Music Search or Just SEO your MP3s?

17Sep/06

Music Search or Just SEO your MP3s?

David Byrne wants just the right thing, but is not quite searching in the right place:

Soon enough a site will open that is like a Google search for music
downloads — downloads that are not copy-protected but you still pay
for. eMusic tracks have no copy protection, for example, but their
catalogue is limited. Eventually a meta search will turn up the tracks
you want, wherever they live, on whomever’s site.

Narendra, co-founder of Webshots and 30boxes, danced closer to the solution yesterday, but he did so in response to a completely different Battelle posting:

Google has not yet been able to
index the 420 million photos that live on Webshots and have a wealth of
metadata associated with them. They need to focus on improving their
crawling ability and be able to play with large existing systems like
Webshots and Flickr to improve relevance instead of forays into odd and
ambiguous user annotation.

The solution isn't a Music Google; it's building a new site that springboards off Google's massive traffic. Jason DeFilippo showed us all the way when he put together the Technorati Tags system. It's so much better to ride your users' tags and links to put your new search engine on to the first results page of the big one. It helps your users almost as much as it helps you. The linklove from T-tags been a big factor in Technorati's success, and they're trying to copy that success universally via microformats. However, sector knowledge and passion matter. Techorati's expertise in and enthusiasm for blogs is clear, but do they possess the same for events, identity, streaming media, etc., etc.? If Technorati wants to be the King of Metadata, they should offer a Ning-style microformat service that lets anybody with motivation built their own specialized SEO site.

While we're waiting for that, a great independent music SEO engine
could emerge. Just make a groovier version of Edgeio's homepage and copy YouTube's SEO. For a critical mass of media to kick off the project, look no farther than partnerships with FileCargo and SaveFile, which seem to be the PhotoBuckets of Music. At MyBlogLog, our most populous communities center around the big DJ directory (~2000 members so far), and its most highly ranked celebs: DJ Tiesto, DJ Paul Van Dyk, Armin Van Buuren, etc. We see ton of people clicking to download legal DJ mixes. Since "6) Linking is the new storage," the music storage companies would benefit tremendously by SEOing the files they host.