Music and Search

Question : What's the world's largest searchable index of free internet playable music that's adding thousands of new tracks a day?
Answer: Possibly SeeqPod (beta).
What is SeeqPod Music? From the website ...

At SeeqPod Music, you can search for music, music videos & podcasts by artists you like, as well as discover other artists and songs you were not familiar with. You can generate countless playlists of songs and videos, save them for future enjoyment and share them with friends by e-mailing or embedding a player and playlist in a web page.

Where does the music come from?

The amount of music on the Internet is much larger than music found in catalogs or physical inventories. It's also a well known fact now that the Internet has a growing inventory filled with mashups, mixes and music of all kinds. At SeeqPod we crawl the entire multilingual deep web in the vertical space of music for the purpose of new kinds of playable search, discovery, recommendation and social experiences. In addition, as people make music and video they submit it to SeeqPod Music. This is done using the "Submit Music" link. You can even submit a location of songs we have not yet found and they will soon show up in the PodCrawler and search results.

hmmm... interesting - sort of like Napster-clone via a browser / mobile browser then ? - but with a sophisticated search/web crawler behind it and the ability for the community to add to the content catalogue...
- I came across this link when browsing for music on the iPhone as seeqpod have a specific iPhone Safari interface.

It works very well on the iPhone thanks to the customised Safari interface. As
soon as you've selected a song in the browser from the list, it starts streaming (I only tried over WiFi but it was quick) so you get to hear the track pretty quickly.

I also tried it on the N95 using the OSS browser - I just pointed it at the same iPhone interface over HSDPA (expecting it to work - which it does) but most tracks are mp3's over http - so they're a download rather than streamed via rtsp - still it's a way of picking up some music as they can be saved...(I couldn't save on the iPhone).



Whilst the service might not quite have all the longtail music completely catalogued yet (I tried some quite obscure tracks which were present but there are glaring omissions too) - it looks like they are working on it with a combination of user generated content and patented search crawling.

Another question : will this service survive given the weight of the music industry ?

If they do survice, roll on HSUPA for streaming speed and ubiquity when mobile - another way of storing your entire digital music collection in the cloud and accessing a vast library of (free) music...