Just checked out Blogmusik.net, thanks to the folks from TechCrunch, who advise people to check the site out before it gets pulled. Blogmusik offers on-demand listening to users via a Flash interface made to look like an iPod. Search for an artist or song and you’ll get the results that you can start listening to right away. Register and you can save songs to playlists. Blogmusik seems to be a search and playback interface to various mp3 (and other?) blogs that publish music. Think of it like a distributed version of Rhapsody — ie, when you access Rhapsody, your playlist accesses files on Rhapsody’s CDN. Blogmusik points to files that are distributed on the sites of others but it is a similar on-demand listening experience. I listened to songs from Yo La Tengo, Jack Johnson and the Beatles and they all seemed to be from servers that ended with a “.free.fr” domain. I did listen to a Van Morrison song from www.paulhunter.info, so they must be deep linking to multiple sites. The comments section in the TechCrunch post has more info on this.
The site seems to be very similar to the Hype Machine, which I recently blogged about here, only that it’s more focused on enabling the user to listen to a song rather than being a directory of various mp3 music blogs. TechCrunch thinks that it’ll get shut down. It seems to be offshore (in France). I’m not as familiar with copyright law in the EU but I suspect it, or even the Hype Machine, would be on shaky legal ground at least here in the States. While there isn’t anything inherently infringing about the technology (except perhaps the imitation iPod on Blogmusik), it’s hard to argue that most of their deep linking isn’t to copyrighted material that hasn’t been licensed by the copyright holder. Of course it all starts with the blogs that post the MP3 files (sometimes with the permission of the copyright holder). Blogmusik and Hype Machine simply make these more readily accessible.
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This type of service is “almost legal” but the bigger issue is that links to other sites’ music eventually go dead. I’m involved with a service at http://www.finetune.com which has licnsed content from all the majors and the biggest indies is web-ba sed and free and allows you to program your own playlists etc. anyone interested in blogmusik should check it out.