The result is pretty amazing. The complete discography of many artists are shown on the results page. All albums and songs can be played right on the website without additional plugins or registration hassles.

Users who want to listen to music online can enter a band or artist name in the search form or pick one of the suggestions in the tag cloud below. It takes only a few seconds before the next page is loaded containing information about the discography of the selected band or artist. The first song of one of the music albums will play automatically.

The results are spot on. Even the tested live albums did return the live songs (most of the times) and not other studio versions of the songs. All songs were playing fine during tests, there was no delay or any other sort of disturbance. The page with the music player uses several ads which might be distracting to some users. It provides the means to purchase songs at Amazon. There are also some concert information listed on some pages.

Vastfm is a unique interesting website that provides access to virtually any band and song that can be found on Youtube.

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Enter Cloud Speakers, a music business news aggregation site that offers more than a slightly unusual layout and choice of color. Cloud Speakers displays music business news on their pages. It has a vast database of artists and labels which can be followed on page, by email or RSS news feed.

They collect news, reviews, audio and video and make it available on their website. The user can filter the four main categories, if he is only interested in reviews he can only display those. The audio category is a very appealing category on the website. Users can play the music that is listed in that category. The frontpage of Cloud Speakers is offering an mp3 player that is showing and playing the latest mp3 as well. (A similar feature is available on individual artists pages)

A source is provided next to each news item to read the complete news article or review on the original website. Although there are a few reasons why using Cloud Speakers might be a good idea there are some that stick out. The first is that it is possible to follow artists by RSS news feed or email update. That’s indeed a nice feature if you are a hot blooded fan and crave for news on your favorite artists.

The second is music discovery. It is possible to play music on the website which might give a user the opportunity to find new artists that he likes.

It is interesting to note that Cloud Speakers is missing many of the social news portals features like commenting on news, rating music or making friends. That’s a refreshing change for some users while others will probably miss those features dearly.

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It all starts with an upload obviously. Not your usual pick a song and hit a button type of upload though. You do pick a song but can add a wealth of information to the upload including an extensive description, genre, bpm, record label, catalogue number, release data, track number, keywords and even a buy this track link.

Artwork can be added as well and a decision has to be made if the song should be publicly or privately accessible. If the latter is chosen users can be picked from the list of followers and followed or by email. Emails will be send to users with a direct link to the song so that they can access it at the SoundCloud website. Those users have to chose a password for the first time and can use that password to access that song and any other that they are invited to.

Users with access rights can leave comments that are attached to a specific time of the song which is another interesting feature.

Public Songs can be embedded in websites like the example above. The color of the player can be selected freely. Users can jump to any position of the song. I’m a bit surprised though about the lack of player controls. There is only play and stop. Downloads on the other hand are blazingly fast.

SoundCloud offers some interesting unique features to its core audience. I have three invites up for grabs, if you want to give it a try leave a comment. I pick three random ones tomorrow.

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Well, actually it’s two feeds that are created. The first lists the upcoming releases while the second lists the releases of the previous year. I tested it with several usernames and it is working fine. It takes anywhere between 1 and 30 minutes before the feed displays the releases according to the Soundamus website although I was able to see the first items after less than a minute.

The feed items list information such as name of the album and release date. It also contains several links to pages that contain further information, some of them are located on Last.fm, some on the Soundamus website. There is also an option to add the date to Google Calendar and to buy the CD from a online shop.

The page of the release at the Soundamus website is surprisingly clean and lists similar artists and their releases. Again with links to all kinds of sites including Last.fm.

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Each recommendation displays the cover artwork, name of the band and three icons. While the first icon does not seem to do anything the other two are linking directly to the iTunes store page of that band and to a event finder that is displaying the upcoming events for the artist or group. I had best results with well known groups and songs, especially those from Britain.

Most did not return recommendations yet. This will surely change over time when more users download and use the software. The events sometimes take some time to load and are currently only suggesting locations in Britain. Events are also accessible through their own icon at the top which does make sense because no one is going to play one song, switch to Giggle to see if there are any events and then continue playing songs.

The link displays all band names with events and users can switch to the recommendations that only display events of artists that have been played by the user. Events are directly linking to ticket shops on the Internet.

Giggle does offer something new and I really like the idea of event recommendations or reminders. If they manage to add events for a larger audience, say all of Europe and North America they surely could become a very popular service. Another feature that I would like to see is that Giggle will be compatible to additional music players like Winamp and XMPlay.

If you currently live in the UK you can already use Giggle. Everyone else should wait until they manage to add events for your country.

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This is however not the only fee that has to be paid. The opposing council has to be paid as well which adds roughly 850 Euros ($1193) if one song has been offered on the server up to 5850 Euros ($8200) for 50 songs. All of these fees without a single second in court until now of course.

If you happen to go to court you have to add fees for your own attorney and for the court which all depend on the amount in dispute. Last but not least there is the compensation for the Music Industry which the server operator or file sharer has to pay as well.

Am I the only one who thinks that this is out of line ? Even if no one did download a song from a user he has to pay up to 20000 Euro plus all those fees ?

Especially if you take into consideration that recent studies do show that downloaders spend considerably more on digital music purchases.

Read More:

Arstechnica
20000 Euro pro Lied (German)

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Audiobaba is a new service that I have not heard of before. You begin be entering either a song title, album or artist in the search field. This is normally a artist that you know and like. All results that match the keywords that you have entered are then shown on the next page. You can then listen to samples from all songs that have been found. The samples are usually between 20 seconds and 1 minute.

Once you have found the song that you have been looking for you can click on the “match” button which searches the database of songs again for matches, that is songs and artists that sound similar to the selection that you have made. One of my favorite songs of all time is Vincent by Don McLean and Audiobaba gave me more than 40 matches of songs. Some of them did fit very well with the overall theme of the song Vincent and some did not.

It is however very easy to distinguish between those songs, just listen to them and give them a thumbs down if you think they do not match or bookmark them for alter reference. Bookmarking them means that they are added to a personal page at Audiobaba. You might be wondering how they find out if two songs are similar to each other, here is their answer:

Audiobaba is powered by a complex artificial intelligence and years of academic research on sound and music. Our computer algorithms ‘listen’ to music and compare it for multitudes (we can’t tell you the exact number but its over 70) of acoustic qualities like beats, rhythm, and all that jazz.

It would be more than interesting to get more opinions on the success rate of that algorithm. If you did use the service, did the recommended songs match the one that you entered ?

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So, the RIAA decided to sue Allofmp3 for the enormous sum of 1.65 trillion dollars. Yes that is right guys, it is not million, nor billion – it is trillion. How did they come up with this amount of money ? They took a look at the sales of allofmp3 and came up with the figure of 11 million mp3 sales in about 6 months. They then decided to multiply this number by 150000 (which is the maximum amount chargeable by law) and came up with the number.

Will the RIAA finally be able to knockout the underdog ? Even if the RIAA wins this case it won’t have an effect on the Russian mp3 site because it would only affect them if they would run their business from the United States. As long as they don’t come stateside they are probably on the safe side.
I personally think that is is ridiculous to demand $150000 for every single song that has been downloaded from the allofmp3 website. The proportions get way out of line here.

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