| URL | www.ShareTheMusic.com |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | social network service, music service |
| Registration | required (free) |
| Available language(s) | Multilingual (8) English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish |
| Owner | Desh |
| Launched | 26 October 2009 |
| Current status | Active |
ShareTheMusic is an Internet platform for legal and free music sharing, owned by Desh, ltd.
It was launched worldwide on 26 October 2009. In December 2009 ShareTheMusic.com has been admitted to Microsoft BizSpark (a global program for Start-up projects owned by private companies)[1].
The guiding idea of the service was to make it possible for all the Internet users, disregarding their geographical location, to listen to the music without any fees and in conformity with the copyright [2].
It is the first time that the mechanism of One-2-One Streaming has been used in the music service, which allows a broadcaster to share the music with only one listener at a time. SharetheMusic acts as a middleman between users, and in contrast to other services, it does not store or distribute any files.
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ShareTheMusic plays a role of a middleman between the portal users who want to share their music by offering other Internet users access to it.
Using the application developed, specifically for this service, by Hicron Company, people who have a particular piece of music on their hard disk can broadcast it to only one listener at a time, and it cannot be copied by saving to the disk of another user. In this way the copyright of authors, performers and producers is observed [3].
ShareTheMusic is a free and global service. Since it was launched, the site has been available in 8 languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Polish [4]). The site has already been visited by users from over 200 countries.
The search engine available on the website allows searching the database for any artist, album, track, group other service user. After finding the artist, album or track, user can encounter three types of button signs:
Currently (July 2010) more than 100 000 unique tracks of differentiated music are available in the service. What distinguishes ShareTheMusic from the site's competitors is, that The Beatles catalog is also available.[4] Available tracks or albums can be played at once or added to the playlist in ShareTheMusic Player application. Apart from the album and track list, artists' profiles contain information on users sharing their music, concerts, related artists, date and place of birth, years of activity and represented music styles.
Another feature that allows to listen to the music on ShareTheMusic is Randomizer - a multi-channel, narrowly profiled radio station, in which users themselves are broadcasters. Each channel of Randomizer consists of a list of theme-related pieces of music which are made available in the service. The tracks from the list on a given channel are played at random order in Player, without the interference of the listener. Randomizer, similarly to the whole ShareTheMusic, is based on the principle of One-2-One Streaming.[4]
ShareTheMusic contains a music community section, in which users can create their own profiles, communicate, create thematic groups, post information on music, and in this way they can directly influence the content appearing in the service.
The user, by creating his profile, obtains a possibility of communicating freely with other community members through a mail box or comments. Other features including Playlists (each user can create their own playlists) and marking tracks as Favourite or Disliked allow the users to share their musical tastes.
Each user has a possibility to create a group (private or public) and start discussion topics on the forum. The users themselves are the moderators of discussions: they determine what they want to write about.
Sharing and listening to the music is executed via applications provided by ShareTheMusic.
ShareTheMusic Player is used to play audio files, such as mp3, wma, wav, and to create and use playlists. With ShareTheMusic Player users can play music files available on the site (also Randomizer channels), and share the music with other users of the portal. Shared files have to be in mp3 format with the bitrate between 64 and 192 kbps (kilobytes per second)[5] and the sampling frequency from 22 to 44 Khz. User can use hyperlinks available from the application to go to the artist, album and track website.
ShareTheMusic Ripper is an application for ripping audio CDs to mp3 files. Ripper, integrated with CDDB, automatically recognizes the titles of the ripped tracks.
Portal's development plans consist of preparing applications for MacOS X and Linux operating systems and, further in the future, versions for mobile devices.