Mercora Networks, an online digital music providing company started by Srivats Sampath, former CEO of McAfee.com, has raised more than $5 million from venture capitalist Promod Haque's Norwest Venture Partners.
The Santa Clara-based company allows users to swap their favourite music online for free while still complying with the copyright laws. Although many Web sites allow people to swap music freely through Internet file swapping, Mercora claims it is the first to do it legally.
Mercora, a large music radio network, has combined peer-to-peer and Internet streaming technologies to create a huge and legal music search and discovery service.
With Mercora P2P Radio, you can search, find and legally listen to thousands of songs. Mercora offers a small application that can be downloaded and installed on one's computer. The application scans the hard drive, looks for music files -- MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, etc -- and creates a small database.
Once the database is ready, the user can send invites to friends asking them to join his/her list. Once people join the friends' list, they can listen to the special playlist that the user creates for them.
Basically, the software helps people listen to songs from other people's computers. All you need to do is to search by artist name or title of the song and the results thrown up will guide you to the place where you can listen to what you asked for.
The only catch is that Webcasting rules mandate that a copy of the song cannot be downloaded on your computer's hard drive. Mercora thus does not allow you to download any songs or burn CDs.
Also you can listen to only three songs by one artist in a three-hour period. If you want to listen to the rest of album, you have to stop after the three-song limit is reached and go back to the search results play the other songs from a different source.
The service is free for now, but Srivats Sampath, founder and chief executive of Mercora, says that company is mulling various possibilities to monetise the service. These could include letting users buy a song or album.
The company says its has over 450,000 users and Sampath feels that premium versions of the service or special packages will soon help Mercora make money.
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