Songza Offers All The Streamed Music

In the never-ending quest to find sources of free music, music fans have a multitude of options. One site in particular though, is starting to gain in popularity due in large part to its ease of use in combination with its large catalog of available material that is playable on demand.

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In the never-ending quest to find sources of free music, music fans have a multitude of options. One site in particular though, is starting to gain in popularity due in large part to its ease of use in combination with its large catalog of available material that is playable on demand.

Songza, created last November by Scott Robbin and Aza Raskin (the son of Apple Macintosh founder Jef Raskin), allows visitors to instantly stream individual songs from their website simply by typing in the name of the track they would like to hear. Describing itself as a “music search engine and Internet jukebox,” Songza acts as an intermediary between users and YouTube, thereby saving music fans the time of scanning YouTube’s 28 million music videos. When a user visits Songza’s website, the site prompts them to enter a song title. The website then scans all of YouTube’s videos and finds a copy of the song to stream. The search is almost instantaneous, and as an added bonus, Songza users do not have to deal with any fan-produced videos, as Sonza hides the video in the margin of the web browser. The only downside to this process is that, in exchange for the ability to pick each individual song played, users have to actually type in each individual song choice they wish to hear. Unlike Pandora, users cannot type in one song, then sit back and relax.

With the site gaining popularity, (Songza is currently up to 120,000 songs streamed daily), it is only a matter of time before some legal team begins to question the legality of this arrangement. Concerning this issue, the website notes that Songza “pays for licenses from all the major performing rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC), who then pay the publishers and writers in proportion to the number of plays they get on Songza.” Music lovers will have to wait and see how long Songza’s current business process will hold, especially in the wake of Seeqpod’s pending case with Warner music.


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