Listen.com Takes a Turn Towards B2B

Following its bid for Scour's assets, Listen.com (www.listen.com), announced the launch of Listen Radio, as a part of a larger plan to focus on building services and products for syndication. Listen Radio is the new face of WiredPlanet, which was acquired by Listen in September 2000. Listen will syndicate Listen Radio to sites looking to add streaming audio capabilities.

Launched in June 1999, Listen has been licensing its music directory to portals and entertainment sites since the beginning. Current syndication partners include About.com, AltaVista, Excite@Home, GO.com, Lycos, RealNetworks, shockwave.com, Snap.com, Road Runner, Yahoo! and ZDNet.

Sean Ryan, president and CEO of Listen, stated that its customers were interested in other music-related services and the acquisition of Wired Planet, and now, potentially, of Scour, will enable Listen to offer a suite of services to other sites -- to provide essentially a music portal in a box.

Listen also plans on integrating partner products for re-syndication. As a result of a recent deal with Moodlogic, Listen will offer MoodLogic's music-intuitive search capabilities to Listen's syndication partners. MoodLogic provides search and personalization software based on descriptive information about songs.

Listen will no longer focus on driving consumer traffic to its own Web site, which will now serve as a showcase of the services and products it can offer other sites.