Musings

Recently launched social music discovery engine Mflow is a “revolutionary download company” (Clash Music newsletter, 16 March 2010) that, to paraphrase their words, is a way for mates to send each other music that they think rocks.

mflow - social music

But not just mates. Radio One DJ Zane Lowe, recording artist Lauren Pritchard, whoever mans the user accounts at Clash and NME Magazines and I’m sure many more music celebs/entities as the service grows. It’s currently in invite-only beta but invited users receive 5 of their own invites to send their friends on registration.

The idea is that users “follow” their friends, or other users whose taste hits the spot more often than not, and receive streamable tracks and albums “flowed” by those users straight to their mflow-platform inbox. Users can also flow tracks that are available through mflow on to their own followers. Many of the tracks on the system (but not all) can be purchased for download directly through the platform.

The twists?

One. You can only stream a track in full if it’s been flowed to your inbox by a user you’re following or you’ve purchased it on mflow.
Two. If you flow a track and one of your followers purchases it, you receive an mflow credit of 20% of the price they paid to offset against the cost of your own purchases on mflow.

Things we like?

- They’ve incorporated the human element into digital music discovery without bespoke, individual, personality profile, read-your-mind interaction
- The service aims to tackle piracy by promoting legal discounted downloads
- Effectively, they’re paying their users to spread the word about the music they love with…Read More