We initially covered Vienna-based Tunesbag in April 2008 when they launched their private beta. Today the company announced that they have received funding and support from the INiTS incubator based in Vienna, Austria.

From the announcement post, “INiTS offers funding, coaching and networking and aims at young professionals who want to start up their own company in the fields of technology, biotech and lifescience.”

The INiTS incubator looks similar to the startup incubators we have in the U.S. It sure seems like incubators are hot in 2010!

I will attempt to get the amount of funding that TunesBag received from founder Hansjoerg Posch and will update the post once I get confirmation.

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We initially covered Vienna-based Tunesbag last April when they launched their private beta. Today they have announced some additions and upgrades to the service they describe as an “online media hub”.

You can now listen to any public playlist using the search feature and then save it to your library if you like the songs. They have also updated the search to allow for a site-wide search which will index artists, tracks, users and playlists.

Tracks and playlists can now be shared with other tunesBag users along with the ability to share outside of tunesBag via mail, Facebook and MySpace. They have also released a new music player. 

Lastly, they plan to publicly open the service in the first half of 2009.

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Vienna-based Tunesbag has announced two new features in their music streaming service. Tunesbag describes their service as, "tunesBag is a platform that lets you upload your music and stream it to your flash-enabled browser. You can also upload your playlists or create new ones, recommend tracks to your friends and comment on tracks you like".

The first feature is a smart playlist creator. You can now create playlists based on genres with your songs and your friend’s songs. Tunesbag then finds songs based on popularity and also provides a discovery mechanism to help find new songs to listen to.

The other feature is a full backup service for your music. The idea is that by uploading your music to Tunesbag, you are creating a backup of all of your music so that if your computer crashes or the CDs are lost, you can recover the music. There’s a simple utility that is used to restore the music back to your hard drive.

If you would like an invite to the Tunesbag private beta, we have 100 keys so register here.

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Earlier this week I had the chance to chat with Tunesbag head of marketing Blundstone Osterberger. He describes the service as, "In short, tunesBag is a platform that lets you upload your music and stream it to your flash-enabled browser. You can also upload your playlists or create new ones, recommend tracks to your friends and comment on tracks you like." Tunesbag is currently in private beta.

The interface is very well crafted and you can open music in tabs inside of the app for quick movement. There are playlists as well for making mixtapes. There is a Tunesbag API for 3rd party services to plug in and create their custom apps and widgets. Files are uploaded either via web form or new desktop application. Friends can be pulled from Facebook to build your list.

I asked Osterberger about the issue of legality with this type of app. He replied, "The beauty of the Austrian law is that as a consumer, you are allowed and entitled to make legal copies of copyright-protected material and share it within a "reasonable" amount of people on a non-commercial basis."

Osterberger also shared who he believes are the closest competitors to Tunesbag. They include: anywhere.fm, Simfy, mp3tunes, Deezer, Pandora and last.fm. While last.fm is a competitor, they have also integrated last.fm’s scrobbling feature.

While no mention is made of business model – my guess is an affiliate setup with Amazon/iTunes. The only thing I’ve noticed in my testing is that while the interface is very slick, it’s a bit slow when trying to load a page that has more than 30 songs. They need some sort of loading meter as it seemed a few times like my IE7 crashed when it was just loading. Tunesbag was founded by Hansjoerg Posch in Austria with Osterberger working from London.

If you’d like an invite, we’ve scored 100 of them! Go to this special URL and register — better be quick!

Here’s an example artist page – using Ace of Base:

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