Fred Wilson twittered that he was looking for these “I’m Free” remixes by The Rolling Stones. Can’t say I’m a huge fan of the Stones, but the remixes are by some hot artists — Postal Service, Hot Chip, Fat Boy Slim, and Moby.
I did some research and found out they were released exclusively on iTunes. I happen to not have iTunes installed at this time, so I did a search to try and find an iTunes song search engine. No luck — I couldn’t find one.
So here’s an idea for the taking — create an iTunes search engine. Sign up as an affiliate of Apple through LinkShare. Then I think to get access to Apple’s 6.5mm song data feed (download data feed spec doc), you have to pay $250 to LinkShare (which gives you access to product feeds from many of their merchants). You’ll then earn 5% of any sales that result from your iTunes search engine.
Note: Don’t use ‘itunes’ in the domain you choose for this (you could use something more generic related to mp3’s or music — because then you could work to get a data feed from Amazon.com’s MP3 library, eMusic, and others like IMEEM, these new ad-supported free download sites, and in the near future we’re going to see other big players opening up DRM-free MP3s for sale — like Yahoo!).
Further Note: 5% of a $0.99 track is only $0.05. You’d have to sell a lot of songs to make any real money from Apple’s affiliate program — however, you could complement your Site with display ads (much like Last.fm and Hype Machine do), as well as sponsored search results (from Google, or Validclick, or Searchfeed, etc).
Good luck!