The Daily Swarm

Wired:

Music is too expensive to be free and too free to be expensive on a song-by-song basis, because on-demand music licensing rates are becoming too high for advertising to cover — as shown once again by imeem’s recent sale to MySpace at a heavy discount. This could be a boost to playlist sharing sites because they are cheaper to operate.

Muxtape tried a similar approach but failed after negotiations with the RIAA broke down last summer. Another online playlist sharing company, 8tracks, which also launched in 2008, hopes to continue blazing that trail. The site redoubling its efforts over the weekend with the release of an open API that lets web and mobile-app developers integrate playlist consumption (updated) into their own products, and plans to monetize this broader distribution of its user-generated playlists in the first quarter of next year — most likely using Google AdSense for Audio ads.

“While this 1/10th of a cent rate is still pretty expensive compared with traditional radio … and satellite or cable … it is a viable rate even with just advertising, if executed well,” said Porter. “Case in point: Pandora will likely be profitable on a monthly basis in next few months.”

ReadWriteStart:

While many companies move to a subscription model, 8tracks continues to forge along in what some describe as a convenient loophole. As of this weekend the company is publicly launching its API for Boston’s Music Hack Day.

Similar to the original concept for Muxtape, 8tracks allows users to trade 30 min (8 track) playlists. But unlike Muxtape, because 8tracks songs are not identified prior to play, the company is treated as an internet radio station. This status as a radio station means that it avoids the high licensing fees plaguing the streaming music sites. While Muxtape was forced to close in 2008, 8tracks continues to thrive.

This weekend 8tracks is publicly launching its music playback API in the hopes of leveraging the collective brain power of Music Hack Day attendees. Some of the tools already built using the API that will be demoed include an iPhone player, a player widget for Facebook and a weekly Hype Machine mix.