Neeraj and I were discussing the possibility of making Audiomatch a pay service. The problem with Audiomatch is that although it's a great free service, it's a very costly service to run. The service runs off of our central server, and all users send data to the server at a constant rate (people who use Winamp *really* use it a lot).

We managed to survive off of donations for a while, but there just reached a saturation limit with the users where donations simply couldn't cover the costs.

So why would anyone pay for Audiomatch? I'm expecting no one would pay for it right now. But if we can get a revenue stream up, we can buy more hardware, and then the real cool features can be released. Right now the Audiomatch DB server is actually a shared server (the tabulas DB is on there as well) so I can't really push the features; I have to limit myself by remembering that using too much CPU on the audiomatch server will force Tabulas to suffer, and vice versa. And since many assholes refuse to pay for their awesome TABULAS, I'm not really making enough money on Tabulas to help support other projects.

But in general, I want to build in more features to Audiomatch to make it *better*. Some things I want to do:
- better image generation control (want to plaster your songs behind an image? sure!)
- xml generated reports (for parsing)
- offsite "posting" (so you can install your own site script to handle output)
- full "reports" (right now the databases are dumped out every few weeks because they are getting too big; it'd be nice if we could generate a full report of what each user listened to before the databases were dumped).

I'm thinking right now $5 for a year of AM service would be a very reasonable price for the new features we'll be building in. That would help us buy more servers and make Audiomatch less of a drain on my personal finances ...

But yeah. We're shooting to execute everything in about 5 weeks. New features, new look, new billing ... etc. etc.