Ideas

Last.FM?
Playlists [Not possible to import; have to make your own]; Listen to music which other people like; Artists can upload their own music [High quality/legal]; Their are currently also videos avaible for some artists; If you listen music in Windows Media Player the Last.FM software will automaticly play simulair music [I don't know about iTunes]

So if you're really going to make this, you have to make sure that's it will be different from Last.FM and it has something 'special' or else people will not use your site. But it could really good be a good idea (especially because of the videos; music site I know are not having this yet, so that really is new and I think it will get much listeners)

Great Idea!

Can it be set so that you can autoplay all the songs in a list starting from a particular song?

To tidewater: If you tried the sample playlists I provided, it already does that. Obviously right now I'm just testing and it isn't very featureful. But if you click on a song it will start playing and it will automatically go through the playlist. Additionally, any new songs added in the back end by a playlist manager will be automatically added to the end of the list on the client side without the need to refresh the page or interrupt the music.

to JelmerBV: To elaborate on the playlist importing system I have, basically when someone imports their itunes playlist (or anyother playlist) I will try to match the songs to the ones in the database and grab the appropriate YouTube IDs for if available, if not I have the user select the appropriate video from a list. If another user uploads the same song he/she chooses a video from the list too until enough people have chosen the same video for that particular song. Then that video is permanently tied to the song. I think song recommendations is something that should be possible to implement since I will have a local database of song information. Also, anyone can upload their music to YouTube, then manually add their song to our site.

I believe by basing off YouTube for serving music, I have some heavy weight lifted off my shoulders. This allows me to concentrate on other aspects and gives me an advantage whereas an actual streaming internet radio station would have to pay for broadcasting rights, server resources, etc.

To JemlerBV, additionally with the new YouTube API, I can streamline the whole song uploading process for artists by making the video upload, and submission all on our site.

There are lots of music video sites. Also, whats broken with Google's search on youtube.

There are also a few crowdsourcing sites... But like I said, I have an advantage by using Youtube. Google's search on youtube (I assume you're talking about Google Video) which does auto play songs however I don't think it goes on forever and I believe the videos are selected by an algorithm. I want to put human edited playlists as well as implement other features including the ones I have mentioned above.

In a nutshell this site will offer:
-ability to listen to internet radio (with video), all provided without the costs of a traditional radio or streaming music site
-ability to transfer an iTunes library online for easy access anywhere around the world youtube is available.
-ability to discover new music because of expansive library and universal playlists.

How sure are you that this is legal? As far as I'm aware there are no loopholes allowing songs to be used in Youtube videos; any copyrighted material found there is in fact illegal. Record industries might be willing to let this slide in the case of hobby video makers using clips of their songs as parts of soundtracks to amateur videos, but I don't think you can build a business on something this shaky.

Many of the newer songs are uploaded by the record companies themselves. I try, when selecting the matching videos to use the official upload. I think at the very least I can use the officially uploaded songs. And songza.com is based on Youtube. All the songs on their site is from Youtube minus the videos. Unless all the illegally uploaded songs disappear from YouTube one day, I don't see why this would be a problem (unless I can be held responsible for displaying illegal videos... can I?).

http://www.imeem.com

imeem doesn't seem to make "radio stations" out of it. And I'm guessing they pay royalties for making the music available?

I like it. Doesn't Sirius kind of do this?

why does this thing keep bouncing back to ones I've already voted on?

This is also 100% free.. Is Sirius?

It's sounds a lot like last.fm to me. You should check it out - they already have a market share offering the same sort of service. (I love last. fm BTW). IT would be hard to get me to switch.

Well I made this b/c no other service out there suited my needs. Also the stations there are all too specific. But I'm trying to build as many features that I and my friends request. So if there is something last.fm is missing, let me know.

Have you looked into the legal issues in this? I'm betting that you are violating some sort of copyright rules doing this, it certainly violates 'fair play usage'. You are basically setting up a pirate radio station. I think the RIAA will come down on you like a ton of bricks.

There have been a couple attempts at a service like this, and they usually get into hot water. That being said, I like sharing music, and I think it is a fantastic disruptive concept.

Like I said above, most of the songs used are uploaded to youtube by the record labels themselves. I also do not encourage uploading of music to youtube through the site. So if I am asked to take down illegal youtube videos, that will only be for a small number of which the record labels did not upload.

chrischen... pretty neat. yeah if someone had proposed this challenge i'd have assumed an MP3 search (which would turn up many a dead link or possibly bogus files) could turn a last.fm feed into music.

But leveraging YouTube could result in a whole new source of possible matches.

Problems:
- Bandwidth? Now we're streaming video too, what might have played instantly if it was just audio would be more likely to skip.
- Poor tagging? People tagging cover versions with the name of the song and band.

Kevin_Cox, this is about playlists, not finding any one track right? Or say actually LISTENING to someone else's last.fm feed. Tons of sites for finding music or recommendations. My interpretation is the value add here is simulating a shared listening experience, which is of course blocked by todays media players due to copyright issues.

It sounds like a neat way around the problem.

Oh hey... I was bouncing this off all CH staff to see if anyone knew of prior art, and Laura's search of TechCrunch found...

http://www.techcrunc...hrough-music-videos/

Here's a snip from TechCrunch Michael Arrington's critique of fiql...

"It’s widely known that music videos are available on video sharing sites (some of them are even distributed legally). In fact, sites like Middio have sprung up that do nothing more than provide music video search for YouTube and other sites. There are a number of services that also allow people to download these videos to their hard drives (see our own YouTube download tool) - and converting them to iPod format is only a small additional step.

Videos are regularly pulled down as copyright holders complain, but they are quickly re-added by other users. That means bookmarks of videos often go stale, but using a search engine will always help you find what you’re looking for in no time."

...and also worth reviewing...

http://www.techcrunc...-like-your-playlist/
http://www.techcrunc...oney-while-doing-it/
http://www.techcrunc...ial-media-ambitions/

What do you mean radio stations? You want internet radio sites?
http://www.pandora.com/

Just took a look at your current prototype version of the site. I think the site could work and would be willing to help you out. Feel free to PM me.

I can see your vision. Clearly this would be able to work if it was presented to the audience right.

But, I would not go so far to say it is unique. I mean its not all that hard to use the YouTube API to do this.

Overall, I give it a hand of gold stars.

Yea like pandora. Also like Real Rhapsody. But I also want to do radio stations like Yahoo Music except less genre-alized and more like terrestrial radio stations.

how is this in comparison to a site like grooveshark.com?

they let you listen to any song and create playlists with the music for free... and i think it's only $1 or so to download the music. i believe they have "stations" there too but really haven't looked too much into it.

or odeo.com too... almost forgot them

imeem haha i love this web site

Hey grooveshark is similar.. I don't know how they make their music available, but I plan on using video sharing sites which allows me to to pretty much make all popular songs available at no cost to me and provide the music video. But the featureset at grooveshark is similar to what I want to provide except I also want to allow itunes XML import (not that big of a deal i guess, but the point is that I plan to have many little quirks... for example, lyrics using the lyricwiki api). Also as I become a college student, I think i can better adapt the site to the needs of the college student, which I believe will be the target audience. I'll also provide itunes, amazon links to download songs.

I'm also planning to institute some sort of rewards system based on user created playlists (for example paying people based on how many people listen to their playlists).

The test website looks much better now =)
However; the scroll back button only scrolls back to the start of the current song and adds the name to the song to the recently playlist... again... and the scroll bar on top doesn't work.
Getting things like this:
Name Artist
Snow (Hey Oh) Red Hot Chili Peppers
Snow (Hey Oh) Red Hot Chili Peppers
Snow (Hey Oh) Red Hot Chili Peppers
Snow (Hey Oh) Red Hot Chili Peppers
Snow (Hey Oh) Red Hot Chili Peppers
Spiderwebs No Doubt
Here Is Gone Goo Goo Dolls

Anyway, I like the site very much so far; go for it!

Yea I recently changed the design of the site (functionally) so some of the stuff may be broken.

Lots of comments, but I think it's already available. I'm not qualified here. Wes

1.20.09

Please take a look to see if there are any sites that base their music off internet video sharing sites. I think that's the most important aspect to my idea. Also give theinternet.fm a try. Just finished saving songs (you must make an account).

nice domain

thats so simple i think your onto somthing!!

This sounds a lot like FineTune. http://www.finetune.com

I will try it out here shortly though and see what I think about it.

The advantage is bandwidth is becoming so commonplace that streaming a video instead of just a song isn't as big of a deal as it would have been a few years ago.

I just feel this is a space that is pretty dominated at the moment.

Of course the cost of running this site must be VERY low since you aren't paying for the bandwidth of the actual music so... you can always just go for it.

I just feel you will have a hard time building an audience against last.fm, finetune and the many others in this space that have backing from labels, and other major companies with nearly unlimited marketing money.

It does sound like FineTune, but FineTune is not any closer to what I'm offering than what has already been mentioned. GrooveShark, Songza.com are closer examples. FineTune doesn't seem to offer full tracks or access to all tracks.

Theinternet.fm will allow you to sync your music collection online with the click of a button. Each song in your music library will be matched with one in our database and the appropriate video source for the song will be retrieved. Additionally you can search from over 6 million tracks and add them to your theinternet.fm library for access anywhere, anytime you please. You can even save instantly a song you hear on one of the preset radio stations.

If you signup for Finetune which is free you can actually get full tracks. I wish the FineTune website did a better job of explaining that... poor copy I suppose.

I do like the idea of being able to save playlists on your idea. I've been unable to find a few tracks sadly but been able to find them on YouTube no problem so that needs some work.

The battle will be tough with the competition but I do wish you the best of luck. You've got an awesome domain I feel.

I will be adding the ability to add songs not in our database. However perhaps you mistyped the artist name? I'm still developing a new search engine since right now since you usually need exact matches in order to return results. Is the song you're searching for recently released? I currently use a musicbrainz database snapshot about a 2 weeks old.

rayrayangel - finetune does not allow me to play full tracks even when I signup. The full tracks only play on the radio, but I can't seem to pick any song and play it.

Hey I hit your site today when I was trying to listen to PRESS PLAY ON TAPE a band I watched once on YouTube, and I was wondering how to queue up a bunch of their songs on YouTube and remembered your site would do it.

So I signed up and I realize its a work in progress but here's my notes:
- username max 12 chars is too short for my usual gordonmcdowell name
- after joining theres no link on the page i'd add a link even if all it does is take you back to theinternet.fm

I can't get my constructed playlist on theinternet.fm to play. I can click on any song in the playlist, but it doesn't seem to proceed to the next song in the playlist when one playlist song ends, instead some other song plays. That's the big deal that would keep me at your site.

And I just wanted to share the fact I was drawn to your site by obscure music, and maybe that's a marketing angle. I'd never use theinternet.fm to listen to popular music, because its crazy easy to buy or download.

Maybe promoting VIDEO GAME MUSIC is a unique angle, because the tracks are based on copyrighted musical scores and so might never be carried by major distributors. Being able to cue up an hours worth of video game music (without having to actually find and download the tracks first) might be an odd capability, but it would probably be unique.

One of my friends suggested a video game music station and I was actually planning to add that.

Currently the only features I have completed are the preset radio stations and the ability to search songs and save to your library. What you did was actually access the individual songs in your library. I haven't added the ability to create playlists yet. After you finish playing any song it reverts back to the radio station, which is why a random song plays immediately after the one you selected finished.

At the moment I am bogged down by school and may not be able to continue work on the site until after early may (when AP testing is done). But I plan to have all those things fixed and new features added soon.

Also there actually may be legal issues with my site, however after asking for some advice, the worst that can probably happen is a take down notice (for specific copyrighted and illegally uploaded songs), which if I comply with by taking down the offending song should be no problem.

So with those legal issues, you can't simply tell anyone who complains "its actually hosted on YouTube... here is the YouTube URL"? Because I'm quite surprised you're in any legal danger. Not surprised you'd get a takedown notice, just surprised you'd need to comply since you aren't the host.

Well according to the DMCA, it is illegal for a site to serve no other purpose other than to circumvent copyright laws. So a site that only links to locations on the internet where you can find movies (illegally uploaded) would be illegal. But i'm pretty sure theinternet.fm can get away with this because there are plenty of legally uploaded music videos and as long as I comply with any requests to take down any illegally uploaded ones I should be fine.

Very good logo.

The laws especially for a lot of the DMCA and industry are total bull under most circumstances and go way beyond the line. For example the 2600 lawsuit. Just linking to sites which had tools not even intentionally made to do anything illegal at all.
http://www.2600.com/...ews/view/article/302

Sweden dose not seem to have any of these silly problems and they are willing to slap corporations in the face with reply:
http://thepiratebay.org/legal

Irony Sony BMG pirates software:
http://blog.wired.co...sonybmg-under-i.html

I like this idea and I think that sometime in the future we might be able to collaborate. 5 stars!

If you, or anyone else, would like to collaborate, that would be great. I'm thinking about using Adobe FLEX to develop this instead of javascript. You can see the FLEX prototype here: http://www.theintern...ug/MusicManager.html

SO if anyone knows how to develop FLEX applications please contact me. This will be a paid opportunity.

Go for it. This might work as long as you address the copyright issues. 5 stars from me.