Playlist.com

Playlist, Inc. operates the playlist.com website (formerly Project Playlist) and is a company that provides widgets for MySpace, myYearbook and Facebook.

History

Playlist was founded in the early 2000s for the purpose of putting more music on Myspace and other social networking sites. With the popularity of social networking sites and online blogs, playlist.com has experienced enormous growth. From a userbase of less than 500,000 in mid-2006, it grew to more than 20,000,000 users as of June 30, 2008. It was originally known as projectplaylist.com, before it acquired its current domain name of playlist.com.

Applications

Music playlists can be embedded into MySpace, MyYearbook, or Facebook using their application platforms. Due to Facebook's different format which does not use HTML coding, the player is more obscured and can not be set to auto-start as it would on Myspace.

Legal issues

A key concern for this site was that the majority of the files linked to are pirated content distributed without the authorization of the copyright holders. On April 28, 2008, the RIAA and a coalition of nine record labels filed a lawsuit against the company for contributing to mass copyright infringement. However, two similar cases against MySpace and Imeem were largely the opening moves in settlements which would see these music sites licensing the content and compensating artists for the use of their music. Project Playlist already has begun contracts with Sony BMG.

On December 19, 2008, MySpace quickly began removing the Project Playlist music player from all profiles and subsequently leaving the affected users a message in their inbox which notified them of the removal. This amounted to a temporary ban of Project Playlist, largely due to complaints brought forth by the artists, asserting that Project Playlist should be paying royalties.

Facebook also later banned Project Playlist from its site.

On May 11, 2010 it was reported that Playlist reached a settlement with Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group  for an undisclosed amount.