Sharing your music through radio.blog.club

A couple of weeks ago I met a a nice guy in a social picknick that told me about radio.blog.club (Thanks François!). The idea is great. They are building a pear to pear streaming network. Basically, they provide the software that allows you to stream music from your server to clients.

You can use radio.blog.search in two ways:

• You can create your own music server that will stream music to users. The software is provided by radio.blog.club but you need to look for it in the forums, I have not seen any other access to it.
• You can search in their website for songs that are stored in user servers, build your playlist and listen to it. The player they supply will automatically stream the music from the appropriate server to your client.

I guess the way it works is that when a user adds a music server, radio.blog.club is notified so they can tell their crawler to look and index all the songs stored on that server (well, there is a configuration file you can use to tell radio.blog.search not to index and share your songs). That way users can search for indexed songs through the website and play them directly from the servers where they are stored. Doesn’t sound great?

I have used it for a couple of days and I works pretty well. Some of the songs in my playlist cannot be accessed, I guess that’s because the servers are no longer there or because they don’t have enough bandwidth.

I think it is a good start but it could be optimized by factorizing songs. Currently, if you look for a song you will get one result per server with that song. I guess it will be better to show just one result and load balance requests across the different servers behind the scenes.

The site also needs some rework maybe to improve the process of building your playlist (I don’t know how to change the order of songs in the playlist for instance). In any case it looks like a very interesting product.

All that said, it looks to me that this might not be completely legal … Well, is like sharing your music with friends and it does not look that different from Kazaa or other p2p networks. But for the time being, just enjoy it!

Economic value of community sites

This morning I saw an interesting article in Techcrunch about a possible Bebo acquisition offer which led to an interesting discussion about the real value of community websites.

All these community sites are usually obtaining money from advertising as their services are free, therefore it seems that the more users and the more pages per user viewed should lead to a bigger revenue and so to a bigger value. Well, as said in one of the comments, there are at least two reasons why this is not necessarily true.

On the one hand, the content is user driven, and thus you encounter a lot “indecent” information, photos, etc. Therefore, some advertisers may not want to appear in this context because it will go against their image.

On the other hand, as the design, layout and also the content is provided by users, adds will probably pass unperceived. You can try the exercise, when you go to a news site or a blog you are interested in, after having read all the information try to remember about the advertisers.

Anyways, we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. This looks like a lot to me but I guess, mainly because the unique real differentiator of these websites is usually the user database (technically they are not very complex and the content is provided by users), the barriers of entry are then low. You will of course need money to build your image and market your site. Obviously media companies don’t want to stay behind in the race and so they seem kind to invest big amounts of money.

I hope nobody has forgotten what happened 5 years ago …