mSpot has just launched a new service that’s kind of like mSpot meets Pandora (without the ads). It’s called Radio Spotter (beta) and combines cloud music storage/streaming with streaming Internet radio. It will match the songs you play from your personal collections to similar music playing on hundreds of radio stations across the Internet.
It will also instantly select Internet radio stations it thinks you’ll like, based on music genres or your own artist searches. CEO Daren Tsui tells WebProNews, “We keep track of songs played by the radio stations we’ve aggregated. We use this data to make our recommendations. For example, you are listening to Lady Gaga using our player and you click on the radio button. We would give you a list of stations starting with our Personal Radio (like Pandora) using Lady Gaga as the seed.”
“The rest of the list is a combination of our commercial free radio stations and Internet radio stations that have played Lady Gaga recently,” he continues. “The more the station played Lady Gaga recently, the higher the station will be ranked on the recommendation list.”
As far as finding new artists and music to listent to goes, he says, “It really depends on what the radio stations are playing. As we aggregate more Internet stations, I would expect our hit rate to keep increasing even with obscure music and artists.”
The service is not ad supported. “We make money when users sign up to our premium tier,” he says.
mSpot gives the following bullet points for how mSpot with Radio Spotter dffers from existing music services:
- Unlike Pandora and Slacker; Play all of your own music alongside new music
- that is discovered on real radio stations: Your own music collection is the
basis of all the new music you find and listen to. - Unlike iTunes; Store your music collection in the cloud so that you can always
- access it, wherever you are. Your music is connected to the Internet, so you
- can match your preferences to hundreds of Internet radio stations to discover
and play new music for free. - Unlike subscription services like Rhapsody, MOG and Rdio; Listening is free.
- Match the music you already love with music playing on radio stations all over
the Internet. - Unlike Cloud storage services like Amazon or Google; Listening is not limited
- to your own music, or music for purchase; your music now connects you to
hundreds of radio stations.
Initially, the service is available for Android. It’s in the Android Market. It will be coming to the iPhone, Mac, PC, and other devices later this year.
mSpot has to find ways to separate itself from the growing competition, which is coming from some big players Amazon, Google, and maybe even Facebook, not to mention the other music-dedicated companies out there like those mentioned above and others. This is a great way to do that, at least for now.
