Jeff Wallace

While there has been some news on the end of Total Music see the TechCruch and PaidContent article.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/07/the-totalmusic-experiment-is-sinking-fast/

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-umg-and-sony-music-jv-total-music-shuts-down/

Below is the “Album of the Week” from TotalMusic’s owned site Tunepost.com.

A quick tear down of the widget. The whole widget is a flash .SWF it allows you to play, pause, stop and shuffle. It is playing back full-length AAC+ streaming audio using Adobe Flash Media Servers delivered over Akamai’s CDN. While listening to the Album-of-the-Week I experienced one ad that come up inside the widget. After reviewing the PlayerConfig.xml it would appear they also considered a version of the player doesn’t include Ads if a special API key is included. No doubt the Ads are how Tunepost plans on monetizing the streams. Apparently Total Music or Tunepost.com doesn’t do commerce yet or now may never. In the current widget/player the widget buy button sends you off to the Amazon store to purchase the MP3. Unfortunately the buy button only sends you to the current song so you can’t purchase the album. They include a link to merchandise that isn’t implemented yet and a link to dada.net to purchase a ringtone. It is also not really implemented as it sends you to the dada.net site signup. Don’t bother with the Sign-up/Register button on the bottom. The Tunepost.com site is still in private beta so you won’t be able to do much more.