By Kevin Johnson
Still in its beta stage, San Francisco based Echo Networks is striving
to make its site a powerhouse in the world of streaming music. The
site lets people create online communities based on common interests
in music. A user will logon, search for station of particular interest,
and join in by having an active role in determining which artists
and songs will get played; or create a station with a specific type
of music and invite others to it. All songs are played through Echo's
java-based player that allows the user to vote on the artist and track
currently playing. The voting increases or decreases the probability
of the song being played again (songs can also be killed while being
played if enough people vote negatively). That along with chat capabilities
creates the framework for a strong system.
However, there are still a few issues to be worked out. One is the
crude station search tool. Users can search by station name (useless
for newbies) or by description, but when a description search comes
up with names like 'Crunk' and 'Jive Honkey' and doesn't include the
description it supposedly matched with it's easy for users to find
themselves at a loss. Music selection can become a problem depending
on users. A hip hop station I joined played "Forgot About Dre"
four times within ten hours which can become annoying very quickly.
The major pluses for Echo are its push towards community and protection
of music. Unfortunately the music protection is also a large hindrance
as well as a few logistical flaws. By using a java-based streaming
player Echo delivers popular music in a proprietary format that has
very little risk of copyright infringement. But since everything is
on the straight and narrow and they are still a small company they
have not acquired the rights to as much music as much larger sites
have. However, they combat this with a searchable database of thousands
of artists in all genres where users can request albums they want
to hear. This allows Echo to spend its time going after what the listeners
want to hear a very nice strategy. It's ideas like that that will
help this site become a serious contender.