And I think that’s the business that Songbird more or less wants to be in — brokering music transactions. It’s surprising that they haven’t gone after that more directly.

About bands that want to host their own mp3s getting stats on their listeners, the first step is for people to use the band’s hosted versions of the files rather than uploading the own ripped versions to some random file host. But getting listeners to do this has a few different problems —

* Nuking the stupid custom against direct linking to multimedia, which some people consider bandwidth stealing.

* Getting bands to realize what they stand to gain, and empowering them to get their URLs over to listeners.

* Making it easier to find and link to stable existing multimedia URLs rather than posting transient new versions of the same files.