Sangeetix - Search engine for Hindi music with a social flavor
Sangeetix is a Hindi music search and discovery engine with social bookmarking features. You can search for music or lyrics, browse through playlists or create your own playlists. If you find a song you like, you can play it within the browser itself. You also have the option to download it (YES, you read it correctly, download it !!!) and add your own tag to the song. The social bookmarking features help in fine-tuning the search results and also discovering new music. Considering the legal implications, here’s a smart move from them: Sangeetix does not store any media on its own servers.
Here’s what they say from their FAQ page:
Does Sangeetix host the media files or music content?
Sangeetix is a search engine, like many other search engines you may be familar with. Sangeetix DOES NOT store any content on it’s own servers. Sangeetix indexes content from several other sites and allows you to perform search. Sangeetix search results may show content under copyright and Sangeetix may not be held liable for misuse. Please refer to our terms of service.
If you want to share your media with Sangeetix, submit the url to your site and their crawler will include it in their search index.
They seem to have a significant search index already (considering that the domain name was registered on September 26th only) . A quick search for ‘Sonu Nigam’ gave me a sizeable resultset. The homepage is inspired by Google and the design of the rest of the site is minimal.
On the whole, I think its a nice and simple concept. Considering how crazy we Indians are about Bollywood and music, it wont take long for the site to get popular. Its been my experience that such sites get virally promoted without any siginificant marketing efforts.
I am not sure if Sangeetix will face legal hassles or not. However, based on similar scenarios (Kazaa, Bittorrent had the same approach - no content on our servers), it wont be surprising if they run into legal problems and lawsuits.
What is your take on it ?
October 31st, 2006 at 3:06 pm
It is a fine line, but they are positioning it as a search engine similar to Google, Yahoo or others and they are not hosting the content on their own sites. Some of the popular search engines already do audio search (Yahoo for instance). The site might be useful to promote non-copyright content too.
December 27th, 2006 at 1:56 am
Simplistic style is good but a more intuitive interface would be nice. Information like bitrate, filetype, etc should be included in results.
Still the viral-ness of this is pretty obvious so let’s see how things go!
Roj