Songza, Last.fm Expand Music Libraries
Music sites Songza and Last.fm separately announced major upgrades to their streaming music libraries. In Songza's case, the additional tracks came via partnerships with competing web sites, while Last.fm snagged the support of major labels for their new streaming music services. The Last.fm news ends days of rampant speculation after the company sent out cryptic invitations to press conference a few days ago, which had some betting the company would morph into a video service.
Songza first: The site, which was a Crunchies finalist in the "best design" category, announced that as of January 17th its library has grown to 28 million songs. The additional songs were added via partnerships with Seeqpod and Skreemr. Any song found on Seeqpod or Skreemr, can now be streamed on Songza.
"We're excited about these partnerships -- they allow our users to find and listen to a much broader range of music," said Songza founder Aza Raskin. "Being able to listen to entire songs -- not just 30-second clips -- is a great thing for music fans. It will lead to more informed purchases of music, and more purchases overall."
Songza also announced a promotional program in collaboration with Creative Commons where independent artists can have their tracks featured on the site's recommended page for 24 hours for 99 cents. According to Songza, the recommended page receives 40,000 unique visitors each day.
Last.fm announced on their blog that beginning today users would be able to stream full-length tracks. People from EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner are all on board, as well as "thousands of independent artists and labels." The service is available immediately in the US, UK, and Germany.
The CBS-owned site already has deals in place with various royalty collection agencies, but under their new program, unsigned artists can upload music and be paid directly for every stream.
In a bit of Facebook-esque hyperbole, Last.fm co-founder Richard Jones proclaimed on the company's blog that Last.fm was "redesigning the music economy."
Last.fm claims that their service is "the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free." However, with Songza's 28 million songs, it may not be the biggest collection of music available for streaming (the legality of Songza's music might not always be clear since the site is a music search engine, rather than a host like Last.fm). So how do they stack up?
I first tried a search for a relatively obscure artist -- Lemon Jelly -- in Songza. 45 results. In Last.fm: "Lemon Jelly isn’t yet available to play on Last.fm." Next a more popular artist -- Radiohead. Songza yielded about 35 results with a lot of duplicates. Last.fm had 4 tracks, but only one was full-length. How about contemporary rap artist T.I.? 45 results on Songza, a handful of 30 second clips on Last.fm.
I'll leave you to do your own tests and draw your own conclusions.
Update: According to paidContent Last.fm's service will only allow tracks to be streamed 3 times under the current structure of the deal with the record labels. Also, see the comments for info on why my math above a little wonky.
FOLLOW RWW ON TWITTER
RECENT JOBS
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Now, sites like Songza are what makes me proud of where the Internet is heading. Taking a challenging business model and trying to monetize it !
Posted by: Vincent Cassar | January 23, 2008 9:30 AM
You should take a closer look before you post wrong figures. I took a quick look at the Last.fm artists you mentionned and:
> radiohead : over 50 tracks (full-length)
> T.I : over 50 tracks (full length)
I assume you didn't bother to browse to the actual album pages (e.g. http://www.last.fm/music/T.I./King)...
Posted by: Greg | January 23, 2008 10:16 AM
Oops... ;)
Here's the link:
http://www.last.fm/music/T.I./King
Posted by: Greg | January 23, 2008 10:22 AM
I had looked at the album pages for earlier, fruitless searches (like for Lemon Jelly), but it slipped my mind for those last two -- which ended up being the ones I used in the article. That was my mistake.
But that said, it appears that all of the tracks streaming on the T.I. page you linked to are 30 second clips, not full tracks.
The same goes for Radiohead (a former EMI artist). I.e., I can only listen to 30 seconds of "Karma Police."
Posted by: Josh Catone
|
January 23, 2008 10:38 AM
I can listen to all the above-mentionned tracks in full length... The on-demand is only available in the US, UK and Germany right now.
Posted by: Greg | January 23, 2008 10:53 AM
Yeah, I'm in the US. Even when logged in, though, I only get 30 second tracks. Maybe I'm missing something (do I have to do something special to turn on full length tracks? That wouldn't make for a very fluid or user friendly service...)
Posted by: Josh Catone
|
January 23, 2008 11:26 AM
you also fail to mention that most of the content on songza is live. why is this article so tilted towards Songza?
Posted by: buster | January 23, 2008 12:30 PM
you can play this game all day too. search charley patton on both and you'll find only about 18 results on songza, and well over 50 on last.fm
http://www.last.fm/music/Charley+Patton
Posted by: buster | January 23, 2008 12:32 PM
It's not tilted either way. I merely reported what I saw -- I still don't get any full length tracks for T.I. or Radiohead (I do see a lot of full-length tracks for Charley Patton -- but there's a reason I didn't mention him in the article ... I've never heard of Charley Patton).
As I said, "I'll leave you to do your own tests and draw your own conclusions."
Looks like you have, buster.
Posted by: Josh Catone
|
January 23, 2008 1:30 PM
You should also replace "the legality of Songza's music might not always be clear" with "the legality of Songza's music is pretty much non-existent" if you want to be accurate. I really applaud what Last.fm is doing by finding a way to make sure that artists are getting paid while delivering a killer product to music fans.
Posted by: Mark | January 23, 2008 3:17 PM
The search result in skreemr is not 100% accurate all the time. Sometimes its very difficult to download songs from this site. So i recommand http://www.woonz.com for searching and downloading song. It's a complete mp3 search engine. user can listen to online or can download from this site. it's really amazing. U guyz can give a look in to it. U will love it! woonz.com rocks!
Posted by: barbone | January 24, 2008 5:43 AM
Josh, you may want to change your settings to play everything in the flash player (in-page) in your Settings > Website.
The on - demand is not available when played on the client right now.
Posted by: Greg | January 24, 2008 6:07 AM
www.flashwidgetz.com. Check out it. Very similar to songza, but better
Posted by: Bobby Ross | February 11, 2008 1:34 AM