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David Byrne has more than just good song titles, he also has some interesting thoughts on digital music, DRM, and search. Here's a quote from his blog, cribbed from John Battelle:
"Soon enough a site will open that is like a Google search for music downloads — downloads that are not copy-protected but you still pay for. eMusic tracks have no copy protection, for example, but their catalogue is limited. Eventually a meta search will turn up the tracks you want, wherever they live, on whomever's site. Consumers don't care who they buy them from if the interface is easy and intuitive."
A site called SeeqPod could be the part of the genesis of what Byrne's talking about (although it's free to use). SeeqPod works by grabbing music from wild, disparate areas of the Web and presenting them to you in one nice, easy, scrolling interface. The system works, as one SeeqPod representative put it, "by taking a biomimetic approach and mimicking the way humans process information."
On the surface, the most original elements about SeeqPod are the way you can add music from a bunch of different sources to the same playlist, and the live PodCrawler feed.
Once you sign in to the service, you'll see the latest crawled songs from MP3 blogs, label sites, and all other sorts of locations, scrolling up the left side of the screen. Click the green arrow next to any of them and the song will shoot over to the right pane – your playlist – and start playing. You can rack up quite an extensive playlist of new stuff really quickly in this way, just by checking out anything that catches your eye. Playlists can be saved for later.
The more powerful search tool is effective if you know what you might be looking for, returning a decent number of results for bands at various levels of notoriety (including a Peel Session version of "Australians In Europe" by The Fall, courtesy of postpunkjunk). Results can be clicked over to your current playlist as easily as the PodCrawled stuff can.
Finally there's SeeqPod's recommendation engine, built on patent-pending technology from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and which, SeeqPod says, "avoids the pitfalls of popularity- and purchase pattern-based recommendations" used by Amazon and other online music concerns. Click on the Recommend Music link next to certain songs to bring up unlinked (for now?) album titles that relate to those songs.
It's almost too fun, as it was easy to get sidetracked setting up playlists while trying to write about it.
Some of the songs that float by in the PodCrawler window have weird, filename-ish titles, you can only delete a song while it's playing, and SeeqPod is still amping up parts of its recommendation engine, so it's not perfect. But it's fun, and gives you a good way to try out a new slice of music. You can sign up for the free SeeqPod beta as of today.
