Best 2008 digital music startups
p2pnet news view Music:- “2008 has been a startling year for innovation in digital music,” says MusicAlly, going on, “So we thought we’d round up some of the most interesting startups from this year.”
There’s a huge collection of 200 links including social networks, streaming sites, recommendation engines, mixtapes, online games, and so on.
“They weren’t all successful (or, indeed, legal), and they’re presented in no particular order within their categories,says the post, adding:
“Oh, and some are less startups and more projects from established firms. But even so, we thought the list below provides an overview of some of the innovation around music that’s happened this year. Bear in mind this is startups or projects we’ve written about this year for the first time - so the likes of Imeem, Project Playlist, Napster, SpiralFrog and the rest aren’t included, because we covered them in 2007 or before.”
Below is the list for P2P file sharing »»»
Qtrax (121) was the ad-funded P2P music download service that botched its launch at Midem – leading journalists to believe it had major label deals when it didn’t – but spent the rest of the year… signing those deals. Gradually.
Pirates Of The Amazon (122) was a cheeky Firefox plug-in that, when users browsed Amazon’s UK MP3 Store, provided them with links to download the songs for free from The Pirate Bay.
LittleShoot (123) was a LimeWire spin-off - a web-based service that let people search for music on YouTube, Flickr and LimeWire itself.
TorrentAds (124) was a UK-based startup looking to sell advertising on BitTorrent sites, promising “some of the highest CPMs in the industry”.
Brand Asset Digital (125) also wanted to sell ads around P2P networks, but in its case, they were search-related advertising - a bit like Google’s AdWords.
YouTorrent (126) was the most powerful BitTorrent search engine yet, pulling in results from The Pirate Bay, Mininova, SuprNova, BTJunkie and at least eight other torrent trackers.
MP3Count (127) was the new AllofMP3 - Ukrainian, on the wrong side of the licensing fence, and very, very cheap.
Wuala (128) was about remote storage, except it used P2P technology, storing your stuff on other people’s PCs. Innovative cloud tech, or legal minefield?
CloudTrade (129) claimed to offer legal music sharing for smartphones, via label deals to make songs available on the service. Initially, it worked on Windows Mobile handsets.
ZipClip (130) was a US startup that let people right-click on web content - including YouTube videos - and send it to their phones, including as ringtones.
TorrentRelay (131) promised client-less BitTorrent downloads, via a site where people could paste Torrent URLs into a box, and download them through their browsers – including iPhone and Wii users.
Songbeat (132) was one of the more controversial startups, being a desktop app that let users search for music on Seeqpod, Project Playlist, Last.fm and other sites, then download them – although they had to pay €19.99 for the premium software to get unlimited downloads.
LegalTorrents (133) offered, yes, legal torrents. Public domain music, e-books, games and images. Although there is plenty of copyright-free content out there to swap, it didn’t look likely to tempt The Kids away from Illegal Torrents…
Good one.
MusicAlly - 200 digital music startups from 2008, December 17, 2008
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