www.songbeatplayer.com
Behind this are two good friends of mine from Berlin, Philip and Marco. Songbeat is not a P2P client, so as opposed to Bittorrent and the like, you DON'T provide music to others while you download yourself. And since not the downloading but the provisioning is considered illegal, you should be OK with it. What's more, Songbeat allows to record directly from lat.fm streams, pretty much like taping from the radio. And that isn't illegal, either.
The way Philip and Marco see it, in the digital world people will always find ways to get the music they want. So why not capitalize from it? It sounds ironic, but they plan to work together with the Music Industry not by avoiding, but by decidedly working with "illegal" music downloads.
If they have, say, 10.000 Songbeat users in Berlin who mainly download Punk music, they´ve created a powerful marketing channel to place concert tickets, merchandise, new records etc every time a Punk band is in Berlin. They can sell targeted ad space on the player - "show my concert ad only to people in Hamburg that prefer Jazz music". They can feature new artists - "show tour dates of latest Popstar-band only to female users in the South German countryside".
See the point? Since Songbeat is no P2P client, you will see it's not very good at downloading specific songs anyway; it's more like a music discovery tool.
And that's the latest news from the Berlin hotbed of innovation
