When I heard about MediaMaster from TechCrunch, immediately I knew this is gonna be very similar to what we are doing. In fact, the entire concept is part of our ideology. MediaMaster allows registered users to effectively store your personal music collection on their server, and able to stream their own music collection wherever they are. Four interesting observations.

The interface is one of the best so far. It’s clean, simple and easy to use. It’s done wholly in Flash. It’s a great idea because that means compatibility across any PC platform is perfect. The only dependency is the Flash plugin version requirement. But, why didn’t they just create their own desktop client? Which makes much more sense, no?

One big disadvantage I see is that much of its interface system is an album-based approach. This can be a bad idea where users purchase individual songs online. It is also possible where a user like me who rips songs from CDs and keep the ones that are good! It’s not intuitive enough. It’s easy to navigate but it’s missing the fundamentals that a music listener’s behaviour is complex.

They are using JUpload, which is by far the best upload client out there. A Flash-based SWFUpload can be a good alternative and may catch up. A great choice overall! It eases the user experience by allowing multiple uploads and queueing.

Last but not least is, according to Neil Day, one of the founders of MediaMaster in TechCrunch, they are on the safe side of the law. But one thing they overlooked is the legality of public streaming via widgets on blogs or personal websites. They must pay royalties, just as (Internet) radio stations. According to him in TechCrunch, they are working closely with the major record labels and SoundExchange. But as of now, they do not have a clear revenue model.

But more importantly, will they last? Can they effectively monetized? How do they compare with MP3Tunes who has been in the business for quite sometime now? How viable is their strategy? Their feature sets? They are using PHP, does that mean anything for their backend technolgy? Last.fm is still having quite a number of user experience issues, how long will it last?

The scene is heating up. It’s beginning to be exciting for companies like ours.