Tel Aviv, Israel based MeeMix, which we first covered in August, is kicking-off the New Year by moving their taste-predicting Internet radio service from closed to open Beta.
Internet radio is already a very crowded space dominated by entrenched startups like Last.fm and Pandora. Smaller players and recent entrants such as SpiralFrog, Jango and Slacker are not increasing the breathing room. MeeMix wants its share of the pie, too, and is keeping its crosshairs focused on the U.S. market and its dominant revenue potential.
MeeMix’s public beta launch is marked by the addition of new features:
- Meeps: Comment-based conversations users can have regarding a song, album or artist.
- Station Home: Every MeeMix station now has a dedicated page allowing users to interact in its context and shape its playlist.
- Mee Feeds: This is basically MeeMix’s version of Facebook’s News Feed. The feed indicates songs favorited, stations rated, friends added, etc.
- Mee Journey: Users can see other members’ public log or “journey” of actions in MeeMix.
- Station Gift: Users can now send other members a station as a gift. The station is then the “property” of the recipient who can customize it without affecting the original station.
- Twitter Integration: Users can update their Twitter accounts with songs they’ve listened to, their favorite stations, etc.
MeeMix claims to have doubled its music catalog, but a search for my personal favorites ‘John Coltrane’ and ‘Miles Davis’ came-up empty. The same searches on Jango and Slacker both came-up positive.
I would like to have seen the addition of “genre” to the channel creation wizard which is still limited to artist and song. A widgetized player also would have been a welcome addition, especially the desktop kind.
In my original post, I hypothesized that licensing its engine could become MeeMix’s core business. Looks like this might not be far fetched as the company says they have been approached by a mobile operator for the purpose of powering a taste-based cellular music streaming service. The company has also shared with me some interesting offline deals on the horizon that should keep MeeMix’s potential on a positive note for 2008. We’ll post another update soon. In the meantime, let us know how you think MeeMix compares to the competition.
Update: MeeMix also sent out an email to some users today saying that they will be discontinuing the service in Israel for now due to licensing issues (Thanks Orli):
