Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

MP3Realm is a music search engine.  It crawls the web for  MP3s, indexes them (it peeks inside the MP3 to pull out the ID3 tags like artist, album, genre, length and bitrate), and makes them available for search.  The search itself, is very Google-esque.  A simple search form  - just in the name of a song, artist or album and MP3Realm will give you results that match - formatted to show what you need to know:  the artist, album and title, genre, track length, the source host and probably most important - the link status - letting you know if the  link is still a live link to real data.

MP3Realm currently has over 2 million tracks in its index - this sounds like a lot of tracks but  many of them are dups or partial tracks - on the other hand, they seem to have lots of popular music - if you are looking for Wonderwall by Oasis - you'll find 20 different copies of the track at MP3Realm in various encodings.

MP3Realm relies on a provision of the DMCA to protect them from lawsuits by copyright holders - MP3Realm will take down any infringing links (they don't host any of the data) if they receive a written document sent by Postal mail.

MP3Realm is pretty neat - it is a quick way to find and download free music on the web.  It has a much lower barrier to entry than the Kazaas and the various bittorrent clients.  It is essentially Google for Mp3s.  DMCA or no, I think MP3Realm's ease of use may be its downfall - the take down notices will come fast and furious once the RIAA machinery gets powered up.  You can bet that the RIAA is also getting ready to argue, just as they did in the Grokster case, that MP3Realm is participating in contributory infringement because its does not meet the 'substantiality' requirement. If MP3Realm can show that it is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes then it will be safe under the Sony safe-harbor principle.  However,  just a quick look through the MP3Realm shows that the majority of the tracks are under copyright. .

It may take sometime before the RIAA lawyers get on this - in the mean time, MP3Realm will be hooking people up with free digital music.  The real victim here will be Apple.  The same person who would buy a song from iTunes that they just heard on the radio can now just as easily go to MP3Realm and find the song and download it.  It is easier and quicker in MP3Realm than it is in iTunes - and it doesn't cost $.99, and there's no DRM.  If MP3Realm is around long enough it may turn a whole new set of people onto the idea that music should be free.   Seen on digg.com