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

There's music scattered all over the web. Its in mp3blogs, on MySpace pages, in deep databases like eMusic, Napster or Rhapsody. Its in music lockers like mp3tunes.  In addition, there are all sorts of sites such as MusicMobs, WebJay  or ArtOfTheMix where you can find interesting playlists.  But even though there's an abundance of music out there on the web, its not so easy to hear it.  It is hard to share playlists, its hard to gather up a good collection of this music.  But things are going to get better.  First, there's the MusicDNS song id, that gives us a way to unambiguously identify a song from the audio and  clean up the metadata - then there's the MusicBrainz music metadatabase that gives us all sorts of interesting data about the music, and then there's XSPF,  an XML-based playlist format.  Combine these three technologies and we start to get a web where we can  listen to music, share music,  pass around playlists.  Imagine a future where any time that you see the name of a song on the web you can hear the song - anytime someone gives you a list of songs in a playlist you can hear the playlist.  This future where music flows like water is just around the corner.  Soon we will see web enabled music players that will use song ids, MusicBrainz and XSPF to give us just that.   One of the first universal players is Grabb.it - Grabb.it (in invitation-only mode) will resolve playlists to songs located on the web.  It's early days for this sort of thing, but I think that these universal players and song resolvers like Grabb.it (and my humble attempt at an XspfResolver) are going to be a big part of the emerging celestial jukebox.   Grabb.it looks pretty cool, I love the URL, I love the logo, and I love the idea - I can't wait to see it go live.