, user friendly, high quality experience on all fronts.
Come back, Pandora… we need you.
- Bruce (An Australian resident who is currently unable to listen to Pandora due to the current — and seemingly dysfunctional — international media laws).
PS.
Last.FM is “sort” of ok. The music is higher quality, but the rest of the service is lacking. I’d rather buy individual tracks from iTunes (not that I have an iPod, ha!) or Amazon.com. I’d even go as far to — *gasp!* — pay for a full album.
But anyway, regardless of what I think of the music services, thanks for making the blog post. It had some good info in it.