What, or perhaps WHO, is Flickr Music?
Don’t think for a second that this is the same flickr, because it’s totally bogus. I’m calling this one out, so hold me to that in a few months when the real flickr shuts this site down.
Some people have been asking about what the deal is with FlickrMusic.com. What they offer is a way to download as much music as you want, with access to millions of songs, movies, games and tv shows for a very low subscription cost. The “Lifetime Unlimited Access” costs $29.40, 3 years of access is $27.00 (or $0.75/month), and 1 year of access is $18.00 (or $1.50/month).
As the adage goes, if it’s too good to be true…
What FlickrMusic leads you to believe is that their site offers a legal sale and download of whatever content you’re seeking. That’s not entirely true. FlickrMusic does NOT host any of the content on their servers for you to download. Instead, they link you up with songs hosted on the computers of other users through an array of P2P networks. What that means is that there is no means for them to monitor content efficiently or subsequently pay license and royalty fees to the record labels and copyright holders.
Once you search for a song on FlickrMusic, it brings you to a page with two options; “buy CD” and “download.” If you click the “buy CD” option, it links you up with Amazon to purchase the hard copy of the album at hand. If you click download, you’re prompted for your user account info and can then download the song.
Is anything they’re doing illegal? The short answer is not directly, since it’s not illegal to share music (only copy written music).
My suspicion is that flickrmusic.com has nothing to do with the popular photo/video hosting site we all know and love. Somebody, in a brilliant ploy to garner legitimacy, bought flickrmusic.com with the hopes that they would inherit the credibility of flickr. I’m very hard pressed to believe that the people behind the brand image, content, and site design of a site like flickr would put out such a crude, primitive, unbranded, and visually nauseating site as flickrmusic.com. It has advertisements and web flair all over the place making it look like a prime spam site. There was not a flickr brand logo to be found on the whole site. I seriously started having flashbacks to the whole “dirty web design” movement a few years back, when artists would intentionally put up sites with an aesthetic as if they had never made a web page before (see blackpeopleloveus.com). I was waiting for pop-ups to divide and conquer my screen real estate as soon as I arrived. When I visited, there were animated GIF snowflakes falling down all over the site, which is way off kilter with something any hip company, like flickr, would do. So unless flickr decided to hire a 15-year-old girl to do their site after seeing her myspace page, this is not the same flickr. I’m just counting the days until flickr drops a lawsuit on this site and gets it shut down.
Here are the sites side-by-side, you decide if you think the same people are behind each one:
;)
;)
If I’m wrong, I’ll gladly eat my words; but it would be absolutely boggling to think that the real flickr would make a move like this.
Tweet
2 Responses to “What, or perhaps WHO, is Flickr Music?”
Leave a Reply
1) flickr is owned by yahoo, and this is definitely not a yahoo venture.
2) safari is flagging the site as "containing malware," so i’d be super wary of going there.
Yep. A quick view on SiteAdvisor shows only one user review rating the site as "Phishing or other Scams", even though SiteAdvisor itself thinks the site is legit.
One of the dead giveaways is that the site has cheesy banner ads and such all over. Flickr doesn’t, and if FlickrMusic likely only does because they’re either:
A) Not getting enough revenue from their subscriptions, because it’s a scam.
AND/OR
B) Trying to maximize the site and make as much money as they possibly can in a short amount of time, since they know they’ll be shut down soon… because it’s a scam.