I've recently been trying to do something with music previews, displaying a page with a list of songs and include short music previews for each song.

After some research on Google I didn't find any services which provide anything like what I wanted. Amazon provide a music widget thing which let's you build a little bit of java script that follows a playlist but not really what I had in mind.

I was surprised that this would be so difficult to find, in my head I imagined being able to provide something like the 30 second previews Apple give you on their iTunes Store. Amazon provides similar previews which is purely a MP3 file however I don't think it's an easy thing to go in a pull out without a bit of hacking away.

Maybe the key here is not waste time building  service which provides music previews but instead build a service which offers music previews!

Am I missing something here?

UPDATE:

Turns out I completely missed Apple and their iTunes Search API, this will return JSON formatted results and allows you to use it for pictures, video/music previews and whole lot more, their documentation is pretty good very easy to understand and implement.

For example - search iTunes store of all content by "The XX" would be:

http://itunes.apple.com/search?term=the+xx

You may then use extra terms in the url to specific media type, limit etc.