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Comment by mdemare | Hacker News Reader

A social music site / including music client and music store for classical music. Both last.fm and iTunes suck for classical music, which has a completely different set of concepts from pop music. Composers, conductors, orchestras, choirs, movements, etc. It's a smaller market, and the people are less technically inclined, but they're richer and less likely to pirate music.

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Oh, why a social music site? Because discovering new (to you) music is a harder problem than playing, organizing or buying music.

I was thinking of something like that, but I am not familiar with the copyright laws etc even for test listening music. How does last.fm deal with that? Loyalty fees to the big four?

I believe playing a 30 second clip is considered fair use.

This is a fantastic idea. I may try and implement it in the next few months (depending on how much work there is to do for my college classes) :D

How is Pandora for classical music?

Almost non-existent. The problem isn't licensing (any more than the current licensing issues they're having). The problem is access to all the CDs.

You read that right: I know for a fact that Pandora gets its music by ripping CDs. No, really. I've been there and seen it happen. Crazy. You'd assume the record companies would send over the digitized files -- no such luck. They have one person dedicated to ripping CDs, full-time.

Anyway, last I knew, Pandora was trying to work out a deal with some guy who owned thousands of classical CDs. So as long as the company can manage to stay in business, Classical is probably coming.

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