Free For All Friday
When I think of Blogmusik.net, I can’t help but think of the original Napster. You know, back in the day when Napster was the free peer to peer music sharing service that loads of people used? The good old days of Napster didn’t last too long, and I imagine Blogmusik.net won’t either. It is cool nonetheless and worth checking out.
They use an iPod like interface acting as your own personal jukebox to stream your selected songs over the Internet. It has a search feature with a rather large variety of songs to choose from. When you become a registered user, you’re able to save playlists with all of your favorites ready to go for the next time you’re wanting to listen to music. They even have some of those “one track wonders” you never thought you’d find or hear again!
The virtual iPod interface really couldn’t be any easier to use, and as for the quality of sound, it’s decent. Not great, but decent. Oh, and you can change the color of your “iPod” from black to white. The idea is kinda cool, however as mentioned, the legal status remains unknown which gives a good indication that it may not be around for long!
Alright, so that’s the free route you can take for now. There are alternative options that are legal and have similar features such as allowing you to save a playlist. One such option is brought to you by the ”new” (no longer free) Napster. According to their website:
”As a registered member of Napster’s free music service you can listen to all 2,000,000 songs in the Napster catalog up to 3 times each. After the 3rd free play, you must purchase the track to listen to it again. As a Napster subscriber, you can listen to the same song an unlimited amount of times without having to worry about any limits. You can also download your favorite music to your PC and listen to it when you are not connected to the Internet.”
To recap: Blogmusik.net is a pretty cool free service with the virtual iPod interface but probably won’t be around for long! Once/if they’re shut down, a good alternative paying option for $15.00 per month would be Napster.
There’s also [radioblogclub.com] which is also quite similar to blogmusik.
Both pretty much suffer from some incoherent filenames and a lack of a broad enough artist selections, but they are still fairly neat.
BlogMusik is a complete rip-off from RadioBlogClub – [radioblogclub.com] It uses their database and the only change is the flash interface.
Raed more at TechCrunch – [techcrunch.com]
We didn’t realize that it was a rip off of RadioBlogClub which definitely appears to be so. However, it is nice with Blog Musik that you don’t have to register in order to play songs…maybe that is something RadioBlogClub should consider doing as well.
I can’t imagine this staying up long either. I’ve said it on my blog and can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it here, but what I really want to see is an online download service (legal) that gives me .mp3 files. It’s all well and good for the RIAA to say ‘There are plenty of legal music download services, don’t use P2P’ but what exactly do you get from them? You get either an AAC (iTunes) or a WMA (everything else) that is limited to certain players, can be copied a limited number of times, can’t be burned to a CD and could technically be disabled at any time by the provider. If I buy a CD I can do whatever I wish with those MP3 files, and I’ve still paid the artist the money they deserve. I want to be able to do the same over the net, because sometimes the only song you like isn’t available as a CD single.
My friend wanted to go ‘legal’ as well and signed up for the pay service of Napster. But what he found was limited selections, he could rarely find what he wanted.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like to download albums from Soulseek and after a while just buy the album (in physical form) from djangos.com if I like it enough.
I like listening to full albums from my cd collection and dislike paying for an annoying DRM protected file, so buying digital is fairly useless for me. Not to mention the limited selection the ffextensionguru mentioned, which is annoying as well.
btw- Here in Israel we have 2 music downloading services (which belong to 2 different labels), and both just give you mp3s, which is a much appreciated approach.
That’s the first I’ve heard about a limited selection at Napster. Does anyone know of a good service that has a good selection?
Inferno_str1ke: I agree with ya there on the limitations with some of the services. There would definitely be a market there for a service that didn’t make it so difficult to get the music you want for any device, and that didn’t have all of the frustrating limitations.