Tunesbag Lets You Listen Anywhere, Anytime - We've Got Beta Invites!

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: