The popular music search and discovery site SeeqPod is reportedly about to start an aggressive monetization strategy, according to Wired. Long beleaguered by music industry lawsuits, the company is surely feeling the strain of ongoing legal battles. Even without that cost to defray, SeeqPod is in the same position as the rest of the online startups in dire need of figuring out how to face the music and drum up some revenue.

Other web services built on top of SeeqPod's API will shortly be charged for the privilege of querying the site's engine, which at $3 per 1000 queries may be prohibitive to smaller, independent and experimental music discovery sites. Or, developers will have the option of licensing the SeeqPod source code whole hog for $5000, allowing third parties to run and presumably tweak their own iterations of SeeqPod's search algorithm; again, prohibitive for smaller sites.

Still, if SeeqPod is successful in spawning an ecosystem surrounding its API and search engine, it could fragment the playing field so drastically that legal action on the part of major labels becomes exceedingly difficult to control, police or sue out of existence. This would repeat the cycle that happened with peer-to-peer file sharing networks in the early 2000s, when RIAA efforts brought down Napster and Kazaa, forcing the file-sharing movement to split apart into smaller, harder to catch moving targets. All this has happened before; will all this happen again?

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