A new music site launches, so what do people use it for? Rickrolling of course!

I’m liking Songza, it’s got a slick interface.  I can do most things on the page with AJAX, so I can keep listening while I line up other songs to play.  The speed is good & the audio sounds like standard MP3 quality.

You can register for an account now, here’s my profile. You can share the songs you find, the site gives you links to Twitter the songs, email them or embed them in your own site.

Here’s some Jonathan Coulton for your audible pleasure:

<p><em>There is embedded content here that you cannot see. Please <a href="http://blog.slaven.net.au/archives/2008/04/18/guess-what-the-most-played-song-on-songza-is/">open the post in a web browser</a> to see this.</em></p>

You can also rate the songs. They don’t seem to be after your opinion on the song so much as the quality of the recording. When you rate something up, it appears higher in other people’s search results.

The site seems to have set itself up in competition with last.fm. Songza has the advantage of letting you play the songs you find, in full, for free.  You can’t download them so it keeps the recording industry happy.  They’re also paying the industry for the rights to play them, so that should keep the lawyers off their backs.

The reason the interface is so nice is that it’s been built by Scott Robbin & Aza Raskin of Humanized.  Here’s what Aza said on the Humanized blog about the launch of Songza:

Songza is also an interface showcase. I’ve used the interface principles discussed here on the Humanized blog to design Songza to be humane, slick, and viral. Play with the interface for a bit, and you’ll find habituatable pie-menus instead of slow linear menus; an inviting design that uses only two icons, both of which act as illustrations for words; an incredibly high density of content and a correspondingly low amount of interaction; undo instead of warnings; and transparent messages that don’t break your train of thought.

Ironically, there’s a lot that went into making Songza so simply. Achieving such a high level of simplification required a lot of code, in part because we couldn’t just use standard widgets. It was worth it, though.

As far as features goes, it’s nowhere near as rich as last.fm. But then from the sound of it they don’t want to clutter the site with thousands of features, and the ability to play full songs is a pretty great feature on its own.  It’s also not region limited (ala Pandora) and you can skip songs & replay them as much as you want (also not allowed by Pandora).  I’m not sure why Songza can do this & Pandora can’t, but we’ll see what happens in the future as far as legal issues go.  They have a recommendation engine that shows up while you’re playing a song, showing other artists like the one you’re currently listening to.

There are a couple things I would like to see them add though:

• A list of songs I’ve played, along with an RSS feed. (And then FriendFeed needs to add them as an importable item)
• Displaying the album info for the song that’s playing

These aren’t big things, just nice-to-haves. According to Scott Robbin’s twitter, he’s working on the playlist interface right now, so I’m keen to see what changes.

Listening to Paul Simon and redesigning Songza’s playlist infrastructure. Surprisingly, these things go together well.

Songza is also working in conjunction with Seeqpod & Skreemr to source their music [source].  Technically they’re competitors of Songza, so I assume some sort of revenue sharing arrangement is going on there.

As far as revenue goes, there aren’t any ads on the site, but all the songs have ‘Buy Song’ that usually link to Amazon, that will be giving them referral fees.  Also, artists can pay to have their music on the ‘Featured Songs’ list on the homepage.

Your band’s song featured in the Recommended list on the Songza homepage (where tens of thousands of listeners will see it and can listen). You’ll also get to define the links that appear next to your song while it’s playing so that people can buy your song or visit your band’s website.

For songs that have been paid for, the ‘Buy Song’ link is then defined by the artist (e.g. Jonathan Coulton’s songs link to his site’s store).

This is a great new site, a welcome addition to the legitimate online music scene.  The more popular sites like this become (assuming they can remain profitable) the more likely it is that the music industry will realise that online music listeners are customers not pirates.