Google and music
Google hasn’t done much with music so far, though there’s a bazilliion tunes streaming, with video, on YouTube. That’s indirect, though you can grab mp3s from YouTube using a clever little tool called Dirpy. (Okay, I have missing time, not in the Barney Hill sense, but because I had to give Dirpy a try.) In a recent article, Wired suggests possible moves for Google – sell cheap, make a portable solution (eMusic sí, iTunes no), charge micropayments for access to large, cloud-based music collections, come up with something that works in the living room, and continue to leverage search. I’m still thinking about music like water and SOMA.fm.
I must admit I can’t stop thinking about the possibilities on commercializing soundcloud or a similar service, especially one that could stream to a wide range of mobile clients.
Soundlcoud has an amazing collection of music, both in individual tracks and remixes, mixes and mashups and is slowly being put at risk by those simply uploading their favorite MP3′s and allowing them to be downloaded, so in a way, its becoming another piratebay/rapidshare which will be a shame. The great thing is you can search for a genre, artist, track or keyword and then let it stream the whole page of results to you. When one tracks is finished it just moves on to the next. I’ve tried other services like last.fm but the music variety and tracks were too much like the radio…
So, I’d pay for soundcloud, I’d also pay for the BBC iPlayer, but the BBC also don’t seem to get the opportunity for micro or pay-per-play etc. when the user is outside the UK. You can listen to their Radio free, but video is only post live, and only on 7-day catch-up. Maybe Google should license content direct to add to YouTube in much the same way that the regular networks do. Finally, I do hope that whatever Google do, assuming they do, they come up with some form of micro-payments process and don’t put it into subscription on $1 track or some such. The music biz won’t like it, but given a pay per play, micro-payment service I’m sure it would make a major dent in downloading and free streaming sites.