Mzinga isn’t the only new product launching tonight at the Boston TechCrunch Party. Massachusetts based OurStage is debuting a new iPhone site where anyone can listen to top ranked Indie songs as well.
Ourstage, which launched in March 2007, is a site that lets users rank and buy Indie songs. Artists upload the songs, which users then judge - two song snippets are heard and the user votes for which one he or she likes the best. The result is are constantly updated top lists of songs. The top songs overall or by category are then listed on the site, and two $5,000 prizes are given to the top artists each month.
Users can also purchase any song in unrestricted MP3 format for $.99. Currently the artists receive 100% of proceeds, but starting in 2008 OurStage will begin to take a 30% cut.
Now iPhone users can visit the site and stream any of the top songs - just visit ourstage.com from your iPhone to access the custom user interface, which uses Quicktime to stream the music.
OurStage is taking a different approach to ranking Indie music from other startups we’ve covered. Amie Street, by comparison, simply sets the price of every news song at zero and then begins raising the price as the number of downloads increases. Amie Street was recently funded by Amazon. Also see our coverage of Strayform and SellaBand.
Do i get a free iphone if I talk to them?
BTW - where is our bet standing Mike with regards to business usage - still not seeing it buddy!
cool.
Nice!
Works better on a Zune though, check it out!
Cool, too bad I don’t have an Iphone. =(
You should check out IndieKazoo as well (http://indiekazoo.com/). Its very new but they already have a number of fairly well known independent artists.
i’ve been using http://seeqpod.com/m for the iPhone for every song, these iPhone apps are not as bad as some initially thought. i also use http://iradioapp.com
Oh boy, Indie music.
That’s cool feature for Indie music lovers.
For a very cool iphone trick you should check out wfmu’s iphone site (http://iphone.wfmu.org) where they are streaming live internet radio to the iphone via both edge and wifi.
I think they are the only people providing live streaming to the iphone right now and they are using a product called tversity to do it. Should be interesting to see if this is the first sign of more live content coming to the iphone.
Does anyone else see the irony in “top” indie music?…
a great list of similar sites that should have included ourstage:
http://digg.com/music/Top_5_RE.....ch_Engines
looks like there are some great incentives in here for artists to upload. i took a look at the website. purchasing songs is somewhat challenging. clicking on the artist page doesn’t show a list of tracks for purchase, but has links to the artist page. the track can be purchased if it is being played. redesign?
listeners may want to rank as they listen to a channel - which is not supported. listeners could judge the current song against the previous as the channel streams. ourstage may want to incorporate that functionality or at least randomize the channel so that it doesn’t simply count down from #1 each time.
http://www.chartvote.com is a similar site that is launching soon.
Sweet iPhone app from OurStage, looks good.
Drew, Great feedback. Thanks.
Watch Out! Playlists are coming…
-dev team
It’s great to see the many new novel ideas for creating, ranking, sorting, searching, and playing new music and videos are coming out.
TechCrunch stays at the forefront of changes the internet is brining to music and movies.
I’d like to shamelessly promote a new video that is seeking crowd funding.
http://www.strayform.com/Propo.....html?id=57
Bob Ricci is teaming up with an independent web creator to make a video for his next hit “Unhackable.” His last hit “She Blocked Me” and its video had over 50 million hits a couple of years ago.