With a comic message on its website saying that the service has gone away to enter the 36 Shaolin Chambers of Software Kung Fu but will return stronger, music discovery application Songbeat lets its visitors know that it has received a first blow in court after Warner Music (and other music labels) sued the German startup for enabling users to stream and download music without permission.
Songbeat essentially allowed you to scour the web for MP3s using integrated search for Seeqpod, Project Playlist, SpoolFM, iASK and more, stream tracks and even download them from a neat and fast desktop application.
This comes fresh off the heels of the news that Warner Music is suing Seeqpod and even a developer that was using the application’s API, which prompted us to write that they’ve reached a new low. It’s not getting any better today.
Warner Music succesfully sued the startup in a Hamburg court last week, so they have a court enactment which they also served last Friday. Songbeat says it will respond with a fast appeal but has taken the service offline for the time being just to make sure. The company believes it has a good chance of winning the appeal; I’m a bit less optimistic but I like the fact that the startup firmly believes they can make the labels start listening to them instead of chasing them around. One can always dream.
Either way, Songbeat says it will be back online soon. The company says it’s currently in talks with music labels and will continue to do so even if it loses the case for good. If the latter should happen, the startup plans to relocate and simply reboot the service anyway.
This sucks. I’m sick of labels allways trying to take it to the man. Pretty soon mp3s will be a thing of the past and we will have to go back to records. hmmmmm. Well maybe not records but tapes. Get your walkmans out
I really hope these guys fight it out in court.
The record companies are like school yard bullies picking on the small kid with glasses.
The fact of the matter is that the record companies are resorting to extortion … they don’t sue Google even tough Google indexes plenty more mp3s than most of these sites (just try doing a query like
inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(mp3) “Coldplay”
in the Google search box (but replace Coldplay with anything else)
Of course RIAA is scared of Google, and instead they try to intimidate small players like Songbeat.
I really hope they fight all the way to court like the Pirate Bay guys.
We support you here from India!
Anjali Sen
That’s my favorite music soft!
I believe they’re coming from a point that while this may be free promotion, there is a very very high chance that people listening to this will not even buy the songs.
Come on, let’s be frank, the ease of just connecting to the internet and just stream music and even download it with some 3rd party software defeats the purpose of wasting some money, even a dollar.
*I think what they need to figure out is some other way of artists making money from their songs other than people actually purchasing it. Maybe product placements, etc.
As for me, file sharing ftw! Embrace the community!
“I believe they’re coming from a point that while this may be free promotion, there is a very very high chance that people listening to this will not even buy the songs. ”
Its the same thing when Napster was getting sued. Music Sales went down almost 50%. The Record companies are still living and working in the dark ages before computers and the internet. They have to learn that streaming and downloading is the way of the younger generations and no matter what they do we will find away around them
why does the adsense copy what was in the article? IS this some sort of spam deal? I have had the same thing happen with one of my other comments
Yeah, deleted that one. Nasty kind of spam, hard to stop!
3Sixty Fishes DivShare Out Of The Deadpool it’s also on that post two. Thanks for the heads up.
Looks like the only company that has any chance against music labels is Veoh.com
I know sites like skreemr link to the amazon affiliate download for the song plus the mp3 so its not like some sites don’t try to support the labels. Wonder if that plays any kind of factor in who the labels go after.
Come on, let’s be frank, the ease of just connecting to the internet and just stream music and even download it with some 3rd party software defeats the purpose of wasting some money, even a dollar.
Hey, lets cut off the channels that create demand for our products and make more money.
I don’t understand why other services like that are not being sued (Project Playlist, SpoolFM, iASK were mentioned as well)