News

I've had SeeqPod on my cell phone for several months now. I haven't really found much use for it on a regular basis, but I really like the concept. In short, you punch in a band or artist name (or some similar search term) and SeeqPod will return you a list of individual tracks, whole playlists of tracks, or links to articles about that band, artist, or track on Wikipedia. Right from that returned list of search results you can queue up tracks into a playlist or just choose to play one of the returned playlists, streamed right over the Internet. The interface is slick, appealing, and customizable with different skins.

In what probably comes as no surprise to anyone, various music labels are suing SeeqPod for copyright infringement. In a rather daring and creative move, SeeqPod is now taking pre-registrations from anyone wanting to license their search engine technology and use it for their own (obviously nefarious) purposes.

As the Wired article points out, this didn't work so well for the music labels when they tried this strategy on P2P services like Napster. Taking action against these services forced P2P underground, making pursuit and monitoring significantly more difficult. I think it's fair to say that at this point, the labels have lost that particular battle. I have no idea if SeeqPod's strategy will save them, but you can rest assured that the number of services employing a similar search technology is going to explode, if for no other reason than because of the massive publicity this suit is going to rouse in the music-loving public.

UPDATE: It looks like some labels are working with similar service Project Playlist by licensing their libraries to the music search service. I have no idea why the labels choose these differing strategies for similar services. Obviously there is something here I'm not getting...