Audiogalaxy acquired by Dropbox
audiogalaxy.com
audiogalaxy.com
It had a lot of other convenient features (good, specialised search engine, community features, network effects meaning you could find obscure stuff), but the robust fingerprinting and resuming was the big one. I also seem to remember that it had a very odd interface, where you controlled the app through the browser (I'm hazy on the details.)
Of course it was all quite obviously designed to facilitate copyvios and Audiogalaxy was subsequently killed, sold, repurposed and now resold. I had no idea the brand still existed.
I was really sad to see it go, until Spotify came along it was by far my favorite music consuming program.
They also had an ftp server search index where you could find even more obscure stuff.
The only place I can think of which a comparable selection of rarities (at least for electronic music) is Soulseek, but AG seemed more reliable, and the split client/web concept was brilliant. I'd pay a decent amount for a legal version of it, if they could somehow get record labels to agree that any file (including white labels, bootlegs etc) could be shared and they'd just get a cut of whatever they could match up to a label/artist. Not holding my breath!
If record companies had put their efforts into turning just one of these services into a legal alternative (without completely ruining it), they'd be in the position Apple is in today with iTunes.
Sure, though the same can be said for drug cartels too.
If record companies had put their efforts into turning just one of these services into a legal alternative (without completely ruining it), they'd be in the position Apple is in today with iTunes.
Actually they tried, and they didn't go anywhere. Napster was turned into a legal service, as was mp3.com.
The legal Napster was created years after the original had died, was completely different and not very compelling. It felt like it was designed to fail.
mp3.com was an honest attempt but they didn't have label support. That's what killed them.
No, I'm saying that both of them are illegal, thus both of them ARE shut down in a similar manner.
When you assume...
This strikes me as an apt comparison, although maybe not for the reasons you intended. In both cases, the illegal services came about only because people wanted things that weren't or couldn't be provided legally. In both cases the laws are purportedly made for the public good, and in both cases it's not clear that they achieve the desired effect, and there are some decent reasons to think that we'd be better off if these things were legal. In both cases, there's behavior we wish wouldn't happen, but criminalizing it isn't really reducing it.
Perhaps. Nils Gilman argues that increasing the risk of a transaction increases the reward, and backs it up with drug-war data.
http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/may/03/deviant-globalizati...
The difference is that drugs are physical goods that require nontrivial infrastructure to produce. Digital media is essentially free to reproduce, and very cheap to distribute. Instituting the death penalty for trading Metallica's songs is unlikely to drive the price of a bootleg copy of the black album into the tens of thousands of dollars.
I'm very interested in what Dropbox is going to do with Audiogalaxy. Perhaps more of a dynamic cloud solution where content is not only stored but also interacted with? To be honest, I love the Dropbox interface, but I use G Drive because of the ability to edit documents on the fly instead of having to download them, edit them, and then overwrite/save. It would be awesome to see Dropbox incorporate client-side content editing capabilities, and I could definitely see Audiogalaxy helping with the music streaming aspect of it all.
How well does their implementation work? Are you writing this in the past tense just because AG is likely to close soon, or did you already find a different solution?
1. Unsustainable financially. They're losing money and will likely have to change the service or charge significantly more at some point.
2. Occasionally it doesn't have a song. Too obscure, too new, or some kind of legal wrangling is preventing it. Spotify doesn't have a good solution in this case. I can't augment it with music in my own collection.
3. With Spotify you have a huge music collection, but it's not portable. If they change the service (see #1) or you want to use a different client, you don't have options.
4. Mobile apps are limited to 96kbps. I want to be able to connect my phone to my (or a friend's) stereo to play music in the living room. The artificial bitrate limit means that won't sound good.
These might all be things only nerds care about, which is why I don't expect the market for my side project to be particularly large. But it's enough to make me want an alternative.
Now, assuming everyone uses their music service, they would have information about the music taste of 100M users. Why would they not make use of that information? There comes the "you can buy this on amazon", "since you listen to Justin Bieber, you might like Selena Gomez". Amazon? Why redirect users to Amazon when we can sell music ourselves? "Dear Dropbox users, you can now buy music directly from Dropbox Music.". A year after that:"Dropbox revenue increased 10 folds over the last one year".
A week after that: "Dropbox buys Vimeo"
It will be a real shame if this all gets shut down just because of this acquisition. I would have paid for this service if they had asked for money. The tone of the announcement does not make me optimistic, but I hope Dropbox can see the value of Audiogalaxy's assets and open the service up again, even if it becomes a paid subscription.
It was a revolutionary service, a decade ahead of its time.
I didn't know Audiogalaxy was still around. But it seems the service was arguably better than Google Music and/or iTunes Match though, so it's a real shame see it die like this, with little over 2 weeks notice to it's members.