Today in TUAWsville, we got a message about SiriTunes, a service that delivers “free music” [tanstafm] to your phone using the Siri voice assistant. We contacted the developer to find out more about it.
We were initially fairly concerned that that there was no privacy policy posted at the website, but the developer Brian Levine assured us, “I do not presently plan to share or sell any of the information, and am tracking very little.”
SiriTunes works like this. You text a message to (424) 888-7474 like “Play [artist name].” If you’re using Siri, you can assign the phone number to a contact and tell Siri, “Text SiriTunes play Darius Rucker.”
SiriTunes searches for that music online and texts you back with one or more links to those files. Or at least what SiriTunes thinks is those files. The service was wrong every now and then in my brief tests.
We were also concerned that these files were (to say the least) dodgy from a legal point of view. Levine responded, “I do not host any of the music tracks the service returns. They are publicly available URLs found through simple web searches. I do request the HTTP headers for each file to ensure the link is a valid music file.”
As for how this service might monetize, Levine said, “In this first iteration a small selection of free files are available, but I believe there is great opportunity to up-sell licensed content. Web searches may not be able to turn up results for every request. A link to the iTunes store or Internet radio site (Spotify, Rdio etc.) may be useful and convenient.”
Levine also talked about the motivation for his proof-of-concept website. “Customers access the service over mobile phone and it’s all about providing benefit by making things easy and saving them time. Siri is a new technology and understanding the ways people search and the things they are looking for is incredibly valuable.”
We found SiriTunes to be easy to use and fun, but we are not intellectual property lawyers.
SiriTunes uses SMS to find free music originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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