Week of September 15, 2008

ILike Adds Music Streaming To Any Site

Friday, September 19, 2008

If you want to take the concept of streaming music to your site, iLike has released an interesting partnership with Rhapsody that allows users to embed code on their site that allows visitors to stream full songs from the Rhapsody library. This is an excellent solution for music blogs and other sites looking to add legal interactive music. The downside? The Rhapsody terms-of-service apply: Users only get to stream 25 songs for free. Beyond that you have to sign up for a subscription. Still, for casual listeners and select usage, it's an interesting solution.

Content-based Social Networking in 1 line of code

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Liveworld, which is best known for creating expensive and integrated social networking solutions for companies, has released an interesting product: Livebar. The Livebar is a single strip at the bottom of every page of your website that integrates interactivity for that one page. In terms of facilitating interaction, it's an interesting idea. The downside is that it is a bit of a shotgun approach-rather than facilitate interaction for every piece of content, Livebar facilitates it for individual pages.

Enterprising companies could find some interesting uses for Livebar, we're sure, however. Check out liveworld.com for more info.

Free Video Platform Launches

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

As we've written about elsewhere, the efficiency of the Internet pretty much removes the "I can't afford it" excuse from the mouths of radio executives. If you're willing to get a little dirty on the implementation side and embrace open source, you can do practically anything. The latest example? Panda, an open source video platform for websites. If you want a free and fairly comprehensive video solution, Panda is worth checking out. You can find more info at pandastream.com

Best Buy Buys Napster

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Discount tech store Best Buy has announced that it has bought digital song storefront Napster. The deal makes sense on one end... now Best Buy has a digital song store asset to compete with Amazon and Wal-Mart, but at the same time, how important is it to compete in this space? Best Buy has said they are going to leave Napster alone for the short term, but to make this work Best Buy is going to need to create some interesting synergies between their brick and mortar stores, their tech products, and the digital Napster storefront. This could be interesting.

MySpace Music prepares to conquer the world

Monday, September 15, 2008

MySpace Music, already part of the integral glue that holds MySpace together, has been planning on an aggressive re-launch that will include content from all the major labels. The company has already announced a compelling list of advertising partners for the launch, including Toyota, Sony Pictures, and McDonalds. With the growth of Imeem as a music-based social networking destination, MySpace clearly isn't sitting on its hands, and it is also not ignoring the revenue aspect either.