Internet Culture from London… and beyond
mflow – Twitter meets iTunes meet Spotify
TweetIt is becoming more and more difficult for the music industry to ignore the basic economics of the their industry: unenforceable property rights (you can’t sue everyone) and zero marginal production costs (file sharing is ridiculously easy); as long as there is a free alternative (file sharing), the price of music will have to fall towards free.
Enters mflow, the new music-sharing service, which may well challenge illegal downloading (to a certain extent) but could also seriously threaten other online music retailers.
mflow is a Last FM (music discovery), iTunes (buying music), Spotify (streaming) and Twitter hybrid. mflow is an engaging and fun way of discovering new music through your mates. If one of your followers purchases one of the tracks you recommend, you’ll get 20% to spend on music. Here’s a quick demo.
Whilst some prefer to stream music, there are plenty of reasons why owning the song will remain, but the most compelling is the technological constraints on streams.
Count the number of earbuds on the next tube-carriage, airplane or bus you ride, multiply it by 128kbps (for a poor quality audio stream) and imagine that you had to find enough wireless bandwidth to serve them all, without slowing down anyone’s competing net applications; it’s not going to happen any time soon…
I had a quick chat with the mflow team on Twitter the other day, and it looks like they’re planning on launching some cool new features real soon, such as hyper-linked Twitter style handle so that you knows who’s flowed some music your way.
I’d also like to see some sort of Facebook integration (Facebook connect/Widget??) to share songs with my friends (which is something I currently do using good old fashioned YouTube links) and a find your friends made easy option.
With the right community management i.e. keeping current users interested whilst increasing its user-base, mflow has the potential to radically change the way we purchase and discover music. Here’s their blog to keep up with their latest news and Twitter.
I still have 5 mflow invites to share – DM me on Twitter with your email address and I’ll send one your way.
| Print article | This entry was posted by Lolly on 21/03/2010 at 11:17 pm, and is filed under Social Networking - Tools & News. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 5 months ago
I was a bit puzzled by mflow when I first installed it as I didn’t see any point in it to be honest. This however comes from someone who has never bought a track on iTunes… Yes, my desire to be a modern day Jack Sparrow is admitted
However, all that said, after re-visiting it with the benefit of a wider variety of followers flowing music my way I *gasp* bought some music and even had some of my flows bought by others, which was a novelty as I really didn’t think anyone bought music these days…
Personally I won’t pay to stream music but I am willing to pay for a track I really like so perhaps mflow will serve a purpose in my life
about 5 months ago
The most interesting element in mflow is the music discovery aspect, and the reward aspect too of course!
I’ve never been a big fan of Last FM and I am really enjoying discovering music through friends at the mo.
I really hope they do well in the future…