« Home | XM/Sirius Merger: WWHT? (What would Howard think?) »
DJ Play This Social Radio Networking Site: Mercora
Labels: Digital, DJs, Jointblog, Media Trend Watching, Mercora, Online, profile, Radio, social networking, streaming
If you're into radio (as a music fan, talk fan or industry insider) and are tied of wading through junk social sites, you should check out a cool growing social networking site aimed at increasing DJ (and wannabe DJ) profiles. Music purists with a jones to get your DJ groove on will love it.
Mercora is a "social radio" network which enables users to become DJs and create their own user-programmed radio channel. A search function allows users to find specific songs, albums, artists, or genres of music.
It's MySpace or Last.fm without the BS junk.
"We're the largest social network you've never heard of," quipped Mercora's CEO Srivats Sampath to ClickZ.com's SearchEngineWatch. Sampath formerly was CEO of antivirus giant McAfee.
Sampath said he chose to get into radio because it was "ripe for rewriting the rules of the game." The site served more than 1.3 million DJs last year, with over 3.5 million tracks in its database. There were over 400 million searches during 300 million visits, which typically lasted 32 minutes.
Mercora offers a Web application for casual listeners, playlist software for DJs, and a mobile product to enable smartphones to become wireless radios.
The main monetization method for Mercora is its "MadWords" program, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Google's search ads. It will serve music-based ads, triggered by a keyword search.
Searches return links to all DJs on the network who are currently webcasting songs by that artist.
Mercora's mission? To catalog and organize the world's music and make it universally searchable and legally listenable. Quite simply, Mercora says "they've built the world's largest and legal music radio network composed almost entirely of music resident on people's computers."
Check it out and see what you think.
posted by Unknown @ Wednesday, February 28, 2007,
