eSnips, the sprawling media-sharing platform, just announced the release of music players to post tracks to social networks - these come with a selection of nicely designed skins. They're promoting them as a way for independent artists to distribute their music, but no doubt users will want to upload copyrighted music, too.
eSnips also announced 12 new music communities - Electronic, Hindi, Reggae, Metal, Gothic/Industrial, Hip-Hop/Rap, Elvis, Jazz, and Blues. Clearly, those continue eSnips' strategy of rolling out niche "microportals" on certain topics. Additionally, they're increasing the free storage to users from 1 GB to 5 GB and allowing users to email their favorite songs to each other in customizable, animated email messages (sounds like Bebo Mail Skins and Gigya, but the site is suffering some downtime that makes testing difficult).
eSnips is like Photobucket meets YouTube meets Webshots and everything else in between. The model works, with users hosting and syndicating their media all over the web. At least for now, eSnips seems to be less reliant on copyrighted media than its competitors (YouTube, Imeem etc), and perhaps less dependent on the social networks for traffic.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]