Streampad Music Widget – A Review

Streampad is a service that allows you to create music playlists and add them to an embeddable music widget that you can place on your blog or social networking profile page.  Playlists can be created by selecting from tracks linked to from the Streampad site, by pointing to a blog that contains MP3 files, or eventually (hopefully?) by pointing to your personal music collection. 

Streampad is trying to take the wildly popular feature on MySpace that allows members to embed tracks from their favorite artists on their profile page, and apply it on a distributed, Internet-wide basis.

It is a hugely ambitious concept with lots of obstacles, and plenty of upside.

NOTE: I'm speculating about Streampad's plans to let you run their player from your personal music collection.  Currently the site's language says:

Streampad allows you to listen to your music from any computer connected to the web. This feature is currently in beta testing.

Applications & Opportunity

It’s easy to imagine a scenario where the Streampad music widget takes off.  Most people listen to music, and many people feel that the music that they listen to says something about them.  The ability to personalize your home(s) on the Web with a music track that captures a personal mood, style, or taste could certainly be appealing to a broad audience, as we have seen with MySpace.

Because of the digital rights issues involved and challenges in getting permissions from thousands of artists, nobody has yet solved this problem for bloggers and the vast majority of social networking sites.

If Streampad can overcome the digital rights issues and execute well, as one of the first players in this space, they have a chance to become standard fare on blogs, and on social networking sites without the will or means to solve the copyright issues themselves.

Configuration

During its current beta period, the Streampad site does not go out of its way to educate visitors how to set up a Streampad widget.  You sort of have to poke around a bit to get a feel.

Eventually, you find that clicking on “Web” or “Concerts” gives you a couple of options for selecting tracks for your playlist or for sharing a standalone track via a widget.

There are currently no customization options for the widget if you access it from their main site channels, although depending on how you generate your widget, the width varies.  For example, selecting the “share” option associated with tracks in the “Web” or “Concerts” sections generate a widget that is 200px wide.  But using the tool that lets you pull MP3 files from a specific URL generates a default widget that is 150px wide.

After poking around a bit, I was able to generate widgets from Web and Concert tracks without a problem for both MySpace and Typepad, though the default widget is too wide for my Typepad sidebar.  I was able to go into the code to adjust the width.

I only managed to find the tool that lets you aggregate tracks from a particular blog because I had bookmarked the link from a Fred Wilson blog post.  As I don’t have any MP3 files in my blog, I plugged in Fred’s URL.  The tool worked great and immediately generated a widget that fit nicely in my Typepad sidebar and that displayed all of the MP3 files from Fred’s blog.  There were also a couple of basic customization options available with this tool – things like setting autostart on or off, and defining the height and width of the widget.

While the design is not super user friendly, the widget configuration tools are functional.  I would imagine that the design quirks are due to the fact that Streampad’s (speculated) core service, allowing people to stream (listen to?) their personal music collection anywhere, is still in closed beta.

Testing

I successfully added the Streampad music widget to MySpace, Blogger, and Typepad.  As mentioned earlier, there are some inconsistencies in configuration options depending on which Streampad tool you use, but they didn’t really pose any problems.  The widget works.

Editorial

I spent the evening messing around with the Streampad music widget, and I have to say, it’s really growing on me.  It helps that of the handful of concerts that Streampad has represented on its site, several of my all-time favorite bands are represented.

The real stand out feature of this widget in my opinion is the “share” link that shows up on the bottom left of every Streampad widget.  Clicking this link displays the embed code right in the body of the widget.  No new browsers open.  There’s no need to register.  You don’t need to go to the Streampad site to learn more.  It just displays the code, ready for the grabbing.

This is superior execution of the critical viral aspect, and you can imagine how this could play out.  A few early adopters with good music taste put this widget on their blog.  If somebody likes the widget, or even just likes one of the songs in the widget, they are seconds away from grabbing it and putting it on their own site.  This is pretty powerful.

I don’t know enough about the digital rights issues involved in this to predict how quickly Streampad can expand the tracks that they link to, or what the issues are involved in allowing users to point to their own musical libraries.  MySpace is able to make a simple deal with musicians on its site – you can use our infrastructure to promote your music to our massive user base, but you must let our users play your tracks on their profile pages.  On a distributed, Internet wide basis, the issue gets much trickier.

Streampad has done enough already to be very intriguing, however.  This is definitely a widget to watch.

Click through to leave your own review of the Streampad music widget.

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