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Described as a mixture of  iTunes and Twitter, mflow is the latest in a steady stream of online music services originating from the UK. After spending several months refining itself in a private beta available to about 15,000 invitees, mainly music industry-types and journalists, it finally opened its arms to the general public’s ears last week with a slightly muted fanfare.

NME are one of the first to go with the mflow

Dubbed ‘Twitter – The Musical’, mflow aims to combine the best bits of tweeting with the best bits of, um, iTunes-ing. Fundamentally, how it works is that, like Twitter, you follow people in whose tastes you’re interested and listen to the music that they recommend (or “flow”, to use the mflow lingo). You get to listen each flowed track once in its entirety, but if you want to listen to it in full again then you’ll have to buy it – mflow tracks set you back around the same as iTunes’ at about 79p to 99p or less when sold as part of an album.

But here’s the unique bit: should you buy a track that’s been recommended (sorry, flowed) by somebody else then they get a cut (currently 20%) of the money you spent.  To keep the money where it matters, this money must be spent within mflow. It’s an intriguing double-whammy that plays on your both your esteem and your pocket: when flowing not only do you get that warm fuzzy feeling that your followers like the tracks you’re recommending so much that they’re buying them, but you’re also making a tidy bit of credit on the side.

Music taste is highly personal and emotionally-driven and mflow’s model intelligently plays on this to the full. It’s a clever, potentially self-sustaining eco-system that we reckon could work, and its plans to integrate into existing social networks like Twitter and Facebook mean that it’s sure to get some good further exposure with people who’re most likely to ‘get’ it.

Other online music services have tried in the past to create a sustainable business model but Apple’s bite of the pie might just be too big. Services like Last.fm and Spotify may have offered much to the music consumer but they’re still not turning any profits for their owners (Last.fm has been trying since 2002) and there’s huge debate as to whether they’re actually supporting the artists who make the music in the first place. Only last week it was revealed that Lady GaGa and her track Poker Face – a big hit with over a million plays on Spotify and one of the most popular songs on the site – received a cheque for a miserly $167. Informtion Is Beautiful recently published a stunning graphic answering the question, “How much do music artists earn online?” revealing that, in order to earn the same sum (a minimum monthly wage of £1,160) as 150 CD albums sold by an online retail site such as CDBaby.com, they’d have to sell just over 1,200 album downloads on iTunes. Quite a hike. But to achieve the same earnings on Spotify would require a staggering 4.5 million plays of a track. If this is the future of music then there won’t be quite so many musicians, or half as much music choice, for listeners to enjoy.

For mflow, its longer-term success might depend upon two key things:

• for sure its music catalogue and whether they are able to sign-up either the volume or the right market of artists and labels that its prospective users  want keep on listening to, recommending and buying;
• almost certainly mflow’s ability to find its very own Stephen Fry, a special someone who can do for this fledgling service what Britain’s favourite Tweeter almost single-handedly achieved for Twitter when it first hatched.

Why sacrifice valuable Sunday morning hangover time when you can follow God on mflow?

During the private beta period the guys at mflow tried to sign-up as many potentially influential people as possible, presumably with the intention of creating some of these musical beacons for new users to follow. Chatting with the mflow team the day before the launch last week they were very keen to point us in the direction of some shining lights –  Phil Jupitus, Island Records and The NME all have high-profile channels, as does Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs and God (I’m not kidding, whoever he – or she – is has thousands of followers). mflow also have their own channels, each dedicated to specific genres of music – follow these channels and you’ve a pretty good idea of the kind of music you’re going to be flowed.

But as yet there’s still no single standout figure who represents, champions and epitomises mflow. Perhaps this is asking too much from a single man. Whilst many of us may have been a tad bored of Stephen Fry’s tweets long before his self-imposed Twexile, ignoring his (or anyone else’s) 140 character missives is pretty straightforward. However, choosing to ignore 3 or 4 minutes’ worth of music that makes your skin squirm is another matter (of course, ‘next track’ buttons are available within mflow).

In fact mflow may need several Stephen Fry-like pioneers to appeal to the various musical genres it represents.

Or perhaps mflow just needs a God. Oh, it has already, and as it happens he is currently flowing “The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret (Album Version)” by Queens of the Stone Age. Who’d have thought…

Want to follow the author’s flows? Find him on mflow at ‘bigdavemac’. Find out more about mflow at http://www.mflow.com/