We first looked at the Republic Project in February this year, when it was still in closed beta with only a handful of artists, including Tim Myers, Dexter Freebish, Steriogram, and Still Time. During the beta period, the service provided a lot of help to these bands, but now that the site will be open to all bands, this amount of hand-holding won't scale and bands will have to use the project's self-service tools to manage their accounts. Bands will get a widget that they can put on their site or MySpace page to bring fans to their Republic Project site. On the service, they will be able to upload new videos, track orders, and set the price for their albums and a release date.

When we talked to Republic Project CEO Ryan Swagar yesterday, he stressed that the project is now open for everybody, no matter the size of their fan base or style of music. Bands can set the price for their albums anywhere from $2.99 to $9.99. All of this money will go directly to the band. In addition, the Republic Project will charge fans a fixed $1.99 transaction fee. Swagar also noted that bands don't have to produce full albums but could also use the service while they're in the studio to record just a few songs.

Focus on Video

Of course, bands are free to upload as much or as little content during the pre-release phase as they want, though to make the best use of the service, we would expect bands to update their fans at least once every couple of days. The Republic Project will hold all the money it collects from fans in escrow, just in case a band never actually finishes an album.

Once an album is finished and all the music is uploaded to the service, the band flips a switch and the finished music goes out to all the fans. At the same time, though, the band's site on the service will shut down and the band can sell its final product anywhere else as well. The service does not plan to become a full-blown music retailer and won't sell any of the tracks after the album is finished.

From what we have seen so far, we think the Republic Project looks like a great idea that is very well executed. We are also not aware of any other company that currently provides these services. The Republic Project fills a niche for both musicians and bands and it will be exciting to watch how bands use the service over the next couple of months.

Big words indeed. To see if that You Tube comparison was justified, let's check back in with Imeem one year later and assess how they're doing now.

The tale of the tape is usually a good indication of growth; and according to Compete Imeem has actually declined by 10.5% in unique visitors this past year. The chart below doesn't include Facebook and MySpace, because they are much larger than Imeem. While Imeem is still larger than last.fm and Pandora, the chart below shows a definite dip - whereas last.fm and Pandora grew.

If we add in MySpace and Facebook, you can see the gulf between Imeem and the other two large social network players. We also see the massive growth of Facebook over the past year; it passed MySpace in Dec '08 - Jan '09 according to this data.

Statistics don't tell the whole story of course, however we've also seen other evidence of problems at Imeem. The company appears to be under pressure financially - in October '08, Imeem laid off 25% of its staff. The product is also under strain. In late June this year we reported that Imeem will remove photos and videos from its features, in order to simplify the service and focus on the service's core social music features. That move did not go down well with Imeem users.

We also note a relative dearth of news this year - just 2 news announcements at Imeem so far this year (into the 8th month), both about Imeem Mobile. Our review of Imeem Mobile was tepid.

We don't want to be too negative. There's much still to like about Imeem - its design has improved and the list of record labels is impressive. But it's obvious that the hype that we saw one year ago (including our own comparison to YouTube!) just hasn't panned out.

With Miley Cyrus now draped all over the Imeem homepage and Jonas Brothers in the default playlist, it seems that the site is now aiming to attract the teeny bopper audience that perhaps MySpace and other online music sites don't serve too well. That's great, but it's far from the diverse mainstream audience that Facebook and MySpace attract.

Unfortunately, Imeem is heading the wrong way in terms of its growth. And there are newer, arguably better music streaming services rising up - Spotify has gotten rave reviews so far from international markets and it's about to launch in the U.S.

Can Imeem turn it around? Let us know your thoughts on Imeem in the comments.

It seems the WTO ruled with Antigua after a long series of battles over the fact that US restrictions on online gambling were found to violate free trade agreements. Despite the decision, no new forms of offshore online betting were allowed in the US. In retaliation, Antigua received permission from the WTO to suspend US copyright obligations up to a value of $21 million dollars annually.

Zookz founder Hugh Marshall launched the site in the belief that the Antigua-based company is not subject to US copyright law until those within the space reach a profit of $21 million dollars. Nevertheless, it's unlikely that this is the case as it would mean that the WTO would allow Antigua-based websites to simply give away files or sell them at rock bottom prices in order to stay below the limit. While the actual terms of the WTO's sanction is blurry, John Healey of the LA Times suggests that the annual value limit is likely to represent the loss to US industries rather than the profit yielded. As well, the fact that the site is accessible by global audiences outside of Antigua makes this a particularly suspicious venture.

While the site's 1,500 movies and 50,000 songs represent a relatively small catalogue, it appears that for now, for the price of a Netflix monthly account, Zookz users can access unlimited downloads. Obviously this is tempting. Dubious legality aside, and regardless of how you perceive the RIAA and MPAA, please remember that in this case neither starving musicians nor billionaire record labels receive payment for the downloaded works. If you're still curious about the service, you can register at Zookz.com.

Update: Matt Graves, imeem's VP of marketing and communications, left a comment below. Comments on the imeem blog post are now open, VIP subscribers will be able to get a refund.

The original post continues below:

Unhappy Users and VIPs

It's not surprising, however, that imeem's users are quite vocal about their dissatisfaction with the service's decision to delete the photo and video collections that many have poured quite a few hours of work into over the years. A lot of users are especially outraged by this because they specifically subscribed to imeem's VIP service in order to upload more of their own videos and photos. It's also noteworthy that imeem isn't giving users an easy way to download their content from the site. While users could right-click on every picture and save it to their desktop, there is currently no way to download videos from the site.

Not Handled Well

Overall, we would have to side with imeem's users and it doesn't look like the company is handling this current affair very well. Comments on the blog post are closed, nobody from imeem's staff (as far as we can see) is interacting with customers on imeem's forums, and the service isn't giving paying customers a chance to get a refund. imeem, of course, is under some pressure to make a profit at some point, and the service's relationship with the music industry has been rather rocky lately, but this decision to give users only five days of warning before deleting their content on the site just feels like a textbook case for how not to manage your user community.

The user interface of the desktop player, which looks a bit like Mozilla's Songbird, is slightly more complex than it really needs to be, but it also gives you access to a set of powerful tools that go beyond the core recommendation service. The desktop player, for example, includes a CD burner and some rudimentary support for managing portable players. Thanks to its integration with AudioID, Mufin can also easily find MP3 id information for tracks in your collection that haven't been tagged with the right information yet.

Sort by Sound

At the center of the Mufin Player, is, of course, Mufin's recommendation engine, which allows you to quickly build playlists based on the music similarities between songs. Once you import a new song (Mufin can import your iTunes library, by the way), Mufin automatically analyzes the musical qualities of that song. Based on this, Mufin will then recommend similar songs from both your own collection, or based on information from Mufin.com, which currently features about 5 million tracks. Sadly, Mufin only allows you to play 30-second clips from songs it recommends from its own site.

The problem for Mufin, of course, is that most users already have a favorite music jukebox. Mufin's recommendation features are extremely interesting, and we recommend that you give it a try, but if you like Mufin's recommendations, then using the iTunes plugin might be more worthwhile for you in the long run.

mufin player from mufin on Vimeo.

For artists, the Republic Project offers a full range of services, ranging from the in-house design of the artists' web pages on the site, to reputation management and regular updates of the artists' presence on social media and video sharing sites. The Republic Project will not manage tours or sell merchandise, however.

Focus on Video

In order to produce the artists' behind the scenes videos, the Republic Project has teamed up with Flip, which will provide participating artists with its MiniHD camcorders. The Republic Project puts a strong emphasis on the video production and will edit the artists' video in-house. Only those customers who pre-order the artists' albums (or buy them after they are finished) will get access to the full-length videos, while the Republic Project will put teasers on publicly available video sites like YouTube or Vimeo.

Sounds Like a Good Deal

Ryan Swagar, the Republic Project's CEO and Co-Founder told us earlier this week that he believes that his company offers a better deal for both artists and consumers. The Republic Project keeps 30% of the revenues from all sales, which is similar to the cut that Apple takes for songs sold on iTunes - though most of that money tends to go to the labels and not to the artists.

Access to a band's site, with video updates and blog posts during the production of the album, as well as a download of the finished product will cost between $9.99 and $14.99. This is also similar to what other online music stores charge, though that obviously only includes access to the songs and doesn't include the 'box set material' that the Republic Project plans to offer.

We like the ideas behind the Republic Project: connecting artists and fans directly, providing DRM-free music, and helping artists to develop their digital footprint, while also allowing these musicians to bypass the trappings of traditional music deals. In the end, the marketplace will decide if this is something that users want - and that bands want to sign up for - but to us, it looks like the Republic Project has put together a very interesting package. Because of its emphasis on pre-orders, however, its appeal might currently be limited to bands that already have a strong, dedicated fan-base.

SitePoint's Bushfire Appeal

On the subject of worthy charities, Australian-based media company SitePoint is currently running a special promotion to help the victims of the terrible bushfires in the Melbourne area. SitePoint is offering 5 books (in PDF format) and you pay for just 1; and 100% of the proceeds from that will be donated to the Australian Red Cross Victorian Bushfire Appeal 2009.

There are more than 650 stores currently, with over 250,000 songs in the catalogue - most appear to be available at $0.99 per song or $8.99 per album. The site claims to be "working with" 4,500 labels, including 4AD, XL, Rough Trade, Matador, Dominio, and Ged Day's own Warp.

Other than the lack of major label music, there is another minor annoyance for those of us who don't live in the U.S. - international users will frequently run into a "we're sorry, but this release is not available in your country" message. However on the plus side, all the music available for download is DRM-free and at high quality 320Kbps.

Founder Ged Day set up People's Music Store because he felt that no one company, including his own Bleep.com, can manage music expertise at a large scale. People's Music Store is hoping to tap into the Long Tail and enable music fans to create thousands of unique music stores. In a way it's like 'MySpace meets Etsy'.

On some of the more popular stores, for example one called walpod, we can see plenty of evidence of social media:

• Profiles
• Storekeeper comments - basically a form of blog post
• Shoutbox - like Facebook's Wall
• RSS feeds
• Favoriting stores (kind of like the 'friending' concept in social networks)
• Ability to add items from other peoples stores to your own, with one click
  

However there's work to be done with the social elements on the service - for example it's not intuitive where and how to add content such as 'news' and other multimedia into one's storefront.

Overall I found the concept of setting up my own online record store to be a compelling one, despite the limited range of music currently available and the relatively minor quibbles with social media elements. And in terms of music discovery, People's Music Store does a great job of enabling music fans to find new music. In the 'alternative' music stores I browsed, I discovered several interesting new acts I hadn't heard before. So if you're a music fan, People's Music Store is worth checking out. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Here are a couple of screenshots showing the type of data musicians and music industry professionals can expect.

The first is an example of where a band's fans are hanging out on popular music social networking sites. In the example below last.fm has the largest fan base. This kind of information will be very handy to bands, because it will enable them to target news and interactive features to the social platforms where most of their fans hang out.

The following screenshot shows examples of song stats on a website. The 'total plays' stat is not too disimilar to the 'page views' stats that online publishers track in Google Analytics - and indeed Band Metrics very much models itself after the popular Google Analytics service.

Band Metrics received angel funding in November '08. It is a project of Indie Music, Inc., an Atlanta-based music technology company founded by Duncan Freeman.

Statistics for musicians is an important next step for online music. As a Wall St Journal article about trendy indie musician Bon Iver noted, "exposure on blogs, YouTube, social-networking, marketing and other sites can allow them [musicians] to nurture a following quickly and cheaply." So services like Band Metrics will add an extra layer of granularity to that, allowing the next Bon Ivers to get hard data about their popularity on the Web.

Mugasha, a new service focused on the world of electronic music, hopes to improve that listening experience by taking those long sets and parsing them into something you can use.

Compared to how we're accessing DJ sets today, it's a leap from that linear radio format to the modern user-controlled listening experience to which we've all become accustomed. And it's provided in an interface that is intuitive and aesthetically pleasing.

Mugasha was originally conceived and prototyped during Portland Startup Weekend in May 2008. After several months of development and testing, it's been made available to a limited number of users.

If you're interested in more about the thinking behind the service, you can listen to co-founder Akshay Dodeja describe the service to Robert Scoble during an interview conducted last year.

For all the upside to Mugasha, however, there is still one drawback to the young service: a limited number of sets and genres. So, it's likely that some of your favorite artists aren't yet available on Mugasha. That said, the collection continues to grow. In fact, the service just added a new series of Trance sets. And there is the promise of new sets being added on a regular basis.

Even with the limited selection, there's still days and days worth of music available to test the service and get a feel for what Mugasha delivers. No matter what your preferred genre, we're sure you'll find the service a compelling addition to your available musical resources - especially if you've been among those listeners dealing with hours of cryptic sets.

But why take our word for it? If you're interested in listening to some of Mugasha's current sets, we've got some good news: ReadWriteWeb has been allocated 500 invites for the private beta that will get you behind the velvet rope.

The invites are first come, first served. When they're gone, they're gone. Simply enter the beta code "RWW" at sign up and start making some sense of the latest DJ sets.

In our tests, Mufin often performed better than Apple's Genius feature, but for now, the plugin is only available for Windows.

Fingerprinting

Mufin creates a unique fingerprint for every song in your library when you start the plugin for the first time. You can choose if you want the recommendations to be based on the analysis of 30 second snippets (for fast analysis) or on the whole song (very slow, but highly accurate). Mufin's proprietary algorithms can then create playlists based on the similarities between the songs in your library. In creating these fingerprints, Mufin looks at over 40 characteristics, including tempo, instruments, and rhythm structure.

Apple's algorithms, on the other hand, are hidden in a black box, but seem to be based around the listening and purchasing habits of other users on iTunes.

Mufin's approach means that it will work for any song you may have imported into iTunes, no matter whether it is part of Apple's library or not. Mufin is also agnostic as to what language the songs are in.

Similar to Apple's Genius, the Mufin plugin will also make purchasing recommendations for similar songs that are not yet in your iTunes library and take you right to the iTunes store to listen to the preview or purchase them.

Verdict

Overall, we have come away very impressed with Mufin's recommendations. Judging from what we have seen so far, it may just replace the Genius feature as our preferred way of constructing automatic playlists.

That said, we are still not great fans of Mufin's core web service, which, unlike the plugin, is encumbered by licensing problems and which can only play 30 seconds of most songs (and often can't play the songs at all). The plugin, however, is a clear winner in our eyes.

Audiolizer offers a library of musical selections for creating playlists - the mixtape concept we all know and love. It's rather limited at this point, but it shows promise. Currently, you have to know the artists or songs you're seeking, but Audiolizer has a discovery option in the works. And there doesn't yet appear to be a way to save and share your mixtapes with friends - aside from walking over and setting up a playlist on their machines. While there is no information on where the tracks originate, the selection is extremely broad. I searched on a number of random artists and was able to find a bunch of music from each one. But your tastes may be more eclectic than mine, so give it a shot.

Fizy is a track-by-track search service. No playlists. No downloads. Just searching for and playing individual tracks you're seeking. So why try it? There are two big benefits to Fizy. First, it's database of music is huge. They're claiming over 75 billion mp3s indexed. Diving through the Fizy music selection made me nostalgic for the good old days of Napster when I could find practically any song I wanted to find. Second, it's international. Fizy supports at least 26 languages and is designed to be accessible to as many people as possible. As an added bonus, Fizy will also serve up a video of the track, if it's available. In fact, during my testing, I found the video selection to be a more comprehensive and more accessible than the US-centric MTVmusic.

If you're in the mood to test some very early services - or if you're just looking to find that random track you've been seeking - these three are definitely worth trying.

Here's hoping that satisfying all of your New Year's resolutions will be as easy as this one.

Photo "I Am Music" by Maxedaperture used under Creative Commons

We think it's CBS Radio and not Clear Channel which has made the biggest strides. CBS' partnerships with AOL and Yahoo!, along with its ownership of trendy online radio app last.fm, have effectively made CBS Radio the most powerful force in Internet radio in 2008.

Kevin Conroy, executive vice president of AOL, recently wrote in a guest blog post at Radio Business Report about the evolution of AOL Radio. Conroy wrote that the partnership with CBS Radio allowed AOL to tap into the "core competency in traditional radio" that CBS had. At the same time CBS got access to "AOL's substantial online listener base, and allowed it to connect with the AOL Network, which reaches more than 110 million unique visitors a month", wrote Conroy. He also noted that AOL got "an improved player, built by CBS Radio" that works on both PCs and Macs.

At the end of August we published data from comScore about the Internet Radio industry. It showed that the big Internet companies still dominate, specifically AOL Radio and Yahoo Music. At that point AOL Radio had been showing excellent annual growth, with a 56% increase over the past year. However Yahoo Music had decreased 19% annually since July 07. According to Reuters, in October comScore data had AOL at 3.99 million unique visitors, while CBS Web properties had 3.95 million unique visitors and Yahoo! Launchcast had 2.87 million. When you look at who powers both AOL and Yahoo now, it's clear that CBS has significantly increased its market presence since mid-08.

At ReadWriteWeb we've tended to focus on the innovative Web native apps that have risen independently of the big radio stations. According to comScore Pandora rose 89% from July 07 - July 08, while last.fm had 62% annual growth. But both the traditional radio broadcasting and Internet bigcos have been steadily increasing their influence - none moreso than CBS, which in addition to the AOL/Yahoo! partnerships this year also acquired last.fm in May 2007.

And then there's mobile. As Reuters pointed out, the iPhone has had a big influence on radio for mobile devices this year (see our post Top 5 Streaming Music Apps for the iPhone for examples). Other mobile devices, such as Blackberry and the Internet phones from Nokia, are also ramping up.

What other trends have you noticed in 2008 from Internet radio? What do you expect to see happen in 2009?

The Top 10 tracks is absolutely dominated by Coldplay's Viva la Vida, with 6 songs - including numbers 1 and 2. The title track was number 1, with more than three million listens in about 6 months. Coldplay also features at 5, 6, 8 and 9. This is reminiscent of the dominance of the Billboard singles chart the Beatles enjoyed in April 1964!

The only other artist to make the top 10 tracks was Katy Perry at number 7 with 'I kissed a girl'.

Guess what's the number 1 album? Coldplay's Viva la Vida. Coldplay did have an impressive online launch for that much-anticipated album, which certainly helped. Indeed the album was also the biggest selling iTunes album download of 2008.

These charts, although depressingly dominated by a few bands, show that last.fm is a data generating machine. Its Scrobbler technology tracks what users listen to on a variety of media players - such as iTunes, Songbird, Hype Machine, Blip.fm. It tracks data at the rate of about 650 songs per second, from a community of over 25 million users worldwide according to the analytics firm Omniture. Last.fm claims this is the largest global database of online music behaviour.

Head of The Long Tail Wins Again

Last.fm says it currently has 43 million distinct pieces of music from more than 12 million artists in its database. Of course, even with such a 'long tail' of music data, clearly the Coldplays of this world will continue to dominate. It's not just Coldplay either, Radiohead probably would've been just as successful in 2007. According to one digger, last year "Radiohead would have been the entire top 10 tracks...". We can't verify that claim, but it sounds all too plausible given the 2008 data.

Although it's disappointing that mainstream artists can dominate charts even on the Internet, the beauty of online music services is that users can create their own Top 10's too. Thousands of those won't include Coldplay (including this author's!).

The complete "Best of 2008" lists from last.fm:

Best Artist (artists who have released their debut album this year)

1. MGMT - Oracular Spectacular

2. The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing

3. Sara Bareilles - Little Voice

4. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

5. Katy Perry - One Of The Boys

6. The Last Shadow Puppets - The Age of the Understatement

7. Foals - Antidotes

8. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

9. Does It Offend You, Yeah? - You Have No Idea What You're Getting Yourself Into

10. Santogold - Santogold

Best Album

1. Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends

2. MGMT - Oracular Spectacular

3. Portishead - Third

4. Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I-IV

5. The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing

6. The Kooks - Konk

7. Death Cab for Cutie - Narrow Stairs

8. Hot Chip - Made In The Dark

9. Jack Johnson - Sleep Through The Static

10. Sigur Rós - Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust

Best Track

1. Coldplay - Viva La Vida

2. Coldplay - Violet Hill

3. MGMT - Time To Pretend

4. MGMT - Electric Feel

5. Coldplay - Life In Technicolour

6. Coldplay - Cemeteries of London

7. Katy Perry - I Kissed A Girl

8. Coldplay - 42

9. Coldplay - Strawberry Swing

10. MGMT - Kids

All of this is further proof that Web technology has gone mainstream in the music business.

The Guns n Roses MySpace page is impressive. It offers the full album online, a couple of days before the official release in stores. True GNR fans, including this author, will still buy the album when it is released. But by promoting the album online a couple of days before release, it encourages new fans and gives Guns n Roses a lot of free publicity and viral uptake on the Internet. This will almost certainly increase overall sales.

While Guns n Roses hasn't gone as far as Radiohead did with their latest album In Rainbows - which was released as a 'pay what you want' download before it was even an actual CD product - Guns n Roses and MySpace is an appropriate partnership for both parties. For Guns n Roses, it allows them to reach a young, hip, massive audience. And for MySpace, it gives them a lot of page views and we presume a very healthy profit from the record label and retailers such as Best Buy (which has a banner ad right at the top of the page). We should also point out that Guns n Roses has employed some heavy handed tactics to stop illegal file-sharing of the album, so they haven't been entirely savvy about the Web. Still, the MySpace promotion is inspired.

We've been impressed by many of the online music services this year - last.fm has continued to evolve its web services, Imeem has been a revelation for many music fans, Pandora's traffic continues to grow despite ongoing legal issues, sites like The Hype Machine (our coverage) and Muxtape (when it was available) offer something new and different, and so on.

But we're also noticing some of the more traditional radio stations vastly improving their Web sites - and NPR is a great example of that. NPR Music is currently marking its one year anniversary. It features content from NPR and 12 of its public radio stations, but what's impressed us has been the "original-to-NPR Music features" such as live performances, studio sessions, first listens to forthcoming albums, and interviews. This author is a subscriber to NPR's All Songs Considered podcast, which has recently featured a full Radiohead concert and a Guest DJ appearance by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke.

I want my MTV? Not anymore. I can get everything I want in my Web browser! Although to be fair, even MTV has moved its music to the Web.