Anywhere.FM

So you hosers seen this new place called Anywhere.FM? It's pretty interesting. You can pretty much upload all your MP3s, and then listen to them on any computer that has internet and flash.

"But Gas!" you say, "What about piracy and digital rights and the RIAA and all that rigamarole?"

Not to worry, says I. Apparently these guys pay ASCAP/BMI fees just like a radio station, so the ball is entirely out of your court on this one, and they cover it all from their end. I'm not entirely sure where the money is coming from since right now (in a so-called "beta" state) it is free. I'm guessing some kind of ad-supported or membership-fee based business model will come into the picture once it is out of "beta," but for the time being there doesn't seem to be any strings attached.

So far the only two gripes I have about it is (one) that though you can get "radio-like" streams from other users' libraries, you can only play songs "on demand" from your own stash and when you're logged in, and (two) that their flash-based uploading doesn't retry failed/broken uploads, and gives very little feedback that an upload didn't work... so, say, if you queue up 400 files to upload and two of them don't succeed, you have no idea which two they were other than by going through the whole online list and checking it against your music folder. But other than that, I kinda like it

So yeah, I've got about 400 songs up there you can "radio stream" if you want... my profile is at http://anywhere.fm/gasbandit . You can listen to my "top 50" here. And I've got a couple custom playlists under my profile, too.

It's pretty snazzy. I recommend it if you're like me and like to have music playing, and need a centralized and simple way to access the same music library from multiple locations.