Search the Internet for Music with Clickster

One of the great benefits of the internet is that more information, arts and culture have become freely available. But if the RIAA has its way, it’ll be less of the “free” thank you very much as music artists slowly come to terms with the fact that the CD is dying a slow death and most people get their music these days by illegally downloading it. You may not like that fact but nevertheless it’s still a fact of life, along with death and taxes.

I hesitated a great deal before writing this article because I was struggling to grapple the legal logic behind the idea of Clickster (to view it, go to the site and scroll to the bottom of the page). After going over and over it, I am not convinced and I will probably never use Clickster as a result (me being a solid upstanding man of the law and all ). However, Make Use Of is still a public service and we try to cater to everyone – even the music downloaders in the world.

Clickster is a software program which uses already well-known search algorithims to look for music stored on peoples unprotected website directories. It just takes those search algorithims and gives you an aesthetically-pleasing interface to find and download the music you are looking for.

All you have to do is enter the name of the artist and / or the song and Clickster quickly sends its bots throughout the net looking in website directories which are not password-protected to see who has a copy of the song you are looking for. You will then get the results and you can click on the ones you are interested in.

From what I can make out, it seems there is an embeddable MP3 player inside the application so you can listen to the song without downloading it. You can also get the full URL to the song if you want to link to it on a webpage. You can even embed a playlist on a webpage (see screenshot).

As I said, I’m not passing judgment on the rights and wrongs of the software. If you use it, you use it at your own risk. If you are interested in other alternatives head to previouslly posted 7 Websites That Make MP3 Downloads Easy.

(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger and professional freelance writer. Check out his blog at BetterThanTherapy.net

Tagged: downloader • mp3 • music player • streaming

Mark O'Neill

Mark O'Neill is the managing editor of MakeUseOf.com

perfektskyy

This sounds a lot like songbeat, i believe that program made the songs found by seeqpod downloadable.

I am curious however if downloading music in this way is safer than using torrents since you would be actually downloading off various servers and not directly downloading and uploading from a specific batch of users on a known torrent site. Any ideas on this?

http://makeuseof.com Aibek

Yes you’re right it’s a bit like Songbear, the only difference there is no restriction on the max. number of songs user can download. If I remember correctly, Songbeat allows 50 downloads/month.

As about your other concern, I agree torrents are a lot safer. However, I never really heard someone being targeted from unprotected servers. These MP3 files are available to everyone simply because some people don’t know how to hide them from search engines.

Although, you still got a very good point.
http://www.betterthantherapy.net Mark O’Neill

The inventor of Clickster claims that his method is safer and legal because there’s no way to track people who download files off people’s unprotected website directories. He claims the legal consequences fall on the website owner for not securing their website directories properly. Whether or not this is actually true is debatable.

I would imagine though that all the attention would be on well known file sharing sites such as Bittorrent and e-mule, and not on regular web servers like momandpop.com. I mean, with all the millions and millions of websites out there, how can the RIAA possibly keep track of them all? It’s impossible.

the_iSaac

If all you need is to search the Internet for music (i.e., you have a song stuck in your head and you only want to hear it), then go to songza.com (no download). It has a fairly nice UI and you can rate the quality of the songs in the list. The site essentially grabs files from all across the Internet and displays the list it grabs…usually finds what I’m looking for. Not to mention, you can’t download the files (from what I know) so your conscience stays clean.