Introducing mflow: It's going to be huge...

The music industry is changing. We know that. What with the digital economy bill being pushed through parliament last week (boo), and a general shift from buying physical music, to buying digital downloads, and now, with spotify, not even owning music anymore, things are moving pretty fast.

The latest music tool to hit t'internet is mflow - billed as 'spotify with twitter', it's a new way of sharing music (yep, sharing music, legally!) and discovering new music in return:

"We believe that music's better shared...

We don't want to be told what we 'might like' by a software program.
We don't want to stare at an empty search bar... "a whole world of music at my fingertips, and I can't think of anything to look for..."
We don't want to have to subscribe to anything.
We don't want adverts.
We just want a way for our mates to send us music they think rocks."

It's quite simple really - you download the software, register, then start following people (as you would in twitter) - they 'flow' songs that they like, and you get to listen to 1 full preview, then after that, (any) 30 seconds of the sog . You can flow songs that you like to your followers, write a little comment about why you like it, and so on. The great thing is that if any of your followers buys a track after you've flowed it to them, you get 20% of the price! Which is nice. The downloaded songs can be moved to your itunes folder and played on any mp3 player and ipod.

They haven't got the extensive library that itunes does yet - but they're getting there. And if you're going to buy a track off itunes - check if it's been flowed to you already, and you may as well buy it off mflow instead - then you give someone 20%! Sharing is caring, folks.

It works best if all your mates/network are on there; I'm always saying 'have you heard this song?' to people and they're like 'eh'... now you can just send it to them. It's great. If you're already someone who uses twitter a lot, then you've got the right frame of mind to use mflow - that desire to share something new and fresh that you've discovered with the world. It's my favourite part of it.

I think the only downfall is that you only get 1 full preview - sometimes you need to listen to a song a few more times than that. Spotify, while it has adverts, obviously lets you listen as many times as you like. I wouldn't mind mflow having adverts if I could have unlimited plays.

Unfortunately, I was lazy and never got round to downloading spotify... now you can only get it through invitation only! And you can only give invites out if you pay for it. Well gutting. So if any of you have an invite, wang one over my way, cos I am silly.

Mflow is currently in beta - which means you can only try it at the moment if you have an invite code. Luckily, I have three left! If you want to try out mflow, the first 3 people to leave a comment on this post get a code off me! Don't say I'm not generous.

When it comes out of beta then anyone will be able to download it I'd imagine. But by then everyone will know about it and you won't be one of the cool trendsetters. You have been warned.

If you already have mflow and want to follow me on there, search People for 'Rachillustrates' - then you can start receiving my awesome taste in music.

Check out mflow's blog.