Muse.Net (feel free to use
as a referer)
has gone public today. Pretty much what I expected. The agent installs on each of your systems w/ MP3s and streams from there. The Muse.Net servers act to collect and centralize the information as well as to organize the songs. There are some interesting possibilities involving roundtripping that infromation… Overall, pretty cool. First month is free, after that it’s $12.95 a years. The price of one CD for a something neat to fiddle with.
Right now the organizing display/metadata is pretty anemic, but it’ll be interesting to see what’s going on under the covers. One thing that is pretty disappointing is that there doesn’t appear to be any method for sharing of music. If you think about fair use, you should be able to ‘lend’ a song to a friend to listen to. Personally, I think that’d be a killer feature, even if you put in locks to approximate physical lending (ie, you can’t stream it while a friend is streaming, only people that you put on your friend’s list can stream, etc. etc.). But yeah, there are enormous pitfalls involved. No need to kill a project before it gets started. As a web service, I’m hoping that the primary feature thing they work on is making this a great music metadata recognition and organization tool. (It’s a great problem to tackle and no one has really done it that well yet.) Once that foundation layer gets done, it makes everything else much easier (whether you’re talking about finding more music that you might like, or people who listen to the same music as you do, or generating mixes that sound good, etc.)