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The web game of sharing music

After song.ly’s recent bid (for $50 000) and my own interest in web and music (http://www.tweekly.fm), I decided to delve into the host of services that aim to “share music” and more specifically to twitter.

Some of the more popular streaming sites like “imeem” that died allowed you to post tweets from it, but I’m rather looking at sites specifically built for this purpose.

So here is the list in order of alexa rank (as of this post):

blip.fm – 4,449

It’s strongest feature is its first mover advantage. Started before most other services and although it claims to be “twitter for music”, it sees Twitter as a distribution channel, not its main feature. Decent service, nice backing. Used it some time ago, but haven’t really after that.

twiturm.com – 59,319

“Twiturm.com is the easiest way to socialize your music. Created for the artist, Twiturm is to be used as a promotional tool to promote their music.” TWIT Ur Music. Used more as promotional tool. P.S. They should get rid of the easter background. Really hurts my eyes.

tweetmysong.com - 143,567

Almost missed this one. Like twiturm. Post YOUR music. Very easy to do. Kudos for that. Still uses basic auth and has no twitter account??

song.ly – 189,228

Simple and sleek. Embedded player. Competitive advantage is its various ways to easily post songs (API) and integration into several twitter apps.

twt.fm – 189,563

Very similar to song.ly. Has API, searches for songs, has userpages that looks like twitter. Love the design (in fact most of Lee Martin’s designs). Simplistic. Competitive advantage. 1,600,00+ followers. Tweet a popular song: get lots of RT, get lots of traffic. Simple.

swift.fm – 209,969

Uses twitter “to help you discover, share and enjoy new music”. Focus is on friends. Very much infused with twitter. It is a lot like Blip.fm in a way, but also allows you to upload your own songs. Seen few comments of people switching to swift.fm because of that reason. One to watch.

bln.kr – 250,630

Also very simplistic. Focuses on sharing YOUR music, much like twiturm.com.

twones.com – 310,987

twtmuzik.net – 305,412

Same thing. Share mp3′s on twitter. Don’t like the design (bit broken in chrome). Also no twitter account?

twones.com – 310,987

They aren’t really clear exactly what it does. Joined a while ago in the invite stage. Now that I came back, its different and focused on the music bar. Aims to “bookmark” music on the web. Sounds interesting. It can scrobble to last.fm which helps! They should watch out for extension.fm (looks mighty awesome!) though.

tweekly.fm – 349,396

My site, run with Scott. Can’t be too biased here. Core service: Share your last.fm top weekly artists. Very reliable on twitter and last.fm. Mashup. More interesting features coming soon. ;)

tinysong.com – 354,484

Grooveshark powered music sharing tool. Pretty simple. Did some hunting and actually found out it was created by the marketing director of Grooveshark. Nice. Has an API too.

maestro.fm – 358,503

Still don’t know where to position them. Let the blurb on the site speak for itself. “stored your music in the cloud, share and discover”. You must download a maestro connector to connect to your home PC. You basically play your songs through the web. They should put the FAQ on the frontpage. I had to figure out what it does.

twisten.fm – 1,095,911

Listen to Twitter. Powered by Grooveshark. So basically, you aren’t using a service to ‘tweet’ it. Was popular, but dropping. Don’t know why they still have basic auth. Team also incorporates the marketing director of Grooveshark. Looks like he has hand in some music sharing pie. I wonder if he bid for song.ly. :P

songtwit.com, swg.fm – > 1,600,000

Both of these, I find hard to distinguish. Simple, but much better services out there.

imusictweet.com – 4,492,053

Surprised I found this. Launched 30th of March. “Share and stream songs or playlists for free”. More like song.ly and twt.fm than swift.fm and blip.fm. Struggling to find how it differentiates from the other offerings. Don’t like the design that much.

listento.fm > 5,000,000

Not directly “linked” to twitter through authentication. Interesting system, but ultimately laborious. Too many steps to tweet a song. listento.fm creates a page to “listen to it” by the whatever way your provided the link, but you have to post the link yourself. One can just post a link to the youtube video or mp3 itself?

tweetmylast.fm – 7,658,433

Very blah. “It’s just a way to annoy your followers on twitter with what you last.fm is tracking”.

—–

So yeah. That’s my list I scoured the net for. I think I found most of them. Also, thanks to twitdom for finding the ones google didn’t. Let me know if there is more.

I also created a twitter list for most the sites’ twitter accounts. Here it is: http://twitter.com/shotbeak/sharemusic

Become a share-bear:
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Tumblr
  • TwitThis

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 3rd, 2010 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://brian-stoner.com Brian Stoner

    Good list. The value in sharing music is that other people are able to discover it. Do you think twitter is an efficient platform for discovery? Personally, I'm more compelled to try out music I discover through real life friends on Facebook, rather than people I barely know on twitter. But ultimately all these generic social sites are not ideal for sharing and music discovery, its just thats where all the interaction and eyes are right now.

  • http://www.shotbeak.com shotbeak

    I happened to find tweetj when I searched for music sharing services.

    Twitter for sharing to me is useful in two ways:

    1) When songs can be compared, it is particularly useful. As with my Tweekly.fm, the top 3 artists are usually shared. Many times I've found that I've listened to 2 of the 3 artists someone shared, but not the third, which has me going to last.fm to listen.

    2) People are sometimes more interested in just sharing instead of discovering. They want to say, “hey look. I'm listening to this band.” It's more a way of showcasing and defining yourself. You might get a tweet or two saying, “nice taste in music!”, which reinforces that desire.

    I've read your blogpost on music discovery. Very interesting and things I've pondered too. As music is becoming ubiquitous and the record labels start losing, artists are moving away from relying on record sales. They'd rather want their songs free and have people come to their shows. In that case, although music is global, it is still inherently local. Most artists can't afford to fly everywhere and share their local music. There is still a gap for that somewhere.

  • http://brian-stoner.com Brian Stoner

    Funny, your last paragraph is exactly the thought that's been driving a side project I've been working on. I totally think local music sharing/discovery is the future of the industry, I'm building a small site now to experiment with building an online community that promotes sharing/discovery of local music in my region, Philadelphia.

    The Internet and the ability to reach anyone was supposed to democratize everything, but instead drowned us all with infinite choices. Back in the day, before the Internet, good bands (that weren't pushed down from major labels) got started by building local followings, and that's what I think bands need to get back to. Local fans can come to shows and provide a viable revenue stream for small bands. Problem is there's not a lot of online services that support this model…I think there's real opportunity here.

    Just signed up for Tweekly.fm, I was using http://lastfmlovetweet.com/ for a while, and another service (don't remember the name) that sends Weekly Top 5 from Last.fm to Tumblr. Will give it a shot.

  • http://www.bandwidthblog.com/2011/10/06/why-spotify-and-facebook-are-on-the-right-track/ Why Spotify and Facebook are on the right track.

    [...] there was also quite a rise in websites that offered the ability to tweet your songs to Twitter. I wrote a blog post on this quite a while ago in April of 2010. It was an exciting arena, one in which Tweekly.fm was competing in as well. Of [...]