MixedContent

The post below is a test of the cool Promonet service from IODA. The basic idea is promonet provides a slew of quality, rights cleared mp3’s that you can (legally) post to your blog, add to your podcast, or do (almost) anything with.

I still find it a bit strange that rights cleared music is itself a big deal, but these days, it IS a big deal. I am also curious to see the difference in sales numbers between IODA artists who participate in Promonet (and *gasp* give their music away for free!) and the ones who abstain, but my gut feeling is that Promonet is an invaluable way for artists to gain exposure and generate new sales.

While I like the “blogging” tools that Promonet provides, I think it could be made even easier. Currently Promonet uses a code generation tool that creates an html snippet that you can then paste into your website or blog (including your own affiliate ids), but one suggestion that I might make is to offer “blog this” functionality like Flickr. This way posts could be made automatically to your blog with a few clicks on the promonet site. One other suggestion would be to provide webservices so developers can leverage the large amount of rights cleared music IODA has gathered.

Lastly, I would love to see some sort of ‘promonet flash player’ that can be embeded into a page. This would make it easier for people to listen to music, and might even add some useful reporting stats. For example, you could track if someone listened to the first half a song and then bailed out; all useful information. I bet a flash player (that included money generating affiliate links) would also do pretty well in places like myspace. But I wouldn’t be surprised if IODA is already working on such things…

It’s fun just to explore the broad base of music on the Promonet site, and you can get a small glimpse of what the world might be like if congress ever enacts a compulsory license (like that will happen).