P2P radio pioneer Mercora changed direction with a new product release that replaces its subscription business with keyword advertising. The company is jumping on the Web 2.0 hype bandwagon with Mercora "Social Radio".

More from the mercifully concise press release.

Santa Clara, CA - April 3, 2006 - Mercora, the Internet's largest and fastest growing user-contributed and user-programmed digital radio network, today introduced Radio 2.0 - the next generation social radio and music platform.

The Radio 2.0 platform enables social radio on a global scale and combines the power of people, their music and audio, distributed processing, digital streaming and tagging to create one of the largest 100% user-contributed and user-programmed social radio networks on the Internet.

Radio 2.0:

* Enables music-centric communities, musical self-expression, and social music discovery using a streaming radio metaphor.
* Provides multi-dimensional social search and discovery of both music and people across the web, desktop and distributed desktops.
* Is built on Ajax to provide a rich in-browser experience and uses open media formats such as Ogg/Vorbis and MP3 to provide a rich audio experience.
* Enables personalization through user-contributed tags, reviews and recommendations, and rich interaction through presence, chat and inter-personal messaging.
* With users in 140 countries worldwide, the Radio 2.0 platform automatically enforces country-specific copyright compliance, reporting and royalty payment.
* Seamlessly integrates with all major IM systems from AOL, Google, MSN and Yahoo for single sign-on and social network-building services.
* Provides contextual search advertising capabilities, allowing advertisers to place text advertisements for music-centric keywords.

Mercora is launching an entirely new product line based on the Radio 2.0 platform, including:

1. Mercora IM Radio 5.0 - Social radio software for Windows XP and 2000 (available today)
2. Radio2-0.com - Web 2.0 implementation for browser-only access (available today)
3. Mobile Social Radio - Social radio software for devices and smartphones supporting Windows Mobile (April 06)
4. My Audio Locker - Personal music locker hosted and managed by Mercora (April 06)
5. Madwords 2.0 - Second generation contextual self-service advertising framework for music and music-centric advertisers (May 06)
6. Mercora "Music Search" Syndication tool (available today)