The music search engine and Internet jukebox, Songza, lets you seek out any song on the web and stream it immediately. In January of this year, we announced the site's partnerships with Seeqpod and Skreemr, which allowed them to grown their online library to 28 million songs. Now, Songza grows again with a launch of a new Facebook app and the arrival of a Songza API.
The Songza Facebook app lets friends see what each other are listening to on the Songza web site. Whenever a song is added to your playlist, that information is posted to your mini-feed and your profile page. Your friends can then click the link to the song to be taken to the Songza site to listen to it for themselves. In order to use the Facebook app, you have to first sign up for an account at Songza.com
Songza in the Mini-Feed
Along with the Facebook app, Songza is now also offering RSS feeds for the site's top-played songs, the featured songs list, and each user's playlist of newly added tunes, which is found on the user profile page. With that last one, the user playlist feed, you now have the ability to add Songza to a lifestreaming service such as FriendFeed, for example.
The last part of the Songza announcement involves the launch of their API. By using the API, developers can build custom widgets and applications based on Songza data. The API can be used to access the featured songs list, a user's playlist, and the last ten songs a user has added to their playlist. At the moment, Songza isn't imposing any limitations on the number of times requests can be made to the API, but they do remind developers that their feeds only update every 15 minutes, so there isn't much point to polling more often than that.
Because Songza finds its music on the internet, it can be useful for locating more obscure artists or live performances. And since the service doesn't allow for downloads, only streaming, it's legit. They even pay artists based on how many times a song was streamed via licenses with the major performing-rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC). However, the best thing about Songza is that you can listen to a song as many times as you want in its entirety, unlike Last.fm, whose on-demand service lets you play any particular song, too, but only in full three times before receiving a prompt to purchase it.
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One correction to this story. This service does not pay the artists. It has licenses with ASCAP, BMI & SESAC which are all performing rights organizations in the US which represent the composers of the songs. The recording artists many times are different people and receive no money from this service when their songs are streamed. This is why similar services such as Seepod and Playlist.com are being sued. The owners of the sound recording copyrights are not being compensated. To Songza's defense, there is a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which indemnifies search engines from copyright infringement claims. Since Songza's service sits on top of the Google search engine, this clause in the DMCA may apply to them. Time will tell if it does.
Posted by: w1n5t0n | May 16, 2008 1:46 PM