blogmusik / radio.blog.club: on-demand music – free & accessible

Posted on | September 9, 2006 | 4 Comments

recently launched (MoMB is a bless!) blogmusik.net delivers free music on-demand through a flash-based audio-player. just search for your favorite artist or track and you’re ready to roll. unlike TechCrunch initially suggested, blogmusik doesn’t host any audio-data itself and therefor is not pledged to pay for licensing. so how does it work then? blogmusik either indexes (illegally) linked mp3’s on gazillions of webpages and blogs, or – even smarter – uses the google index to find these files. the flash-player connects to the original sources – voila, no more waiting for the download to finish, free-of-charge, instant audio-pleasure.

this approach is problematic in some ways:

• linking to illegal content – that’s what blogmusik technically does – could be and in fact is treated as crime by many legislations – depending on where their servers are located, this could bring them to court or at least disrupt their google-ad driven income. some might argue, that loading 3rd party-URLs into your flash-player is to be considered more than plain linking (and honestly, I’ld agree)
• any index of linked mp3’s is out-of-date per definition – blogmusik-users inevitably run into dead links (it happened to me during trying it out briefly)
• audio-quality varies among sources. even worse, some sources can’t cope in terms of bandwidth which leads to buffer-underruns

btw, blogmusik isn’t the first of its kind. radio.blog.club seems to have been around for quite some time. like blogmusik, it streams content harvested from all around the web in a custom flash-player. I like the playlist-feature, which suggests other music matching your inital query – think last.fm / pandora on on-demand-steroids

 

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