Free music, from indie to major label, is all over the web these days, but quickly (and legally) finding what you’re looking for isn’t quite as easy as one might think — even in the age of Google.
Google has structured it’s search interface to return by object type (web, images, video, news, etc.), but it relies on the user to add specificity through query strings for returning more particular content types. Most normal people (read: not living between San Jose and San Francisco) give up searching after a few different keyword attempts, so finding free, full-length tracks by particular artists for playback or sharing online can actually be quite difficult.
Until Songza was born, that is.
Songza has removed the mind numbing query construction out of music searches by simply allowing the user to search by artist or song name. I’ve run a number of obscure, indie artist searches, and each has brought back a decent sampling of full-length tracks.
Revolutionary? Not quite.
Under The Covers
How does Songza do it? It’s pretty simple — they mine YouTube’s flash movie pages for keyword matches.
That’s it.
When Songza finds a match, it returns the YouTube video title along with the audio extracted from the video. Might I add that in most cases, it’s of extremely shitty quality, as it completely relies on UGC.
Without including services other than YouTube as input for it’s search results, Songza really can’t be touted as a “music search engine.” It doesn’t even scrape the internet for MP3’s to include in its results (which is completely understandable — I wouldn’t put that kind of chum in the water for the lawyers over at the RIAA either).
The YouTube reliance isn’t a guaranteed sustainable route either, though. YouTube could easily decide to shut down Songza’s access, similar to what Rhapsody did to YottaMusic this past week.
So why use Songza? What’s the draw to keep me from just running a Google video search for “obscure” acts and songs?
Not much, really, but for the sake of this review, I’ll focus on the only two features unique to Songza in comparison to YouTube itself.
Music Embed
Out of the four Share features (Send to friend, Link to song, Watch on YouTube and Embed it on my site), the embed feature is the only differentiation from the YouTube experience itself. Since I’m a blogger that uses embed often, there’s a slim chance that I might use this service just for that feature alone.
But since so much of the music that Songza returns is of such shit quality, the feature becomes useless to me. I mean, what would my readers appreciate more:
A decent video with shit quality audio ?
Or the same shit quality audio, but without the movie to distract you from the shit quality audio?
It’s a nice thought for a feature, but quality audio matters. Well, at least for me it does. So if I need to embed label music, I’ll keep using Rhapsody’s free embed service and probably continue to use YouTube in the other cases.
That’s a nice segue into the other Songza feature differentiation from YouTube.
The Playlist
With all the choices available to me for listening to music these days, why would I decide to string together a playlist of semi-decent to shit quality music here?
When I fire up a playlist, I move onto other tasks, both on the computer and off. The utility of a playlist is 100% centered around the experience of listening to music, not constructing the playlist in the interface. And in this day and age, losing the scrobbling of my iTunes music or the suggestions of a Pandora just isn’t acceptable.
Aza Raskin has done a nice job with the interface — it’s simple, elegant, Humanized even — but he’s completely missed the boat on modeling the usefulness of the end product.
I highly doubt creating a full-fledged music service was Raskin’s goal in the first place. There’s no money behind it, no sign-up functionality and according to Raskin, it was an idea he came up with in the shower and it took only a few weekends to pull together.
Sans the utility of the actual product, it serves as a nice business card / portfolio piece for pitching Humanized interface projects.
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