I'm really excited about this kind of service. People have been moving increasingly online in everything they do, and music is no exception. I believe that in the future the vast majority of media consumption will use streaming. (As if it isn't, already!) My main side project involves this kind of service, so I know at the very least it can be complicated to write a server/website which can chomp diverse APIs. [1] What puzzles me is how this could be monetized--I'm sure YouTube and SoundCloud aren't in a hurry to stream their media for free without seeing license fees.
How do they make money?
Tomahawk has been doing this for quite awhile, both as a standalone payer and on the web: http://toma.hk/
I had a similar idea since I wanna create playlists from tracks in multiple resources and made this library; http://github.com/azer/play-url
Which takes a url (Mp3, Rdio, Soundcloud and Youtube) and gives you a unified API to play it. www.7min.io/customize is based on this.
Looks like a more enhanced, professional version of one of my side projects, TuneCrawl. Hopefully it does well!
Oh man, if they expose some sort of API, it could be used to clean up tags in music libraries and such. Being able to give a service the tags you have (or a hash of the song or something) and have what track the result most probably is could be awesome.
How does this compare to Tomahawk?
No more “this is not available in your location.”! I have been waiting for that.
Just got picked up by TNW - http://tinyurl.com/bopfm1
I feel like it'll probably make Spotify Premium obsoltete considering it makes mobile listening of Spotify's tracks free...
Been waiting for something like this!
Nice. Can't login with my Spotify though. Just says 'launch spotify or login here'.
You can only login/signup through facebook? Unfortunate.
I love this idea
meh. I'll be sticking with google all-access.
From the terms for embedding the player [1]:
> You agree to place a link (“SEO Link”) to bop.fm’s home page (www.bop.fm) on at least one (1) web page within each Website that is no more than 3 clicks away from the home page of the applicable Website and is indexed by Google with “Page Rank”. Each SEO Link will be displayed using the anchor text “bop.fm” (the “Anchor Text”) and will be accompanied by a generic description of bop.fm (e.g., “bop.fm enables any user to play any song, use any streaming music service, and share with any friend.”) and the bop.fm mark. You will not prevent search engines from crawling any web page containing an SEO Link and crediting bop.fm for such SEO Link, including, without limitation, by using “no follow” designations, placing the SEO Links in an i-frame, or placing the SEO Links in JavaScript.
This seems like a bit of an odd requirement, especially since it's not mentioned anywhere other than the ToS.
[1] http://www.bop.fm/tos-meta