Hopefully you’ve found a use for Rank ‘em to date, but we’ve known all along that the site was void of one major aspect.

As I’ve always maintained, we never set out to create the next streaming destination. There’s plenty of choices out there such as Pandora, Slacker & Grooveshark. I’ll write a blog post breaking down my perspective of the streaming space soon enough.

Each of the sites mentioned above deal with excessive royalty rates…that is if they go the legal route from the get-go. I know a number of sites that get takedown notices from labels on a daily basis. It’s a messy situation all around, and one that doesn’t serve artists or the businesses very well.

Considering it’s our mission to properly sort the entire catalogs of each artist, 30-second clips are much more relevant to our core competency. We want to expose you to as much of the each artist’s catalog as possible, and help you discover all the songs that you were meant to hear.

With that said, we want to give you a taste & point you in the right direction, because as I’ve described before, we consider Rank ‘em to be the ideal 2nd step in the music discovery process.

In the past, our temporary solution was providing a direct link to each artist’s clips on Amazon, but then you had to find the song you were looking for. Well, no more. As of earlier this month, millions of the songs now have associated 30-second clips!

Hopefully this will go a long way to helping you easily & efficiently discover some of the great music you’ve missed to date. As always, the retail options for full song purchase are only a click away from each artist’s page.

How can it help?

• You just received a rec for an artist, but don’t know which songs to start with.
• Your friend wants you to join him at a concert tonight? You only have a little while to make your mind up and check out the fan favorites on Rank ‘em.
• You’re trying to rank your favorites but you can’t remember how the song goes.
• You want to dive into a catalog from one of your favorite artists, and want to get a taste of some music you may have missed in the past.

Those are just four examples off the top of my head, but I imagine there’s plenty more. I’d love to hear how the samples are useful for you…

In the meantime, the site just became a lot stronger & will continue to grow with our expanding community!

Peter Kafka, Ned Sherman & David Pakman (Credit: mynameisrico)

One of my personal highlights from Digital Music Forum East included the animated keynote conversation Peter Kafka of AllThingsD had with Venrock Partner, David Pakman. Ironically enough, David was two years removed from giving a keynote while running the show at eMusic, one of the three affiliate retailers offered on Rank ‘em at the moment.  He’s since moved on to the venture capital, but it was great to hear from someone who has experienced both sides of the table (indirect shoutout to one of my favorite reads, ex-entrepreneur-turned-VC Marc Suster’s aptly titled blog)

David started the conversation by explaining how few “digital music startups” have led to positive returns for their investors. In fact, David explained he could only count five of 109!

In a subsequent email, David named the five companies he had in mind:

• Last.fm
• eMusic
• Pandora
• Spinner
• Winamp (never took VC funding)

David went on to mention that there are probably a couple more, but they pail in comparison to all the failures.

Having met Peter during my trip to NYC two years prior and knowing about Rank ‘em, he encouraged me to ask David a question when the time came. When it finally did, I still couldn’t get over that statistic that he had put out at the beginning.

As I explained in my comment for David, I completely understand that “success rate” if it implies startups that require unreasonably high royalty rates (AKA music streaming sites). Yet, I have had a problem with the phrase “digital music startups” becoming synonymous with streaming startups even though there’s countless examples of innovative & unique digital music startups that have no part of that issue. Consider the variety of great services that are being built by the likes of Songkick to The Echo Nest to Indaba.

In Rank ‘em’s case, I specifically set out to avoid that problem because I was well-aware of the messy complications that could arise from licensing content from labels. I didn’t want to initiate a startup that had to start the “illegal” path before negotiating to a “legal” foundation like iMeem, which was picked up by MySpace for peanuts in Late-2009. I always saw Rank ‘em as a resource, and considering we’re trying to highlight the entire catalog, 30-second clips of each song are more appropriate anyways!

As a fitting signoff, it was great to hear an ex-entrepreneur (is that even appropriate?) like David mention “there’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur.” Now, the only entrepreneurial thoughts I had when David was getting his start came from my monthly subscription to Beckett magazine and maximizing the value of my baseball & basketball cards…but I know what he’s saying. The barriers to “change the world” like Guy Kawasaki loves to say have never been lower!

P.S. Another interesting statistic that David mentioned regarded iTunes’ revenue position. Despite raking in approximately $2.5 billion in sales, it is still a break-even proposition! I’ve known for a while that Apple makes very little money from each sale after factoring in the licensing fees, transaction costs, etc., but I never realized it was like that!

P.P.S. Did you hear about their 10 billionth download on 2.25.10? A 71-year old man from Georgia purchased Johnny Cash’s “Guess Things Happen That Way”)