Michael Robertson is at it again. He has launched AnywhereMP3.com, a flash-based MP3 player, which allows those with Mp3tunes.com accounts to stream their music and listen to it on their computers. Think of it as an add-on, incase you don’t have any MP3 playback software on your machine, or you are using a computer other than your own machine.
The player’s skin resembles that of your favorite “physical” music player such as iPod or Zen, and allows you to sort the collections in your Mp3tunes locker by playlist, albums etc. In other words a virtual MP3 player. It is a nifty little tool, but I wonder how Robertson plans to make money off the service. There is the premium service on Mp3Tunes, which costs about $40 a year for unlimited storage, but is that enough?
Still, give it a try – the demo player is chockfull of good stuff. The playback itself is pretty simple, easy and fast.
Another must check out with a free virtual ipod player – http://blogmusik.net
I dont see this is going far as Video on line sites can go, like youtube. But it is interesting as it will resolve issues with various song formats and people can use this to listen to mp3 songs only.
Oh yippie 192kbps limit on music.
What is the point of music if you are playing it in such low quality?
Adam, 192 kbps is quite decent quality for most people. Elitists who want to get every inaudible trebles would have all their music in CDs only and play them on powerful 5.1 HiFi systems instead of Flash-based player on computer speaker set 🙂 Absolute majority of people does not know what kbps means anyway…
Why did they base it off of another service? Where’s the money in that? I can see MP3Tunes making money, but not AnywhereMp3.
I definitely see a market potential for web-based media players that play music AND videos. In addition, it would be great if there was a “behind the scenes” software that takes care of the syncing of media from the hard drive to the web-drive. MP3Tunes has “Oboe”, but it’s a little too bulky and un-automated for my taste.
If anything, these companies could also position themselves as web-based storage providers for backing up music and media.
It sounds extremely similar to the “BeamIt” software that got Mp3.com sued during the last bubble. Wrapped up in a fancy new wrapper, but the same basic concept. They likely limit it to 192kbps because that’s what they are storing everything in; presumably they are really keeping one copy of every track regardless of the user.
Roberts comment is exactly what got Mp3.com sued last time. It’s funny how many re-run startups are popping up!
-Todd
I don’t see the usefulness of it.
Maybe I’m missing something but anyone really need this?
I wonder if there is decent money to be made by hooking up with a big ISP the way Rhapsody, Snapfish, McAfee and others have done with Comcast? AnywhereMP3 would certainly fit right in with the suite of goodies accessible through Comcast.net. It would then be left to Robertson to upsell this user base to his premium services (as the others I mentioned do).
Ted, the only application I can think of this is linking the flash player with other mp3 search sites like sangeetix.com
I agree with Jesse that comcast and other similar isps like roadrunner could leverage this technology.