I’ve been tracking the progress of Vienna, Austria-based music startup tunesBag for a while now. It’s essentially a social music player that can best be compared to the likes of Lala, imeem and Anywhere.fm in the sense that it allows you to upload your entire MP3 collection, stream it from anywhere over the Internet and share it with your friends. It’s completely free and claims to be perfectly legal under Austrian law, which I’m not sure will be enough of a shield against sue-happy music labels should it become popular.
TunesBag doesn’t bring anything truly innovative to the table, but it’s always nice to know there are alternatives available, and tunesBag is a strong contender that too often remains under the radar, even if you need an invite code to get in for now.
Today, the company is hoping to change that with the release of an Adobe AIR-powered application (hence available for Windows, Mac and Linux) that brings some of its goodness to the desktop. You’ll still need an invitation code to access the service for now, but hopefully they will open up to the masses soon. We’re trying to get the company to release a number of invite codes for our readers. Update: TunesBag came through with 500 invites. Sign up here or use the code TECHCRUNCH.
The app currently only lets you play tunes from your uploaded music library as well as custom or public playlists from your desktop, and is pretty basic in that sense – it doesn’t even have a volume control option. You can buy music tracks directly from within the tool (through Amazon or iTunes) and share them with your friends on other social networks like Facebook etc., but that’s currently pretty much all there is to it. Most likely, there will be additional features in the future, hopefully mimicking the way the web application currently works (including recommendations, native upload of iTunes and Winamp library, and so on).
For now, check out the web service first and install the desktop application if you like the way it works, and let us know how it goes for both.
This looks pretty convenient for people on the go. Love the Air based interface too, I’ll have to keep an eye on them.
Update the article with invite codes if you get any.
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So, are they bringing back the old Napster?
Does anyone have invite codes for tunesbag?
Thanks you Robin for specifying tunesbag as a “Digital Music STREAMING Startup.”
It’s a shame how many other music projects are unfortunately attached to the moniker whether or not they are befallen to the pitfalls that are associated with streaming destinations.
Awesome, I’ve been playing around with all the library streaming startups I knew of and none of them do exactly what I want. Love to test out Tunesbag if anyone’s got an invite code.
Thanks!
This is Hansjoerg from tunesBag.com; of course we’re providing an invitation code
Click here (be quick!)
http://www.tune.../kw/?techcrunch
This looks interesting… what I would like to see though is some way for people to benefit from making music suggestions and providing playlists.
So if someone likes your playlists and they go and buy it on Amazon/iTunes, you get a share of the revenue.
It is cumbersome to sign up as an iTunes affiliate, so a third party could help with this sharing of music and profit.
If there’s anything like this already, please post it here, I will watch the thread. Thanks
I’ve used this program before, its good but really doesn’t offer anything new or doesn’t have an innovative direction
who gives a flying fuck? good luck about innovating in vienna. when they have some time from their opera and coffee. frikkkin caught in a time warp
Neat app!
Just subscribed and uploaded my first album. I have to say: it comes pretty close to what I need for listening my own music online.
Looking forward to where this is going
yeah, all this is spam; why would anyone want to use this? what’s it do that many other streaming companies don’t do? plus you don’t even have to download a special AIR app to do it.
Several other companies that did this have already gone out of business. No one wants to pay for it, and you can’t make money with Ad dollars.
Good luck, but I think you are going to join the boneyard along with the likes of MediaMater and a several others who didn’t find the revenues that they needed.
Wake up and Smell the Coffee.