Not long ago, the professional music industry involved a complex but fixed set of players: artists, labels, managers, promoters and the like. Many of these roles have changed, but none have disappeared. They're joined by a new set of participants: tech giants, streaming services, social music startups and, perhaps most crucially, developers.

This weekend, coders and industry representatives gathered in San Francisco for Music Hack Day, a tradition that has spanned continents for the last four years. Like other hack days and hackathons, the event is dedicated to bringing developers together to build new things using the latest technologies and platforms. In this case, the focus is on music, so the toolkit includes everything from mobile hardware and homemade digital instruments to open Web standards and the APIs of services like SoundCloud, Last.fm, Spotify and the Echo Nest.

Noteworthy hacks conjured up in the past have included various software mashups between services, as well as things like invisible, interactive instruments that can be played in the air or on a surface. Some hacks are strictly Web or software-based, while others involve some tinkering with hardware, including LED lights, Nintendo Wii controllers and Kinects.

The most recent Music Hack Day spawned a total of 62 hacks. The list included a music search engine that queries multiple streaming services, as well as a Theramin made from two iPhones. One app succeeded in predicting Sunday's Grammy winners almost as effectively as Billboard did.

Some creations were simpler, such as a Spotify-based clone of the classic MP3 player WinAmp, a mash-up between iTunes and the Echo Nest's recommendation engine and a SoundCloud plugin for Wordpress.

The hacks ranged from the mind-blowing to the simplistic but useful. They dealt with everything from the creation of music to its distribution and promotion.

How Music Hack Day Helps the Music Industry Evolve

Music Hack Day was started in 2008 and hasn't stopped growing since. In the tradition of other hacking events, SoundCloud VP of Business Development David Haynes teamed up with experienced hack day organizer James Darling to create a music-specific event. The proliferation of APIs from various music-related platforms plus some of the other disruption going on in the music industry made the space ripe for some creative hacking.

"Weren't sure what to expect from it at first," said SoundCloud cofounder and CTO Eric Wahlforss. "It got off to such a good start that's now become sort of a tradition for the last few years. Music Hack Day is a big part of our culture."

For startups like SoundCloud, events like Music Hack Day yield creations that could one day find themselves integrated with the company's core product. The vast majority, however, will not. And that's okay. The event's value is of a much deeper nature, in that it fosters a developer community around music and brings a wide range of players into the same, from independent coders to music industry representatives.

A side effect of this type of collaboration is that the entire industry is creeping forward. A few years ago, Wahlforss told us, some record labels had no idea what an API was or how it was relevant to their business. Today, EMI has an API of their own. They, along with Universal Music Group, participate in Music Hack Day and are curious about much of the fruit it bears.

"If you speak to the labels today, they're all about API's and mashability of their content," Wahlforss said. "They're very on board with this trend, which is very exciting to see."

For SoundCloud, this spirit of hacking is something that plays a prominent role in the culture of the company and its growing team of developers. Modeled after Google's "20% time," the company encourages employees to use what it calls Hacker Time to experiment and build new things that may or may have any direct bearing on the official product strategy for SoundCloud.

The company also recently hired its first developer evangelist and is silently preparing a major announcement about its platform.

Pushing Music into the Future

SoundCloud isn't the only company pushing the boundaries of what's possible in online music. Innovation is all over the place, from Spotify's new third party app platform to the long and growing list of apps powered by the APIs from services like The Echo Nest, Last.fm, Bandcamp and several dozen others.

The open architecture of the Web, the proliferation of APIs and hacker culture have already made a notable mark on how people create, discover and share music, yet all of this is still very much in its earliest stages.

Twenty years from now, things will look even more different. The industry and ecosystem will move forward together, probably with a few players becoming obsolete along the way. Artists and sound engineers may lead the creative charge, but if what emerges looks and works radically different from what we have today, we'll have developers to thank as well.

Music Hack Day Photo by Thomas Bonte

MySpace has been losing traffic since 2008, when Facebook first surpassed it on Alexa. Last year, the company was sold for $35 million by News Corporation, who bought it for $580 million six years earlier. Its new owners, Specific Media, have tried to reposition the site as an online entertainment hub rather than a full-fledged social network. If early numbers are any indication, the refocus appears to be working.

If this particular trend line continues to move upward, it would suggest that the site's music-centric gamble was a wise one. It would certainly make sense, given the site's history. When MySpace first came onto the scene in 2003, it was used by independent musicians to share music and connect with fans, who quickly flocked to the site. By 2008, the site attracted nearly 80 million unique visitors per month and was considered the preeminent social networking service.

Specific Media's new strategy aims to capitalize on MySpace's roots while building new features and functionality to help better reposition the site as a music hub. Even as the site's popularity has declined among the general population, it continued to be big among bands and other musicians.

Over the years, the site has amassed a library of music containing over 42 million tracks, which positions it quite competitively with the likes of Rdio and Spotify, even if MySpace's content leans heavily toward unsigned and independent artists.

Is this enough to turn things around for MySpace? The site won't return to being the social behemoth it was before the rise of Facebook, Twitter and Google+. By more aggressively carving out this niche, its new owners could at least allow the site to grow and build a viable, more focused business.

As effective as these methods can be, they're not always perfect. With Twitter and Facebook, there's the risk of having your song get lost in a sea of other social noise. With direct-sharing on Spotify, you can get more granular, but the social experience more or less ends once your friend hits the play button. This new song you just discovered is so awesome, though.

This is My Jam has all the basic social features you'd expect: following, liking, commenting and, of course, integration with Facebook and Twitter for sharing songs to a wider audience. When we first played with it, we couldn't help but feel like the experience was akin to Pinterest, in the sense that it allows users to curate stuff they like and share it among friends.

One of the key differences is in the way the content is deliberately limited on This is My Jam. Instead of building out a page-long archive of past jams, the service just shows a gray, unlinked list of them. The focus here is really on one song per user. In a sense, it's kind of like the music-obsessed love child of Twitter and Pinterest.

The music on the site comes from various sources across the Web, including YouTube, SoundCloud, the Hype Machine and the Echo Nest. Between the lot of them, there's a massive library of music to choose from. This approach also largely frees This is My Jam from any messy DMCA legal disputes. The YouTube integration makes the new social service one of the few music sites that includes music from The Beatles and other notoriously digitally-hesitant artists.

The site can also work as a promotional vehicle for new artsits, with some limitations. It lets you upload your own audio files, provided you have the rights to do so, but those tracks don't automatically get added to the library of music that other users can choose from. Any videos a band or artist has on YouTube, however, can be pulled up and shared as jams.

As you amass a network of friends on This is My Jam, the site becomes a sort of social radio station, kind of like Shufflr.fm, but based on what your friends are into, rather than recommendations from music blog tastemakers.

The site's audio player is built so that playback continues as you browse through the site. A big yellow button at the top of each user's homepage allows you play all of the jams of the people you follow. Those tracks can be scrobbled to Last.fm and tracks you like on This is My Jam can be added as favorites on Last.fm as well.

Overall, it's a promising little Web app, but like any service of this nature, how useful it becomes will depend entirely on its ability to attract users. It's brand new, so the growth that user base is just getting started.

For artists, it's another story. The dirty little secret of services like Spotify and others is that they are not particularly lucrative for artists. At all. Each of them has managed to court record labels with attractive enough licensing deals, but that doesn't necessarily trickle down to the artists themselves. As a result, many artists have held back new releases from streaming services, or jumped ship all together.

Initially, independent artists such as bands on small metal labels started to question the value of Spotify and pulled their catalogs. Then bigger artists like The Black Keys and Coldplay declined to release new material on Spotify.

Exact figures range (and are seldom made public), but it's clear that streaming services simply do not pay out much money compared to physical album sales or paid downloads. According to CDBaby, iTunes accounts for 77.4% of digital revenue for indie artists, while sources like Spotify and Rhapsoy bring in about 2% apiece. Now, with iTunes Match, artists get an additional stream of revenue on top of their initial digital album sales.

In theory, the streaming services will grow their user bases and refine their monetization strategies to a point at which things are fair for labels, fans and artists alike. In the meantime, not everybody is willing to stick around and wait for their business model to mature.

Turntable.fm was such a craze that it gave rise to a number of copycat services pretty quickly. Group listening in general became one of the biggest trends in online music last year. But many have wondered if this particular trend has long-term staying power, or if the whole thing was just a fad.

What this data does not include is information about the service's mobile apps, which so far only exist on iOS. Even so, it's unlikely that the losses it has apparently seen on the Web have somehow been made up for entirely with mobile users. Evidently, the September launch of that iOS app didn't do much to drive interest in the service back toward its July peak.

Turntable.fm isn't the only site of its kind having trouble making this model work. In August, a site called Chill.com went live, promising to offer a "Turntable.fm for video" type of experience. That is, it allowed users to watch videos with one another in real time, much as they could listen to music on sites like Turntable.fm. Chill shifted gears last month with a major relaunch that deemphasized group watching in favor of social video discovery.

This isn't to say that group listening is dead in the water. Indeed, socially-curated and synchronized content consumption became a big new focus at Facebook last year, with their tight integrations with services like Spotify, MOG and Rdio. In January, Facebook took things a step further by launching a feature that lets users listen to music with friends in real time.

To be sure, Turntable.fm is still popular among a certain set of users. It just doesn't seem to have caught on as widely as expected, if the publicly-available data are to be believed. It's entirely possible that the press buzz the service got over the summer let to a spike in usage and that it's now settling into its proper niche user base. For the site to remain viable and eventually forge a monetization strategy, those numbers will have to find a way to climb back up.

Traffic chart courtesy of Digital Music News.

Last week, rock veteran Neil Young chimed in with his assertion that the digital music files we listen to today are of much lower quality than the original recordings. Speaking at the D: Dive Into Media conference, he said that the technology now exists to deliver much higher-quality audio to music fans, and that he had even talked to Steve Jobs about a possible solution.

How Serious is the Problem? ... And How to Fix It?

Exactly how bad is this problem? By Young's estimation, what we hear in most files today is "only 5% of the data of the original recording". That may be a slight exaggeration, depending on how the files are encoded. Certainly, lower bit rate files (such as 128kbps MP3s) have a noticeably degraded quality to them, compared to a CD. But most sources have graduated to higher quality files now that broadband speeds allow for it. A standard track on iTunes is a 256kbps AAC file and premium Spotify subscribers can listen to many songs at 320kbps, which is about 22% of a CD track's bit rate.

When it comes to streaming audio on mobile devices, the quality buck pretty much stops at whatever the data connection can handle. On 3G networks, streaming CD-quality audio just isn't feasible. Over a good WiFi connection, things look a little more promising, but there are still limitations if the user experience is to be preserved.

Young: We Need an iPod For Audiophiles

So what does Young propose as a solution? From the sound of it, he'd like to see a sort of mega-iPod with more disk space and internal guts optimized to playback massive files. Such a device wouldn't be designed to include one's entire library, but rather only a selection of audiophile-quality albums. Presumably, it would tend to be used with superior quality earphones or speakers, which is another important factor in the quality of what we hear.

Even if a device akin to what Young describes were produced and sold, how big of a market would there be for it? The quality of the audio found on sources like iTunes, Spotify, MOG, Amazon and Google Music is apparently good enough to convince millions of people to pay for access to it. At the end of the day, most of the content on the pay music services is certainly good enough. Musicians and audiophiles can pick up on the degradations in quality, but for the average listener, it's pretty subtle. The device that Young describes would have to be marketed toward the audiophiles for whom 320kbps simply won't cut it.

Last week wasn't the first time Young has criticized the state of digital music. Some may dismiss his stance as nothing more than a grumpy, old-school perspective, as though he's just an old guy that doesn't get the new-fangled ways of the Web and digital media. This isn't the case. Young may be a veteran of the music industry, but he's well aware of what's changed about it and why. During the same interview in which he slammed MP3's, he said that "piracy is the new radio" and encouraged new artists to forgo record labels in favor of doing it themselves.

There's Nothing Wrong With Analog

As Young pointed out, Steve Jobs may have been a digital music pioneer, but "when he went home, he listened to vinyl." This is true not only of the generation that grew up on LPs, but also of a growing number of younger music fans today. Vinyl sales have been surging for the last few years, with 2011 seeing a 39% increase in sales over the previous year. Digital music sales grew last year too, but by considerably less.

For music fans with the deepest concern for audio quality, it seems analog is increasingly the way to go. That's okay. We can have our digital revolution in music and still fall back on analog formats. Just like with books, the value offered by digital music is primarily about volume, convenience and ease of production and distribution. And just like sitting down with a good, paper-bound book, putting on a vinyl record is more about quality and the overall experience.

Digital and Analog Can Coexist Peacefully

Digital and analog don't need to be at war with one another. What many labels and artists are doing now is sell records on vinyl and include a coupon for a free, high-quality digital download in the record's sleeve. That allows people to enjoy the album as it was intended and also throw it onto their iPod or smartphone for listening on the go.

It's also possible to go the high-quality route in a digital-only format. When The Beatles' catalogue was remastered and reissued in 2009, the material was released on CD and, for the first time, via iTunes. For diehard fans who wanted more than what iTunes could offer, they also sold an apple-shaped (no, not that Apple) thumb drive containing every album in superior quality, lossless FLAC format, as well as as 320kbps MP3s.

However things may evolve, it's evident that digital music has brought us great value, but it's done so at a cost, namely quality. This may not be perceived as a problem by every consumer, but for those who take the craft of creating and recording music most seriously, it's one well worth solving. Whether it's solved through a hybrid of analog and digital music consumption or through some new, high-capacity device for playing back lossless digital audio, the challenge isn't an insurmountable one.

Vinyl sales chart courtesy of Digital Music News.

Apparently, iTunes Match has been inadvertently replacing certain tracks with the "clean" version of the same song, Cult of Mac reported.

It looks like what's happening here is the system is misreading metadata for certain tracks and cross-referencing with radio-friendly edits of the same song. At the very least, this has happened with four hip hop tracks as reported by Cult of Mac.

To some, this may smack of the nothing-dirty-please, prim-and-proper censorship for which Apple has gained a reputation in the iTunes App Store. More likely than not, it's just a bug. The company may not want filthy porno-filled apps populating its App Store, but that's quite different from allowing people to listen to a profanity-laden Jay-Z song that they purchased (or otherwise) acquired on their own accord.

Apple has acknowledged that this is an issue and is reportedly working on a fix.

His archives include "5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts," according to the New York Times. By the end of February, 17,000 tracks will be available for free download. But today, a collection of 16 field recordings is being released for free download to celebrate what would have been Lomax's 97th birthday.

You can play the offerings on a featured player or download them for free.

Under the Global Jukebox label, Cultural Equity will continue to release more complete tracks and collections for free download.

Tracks are already available on the site for listening, but most are not downloadable, aside from the birthday sampler. Plans are also in the works to release CDs of some of these collections.

Global Jukebox gets its name from Lomax's recording mission, to assemble a global jukebox that allows listeners to understand what we have in common as a species through our musical undertakings, as well as understanding the different solutions we've come up with musically to adapt to our surroundings and answer the big questions of human life.

Lomax began recording on bulky tape machines around the South in the Thirties, visiting locally famous, but nationally unknown, musicians, like Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, to capture the unique vocabulary of American music. He continued his recordings, as well as lectures and writing, until his death in 2002. For a large chunk of his life he was dogged by the F.B.I., who interpreted his devotion to cultural equity as an element of the Communist threat.

Photo of Alan Lomax recording in Dominica, 1962 by Antoinette Marchand from ACE.

More than 3 million people are now paying to use Spotify, according to the Financial Times. That's a conversion rate of more than 20%, a figure that has reportedly increased by 5% since the service hit 1 million users last year. In other words, not only is Spotify itself growing, but the rate at which people sign up for a premium or unlimited account is also increasing.

It also doesn't hurt that the six-month window of unlimited, free streaming music for new users has begun coming to a close for the service's earliest U.S. adopters. As that happens, those who are truly hooked on the service are forced to either put up with listening caps or cough up $5 per month to remove them. The company hasn't said what percentage of those paid users have opted for the pricier "Premium" account, which allows for mobile streaming in addition to stripping out ads and listening caps.

This isn't to say that there aren't still major, outstanding questions about Spotify and the viability of the all-you-can-stream model it shares with the likes of Rdio and MOG. The music labels are evidently happy enough with the arrangement to stay on board for now, but the artists are a different story.

The streaming services pay out notoriously low royalty fees to artists, some of which have begun to question the value in being on the service. Sure, it's a great way to promote one's music, but it may not be economically advantageous for artists, especially if it ends up hurting record sales.

The new player first went into beta in November, giving those curious enough an opportunity to experiment with it. Now that the bugs have been ironed out and a few new features added, the widget is ready for prime time.

A big part of that growth, cofounder Alex Liung told us, is the company's mobile strategy. It has highly functional native apps for iOS and Android, but the browser-based Web is another story. When users try to play back embedded SoundCloud clips on an iPad or iPhone, the old player simply wouldn't work, like all the other Flash embeds scattered across the Web.

HTML5: A Necessary Move

For this reason, the conversion to an HTML5 embeddable player is a necessity for a service like SoundCloud if it expects to maximize its reach across the Web and keep growing. Flash will presumably never be supported on iOS devices iPads and iPhones, a fact that wouldn't matter so much if Apple didn't keep selling millions upon millions of them. Just last quarter, over 15 million iPads and 37 million iPhones landed in the hands of consumers, and this revolution in personal computing is still well underway. In November, Adobe announced that it would suspend development of the mobile version of Flash, apparently accepting that open standards like HTML5 and related technologies could do most of what Flash was capable of it.

It's not just cross-device compatibility that makes ditching Flash a good idea. HTML5 is also less resource-intensive when playing back audio, and should exhibit better performance.

While testing the new player out, the SoundCloud team discovered a few other advantages as well. Apparently, the appearance of the revised player made users twice as likely to hit the "play" button. From there, they were eight times more likely to share a given track with others.

Now that it's coming out of beta, the new player now supports saving any sound to one's "likes" and making comments in-line on the waveform, which was one of more the powerful features of the original Flash player.

Raditaz launched earlier this month with promises 14 million licensed tracks, compared to the "more than 900,000" currently offered by Pandora. But guess what?

Still no Liz Phair. And now, seemingly, no Pixies either.

Update: Raditaz spokesman Tom Brophy emailed to say that the lack of Pixies tunes was because of a "snafu" with Warner Music and that it should be resolved in about a week. And the service does, in fact, have those Liz Phair songs I can't get on Pandora.

"I actually will admit that you made some fair points," Brophy said in an email. "We are in the process of significantly upgrading the platform, and in particular, the algorithm that powers Raditaz stations. Our upgrade should be completed in approximately 30 days. We are also doing some work on better integrating Likes and Dislikes."

Why Pandora Is Better

In my tests, Raditaz loaded slower than Pandora.

Overall, in fact, the Raditaz interface was rather ugly and not nearly as intuitive as Pandora. Like the music I listened to, of course, the latter is a matter of personal opinion. But Pandora does have some objective pluses, including lyrics for many of the songs, as well as artist bios.

Beyond that, I felt that Pandora did a better job of finding music I like based on my rankings. When I gave a "thumbs down" on Raditaz for a Cake song, Raditaz immediately loaded another Cake song. Substitutions for artists not on the service was also weak: I was given Sheryl Crow and Kate Bush when I set up a station based on Liz Phair. At least Pandora gives me slightly better substitutes, including Lily Allen and the Cowboy Junkies as options similar to Liz Phair.

I may be imagining this, but I also felt that, overtime, Pandora is much quicker about learning what I like and don't like and turning me on to new artists. After spending several hours listening to Raditaz, I can't say I've found any new music that I like: that just doesn't happen when I spend the same amount of time listening to Pandora.

Why Raditaz Is Better

Beyond its promise of more songs, Raditaz also promises no audio ads (both sites have ads on their Web interface; Pandora also plays an audio ad every few songs).

Raditaz also geo-locates listeners to create "most popular" by location lists - something I frankly could live without. So far, the geo-location seems more about targeting ads than it is about improving listener experience.

And perhaps its biggest sell is that, unlike Pandora, you can skip through as many tracks as you want. Pandora, because of its licensing agreements, only lets you skip through so many songs in any given listening session.

Then again, unlimited skips is something I really needed to make it through my test of Raditaz since it missed so frequently in trying to match me up with music I actually wanted to listen to.

To celebrate the milestone, the four-year-old startup has released an audio slideshow storytelling app called Story Wheel. It uses the Instagram API to grab a set of pictures, from which you can select the ones you want and order them. Once the photos are arranged, a brief narrative can be recorded in the browser. The end result is a shareable photo slideshow annotated by you.

The service's growth has also been fueled by the proliferation of its mobile apps and open platform for developers, Liung told us. More than 10,000 third party apps are being developed on SoundCloud's platform, something that has a way of naturally extending the service's reach across the Web.

Perhaps more significantly, SoundCloud's availability on iOS and Android has made the service more accessible and portable. It's easy to see why that's the case. Users can record audio directly into their iPhone, iPad or Android device and publish it to SoundCloud from within the app. On the other end of the equation, listening to audio from SoundCloud on mobile devices is as straightforward as using an iPod or the mobile version of a streaming service like Spotify. For users who actively follow others, SoundCloud can be used as a mix tape comprised largely of content that isn't available on other services.

What's Next For SoundCloud: HTML5 and Social Audio

We asked Liung what SoundCloud is focusing on next. For his team, converting its default embeddable player to HTML5 is a high priority. They launched an optional beta player in HTML5 in November and are in the process of making that the service's default player. Projects like this become a necessity for any company that wants its service to work flawlessly across devices, especially Apple's notoriously anti-Flash iOS platform. SoundCloud's native iOS app has done quite well, but it's all those audio files embedded across the Web that have trouble playing back on iPads and iPhones.

SoundCloud is already an inherently social service, but further injecting itself into the larger social Web is another top priority for the company. SoundCloud recently jumped on the "frictionless sharing" bandwagon with a deep Facebook integration. As controversial as this semi-automated model of sharing is, it has nonetheless proven to be a source of major growth for sites and services who get onboard, thanks to Facebook's massive user base.

Digital music only continues to grow and mature, as streaming services explode, Internet radio companies go public and developers begin using the power of open APIs to mash up sounds and services. SoundCloud alone saw 231% growth last year, while Twitter saw a 104% increase in music-related activity.

What's interesting, though, is how the Web is paving the way for unsigned, independent artists to reach levels of popularity that rival major label acts. This is especially true on SoundCloud, where unsigned artists flock to upload their recordings. But even across the larger Web, three unsigned artists broke into Next Big Sound's "Social 50" list, which chronicles, the 50 biggest artists across all of the social and music sites that they track.

These numbers, while impressive, should be taken with a grain of salt. Next Big Sound has gone to great lengths to pull data from sources like YouTube, Rdio, Last.fm, Pandora, SoundCloud and several others. One service missing from their list is Spotify, which just launched in the U.S. this past summer and has seen enormous growth since then. Still, it looks like they're using a pretty hefty sample of online music data to draw their conclusions. You can take a closer look at their methodology. if you're curious.

With the IntoNow iPhone app, you can identify the shows your friends are watching by analyzing the audio signal. Then you can share those TV shows with your Facebook friends.

Trident is not a bubblegum app. It's yet another apps for seeing what shows your friends are watching, liking and commenting on.

The U-Verse social TV app integrates directly with the Facebook Platform. You can share what you're watching and what you "like."

Zeebox is a social TV app with a slightly different twist. Instead of just seeing what your friends are watching and liking, you can also post those shows directly to your Facebook Timeline.

The Snapstick app for Facebook Timeline is designed for playing and watching video, listening to music and surfing channels with your friends. Web content is streamed directly to your TV.

With the Xbox app, you can share game achievements with friends, which seems more useful than just dumping them into the crowded Facebook news feed. You can also share shows, music and pictures taken with their Kinect device.

The Slacker Radio app is similar to frictionless sharing music services Spotify, MOG and Rdio. You discover and listen to music with friends through Web or mobile devices.

Earlier this week, Kodak launched two Facebook-integrated cameras and two apps; could these two moves save Kodak from its tenuous pre-bankruptcy state?

Facebook and Mercedes-Benz announced a new Facebook app that allows drivers to access Facebook friends and restaurants that their friends have "liked." The new feature will be available in the 2012 SL-Class Mercedes this upcoming spring.

With integration of cars, cameras, music, TV and games, will Facebook become your one true login?

The Grooveshark HTML5 app can stream music from any modern mobile browser, including Safari on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Until now, the service wouldn't work on (non-jailbroken) iOS devices, since the desktop Web app for Grooveshark utilizes Flash for playback.

There's a Cross-Platform Compatible HTML5 Mobile Web App For That

Grooveshark isn't the first company to use the power of HTML5 to circumvent proprietary app store restrictions. The Financial Times launched a Web app of its own last year to get around Apple's steep subscription revenue share requirements. The browser-based version functioned as well as any basic native app and even led to an increase in mobile traffic for the Financial Times, thanks to its cross-platform compatibility.

Amazon has made HTML5 an increasingly central part of its mobile strategy as well, launching the Web-based Kindle Cloud Reader and more recently unveiling an iPad-optimized Kindle e-book store.

Grooveshark's reasons for having to go around Apple and Google are a bit different than Amazon's. The music startup isn't so much concerned about subscription revenue share terms, but rather has been ejected from native app stores because of the legally-questionable nature of its functionality and business model. The company is currently being sued by every major music label, with EMI recently piling on despite being the only one with which Grooveshark has a formal deal in place. The company allegedly hasn't been forthcoming with royalty payments to EMI, so the label has taken Grooveshark to court. Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner were already litigating against the company, accusing it of permitting widespread copyright infringement.

Grooveshark's longterm viability in the face of these lawsuits may be unclear, but for now the company is pushing forward and making its service available to more smartphone and tablet users.