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Evangelism
Playdar is special because it is scalable, cheap, and unbundled.
It is scalable because it is capable of supporting the entire internet.
No single music service can say the same, no matter how big. Every service has its own strengths and weaknesses, with the strengths of one counterbalancing the weaknesses of another.
Spotify is only in Europe, Rhapsody is only in the US. YouTube is the only place for a large pool of amateur content. File sharing networks are the only source for orphaned works that are out of print but still in copyright. Web search is the only way to locate recordings hosted solely by the creators on their own servers. Chinese pop is readily available in businesses that cater to Chinese customers, spanish-language pop is readily available from Latin American companies, and so on for every cultural group on earth, but no business serves all of these customers.
The internet is about federation, not balkanization. Playdar federates. It is a single API for many different sources of content.
It is cheap for web sites because they don’t owe royalties.
Webcasting and on-demand streams cost a lot of money. Web providers have a very hard time staying in business. Playing MP3s in iTunes or Winamp doesn’t cost anything. These companies have no trouble staying in business. Playdar allows web apps to use the same technique as software on your PC. This saves money.
Web sites can do music cheaply by ignoring the risk of lawsuit and hosting MP3s for themselves, but if they have bad luck it will cost them even more than webcasting or on-demand streams.
Playdar doesn’t evade payment and licensing, though! It reuses sources that are already paid for, which enhances their value. Playdar makes it possible for a user who buys an MP3 from Amazon to reuse their purchase on Pandora.
It unbundles MP3 sources from discovery and management.
If iTunes, Spotify, and Rhapsody all provide access to the same song, why shouldn’t listeners use the same software to listen to the song? Listeners should be able to choose one vendor to get songs from and another to listen to songs, because then they can have the best of both worlds. Playdar gives users choice.
If the New York Times is reviewing a song that the user owns a copy of, shouldn’t the review link to the user’s copy of the song? Why should the reviewer pay to license the song? Why would the reader want a 30 second sample when they can have the whole thing?
Anybody in the world should be able to help you find out about new music. Anybody should be able to make software to help you use your MP3s. If you have the choice of any any discovery tool or management tool, you can use the best in each category. It’s about quality.