PickStation So Marshall Kirkpatrick, just twittered about PickStation and I went to go check it out and I have to give it two thumbs up.
It looks like they are trying to do a sort of Hype Machine/digg mashup, but letting you download the mp3s directly from their site rather than to go the step further and click through to the blogger’s blog (where half the time they’ve been taken down if they are old links and you have to go use Acquisition to get it).
I can’t imagine PickStation will survive long if it gets popular. Best I can tell it was launched last July but today is the first that I’ve heard of it.
Still the idea of a direct download DRM free mp3 service built behind a social network seems pretty hot. And there does appear to be a lot of good legal music on the site.
Napster, Limewire, Bittorent, Acquistion, Allofmp3, P2P, hype machine, borrow your “friend’s” 250 gig hard drive and copy over all of his mp3s for sport and fun, pickstation etc. etc. etc. It’s the continuing game of playing pound the pop up only to have it pop up someplace else. Someday maybe there will be a place where you can go to get good cheap DRM free tracks for a fair price.
Thanks for blogging about it! I’d love to see it get more popular so it got even better. I found it as a Pageflakes module, and the FranticIndustries blog wrote about it as one of 10 Pligg sites worth visiting awhile ago – but not much coverage so far. Wonder if Emily Chang’s got it up on eHub?
It’s actually fairly good even without much network effect so far.
Thanks for checking out PickStation. We don’t host any of the music ourselves (nor do we cache it) to avoid possible legal trouble. Surprisingly users have been pretty good about sticking to legally available music, the vast majority of music on PickStation is legal. Soon we will be releasing our firefox bookmarklet so users can quickly and easily add tracks to PickStation, and a new flash mp3 player so users can place their favorite tracks on their blog/website.