I was introduced to we7 earlier this year and has since become one of my frequently visited websites because it offers free streaming music from its website with no need for additional software.

Since using we7 I have seen little change in the way of features and some of the features we7 doesn't have annoys me a little, however it is a great service so who could stay mad for long.

we7 is very similar to Spotify in that it offers free streaming music supported by advertisements, the difference is that we7 works through your browser and Spotify requires a download in order to work, this is why we7 is better because you can be anywhere and listen to your music, including work or college.

With over 1 million tracks to stream for free including some unreleased albums we7 is massive and just last week we7 was the most visited music website on the internet according to official statistics of internet usage, a rather big milestone for legal free streaming websites.

I thought it would be a great idea to post some of my ideas for improving we7 in the hope that someone over at we7 would see the post and hopefully work on some of the features, features that i think would really improve the service for everyone.

Adobe Air Desktop Application

The major positive aspect of we7 but also sometimes the most annoying aspect is the ability to stream everything from your browser, however the problem comes when Flash Player is 'mashing' your memory usage and crashes the browser.

Spotify is built purely on an application and this is where the streaming happens and i see no attempt to move to web streaming any time soon. We7 could benefit by offering both website streaming and application streaming by building a desktop application that runs separately from your browser.

Shared Playlists

At present we7 allows you to create playlists of your favourite music from we7 and listen to them at your leisure from the website, you can also create embedded players from your playlists to place on websites and blogs and you can also share playlists with your friends through links.

The problem with this is that you can only share playlists with friends and you cannot discover new playlists of music. I have a playlist of my favourite music by The Killers but no one else can see these playlists, not even fans of The Killers.

Allowing me to create playlists which would show in a directory of playlists where people could discover playlists and by doing so discover new music would be a great way to share my musical taste with people. What would improve this is if users could rate my playlists, leave comments and also save my playlist, this would allow playlists to be prioritised by popularity in the directory.

Playlist Points

Another idea, a sub-idea if you will, would be to give the creator of the playlist the ability to earn points for every interaction their playlists gets, these points could be redeemed against ad-free days or even music purchases.

So by having people comment on your playlist in a positive way, rate your playlist highly, save your playlist or simply listen to it could potentially earn you points to redeem against we7 features.

Playlist Cover Art

Another idea, again another sub-idea, would be the ability to add an Album Art image to your playlist to make it more identifiable in the directory, a feature that seems to be present but inaccessible on we7 (we7 playlists have custom artwork, user playlists do not).

User Profiles

A feature that is rife on most social networks, simply out of need, is the ability to have your own personal profile which is accessible to the public or just friends. A feature that would go hand in hand with some of the features i suggest in this article simply because rating music, commenting on music and sharing music isn't quite as fun if you have no one to share it with.

If groups could come together and listen to each other music playlists, recommend new music to each other and comment on each other's musical taste it would make listening to music more social and more fun which is something i have been writing about with iTunes.

Your profile would contain the usual information about you, your hobbies and obviously what profile would be complete without an unflattering picture of you drunk at the weekend, but it would also contain information about the music you have listened to, the playlists you have created and the music you are rating, it could even show a chart about the music you have listened to the most.

Smaller Ideas

I decided not all of my ideas were amazing so these are the tid-bits i have on my mind but didn't think were worthy of a big header and lots of text.

Better Embedded Player

The player you can embed on your website at present is nothing short of poor, it places big advertisements into your content (not cool) and then even throws in pre-play ads into the music.

The player needs to be a simple looking flash player with the pre-play ad but nothing else, i don't want image ads in my content, especially if people are not even listening to the embedded player anyway.

Referrals

I think this is quite new to we7 as i have never seen it, but you can earn cash to purchase music by simply referring people to we7, the problem is you have to refer them via e-mail which means i can't invite them from links on websites etc.

I want to be able to place a link on my website and for every registering user to we7 through my link, i should be rewarded, it would encourage more people to link to we7.

More To Come

So these are just some of my ideas for we7 and i think they could dramatically improve the service for new users and current users and certainly increase the number of users and plays through the website.

My brain works like a factory just kicking out ideas over and over so this article is not the last, i have more ideas and i will publish more again soon, so look out for my second article.

Keywords: ideas, we7, free music, music, free music streaming, music streaming, we7.com