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That Pandora might close shop due to onerous royalty fees has made headlines across the industry.  If Pandora really follows through on its rhetoric, many fear that the same fate would befall other popular streaming music services online.

At Qbox, we believe that our social network music streaming service is perfectly suited to address the music industry's unwillingness to let go of the ghost on untenable licensing terms.  Social network music refers to the music published directly by artists on their own profile pages, often on large social networking sites but increasingly on their own, independent sites.  MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube are the leading social networks (all of which Qbox indexes), but there are other smaller networks such as hi5, Cyloop, Goldmic, and PerfSpot that focus on specific genres (e.g., hip hop) or specific ethnic communities.  There are also white-label web service tools such as Marc Andreessen's Ning or Ian Rogers's Top Spin that provide customizable social networking functionalities.

Qbox aggregates the tens of millions of streamable tracks spread across multiple social networking sites through Qplayer.  You create your own playlists and Qplayer provides continuous playback across the different social networks, similar to how Twhirl integrates Twitter and Friendfeed.

The Qbox model differs from those of other streaming services such as Pandora, Imeem and Last.fm in that we let you search and discover music on artists' profile pages that stream promotional tracks for free.  Similar to the way Google brings traffic to online media properties that they do not own, Qbox simply brings the user to artist pages that stream legal and free music.  This approach allows us to stay clear of the constraints imposed by the labels.

We believe social network music is the model of the future, where fans interact directly with musicians who give away their work for free in anticipation of other, more lucrative revenue sources.  We've carved out advertising space on the Qplayer application, which will help us generate and share ad revenues directly with musicians/copyright holders.  We believe artists can and will realize meaningful revenues even with free streaming, as long as their fans enjoy and consume their work.

Posted by Ian

Back in the LP era, the album cover used to be an art. Now, musicians profile pages in social networks has substituted the role. Listening to social network music becomes more pleasant with creative designs. Here are some examples..

We're thinking of awarding 'best design of the month'. Recommendations are welcome!

Posted by Ian

Our beta launch was received very favorably overall, with a great number of bloggers and journalists praising our one-stop access to all social network music.  There were, however, some posts that were very encouraging in terms of their appreciation for our value proposition (i.e., to enable users to listen to all social network music through a single interface) but also reported that the service just didn’t work!

One such case was with Matt Rosoff at CNET, who wrote “Qbox could be the ultimate music player … if it worked.”  We tried to diagnose the issues Matt was describing in his post, but couldn’t really pinpoint the root of the problem with certainty.  We kept testing different ideas (while working out the remaining bugs), and, lucky for us, when he re-tested our Qplayer a couple of weeks later, it worked.  In fact he wrote an update post, in which he wrote “MySpace fans should give Qbox a try.”  Thank you, Matt.

Another incidence of “bad press” occurred minutes before the wedding ceremony of one of our engineers.  Nearly everyone at Qbox was at the wedding venue away from computers, and JR Raphael in Australia wrote “Qbox: Great Idea, But Doesn’t Work.”  From his account of the problems he was facing with Qplayer, we could tell with a reasonable degree of confidence that this was a known compatibility issue with Firefox.  We contacted JR and referred him to a roundabout fix, which involved downloading two files into Firefox subdirectories.  (We now have fixed the problem permanently.)  Again, thankfully, the solution worked for him, and JR wrote a follow-up piece saying “Qbox proved itself to be a relatively neat little program.”  I really appreciate his patience and expectations for Qbox.

What I’ve found most refreshing in our short experience out in the market is that even the critical reviewers are often extremely patient and gracious in giving us another chance – i.e., as long as we’re genuinely and passionately interested in helping them fix whatever issues they may experience with our product.

Another lesson learned?  Bad press gets a lot of press, at least according to Google News rankings.  Now, if only the mass customers were as forgiving…

Posted by Peter K