2 Articles for 'qbox'
- 2010/02/09 fanatic.fm Allows Fans To Sponsor Musicians (1)
- 2008/01/08 Go Qbox Go (3)
With the rise of internet advertising, there were lots of promises for free music, supported entirely by advertisement. (Remember Spiral Frog, anyone?) But the problem of such free, ads-supported music service was that the ads revenue was never enough to cover the licensing and other costs. Meanwhile, paid streaming services like (or Korea's Melon et al) seem to be gaining ground fast.
A new service called fanatic.fm tries to rethink ads-supported free music streaming service. Taking the same old text ads or banner ads and slapping them onto music streaming service is like trying to put a round peg into a square hole, fanatic.fm says. It's just not the best way to combine the ads and music consuming experience, they say.
Instead, fanatic.fm built a better ads system for music streaming service. It's more like a sponsorship system, where individuals or brands can "sponsor" artists so that the sponsors' brands or messages can be presented to their visitors in a more powerful way, fully blended with the right music. For example, Red Bull could strategically sponsor certain rockbands popular among X-gamers. Then people can enjoy the rockbands' songs for free, with "sponsored by Red Bull" messages. This would potentially be a better way to present Red Bull brand than simply placing textual ads next to the rock bands' music videos. Also, the sponsor doesn't have to be a corporate brand -- it could be a group of dedicated fans who would do anything that might help the artists they love, certainly including some sponsorship and donation.
Looking at the website, fanatic.fm doesn't seem to be fully launched yet, but they had already been mentioned in the MIDEM, the big music industry event held in Cannes, France, as "a company to pay attention to". fanatic.fm is the brain child of a Korean team (the same folks who did QBox), but as hinted on their website, the service is very much eyeing for the global audience.
Qbox, again, is a game-changing online music discovery service. Most people today consume their music in digital format, which means music files sit in servers as much as they do on local hard drives.
Qbox lets you look up all songs publicly available on internet servers, e.g. what users publicly put on their Myspace and Youtube pages. The result is a free internet jukebox with almost endless volume of music library. Qbox also has other features, such as "music markup" tool that allows user to tag music file more specifically so that it can be indexed by search engines better. For details, see my previous post.
If you reside in the US, you can access qbox.com (it will redirect you to us.qbox.com) and take the service for a spin - other regions will have to wait a bit more, Ian says.
They are ready to go public beta. Their key to success, in my opinion, will be "Myspace marketing", or how to increase service awareness among Myspace users. The door to funding is still wide open, Ian says.
I don't have any affiliations to this company/service but I see Qbox clearly has potential to become a hit, arguably more so than MusicShake - a Techcrunch 40 wunderkid and another great service.
TAG music, qbox
