15 Megs of Fame

From the makers of the small but perfectly formed user-driven T-Shirt site Threadless comes 15 Megs of Fame, a music site made to the same high standards. Artists can upload songs (much like the old mp3.com, and current contenders such as PureVolume, IUMA, Vitaminic, MySpace, etc.), and users can stream, download, comment and rate songs. The song rating star slider interface is lickable (one for Widgetopia, I think), and fits in well with the rest of the design, as does the seamless flash-based streaming (much like the flash-integration on Flickr). To top it all off, the music is licensed for sharing under a Creative Commons music license.

So it all looks good, but I can't help thinking that there might not be room in the market for yet another vaguely social amateur music recommendation site. Purevolume started off looking quite promising too, but now suffers massively from rich-get-richer charts, and it looks like artists must pay to get on the front page (where most of the traffic comes from). The quality of encoding has also dropped unbearably low since it got more and more popular, as you can tell if you compare my brother's old band (The New Lev Yashin: purevolume, myspace) or his friends (Burnout In The Capital: purevolume, myspace, Stories and Comets: purevolume, myspace).

In the case of 15 Megs of Fame, it looks like the charts aren't totally ratings-based, so hopefully there'll be enough churn in there to keep good artists bubbling to the top. I wish that the ratings system led somewhere though, like the T-Shirt design ratings on Threadless lead to actual T-Shirts, maybe the song ratings on 15 Megs could generate the track-listing for a monthly compilation CD that I could subscribe to?

Anyway. 15 Megs of Fame: great looking site but needs something else, I think.