Songza Adds More Songs With Help From Seeqpod
Erick Schonfeld
11 comments »
Today Songza just got bigger by embracing one of its rivals. The music-search engine (and Crunchies nominee) is incorporating song search results from Seeqpod, expanding the number of songs it can stream from 15.5 million to 23.5 million. Now you can get results from both music search engines in one place. Songza is also considering incorporating songs from Skreemr and other music search engines in the future.
Previously Songza pulled songs solely from Youtube (by only playing the audio track of music videos). Seeqpod is an MP3s search engine that finds songs and streams them from across the Web, including ones that may infringe copyright. (Read this post by Michael to understand why this actually might be legal).
Songza is also launching a Self Promotion beta for artists who want to promote their bands on the site. For 99 cents, bands can get a song on the recommended list of Songza’s home page for 24 hours. The site gets about 40,000 visitors a day. That translates to 1.2 million visitors a month. Not too shabby for a site that launched in November. The company is working with Creative Commons to get the word out about the beta, and is populating the recommended list with Creative Commons artists. Once it builds an actual recommendation engine, which it is working on, it will pull in other songs as well.
Last month, Songza was spun off from Humanized, whose co-founders were recently hired by the Mozilla foundation. Songza will continue to be run as a separate business. It is currently seeking funding.
I’ve noticed a barrage of music news these few weeks!
40,000 visitors a day is not 1.2 million visitors (unique) a month ..
Just as an example of what can be done with the SeeqPod API, here’s a little site I whipped up yesterday:
http://songerize.com/
It would be nice if SeeqPod somehow had its users tag the quality of the files, but nevertheless, it is a very powerful API, and it’s remarkable that it’s 100% free.
This site will make life easier, when all you want to do is search for much. Most of their lists are coming from YouTube.
Here is an interesting option for those wanting to save convert their YouTube favs to MP3s
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/110091.html
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They stream music from youtube videos. And they want funding for that?!
Michael,
What about the judgment MGM v. Grokster?
“We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.”
I understand there may be some differences between P2P software and a search engine, but when you break it down, all of the sites listed are acting in the same manner as P2P networks such as Grokster.
I found the Perfect 10 v. Google case that you outlined interesting, but there is a fundamental difference between that scenario and this one. In the case of Google, they are scraping sites and displaying content with direct links to the content OWNERS website. This type of search is beneficial for all parties involved and contributes to the distribution of information. In the case of these music services, they are scraping sites and displaying content from and linking to, what I imagine in most cases to be, ILLEGAL websites. This seems to be a clear promotion of copyright infringement and thus, seems to fall under the MGM v. Grokster judgment. I’m not a lawyer though.
Personally, while I think free music is great, I feel these services are illegal and will harm the music industry.
This type of search is beneficial for all parties involved and contributes to the distribution of information.
The search result in skreemr is not 100% accurate all the time. Sometimes its very difficult to download songs from this site. So i recommand http://www.woonz.com for searching and downloading song. It’s a complete mp3 search engine. user can listen to online or can download from this site. it’s really amazing. U guyz can give a look in to it. U will love it! woonz.com rocks!
I understand there may be some differences between P2P software and a search engine, but when you break it down, all of the sites listed are acting in the same manner as P2P networks such as Grokster.
http://www.FlashWidgetz.com is similar to songza, but I think it is a lot better and allows you to save your playlist.