Is Dropbox Thinking of Launching Some Kinds of Streaming Music Service

Maybe.  They just bought Audiogalaxy. 

Actually, I had no idea that Audiogalaxy was still around.  I thought they had been crushed by anti-downloading lawsuits in the post-Napster era.  That’s how much I’d been paying attention.

Audiogalaxy had pivoted into a streaming music service based out of Seattle.  What could Dropbox, a cloud storage company, want with them?  GigaOm has some ideas:

Dropbox has acquired Seattle-based music startup Audiogalaxy, according to a post on the Audiogalaxy blog. Details of the transaction haven’t been released, but it looks like an acqui-hire that could get the Dropbox team some serious media smarts. The folks behind Audiogalaxy built one of the pioneering file sharing applications, and made a sort of comeback with a mobile music service focusing on Pandora-like personal cloud streaming earlier this year.

Audiogalaxy has already stopped accepting new sign-ups. Playlists built by its users will only be available until the end of the year, and the rest of the service will shut down some time in 2013.

Audiogalaxy was one of the pioneering music sharing services that combined a web-based UI with a P2P client. The service shut down in 2002 as the result of a music industry lawsuit. Audiogalaxy’s team went on to create Foldershare, a Dropbox-like file sharing service that was acquired by Microsoft in 2005.

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