Anywhere.fm

Maybe I am, as usual, the last person to this party. But there is a website called (and located at) anywhere.fm. It is basically an iTunes-style music player that is online. Not only that, but you upload your music (mp3s only), and you can listen to them anywhere you have an internet connection.

Not only that, but you can listen to other people's music collections on a streaming basis (at least, you can fire up their playlists). There are over 10,000,000 songs uploaded and counting.

Is this legal? They seem to think so. They chose to be basically a web radio station and pay the ASCAP and BMI fees for public performance. They don't allow you to download anyone's songs. Depending on how you use the site, you might not have to.

How do they make money? When you hear a song on somebody else's playlist, you see a little shopping cart "buy this song" link. Apparently they get finders' fees when someone does that.

A downer is that there appears to be no search engine, so you can't just get a big list of Beatles songs and just listen to those. Instead, you depend on the other users to organize things for you, as if they were the DJ of their own little radio station. You also don't appear to be able to skip... yes, I just tried it. If you start on a playlist you don't own, you can't randomly skip to the ones you like... you can only skip so many per hour. Of course, you could put every song you own in a separate playlist, exposing them all, but that's no fun.

The last caveat is that the uploading process goes at about 30 K per second at best (I left it on all night, and I've got about 60 songs out of 800-some).

My music is going up at anywhere.fm/mineshaftgap. I'll warn you that there are some isolated swears, and you should probably skip the Green Day and Ozomatli albums if you care about such things. But there's a lot of Radiohead and Beck and Beatles, and all the Switchfoot studio albums and all the Nickel Creek, plus their side projects (except the 1997 Here To There rarity and a lot of Chris Thile's solo stuff). I'll try and get things organized.

Go check it out.