A Little About The SongSpot

I’m sure you have, by now, noticed the Sonific Songspot widget in the sidebar or, at least noticed tracks from the “Trouble Ain’t Over” CD playing as you wander about the site.

I’ve got to tell you something. When I originally started writing this blog (July 2006), my vision was to have music-mine and other tracks by other artists of my choosing, streaming as people read, browsed and hung out. My thinking was that it would be nice to have some music playing and, it would be a chance to play DJ while promoting my music and other music that I like. Seemed like a simple idea but, it turned out not to be.

Since then, I have kept an ear to the ground and looked at different ways to accomplish my original plan. Different things have come along but, nothing really fit the bill.

I subscribe to about 60 blogs and use Google Reader. One of the functions of the reader is it will recommend different blogs based on your reading habits. I subscribe to a lot of music industry related ones and I am all the time getting recommendations for more. One that I have been reading regularly is the excellent Media Futurist written by Gerd Leonhard. If you are interested in the music industry and where it goes from here, I would highly recommend Media Futurist.

One of the many things Gerd is involved in is Sonific. I think he is really on to something here. It is a place where artists can upload their music, place the songs into a song list and create a widget that can be embedded on a blog or other website. The sound quality is good and the widget seems to work well. If you aren’t an artist, you can design your own widget as well and choose from a great library of songs to stream on your site.

SongSpots are free music widgets that stream any song from our catalog on any web page that you can edit yourself, such as blogs, social networks, photo sharing sites, or personal home pages.

Dive in! Find the music you like, create your playlists, make your widgets, grab the code and add it to your profile page, site, blog or photo album.

It’s like having your own little internet radio station without having to deal with licensing. Artists must have the rights to their tracks and agree to have their music integrated to SongSpots.

Tonight was the first chance that I had to look through the Sonific library and, let me tell you, there is some great stuff there. So, I have added some pretty cool things from some familiar and some, not so familiar, artists to my Songspot, to go along with my own tracks. Just spending a minimal amount of time on it, I find that it’s easy and fun to do and, will be easy to update or change around.

So, if you like music and, would like to feature it on your site, just click on the words, “Get Your Own SongSpot”, on the widget to your left.