Project Playlist is one of the many online music services that have popped up over the last few years. It’s both a search engine and a playlist generator - users search for music that’s located on third party websites and then create playlists which can be embedded elsewhere.
The legality of music search engines is far from clear, as we’ve written about earlier. The company says they pay royalties for songs that are streamed, but that wasn’t enough to stop the RIAA from suing them for copyright infringement in April 2008.
The reason for the lawsuit, which is aggressive even for the RIAA, is that Project Playlist has grown into one of the larger sites on the Internet. Worldwide Comscore stats say the site had 822 million page views from 9.3 million users in September, up from 446 million and 5 million, respectively, a year ago. The number of users is probably somewhere around 20 million.
The company has raised around $3 million from venture capitalists as well as angel investors. They have been unable to raise a new round of financing, sources say, until the RIAA mess is cleaned up. And of course investors are unlikely to pour money into the company since those dollars will just run out the back door to the RIAA in a settlement.
Own Van Natta (Facebook’s former Chief Revenue Officer), is one of the investors in the company. He was until recently being recruited by MySpace to run the new MySpace Music property.
Knowing that the company was in a bad spot, Van Natta may have spearheaded efforts to sell Project Playlist to MySpace while simultaneously interviewing for the CEO spot at MySpace Music. The dual effort put some MySpace execs off of the candidate, our sources say, because they felt that they may have had to acquire the company to get him on board.
Van Natta won’t return emails to discuss the issue, and MySpace isn’t commenting. But it’s clear that MySpace isn’t buying the company, and that Van Natta is no longer in the running to take the CEO role at MySpace Music.
See all
Post
actually, if you have Internet Download Manager installed on your computer, you can download any song from the search results.
the thing is, if IDM is integrated into your browser, it automatically detects the music stream and aks permission for download.
This may be a bug, but its very nice bug for us users, not for RIAA, which may sue them for that bug.
Music online and download has been a sensitive and controversial issue for long….and yet its easily available all over the net. Music industry/ producers and online distributors (legal or illegal) should soon come to a reasonable solution - otherwise its a loose loose for all.
Playlist.com is the best! First of all they have a name that actually represents their business, unlike Imeem or SeeqPod, Songza and Skreemr, which I had never even heard of until reading them in techcrunch, and will most likely fade away as quickly as they appeared. Playlist has all the songs you could ever want and doesn’t crash your PC when it loads (the big problem music.myspace.com is having)… Good luck guys!
Sure it has a better name, but it did copy the whole embeddable playlist idea from imeem which was around years before projectplaylist - so give imeem the respect it deserves for starting this and giving myspace music inspiration for its basic feature search.
Speaking of copying, anyone look at imeem’s “new” hompage design? Looks an awful lot like Project Playlist…
I love playlist.com. Im using thier apps for a while and it caters my music needs. Unlike others.
Anyone was until recently being recruited by MySpace to run the new MySpace Music property.
Here we go!!
Bummer for Van Natta, he was kind of shafted on both ends of the spectrum. As for Project Playlist, I have been using it for a while and I have no complaints, it works out just fine for me.
These guys (Playlist) are hiring by the way…www.rockstarfair.com.
We know the CEO very well, it is a small team of about 3 people, and they make about 7-8m a year off cpa ad revenue.
http://www.fuckedstartups.com
How about http://wwwVibesParty.com, have anyone tried that? I think its pretty kool…
Playlist Project is the no. 1 widget maker - much bigger than Slide and RockYou.
It’d make a lot of sense for MySpace to acquire them.
http://beeintouch.typepad.com/.....vider.html
playlist needs to work because cant get any music on my myspace!
hi