Startup ProjectOpus launches personal music organization, sharing and importing features
ProjectOpus.com, a DRM-free online music community, recently released a screencast (watch below) detailing the launch of their new "Music Importing Tool". These new features mark a strategic change for the company: Site members can now organize their music collections and create playlists that include both the music of ProjectOpus artists, and any music found on the web. They can also tag, organize their song collections, which can then be shared via player widgets that can be embedded into MySpace/Facebook/Bebo/Hi5/Friendster or their blog.
Project Opus declares itself as an online music community designed to support artists, fans and local music. It is a single point of contact for discovery of new music. They have two goals:
- make it incredibly easy for bands to self-publish music, find their audience and then get paid for the sale and licensing of their music, and
- make it incredibly easy for fans to find music they love and support the artists that make it.
The new import tool clearly is an effort in the right direction to help fans find and share music. James Andres, the ProjectOpus.com lead developer, leads us through a screencast demoing some of the new functionality. In a nutshell: As long as you have a link an mp3 file, podcast, or xspf playlist you can import these songs directly off the web into their ProjectOpus.com 'Music Collections'. The songs can then be organized, tagged, remixed into playlists, shared within the website, or shared anywhere else via one of the famous Projectopus.com widget players.
I played around with the new functionality, by importing all the episodes of the Pete Tong podcast.
It was a relatively painless process. I chose to import via the podcasts' RSS feed, so I entered RSS URL into the import tool. All 22 episodes were imported, and the ID3 information embedded in the MP3s was extracted. Since lazy Pete Tong doesn't seem to enter in MP3 metadata, the system prompted me to change the artist name to "Pete Tong". I then tagged all the music as "dance" and the activity "fitness, exercise, workout". Finally, I chose to share (with you) the lovely selections of Pete Tong via ProjectOpus.com's Folio Player. Enjoy the music.
So why is this a big fat powerful idea? The addition of these new features allows external songs to leverage the existing tools, widgets and processes that ProjectOpus.com has historically only provided for music generated within its own community. Ever becoming less of a silo, ProjectOpus.com is now very relevant to every music lover (and collector).
The only potential problem I see is members importing lots of copyrighted music. The last thing a budding startup needs is the burden of an RIAA lawsuit. However, the external music is not actually hosted on ProjectOpus.com servers, so they may have mitigated any legal risk by doing so.
Check out the screencast:
