Tag Archives: music startups

In Praise of Ex.fm

Remem­ber when music start-ups were such a source of frus­tra­tion for me? Now I real­ly enjoy some of them! Chief among them is ex.fm, which my friend Mark showed me just the oth­er day. Pos­si­bly the most use­ful Google Chrome exten­sion that does­n’t involve a Google product.

What does it do? It sniffs out all the mp3s on a page and stores them tem­porar­i­ly in the exten­sion, which allows you to browse away from their source while you lis­ten via a sleek play­er. I’ve been play­ing Mark’s blog like a mix­tape thanks to it, as well as blogs like Songs from Treme and more.

Now if it could just trav­el back in time to 2003…

Why We Are Debating Free

The answer’s easy: it does­n’t work for music. Unless you were liv­ing under a rock on Fri­day, you prob­a­bly read Techcrunch’s post, “The Sor­ry State of Music Star­tups.” With­out going into great detail, Arring­ton’s com­plete­ly right, and for once, he does­n’t resort to the whole “music just wants to be free” argu­ment so com­mon among Web 2.0 types. Instead, he writes that “free stream­ing music” is about as sen­si­ble as try­ing to douse a burn­ing pile of mon­ey with a gal­lon of gasoline.

With all due respect to Bruce Houghton at Hype­bot and Andrew Dub­ber at New Music Strate­gies, the dream is over. It’s time to wake up and smell the cof­fee.Con­tin­ue read­ing “Why We Are Debat­ing Free”