MySpace says 125 million people use the site, which adds up to a lot of music streams. By crunching that data in near real-time, We Are Hunted has created a radio app for MySpace, iPhone and Android that queues up whatever artist has enjoyed the most plays on MySpace within the previous 60 seconds. (You may remember We Are Hunted as the company that impressed us last year with its playable music chart.)
The new app is crowdsourced music programming along the lines of what Jelli does for FM radio, but on a massive scale. Perhaps "hordesourcing" would be a better word for it. And unlike most crowdsourcing projects, this one requires no active participation on the part of the horde supplying the data.
We Are Hunted's MySpace station only plays one minute from each song, rather than full tracks, so it's more useful as a discovery method than as a full-on radio station. If you hear something you like, you can save it to the pane on the right. Clicking the image brings you to the artist's MySpace page, where you can get more info and listen to full-length tracks. One advantage of the one-minute limit is that you can churn through more songs faster.
Interestingly, the songs you hear come not from MySpace or We Are Hunted, but from servers scattered around the web, somewhat in the style of SeeqPod.
We Are Hunted's MySpace apps work by grabbing information about the currently playing artist from the MySpace Real Time Stream API, featuring between 15 and 100 updates per second depending on the time of day, according to the company. We Are Hunted's backend technology then combs the web for a free MP3 of a song by that artist (or looks for something similar if it can't find it), trims the MP3 to one minute, adds fade-in and fade-out, and queues it up after an automated text-to-speech voice introduces the artist and name of the song. The whole process repeats every 60 seconds.
So, what do MySpace users listen to, on the whole? You can find out on your own fairly quickly, assuming you still remember your MySpace password. In our experience, MySpace users listen to more-varied fare than we first expected. We encountered a mix of hip-hop, dance-club electronica, punk-rockabilly, and '80s-style electro-pop, with nary a Lady Gaga track in sight.
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