Mercora Jumps Into Internet Search

CNET: Today, the ambitious start-up Mercora has announced the availability of Mercora Live Music Search - a new Web-based tool aimed at finding "free music" being played on the company's P2P radio network - tapping into current internet search trends and allowing surfers to find and immediately listen to unrestricted music - streamed to them in real time...The article reports that the tool is aimed at a new audience of casual Web surfers - allowing them to search the Mercora network and listen to a wide range of songs that approximates on-demand. "Any Web site can now provide visitors with an immersive music discovery experience; Consumers gain instant results and unlimited free listening-anytime, anywhere."

"Mercora has, in effect, created a real-time directory of live music and audio that is categorized along various attributes, such as genre, artist, period of recording, artist influences, and related artists," said Srivats Sampath, president and CEO of Mercora. "This new search tool and technology is an industry first - a breakthrough that enables dynamic indexing of information that is updated every few seconds, not in days, weeks or months as with other search engines."

This on-demand type of ability can deliver immediate gratification for music fans (which is what we all want anyway) and will hopefully provide a new revenue stream from textual advertising mixed in with the search results...This is incredibly cool if you stop to think about it, but the model sounds too good to be true though and I'm sure someone soon will find a law that is being broken somewhere in the chain to stifle the innovation...In the meantime, Kudos to them for pushing the industry's envelope...