Songza will rock you, but are they legal?

Hey, if thousands of people are doing it, it can’t be wrong.....right? That’s the million dollar question about one of the newest music sites on the Web. Songza advertises itself as a “music search engine and Internet jukebox”. Ummm, ok. Or, one might also say they are a site you can go to in order to search out music and be able to listen to and download it for free. I’m just sayin’.

With 28 million songs instantly playable on the site, 10 month old Songza is luring in the music-seeking crowd pretty nicely. And they make their songs playable in a rather creative way. When you go on their site and enter the song or band title of your choosing, Songza will search the huge inventory of music videos on YouTube looking for it. Then, it streams the audio of the song, while hiding the video in an unseen margin of the browser. Pretty dang tricky, but.....is it actually legal?

Scott Robbin, the CEO of Songza says that there are about 120,000 songs played a day. He also says that they pay for the rights to play each song to publishing rights organizations like BMI and ASCAP. They attempt to recoup the costs of these payments through ads and referral commissions. Where the water gets murky however, is that Songza does not pay licensing fees to the music labels themselves. And it is the music labels that own the actual song recordings. And there have been past battles of situations very similar to this, such as in January when Warner Music sued Seeqpod, a music service a lot like Songza, that searches the ‘Net for music and plays free MP3s. That case is still pending.

Songza tries to differentiate themselves from Seeqpod by stating that they are only turning the query over to the Google-owned YouTube. He states that “our primary mission is to help users discover new music in a way that stimulates revenue for content creators.” Maybe the labels will buy this explanation...maybe not. But regardless, Google apparently doesn’t like that they are violating their YouTube terms of service. Their newest version of the music site, due to come out next month, will apparently now include the video of the songs as well. Robbins says Google “obviously wants their content to be displayed the way it was intended to be displayed”.

So...legal? Or not?

Via [NYTimes]