Thursday, May 11, 2006

We may be the Johnny-come-latelys to the free hosting thing, but I'd like to say it was worth the wait:

* 200MB: that's 25-50 songs and not limited to just songs, podcast posts, images, whatever media you can provide all goes under the same cap (by comparison: Pure Voulme and MySapce are limited to 3 mp3s)
* Automatic creation of embeddable podcast from your media, so you can embed it anywhere (your band page, your MySpace page) You can manage all your media in one place and it will propagate through the whole web (as opposed to being forced to upload to every site and split your fan traffic among them)
* Tags, filtering, the contest: no where else can you earn a guaranteed 20 listens for your song and maybe more based on how people like it. Your song gets tagged and made available to people who indicate a taste for your style.

A nice offering right? And just at the right time, too. The gov't is trying to rip yet another new one for the internet radio community, by forcing them to use DRM on any streams (streams for goodness sakes!) that include tracks under the DMCA statutory license. The GarageBand artist community sidesteps the DMCA and makes it possible to stream amp3s from their accounts without royalties. Now we'll let them make available more (if not all) of their catalog for free streaming. If this law goes through, then artists who play nice with streaming will have even more of a promotional advantage in new media.