Another music community brings out an embeddable Flash player. Finetune, a music community that lets you stream mainstream music from a variety of artists, is set to unveil a player today that lets you play your favorite tunes on blogs and social networks. Just like TuneFeed from Faces.com, it's not clear what the rights issues are here, but Finetune are streaming the music from their own collection, rather than asking users to upload tracks. What's more, they don't allow you to play a track more than once, suggesting that they've secured the correct licensing for the music. In fact, the site's founders claim to be veterans of Napster, Gigabeat and Listen.com.
The widget is very similar to Snocap's MySpace music player, which will soon become integrated with MySpace music itself. There's a business model, too: you can visit Finetune to buy the track through iTunes or Amazon. You can see an example on the designer's MySpace page, but just like the website itself, the player may be slow to load - they were hit by the Digg effect today. When it does load, you'll see an Apple-like interface that lets you browse the tracks in 3D, similar to browsing your CD collection.
Finetune may not be as advanced as Last.fm, but it's a decent effort at combining a social network, a music player and personal playlists. If the new widget can get distribution across MySpace, hi5, Friendster, Piczo, Windows Live Spaces and the hundreds of other networks over the coming months, they should be able to attract a wider audience for the offering. I've said before that selling music through embeddable players is a great idea - it's no wonder that a bunch of these services are springing up.
Finetune User?
Mashable's Finetune profile is at finetune.com/user/mashable - feel free to add Mashable to your friends list if you sign up!
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See also: Sonific's Music Player for MySpace, ProjectOpus Releases MySpace Music Player.