autocratic for the people.

How to commercialize Roadcasting.

Here's the idea: a free service, not really comparable to Pandora or Rhapsody but it could be mistaken as such for sound bite purposes. It'd be a web app, it'd be called LinkTunes, and it would most simply help a person set up an automated internet radio station that plays his music back to him. It would be accessible anywhere there's an internet connection, including home, work, and maybe over the phone (for Bluetoothing into the car).

Here's the hook: it also supports friends' listening in. Friends upload a list of their own music files -- not the files themselves, just a list of what songs they have -- and the station uses that to make a playlist, playing back stuff from the station owner's library that everyone likes. (Yes, very similar to Roadcasting, but at long last this is a commercializable implementation.) So, the station owner and his friends can all listen to the same internet radio station at work while they're noodling around on AIM. Mildly interesting, right? Would never float as a pay service, but since it's free you might give it a shot. Blogs and desperate companies (at the behest of their hip marketing consultants) would inevitably also set up their own stations, so it's seen as an auxiliary, automatic community-building service. No babysitting required.

Now, the Trojan horse: the service can be free because the real value is in the lists of songs people submit (in a non-personally-identifiable manner, of course). The easiest way to afford uploading lists of songs is via the iTunes XML file, and that happens to also contain automatically updated metadata like Date Added, Number of Plays, and etc. Get your hands on a bunch of these, and you have a very good idea of what people are playing and when they're playing it. Combine that with shady but commonly performed IP lookups, and you can then break down this data by region in addition to time. You and I can both think of a few companies that might be willing to pay for this sort of information, especially if it's straight from the horse's mouse (!) instead of scraped together from dubious sources or brick and mortar sales figures.

So there you go. Metadata distills into money, and this is a gusher.

posted by avixe @ 10:36 PM