Foxytunes lets you control almost any media player and find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more with a click right from your browser.
Foxytunes can either be download from their website or via the Firefox add-on section. Either way this free download is a must for all web users!
Crenked Out! has just launched. Crenked Out! is our new service which will be providing our readers with invitations to preview and use some of the most exclusive applications on the web. These invitations are of course going to be free and you can use as many services as you would like. However, there will be of course a limit to the amount of invites we are able to give out, so make sure you get in fast. Each time we add a new service to Crenked Out! we will also write a review about the service and detail how many invitations we have available.
If you are launching a product and would like to have your company featured in our Crenked Out! section, then please contact us. All placements in Crenked Out! are free, but the products need to meet our high standards.
GroovesharkLite is a self-contained flash based application which lets you search, listen and purchase mp3’s online. It has a library of over 6 Million songs covering everything from tiny Indies to all the Majors.
It’s a peer to peer music service in the same vein as Limewire, which also allows users to stream and purchase songs.
Users are not required to register or login to their account in order to search and play songs. You are only required to login to your account when you want to purchase a particular mp3. Otherwise you are free listen to songs as much as you want.
You can also get free mp3’s with GroovesharkLite, for example if someone purchases a song that you seed, you would receive a credit that can be used to purchase more songs from the network.
Check it out: http://listen.grooveshark.com
A couple of weeks ago we wrote a very popular article that looked at several music communities from around the web. Today, I thought I would take this opportunity to let you know about another music community that wasnt mentioned, that being Jamendo.
Jamendo is a large resource for creative commons licensed music. Jamendo has created a platform that allows artists to distribute their music freely and legally, while earning royalties through a percentage of the advertising revenue.
The site itself currently has over 8500 albums available and rising. The design is very simple with a basic white background and has a distinctive colour scheme. On the home page itself I would definitly like to see more artists and not just one large artist promoted on the left hand side, but this is just a personal preference. I think the idea behind Jamendo is quite a good one, creative commons are becoming a lot more common and their is definitely a gap in the market for a music community like this. The advertising payment model is a good one, and is similar to Imeem and what are they are try to achieve. That being said, im not too sure about the Google ads on the site, im think that the click thru rate is quite low, due to the nature of the Jamendo business, a CPM model would be a much better idea.
Overall, Jamendo is a good idea with the right business model in place. I would like to see better advertising on the site itself, but im sure that will improve over time. Features within the site are rich and the design is unique and well done. Jamendo should become a great place to find new music from up and coming artists who are looking to promote their first few albums to gain some exposure.
Crenk has long been a part of the Insomnia Media Group, which today is launching our music initiative.
RouteNote is a user driven music distribution service, allowing indie artists to get access to major online retailers and make their music available to film, radio and other media producers for quick, easy licensing.
The site is launching into public beta which involves our distribution section. Distribution through RouteNote will allow unsigned artists and independent labels from all over the world to sell their music in some of the worlds largest online stores. RouteNote is a completely non-exclusive music distributor that has some of the best rates in the industry. Artists are able to sign up for FREE, uploading as many tracks as they would like and being able to keep 90% of the revenues from download sales.
What RouteNote offers:
RouteNote is a unique service that can help hundreds of thousands of artists all over the world. So why not signup today.
Stay tuned for more features to also launch over time.
A couple of weeks ago Spiral Frog claimed that they were the third largest legal music download store, now they are reporting some very interesting news. SpiralFrog has announced a licensing agreement with RoyaltyShare to add its independent label customers to the free ad supported service. Indie label MPress has also been added to the SpiralFrog catalog which now tops 1 million tracks.
Back in early November of last year, I preempted the launch of Spottt. Spottt is a free link exchange between sites via a 125 x 125 widget. Spottt is developed by the guys over at Adbrite, so they have a product that needs to work and actually launch into something worthwhile. Since Adbrite has had a lot of VC Funding, they will be really expected to not just launch a product for the sake of it, and actually turn it into a commercial entity.
This brings me to the all important point, is Spottt actually going anywhere? Currently, the site is so simplistic and has a lot of competitors doing exactly the same thing. So where is it unique selling point? If I was the VC in Adbrite who put in a slice of the money, then I would expect an out strategy for Spottt and within a year or two at the most. Will this actually happen? and what features are really missing from Spottt or sites like Spottt?
Spottt has finally launched! As I predicted last week the free advertising exchange has finally launched their product. It has been a long time coming for Spottt, since the product was launched at the Techcrunch40 Conference.
The service does everything it says on the can, it provides a 125 x 125 advertising exchange in which you upload your 125 ad to their site and place a widget on your site. This calculates the amount of impression on your site and exchanges them for other impressions on other sites with the widget. Thus, hopefully providing your site with more free targeted advertising and readers.
At present the site is very simplistic and is quite similar in many ways to Entrecard. Hence, im very interested to see if it takes off the same as Entrecard has!
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Spottt the new free service from the people at Adbrite must be launching soon. This is just a hunch on my part, because I have seen a spottt 125 x 125 ad placed on the ever popular Techcrunch. Now, no company is going to spend $10,000 for a monthly ad slot on Techcrunch if they dont even have a product or service. Thus, leading me to believe they will be launching very soon!
There has been a lot in the last few days about the announcement by Last.fm about there new business model. Their business model has moved from 30 second clips of songs to full length streams. This however has a restriction of only 3 streams per song per artist. This is a major negative point with the new business model, because once you really get into a song I know I tend to play mine 10 times a day. All these announcements came on the back end of Last.fm signing content agreements will all four major labels.
Artists will be monetized by these streams through the advertising revenue made by the site. I know for a long time Imeem has been attempting to do exactly the same business model and they have had a great deal of success with this. Imeem now has all four major labels signed up and they are making a great deal of money off of the advertising model. Last.fm has also announced that their new revenue model is not exclusive to only the major labels, and anyone on Last.fm can now opt-in and stream their full music for very low royalties.
This all being said I would have really like to see Last.fm slightly change their model. I dont see why there is a limit on the amount of streams per song, unless they have an additional model that allows members to sign up at an additional fee to be able to play the song unlimited times. It is also good to see that Last.fm has partnered with 7digital to offer the music downloads, however a long term solution for Last.fm must be to kill this partnership and enter the download market independently, this might even be a threat to iTunes!
I am still not convinved by Last.fm. The have a great piece of technology in the scrobbler, but I dont think their professionalism on that software has carried over to the site, monetization options and also profile and social network strategy.
I have made the decision to start a new promotion tool here on Crenk! Instead of selling advertising in 125 x 125 banner slots I have decided to give the banner slots away to Web 2.0 companies.
Every month I will be offering 5 (125 x 125 banners) slots to web 2.0 companies either startups or established companies looking to gain more exposure. At the end of each month I will be selecting from random the 5 slots for the next month. There is really no guidelines at present, you just need to email me: info (at) crenk.com , with your banner ad and a little more information about your company. If you are selected you will not only get your ad on the site for the month but you will also get a writeup about your company and what you do.
So make sure you email all the info to: info (at) crenk.com, or head over to our contact page and ask for some more information.
There are so many startup and web 2.0 companies out there and I know how hard it can be sometimes to stand out from the crowd, so i hope this helps!
P2P music sharing and sales service Grooveshark has raised their level of compensation for sharing music from 10 cents to 25 cents a track, their entire profit on each sale. Users upload their music to Grooveshark, and any member can listen to those tracks for free. If they want to download a song, they can purchase it DRM free and the user who uploaded the song gets a cut of the sale; previously this was 10c and now its 25c. The remainer of the 99c sale goes to the record companies; the service is legal and Grooveshark has agreements with the record companies to provide the service and to cover copyright obligations.
I dont see how this program can actually succeed! I really need someone from Grooveshark to explain to me the finer details. As far as i know it runs the same as any other P2P, where companies and users each run their files from a folder on their computer and thus allowing other users to purchase audio tracks, movies, etc. How is Grooveshark going to monitor copyrights on songs for example, because i know a lot of people out there have illegally downloaded songs on their computer and if they are in the same folder that Grooveshark is using how will they track it all and keep control? Especially also considering a user could change the name of the songs in their folder and then make it more suceptable to being accepted at owning a copyright.
Finally, why would i want to purchase from a P2P network when currently I can head over to LimeWire and get it all for nothing??
