Lots of us love music and we love to share it; I think that’s even more powerful than simply “grab lots of music for free”—it’s the sharing that excites us, motivates us.  Music is a shared experience!

Why, then, hasn’t anyone made it easy to share music snippets legally from a simple iframe, a simple widget that someone can cut and paste or even drag and drop into their blog?

Let me give an example of how painful it is to share (within, IMHO, fair use) a music snippet:
1) Identify song you want to share with others.  Determine that it’s DRM’d.  Ack!
2) Remove DRM (yes, I know this may technically be illegal, but frankly I don’t give a damn.  Call it civil disobedience)
3) Use software to grab a relevant thirty second snippet and save it as an mp3.  Make sure tags are still embedded.
4) Upload to server.
5) Before all of this, download and install a good flash player so others can listen to your snippet whether on a Mac or PC.
6) Embed the appropriate code into your blog entry.

Check out this entry on the emotional wallop of strings for an example of the result. 

I think it took me at least 20 minutes just to prepare, upload, and post this one clip.  Does that sound very conducive to sharing to you?!

So you know what massively puzzles me?  Why on earth hasn’t any major player (Amazon, Rhapsody, Napster, Apple, etc.) made this process easier… not only facilitating the discovery and sharing of music by the increasingly powerful blogosphere, but increasing subscriptions and download sales?!  Let me explain how I envision this working…