Sunday, January 16, 2011

Legal Grooveshark killer, 'mflow' here

Grooveshark is an amazing, almost-legal way to enjoy almost all the music in the world. The online service is ad-supported and there's a subscription, through which it compensates the registered artists. But that doesn't mean that all the artists whose songs are featured there are registered. Anyone can upload any music, so there may be some albums that are illegally there.

But here's a legal music streaming service (which doesn't have ads), and you get just some 5 million licensed songs free here. It's called mflow. Yes, with lowercase letters. And I can safely call it a Grooveshark killer.

What is it all about?
If you go see the mflow About Us page, you'll see that they believe in having legal music open for everyone to listen for free, and buying should be really simple too. They also believe that music is better shared, and the person who recommended the music to you should be paid too. Finally, they believe that ninjas are dangerous - they just are.

Here's mflow in a nutshell, in their own words:
"mflow brings together social networking, music sharing, online radio and music stores. You can listen to music recommended by people who share your taste, share music with your friends, download tracks from our extensive store and talk about the music you love"
mflow is all about 'flows'. It is like a tweet or a status update on Facebook. But it has a track others can listen to. You can use these flows to discover new music, and share them with your friends, and thus they'll discover new music. You can look for flows from particular people on the site, or get them from random people.

To listen to any music, you need to find a flow for it, and use that. You cannot listen to the same flow again and again, but they say that it doesn't matter as you can find several flows by different people for the same music.

There is a search feature that you can use to search for music, people, flows and tags. You can flow any music to your friends, even on Facebook, Twitter, Buzz or via email.

How much music?
mflow is still in beta and hasn't fully started. But they still have managed to get their hands on over 5 million tracks already. And "that number is growing daily". They seem to have tied up with lots of big record labels too.

All the music can be streamed for free. There will be no interruptions or adverts anywhere. You can listen to all the music you like.

You can also purchase and download any song. They are high-quality (320kbps and sometimes 256kbps) and DRM-free.

Free downloads
The first ten songs that you flow (on mflow, Facebook, Twitter, wherever), are available to you to download for free.

Also, you can 'earn' free downloads too. If you flow a track and a friend purchases it, you get 20% of the price as mflow credit. If lots of your friends download the same song, you earn the credit every time. You can use your credit to 'purchase' all the music you like for free!

Geographic limitations
I don't understand this. mflow says (at the bottom of the page) that it is available only in the UK. But I'm able to use it from Asia. I don't know if that holds only for music purchases or not, but you can try visiting and using it anyway.

This site seems fun. I like the ingenious business model, that will allow users to enjoy free streaming with no interruptions or ads, along with publicizing artists on social networks. Plus there are incentives to share music, with all the free credit stuff.

This is certainly better than Grooveshark.

Visit mflow now

Also, consider connecting with RNIT on social networks. You'll love the experience.