Back in September last year Michael suggested everyone check out BlogMusik quickly before it was shut down. BlogMusik is a service born in France that lets you search for mp3 files on the web and listen to them in streaming mode for free. At the time the service was young and had no particular licensing agreements. A few months later, the SACEM, the organization in charge of collecting payments for artists’ rights sent them a cease and desist letter with a view to stop the service. A lot has happened since (beyond a rather nice site redesign and addition of sharing features).
BlogMusik will announce tomorrow that they came to an agreement with the SACEM, clearing the service of copyright infrigement accusations. The details of this agreement are not are not being disclosed, but other deals suggest it is based on a revenue sharing mode. BlogMusik’s business model is relying on advertising and affiliate revenue coming from the sales of songs on iTunes and Amazon. This agreement should cover BlogMusik for any music they host wherever the music is listened from. However they still have to come to an agreement with organizations representing majors and labels (Pandora had to face new webradio rates imposed by the RIAA). This is being taken care of according to the CEO of the company and new agreements should be announced soon.
All in all this is a good news for BlogMusik The company now has an opportunity to become a true free legal alternative to listen to music on the internet. Unlike Pandora this is a music on demand service where you choose the titles you want to listen to (although you have a smart playlist option to generate automatically radios out of a song or an artist).
BlogMusik.net will also change name and become Deezer.com. This is a good thing i had a hard time getting the UR/nameL right with this “k” in the middle (not mentionning the .net).
RadioBlogClub, another popular french service was forced a few months ago to change hosting provider following a complaint sent by the same SACEM. The service was interupted a few days and opened again as fresh as new. To date no official licensing agreement was made with the company.
BlogMusik was an awesome service that I used when I didn’t have my iTunes library with me.
im listening to it now
thanks for blogging about this, its a bit like anywhere.fm
Thanks again
Great Service – only took seconds to register – and there are thousands of TOP oldies to enjoy from the 60s on up
Wicked Service, Excellent, so much so I bought the .mobi DeeZer straight to your phone.
Eeh Eh! Ehh Hmm mm, no dubstep in there yet but we’ll fix that big up Bristol UK Scene is booming.
James BlogMusik with a K makes it hard to remember and to spell right indeed
k in the middle? its in the end, and for germans far more easy than dießer.com
To the commenters (some deleted) laughing at typos – Thank you for pointing them out, but the sarcasm isn’t appreciated. Ouriel writes TechCrunch France for us and knows at least four languages that I’m aware of. I doubt the readers pointing out grammatical issues could speak with him in, say, French. Or Spanish. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to be an American when I see people act like this.
mmmm ….. So I see Techcrunch – has registered bloggers all over de world
…. mmm … Mike – wat will take for me ( from India ) to become a blogger in Techcrunch ?? 
Caz I see Techcrunch idle – with out new posts … between 10Am to 11 AM ( India Time ) — thought I can fill out that GAP
.. wat ya say … ??
what the hell is wrong with you people. It’s like an army of half witted twelve year olds invaded my blog.
Even Better than Seeqpod. Wow!
I thnk Mike has gone of his mind today ( or maybe he is in problem wth his gal frnd
) …… tht makes him dare to scold his users …… oh Boy .. Mike – don forget this de internet and u jus cant speak out like this 
Honte à moi, je savais même pas qu’il y avait un techcrunch.fr!
I love this service. Their SmartList is the best feature there. You don’t need to log-in to hear 3 hours of continuous listening based on one artist (free). For me it is much better than Pandora.
Very nice, I like freebies.
Can the author please answer this question:
Don’t you guys ever do any due diligence??!?!
I’m appalled by the resolute statement made by the author which is misleading and simply untrue.
Let me explain: SACEM is a performing rights organization in France. This is a similar type of organization to ASCAP and BMI in the United States. They do not have the right to license music on-demand, especially not music that does not fall within their catalog.
There is no such thing as a “blanket on-demand worldwide on-demand license” in ANY territory.
Further, music licenses and especially on-demand licenses can not possibly extend to the North American or British territories where on-demand licensing is strictly controlled by the individual rightsholders. An agreement with a single PRO is sufficient for webcasting or non-interactive streaming of recorded “album tracks”, but does not grant the publisher the right to stream music on-demand and especially stream music that can not be traced back to its orginal rightsholder (Since SACEM can’t possibly have all that data worldwide). These laws go all the way back to the old jukeboxes in bars.
Blogmusik, Deezer, whatever it is is extremely vulnerable to serious litigation by ever major US label and rightsholder. They pulled the wool over your eyes with that exclusive, Techcrunch.
Jordan, we looked into that indeed. The agreement with SACEM covers BlogMusik for licensing authors’ rights on any territory. But for majors and labels’ rights they will have to close a second set of agreements with different organisations for each country.
As a non English speaking user, I’m a bit confused with those 2 last comments. Are Deezer and its users acting legal or not? Legal for authors but not for major and labels, how can I see the difference?
in order to be completely legit they will have to nail an agreement with majors too. which is discussion right now according to the founders.
Ouriel,
This may be true, but SACEM is a performing rights organization.
Performance rights organizations (PROs) provide intermediary functions, particularly royalty collection, between copyright holders and parties who wish to use copyrighted works PUBLICLY such as shopping and dining venues, and terrestrial radio this has recently been extended to include webcasting or non-interactive online radio. Legal consumer use of works, such as buying CDs from a music store, downloading and on-demand streaming confer private performance rights.
Only the artist themselves, the indies, major or mid-majors hold the right to license private performances of works.
This means they may have licensed the performing rights for the various authors and composers but have not secured any private (or mechanical rights) to stream this music in any territory.
These rules are in place worldwide to prevent unauthorized licensing
There is no legal on-demand streaming occurring here. They are breaching the right of the author, composer or artist to control their copyrights and therefore preventing or otherwise impairing their ability to license and retail their intellectual property.
I’m not saying that this is wrong on their part. The music industry worldwide has made it extremely hard to directly obtain these rights. Many make it this difficult because they simply don’t know how to monetize outside of subscription and retail.
I find that URLs with non-standard-english things are easier to remember, because I have to force myself to remember what’s different (flickr ask an example).
Please don’t bash .net
It serves a useful purpose. In this case .com made plenty of sense, but if everything becomes a .com (like personal websites…) then .com ceases to mean anything…
Checked out Deezer — Very cool and well done, but…
Jordan your comments are 100% correct. Licensing especially with the major labels is almost impossible and very expensive (prohibitive). I’ve worked with them before, not a fun time….
Deezer is still an illegal service despite their latest claims, they’ll have to come to an agreement with EVERY single copyright holder/label or potentially be held liable for every instance they stream a song they don’t have the rights to play. Lucky they are based in France…
Whether or not they can come to an agreement (I say it’s very doubtful) with the majors is TBD, there are many organizations out there that pay top dollar to license music legally (why would they under-cut their own pricing structure to accomodate Deezer alone?)…
Don’t you think that there are a million media companies out there that would love to openly stream music like Deezer? If the majors made it easy to do, it would have been done over and over again already..
Michael your comment about people dissing Ouriel is definitely embarrassing — Most people in North America are completely ignorant to other cultures and languages, I dare them to try and learn a second language (verbal/written) and see how they do.
90%+ of Americans don’t read a single book after they graduate highschool, so I understand the ignorance … Go live abroad and survive for a year and I bet you would have a lot more respect for anyone that speaks a language outside of their native tongue…
LonelyBloggers, i agree this is not going to be easy. but not impossible. thanks for the support anyway
I think the most powerful site in this field is SoundPedia currently/
http://www.tech...the-rest-of-us/
to Stephen Paul Webber:
.com is ubiquitous, it’s like gas – everyone proposes various solutions, like electricity (.net) or biofuel (.something else) but most of us are running on .com gas. Well, some of my clients decided to go with .us, but still searching for that perfect .com match
Lets not forget the mighty Hype Machine which still in a legal grey area, but non the less a fantastic service, where all the the music actually comes from live blogs.
http://www.hypem.com
You know what’s funny, BlogMusik is a better copy of Radio Blog Club. But what I love most about BlogMusik is that all their music is higher quality (for the most part, some are just crap quality).
But it’s so damn simple to download music from them, I mean that site is actually helping me find songs I can’t find on p2p – and as a result I can just get unlimited downloads from it. Thanks for helping me BlogMusik, I appreciate the free music and now that you’re SACEM approved – it means I can pirate in relative peace
The best part is that you can’t decypher between a user that downloads it or a user that listens to it, and that truly is the best part – Free Music
All – as pointed out above, it’s amazing me that this needs to be said again and again: SACEM, and other PROs (performing rights organizations) do NOT have the right to grant the use of the RECORDINGS – only the compositions. They represent the PUBLISHERS and writers. To be legal and licensed fully (and the same goes for Soundpedia btw.. and another 10+ players in this turf), BlogMusik needs to get a license from the LABELS – for the Master Recordings, and for each track they use, and for each territory. So far, I have not seen any evidence of such a license. Maybe they can clarify because if they can get some agreement like that I sure would like one, too
And last but not least: my own company, http://www.sonific.com has done that for the Indies and aggregators, btw. and we have cleared rights for over 200.000 tracks – but without the major labels, by and large (so far… stay tuned). We offer music widgets, for free, for up to 25 tracks in a single playlist. Michael: maybe you can cover us some time ? Greetings from San Fran.
General comment to Techcrunch editors: I’ve been reading your blog for a long time now and I noticed that you get more and more typos in. Such as this one: “UR/nameL”. There were few more on today’s email in other articles. Seems like you need a proof-reader, as I bet if anyone else read the article BEFORE you publish it – most of these problems would go away and your publication would look a lot more professional.
In case someone doesn’t know it, you can also keep the songs easily. It’s a feature of all Flash based players.
Just keep an eye on your browser cache (e.g. type ‘about:cache’ in your Firefox address bar) and keep saving the tunes on your PC.
To be more precise; It’s a feature of all Flash based players that are using progressive download method.
good one?? will try it and comment ——–
Jordan – you’re sort of right but definitely not 100% correct. SACEM, unlike BMI and ASCAP does also represent the mechanical rights as well as the performing rights so it is NOT a PRO. However the collecting societies in the EU, despite what they may say individually, are generally not able to grant international licences. Licensing needs to be done on a territory by territory basis, which means that while this service is someway to being legal in France it will not be licensed in the UK or the USA. As the article says though, deals need to be struck with the labels for the communication to the public of the sound recordings before the site can claim to be totally licensed in France.
Hi there, that’s something different: http://www.mcracy.com, login with: delmonico. Greetings from munich
A module for Netvibes or iGoogle :
http://netvibes...zer/deezer.html
Phil
chevre men manda para hi5 pero pulentos cd men
ola chocos agregen mi msn capricornio-oliver-1@hotmail.com y nos pedremos conocer mas
Legal? Hahahaha; is right !
Deezer doesn’t use real streaming, but simply progressive download, so all the tracks you have listedned are stored in your browser cache.
Imho, as it has been done for Youtube, Dailymotion etc with plugings like Videodownloader, someone could launch a simple tool allowing any unexperienced user to easily grap Deezer MP3’s…
Try this http://firstfm.lya.eu/en/
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This is an awesome service
I prefer the website http://www.media-bloger.com which is ligther and faster
I’m absolutely FOR compensating the artists and rights holders, but I think the music industry should start thinking fast. No, not about new DRM and user annyoance schemes or big lists of »forbidden« IP addresses (i.e., countries) BUT about feasible worldwide licensing schemes!
»Territories« are long gone, the Internet is per definition worldwide, which is a Good Thing. It seems the idiotic scheme of having »countries«, »borders« and »territories« (and even people defending those with their LIVES!) is still being held high … on such a small planet. Unbelievable, really. Arbitrarily erecting »Internet Fences« is just laughable, NOT a feasible scheme for generating revenue.
Just my 2cents.
good topic
@moonbase
You’re totally right, but that ain’t going to happen in our generation i’m afraid. it works to the advantage of oligarchies to exploit the masses in order to retain their wealth. and if the masses are happy to be exploited, you have a happy medium. It’s called capitalism and it’s the way the world goes round. one small step in the right direction has been apple’s siding with anti-drm policies. I’m hoping the lack of respect for intellectual property in emerging markets will force the labels to rethink their position as countries like china and india enter the global media market.