Frustrated with the fact that Pandora does not provide its streaming service in Canada, Vancouver-based Jeff Anderson set out to build a community-driven Internet radio service of his own along with other music fanatics, and dubbed the project Listen.fm.
Currently still in private beta, Listen.fm is not going to be a ‘revolutionary’ service, says Anderson, but rather just a great place to listen to and discover new music that can legally be shared with others. The site has been in the works for nearly a year and should be launching in public beta some time next year.
SeeqPod, the popular “playable media” search service that many music sites use as the foundation for their core offering, has filed a petition for Chapter 11 yesterday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California.
The company, which has raised $7 million in venture capital to date from undisclosed investors, is evidently doing this out of fear about the outcome of the multibillion dollar lawsuits it was slapped with by music labels like Warner Music, Capitol Records and EMI.
We reported earlier that SeeqPod has become quite the target of the music industry, which went so far as going after developers who merely leveraged the SeeqPod API. They silenced Songbeat and forced Streamzy to put itself up for sale on eBay as a result.
SeeqPod has decided to sell its source code to developers to spawn more clones, one of the media search startups that built upon its API is apparently calling it quits: Streamzy, which we profiled in July 2008, is selling itself on eBay at a starting bid of $1,000, provided it’s not a lame April Fools joke (the bidding ends April 1).
Update: Streamzy co-founder Brian Krantz says it’s definitely not a joke.
The service amassed merely 2,400 registered users since its launch in early 2008, and has a monthly visitor rate of only 7,000. The back-end runs for free on Google App Engine and the Flex front-end code will be included should someone decide to pick up the site.
We’ve seen a number of music sites like Seeqpod and Grooveshark that leverage user-uploaded music scattered across the web to offer free, on-demand jukeboxes. These services manage to skirt legal repercussions by only serving content that is hosted on other sites, which makes them harder to sue (though some have tried).
Streamzy, a media search startup that launched earlier this year, has taken this approach one step further. Instead of trying to index user-generated content, Streamzy uses Seeqpod’s database as a content source, which it further refines by weeding out broken links. The site, which used to only support audio, has just introduced video playback as well.
Streamzy offers a streamlined (and much improved) interface for Seeqpod’s content, sporting a minimalist player that neatly labels each song by title and artist name. Beyond basic media playback, Streamzy also offers an intuitive drag-and-drop playlist maker that users can save for future reference. In the future the company plans to allow for users to embed playlists on their blogs and social network profiles.
Streamzy isn’t much more than a resigned interface for Seeqpod, but it’s a redesign that was badly needed. And while it will have a hard time differentiating itself from the likes of Jogli, Songza, Soundflavor and a number of others, it’s a good place to start for music on demand.
