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

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.

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.

The Internet and mobile technology are beginning to have an equally significant impact on the creation of music itself. Extremely powerful recording, DJing and sequencing software is making its way from laptops to tablets and smartphones, for example. Now, the way people learn to play music in the first place is changing as well.

These days, instead of traveling across town to attend music lessons, many people are using tools like Skype to learn from a distance, just as they can do things like attend meetings and take academic courses regardless of their physical location. The new model allows for more flexible learning and in many cases improves the regularity of lessons since it avoids things like traffic jams and bad weather.

Even if one doesn't get one-on-one lessons via Skype, the Web is loaded with music education resources for all skill levels. When a few friends and I started a band last year, I decided to brush up some more advanced drumming techniques, since it had been a few years since I last played. Much like Lynda.com and Tuts+offer video tutorials for software and coding, there a number of sites out there who do the same for drummers and other musicians. I found one in particular that published a free video podcast, enabling me to download the lessons to my phone or iPad and bring a virtual teacher down into the basement with me.

Online music lessons range from having the structure of a college course to being as loose and on-your-own-time as a series of YouTube searches. On YouTube, the quality of the material may vary, but there are quite a few dedicated sites with legitimate, high-quality video lessons available, sometimes for free.

For those who are especially serious and have the money to spend, the Berklee College of Music offers online-only courses and certifications through a website called BerkleeMusic. The courses don't come cheap, but enrolling and paying for them is a straight-forward, Web-based process.

Learning Music Goes Mobile

The explosion of smartphones and tablets has impacted countless aspects of daily life for millions of people, and budding musicians are no exception. Not only can you watch video tutorials on your iPad or Android phone, but there's a growing selection of educational apps that allow for casual learning from any location.

Some of the numerous mini-piano and keyboard apps for the iOS and Android, for example, come with built-in guides to musical notation, with some of them going into more depth about music theory. Other apps drill down further into music theory, such as Wolfram Alpha's Music Theory Course Assistant app for iOS.

There's a wide selection of instrument-specific learning apps for iOS alone, such as GuitarLab and Gibson Learn and Master Guitar or Piano Tutor and Virtuoso Piano.

Like with any learning process, the effectiveness of mobile apps and Web tutorials like these will depend somewhat on one's approach and level of motivation. Ultimately, in-person music lessons may still work best for some. There will likely always be a place for one-on-one, in-the-flesh education, but these new tools and methods open things up to a wider group of people with virtually no restrictions on time and place.

Berlin based music and audio sharing network SoundCloud has raised a reported $50m more venture capital from the super prestigious Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mike Butcher at TechCrunch Europe reported today. The company had raised about $16m in two previous rounds. If you're not familiar with SoundCloud, now is a good time to learn about the site. It's a vibrant and innovative community, about to either blow up huge or go down in flames with the change that comes from a large and high-priced investment like this.

Meeker's 2011 presentation on the state of the internet addressed a trend of companies growing strong in one small market and then exploding out onto the global stage; she provided 4 examples of that trend and SoundCloud was the only one of the four not yet a Kleiner portfolio company. (Waze, Shazam and Spotify were the others.) Meeker also mentioned SoundCloud in discussing her belief that sound is going to be a next major area of innovation, eg. Siri, Spotify and SoundCloud.

Meeker loves mobile and while SoundCloud's mobile apps are already good, it will be interesting to see whether and how her leadership inspires further development in global mobile applications.

What SoundCloud Means

SoundCloud is an inspiring community of audio producers and fans, leveraging new technology like widespread smart phones, cheap data storage and transfer, within a great user experience. It's reminiscent of the best things about YouTube in its early days, but it's different.

One good way to get started finding good things on SoundCloud is via the official staff collection of highlights from the site. That's where I found the WildEarthVoices account, whose recordings and favorites from other accounts are all about ambient sound recordings from nature. SoundCloud has all kinds of sounds on it though; from podcasts to thunderstorms to electronic music, music made electronically and music you might call electronica. (There's a lot of electronic music on SoundCloud.)

Not all of SoundCloud's experiments work out either, SoundCloudLabs was an effort to highlight cutting edge apps that seems to have lost steam over the past Summer.

None the less, the SoundCloud community appears to be small but growing fast. Traffic analyst firm Compete reports 2.3 million unique visitors per month, up nearly 2X year over year. SoundCloud self-reported 5 million registered users in June. It grew to 9 million as 2011 drew to a close. Pandora, for context, has 80 million registered users.

The company only added web and iOS one-click recording at the end of 2010. The acclaimed iPad app came out in October. The website still doesn't offer RSS feeds of published files.

There's something really exciting about checking the Activity stream on the SoundCloud iOS app and finding something new, then clicking through to listen with other people to music that was just posted.

SoundCloud was founded five years ago this month by CTO Eric Wahlforss, who has degrees in Philosophy, Industrial Economics, Computer Science and Business Administration and CEO Alexander Ljung, who studied marketing and Human Computer Interaction. Both are Swedish. ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus did an in-depth interview with Ljung about the company's prospects this October.

From inline commenting to smooth integration with 3rd party social networks, the user experience at SoundCloud is fun. Discovery can be a little challenging but exploration is easy. It would be nice if SoundCloud would sync with my Scrobbled musical history at Last.fm and offer me immediate personal recommendations.

AnnoySPASMcrack by ellefläädt

The service hosts up to 120 minutes of audio for free, then offers annual subscriptions for more storage, advanced analytics and promotional materials priced at between €29 ($37) per year through €59 ($76) per month for the unlimited pro plus package.

The site offers a huge quantity of Creative Commons licensed audio and loves to interview the users of that and other content.

The SoundCloud API supports an app gallery with more than 250 apps listed and probably an even larger array of independent projects, from things like urban music catalogue CitySounds.fm to the collaborative mashup art project Instagrambient.

SoundCloud feels like the kind of creative place that the Internet was meant to be. For that to gain a big infusion of cash and the support of some of the world's leading tech investors will hopefully mean more of the same and even better for the SoundCloud community.

For this year's ReadWriteWeb list of the most important and influential consumer-grade cloud computing apps of the year 2011, we focused our gaze on services that truly fit the formal definition: specifically, services that 1) utilize a remote resource of 2) variable capacity 3) which the user can provision for herself, 4) which is mostly or totally independent of programs installed on the user's devices or PCs, and 5) which is not just a Web site with a big server. You may have seen Facebook on some publications' Top Cloud lists already; by our definition, Facebook is not a cloud service. But we did look for providers that perform innovative, discrete functions built around their services.

Hosting services are not cloud apps for purposes of this list; and there are plenty of innovative hosts to consider (we gave serious thought to Wistia), but in the end we decided that a hosting service is not really an application unless it provides a discrete function that goes over and above simple storage or sharing. Analytics, which Wistia provides, is right on the edge, but it's really a measurement of a byproduct of using the service as opposed to a function that users actually perform. That's not saying Wistia isn't a great idea; it just belongs on another list.

10. CloudApp. The largest single category of cloud apps for consumers is storage and retrieval, which is understandable because it's a service that everyone needs to one degree or another. What's interesting is how certain services innovate on this theme, and especially whether they give themselves room to continue innovating.

CloudApp is for Mac OS and iOS users at the moment, and its innovation is that it's building a little ecosystem around itself. It utilizes your choice of quick-and-easy gestures for designating a file or object to send to CloudApp's storage, the most basic of which is dragging and dropping the object to CloudApp's icon in the taskbar. In exchange for this gesture, CloudApp produces a URI which is copied to the Clipboard. From there, you can paste it into an e-mail, a tweet, or an IM message; when your recipient receives the link, she has instant access to the object.

The way CloudApp innovates is by incrementally enhancing what can be easily uploaded, and how those objects can be utilized in their native context. One example is screenshots: You can designate a key for taking a screenshot and uploading it in one fell swoop; the recipient sees your link, clicks on it, and sees your screen. There's no exporting or importing necessary here.

But what hoisted CloudApp onto our Top 10 list this year is how well the company is promoting Raindrops. This is an extremely clever, self-promotional idea for enabling developers to build their own tools that utilize CloudApp in similarly contextual ways, with the help of CloudApp's own API. One example the company created at the time this feature was launched in April 2010 is for Adobe Photoshop; since then, the community has contributed a truckload more, including an intelligent link interpreter for Twitter and a stand-alone CloudApp client for iOS called Stratus.

Here's an example (above) of another add-on you can't even see (which is a good thing): The maker of SparrowMail used CloudApp's API to develop a way to do simple drag-and-drop of attachments into e-mail messages, bypassing Mac OS' sometimes convoluted series of steps.

Building a community around something as simple as an app is a difficult thing for a small company to achieve, especially when it's in competition with a plethora of other vendors in the same category. CloudApp is pulling this off brilliantly. (It's worth noting that the service is built on the open-source Heroku platform from Salesforce, thus answering RWW's question from last year on whether developers will trust Heroku: Yes.)

9. Waze. What would be nice is if someone hired a few thousand cars to drive around each town looking for traffic incidents, and report on them in real-time. Let's see, $25 bucks per hour salary times 1,000 reporters times 50 cities... I'll get back to you on that idea.

Or, what would be brilliant is if someone leveraged the platform that's already in existence to enable a few thousand folks to do this job passively and voluntarily. Waze is a system that utilizes the GPS information being pinged back from iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices. It's been in existence since 2006, but last October the 3.0 version of the service introduced a fabulous new feature (so far, just for the iPhone users) that integrates with Twitter. This way, people can tweet on what's happening in their neighborhoods (including the good things, like street fairs) from right where they're standing.

Okay, maybe there aren't a thousand Waze users in a city like mine (Indianapolis) just yet, but it's surprising what you can find. There's updates on traffic accidents and reported police sightings (which are rarer in some cities than others). What Waze demonstrates is that there are ways of making use of data that can be collected passively from a crowd of users, in ways that do not jeopardize privacy.

8. Box.net. This is one of the services that comes to most folks mind when they know what a cloud app is. What's kept Box.net in the news, including just this month - and what keeps Box.net on our list this year - is a constant stream of innovations. Customizable synchronization is one example from last fall; and earlier this month, a completely revamped iOS app that enables features like uploading photos and videos to discrete folders. This puts Box.net on a par with dedicated photo-sharing services that simply can't expand its features list to Box.net's size. And just this morning, the company launched an enterprise-grade option for unlimited storage.

Next: Playing your own tune...

7. Audiobox.fm. My wife and I are both Pandora fans, although last year I found it ironic that both of us had been working - albeit without admitting it to ourselves - to make Pandora play music we actually already owned. Yes, that sounds like a pathetic waste of precious seconds, but there it is.

Audiobox.fm, launched last year, is the streaming service that folks need anyway: one which enables them to store the music they own in the cloud ($3.99 for 11 GB is pretty fair) and also play that music from any device using the service's own media player. ITunes users who were a bit discouraged last year by Audiobox.fm's dedicated player were treated this year to the option of streaming their own M3U files from cloud storage, to their player of choice (with variable results, especially in the case of Winamp, but not for lack of trying).

6. Joukuu. We introduced you to this storage maintenance service last month, calling it a "cloud cloud." It's a Web-based console for displaying in a single list the contents of files stored to Google Docs, Box.net, and Dropbox (Microsoft SkyDrive support still forthcoming). When you work with many colleagues on a project, and they all subscribe to different services (often the case with independent contractors who happen to be paired together), Joukuu is a true timesaver. And the drag-and-drop functionality of its outside-the-browser app saves you about a thousand clicks per day.

5. Hojoki. (If you weren't looking carefully enough, with definitions of Joukuu and Hojoki, you'd think this would be a foreign language course.) Entire billion-dollar-plus industries are built around so-called "collaboration platforms" that enable sharing and versioning of documents among members of teams. And yet there are individual cloud apps (Beanstalk, Dropbox, Evernote, GitHub) that are involved with the individual tasks around collaboration, and which all have managed identity, but which are not linked together.

So it really took more clever observation than creative genius to create Hojoki, but the premise works just the same as if genius were involved from the beginning. Hojoki is a messaging system that looks an awful lot like something you'd see from Salesforce. It builds a stream of people with whom you're already sharing contacts, and lets you organize them into groups for collaborative projects. The activities that all of you share within that group are pipelined through the Hojoki stream to everyone in that group, so it becomes an automatic task progress monitor. The service is currently in beta, although it's already made significant inroads, and there will be a business model attached to a premium service once the beta cycle is complete.

4. Do.com. Nothing more thoroughly demonstrates the rapidly changing state of the applications market in general than the fact that Microsoft Outlook's greatest competition in over a decade comes from something that isn't really an e-mail client. Do.com from Salesforce includes the level and ease of functionality for file sharing and collaboration that enterprises may have already attached to Outlook by way of add-ons, but which aren't available for everyday Outlook users.

And by tying Do.com to Gmail as its primary messaging service, Salesforce is wedging itself beneath Outlook and threatening to uproot it from home users' and small business users' systems. Do.com may not be a threat yet to Exchange, though it may put a dent in Hosted Exchange services for smaller businesses. Nonetheless, it's demonstrating that even an e-mail client with "2010" in its name is looking more and more like "1980."

Next: Is there beauty yet to be found in the cloud...

3. Spotify. The reason for the decline, if not yet outright collapse, of the global recording industry is that it is has not been meaningful or desirable for consumers to own music. The industry's principal delivery system for music, even to this date, remains a container that consumers no longer want; and the system that consumers prefer, and which a majority of them now actually use, is something that the industry has yet to truly embrace. Services like Last.fm and Pandora are more convenient than music ownership and, for more users today, more interesting than radio.

Spotify gambles with the notion that $9.99/month subscriptions to its premium mobile services (estimated last month at about 2.5 million) will be enough to pay down the royalties it undoubtedly owes for all its users, including those who use the free Spotify Radio desktop app to choose the music they want from Spotify's huge library. RWW's John Paul Titlow has been covering Spotify and Spotify Radio very thoroughly, in part 1 and part 2; and RWW's Jon Mitchell named Spotify #6 in his list of overall Top 10 Consumer Web Apps for 2011.

But what made Spotify qualify here again as a Top Cloud App is something it didn't have last year: an apps ecosystem of its very own. If you're thinking we've screwed up and posted a picture of Last.fm instead... well, it's no screw-up. Spotify's new desktop application, with music recommendation apps built-in, is so strong that it includes Last.fm as one of its recommendation providers, along with Rolling Stone magazine and TuneWiki.

When fully built out, the Spotify apps ecosystem will enable what the company is calling an "authentication layer" between record labels, app developers, and users. The technology that the record industry could not find it within itself to build for itself, may just end up being built for it. When that happens, it may have a certain deity to thank, followed immediately by Spotify.

2. iCloud. The establishment of Apple's stronghold in devices, and the services that support them, was deliberate, systematic, and in almost every aspect of its execution, brilliant. The exception was MobileMe, a service whose frequent slip-ups and uncharacteristically dramatic failures led Steve Jobs to openly declare its launch "not our finest hour."

Therefore iCloud could be noteworthy for having (at least thus far) not been a spectacular failure. But the brilliance of Apple's marketing has left many with the impression that iCloud has no direct competition with Android. What Android does lack, and what iCloud does provide, is a context of the service as an ever-present resource that's attached, albeit ethereally, to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Of course it's an Apple-only service, but haven't all Apple-produced disk drives since 1978 been Apple-only? From Apple's perspective, why must a virtual device, by definition, be more platform-agnostic than a physical one?

Because it's just another Apple device, it's programmable like an Apple device. Developers can build apps around it, and create new functions and methods that Apple Corp. hasn't even foreseen. For any other platform, this would be a great thing; from Apple's perspective, it could easily become perceived as an effort by independents to trim their way through Apple's carefully walled garden. Expect some "openness" issues to crop up around iCloud throughout 2012.

1. Evernote. Bill Gates was known to have overused the word "great" during his press appearances as the head of Microsoft, so there are probably thousands of sound bites of the phrase "great apps" just waiting to be compiled into the next great, annoying YouTube mash-up. Only a few apps get to be described as things of beauty.

At its core, Evernote does one thing, and does that very well. It collects clips of data from the Web sites you're reading or the applications you're using, and gathers them into categories that can be synced in the cloud and accessed from multiple devices. I noticed Evernote had pervaded the apps repertoires of many of the Syracuse University students we covered during last month's MLB.com Apps Challenge. Now that laptops, tablets, and in some universities, thin client desktops are the principal research tool of every scholar, Evernote has quickly risen to the level of ubiquitousness among this specific class of users - as invaluable to the work they do as Twitter.

Whether Evernote rises to the level of "beauty" depends on whether it raises its batting average of late. My friend and colleague Joe Brockmeier discovered the latest app in the Evernote ecosystem, called Hello, was perhaps a little less than half-baked. Nevertheless, the core of Evernote has joined Box.net, Dropbox, and Google Docs as the very definition of "cloud app" among users who know the cloud, and who truly do get it.

When it comes to choosing which option to go for, the most you can do is take each service for a spin, run a couple searches for stuff you like and see what comes up. You can get a general feeling of which one's a better fit and go with your gut, but wouldn't some hard data be nice?

The results show Rdio coming out on top by a number of measures, despite the fact that Spotify is known to have a bigger selection overall. Several respected artists were only availble on Rdio, including Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Queen and Thelonius Monk. Both services have a ton of exclusive albums, but only Rdio can boast Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon or London Calling by The Clash.

Spotify (at 4.8%) had slightly fewer exclusive albums than Rdio, on which 6.8% of the albums were available exclusively. Nine of the 100 most popular albums were only on Rdio, while only one of them was exclusive to Spotify.

To be fair, Rate Your Music is probably not the most authoritative source of what's popular. A more complex analysis might mash together datasets from Billboard, Last.fm and, if possible, Amazon user reviews to come up with a more comprehensive list of popular albums.

Not included in the study were services like Grooveshark and MOG, the latter of which does not make an API available to developers.

In the case of Spotify's new Web radio feature, we're not going to go so far as to say that it's a "Pandora killer," but its inclusion in Spotify's desktop client is going to give the up-and-coming streaming service a tangible advantage over the 11-year-old Web radio service.

The recommendations offered up by Spotify Radio are not quite as good as those on Last.fm or Pandora in many cases, but they're pretty solid and the feature has serious potential. We started stations based on a handful of artists across genres and time periods and found the results to be mostly appropriate without being too broad or overly obvious. We even tried a handful lesser known artists from a few decades ago and Spotify was able to rattle off sonically similar tracks.

The feature definitely has its limitations. For one, that stations based on an individual songs (rather than artists) seem limited. Those channels appear to operate as though you'd selected the artist, not the song. By contrast, when you put a specific track into Pandora, it looks for songs with similar aural qualities regardless of genre, time period or other broad characteristics. It does a pretty effective job of pairing up songs that actually sound similar. And if you don't agree, you can always hit the thumbs down button.

The experience certainly varies depending on what you enter. While many stations returned appropriate-sounding results, a station for the band Nirvana mostly brought up other well-known rock songs from the same era, including a slow, cheesy ballad by Aerosmith.

Spotify hasn't divulged what's fueling their recommendations, but it does feel pretty similar to results from The Echo Nest, which powers a number of music apps, including Clear Channel's Pandora cline, iHeartRadio. UPDATE: It is indeed the Echo Nest that's powering Spotify Radio, both companies have confirmed. The recommendation engine has some growing to do before it's a thoroughly viable alternative to Pandora. Still, the mere addition of such a feature to Spotify will make many users that much less prone to load up Pandora.

Spotify Radio is just the latest way users of the streaming service can discover new music. The company recently unveiled a platform for third party apps, included editorially curated selections from Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, as well as more automated recommendations from Last.fm. The app platform and the new radio feature will both be rolled out shortly to desktop users, but you can download a preview here.

The new features are not yet included in the Spotify desktop client, but curious users can download a preview of the next version of the software. We did and after using it, we're finding that the inclusion of third party apps makes Spotify much better.

Of the dozen or so apps that launched with Spotify's new platform, many of them are geared toward discovering new music, whether via human tastemakers or by algorithm. Reputable music publications like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork have apps, which further bridges the gap between the reading published reviews and actually hearing music.

Critic-curated Playlists from Top Publications

Pitchfork's app takes the experience of reading reviews and best-of lists from the influential publication and bakes that directly into Spotify itself, enabling immediate playback of the albums you're reading about. The app opens up to Pitchfork's "Best New Albums" list, from which any of the albums can be streamed (assuming they're available on Spotify, which most are). From there, you can browse the rest of their audio-enhanced reviews and view their repository of Spotify playlists, which include many the site's best-of roundups like the Top 500 tracks of the 2000s and the Top 50 Singles of 2003. Throughout the experience, almost every song you see listed can be heard and albums and lists can be added as a Spotify playlist for later listening.

The Rolling Stone Recommends app is a pretty similar concept, just from a more mainstream editorial perspective. All of the magazine's recent top-rated albums and songs can be streamed and the app offers playlists that tie in with recent features in Rolling Stone, such as the top guitarists of all time. The Guardian offers an app of its own, again based on the music its critics have recently reviewed.

Songs Recommended Based on Your Listening History or Mood

Professional critics aren't the only source of music recommendations on the new platform. The desktop client is now deeply integrated with Last.fm, a service that has long provided recommendations based on one's listening history. It can track every song you listen to in iTunes, Spotify and a variety of other services and devices and then serve up music based on what you're most likely to be into.

Rather than just letting you "scrobble" songs off to some other island called Last.fm, Spotify brings much of the Last.fm Web app's functionality directly into its desktop client. The "Overview" tab displays your vital stats: most listened-to albums, recommended music, loved tracks and recently scrobbled tracks. The "Now Playing" tab focuses on the music currently being played, whether it came from the Last.fm app or elsewhere, and give instant access to similar artists.

The "Recommendations" tab drills shows an expanded view of what's recommended on the app's home screen. This is where most of the magic happens. Each recommended album can be streamed instantly or added as a playlist within Spotify. As it's always done, Last.fm identifies exactly why it's recommending each album. Sometimes it's because you've listened to several similar artists, or perhaps you've already heard one release by that artist and want to hear more.

The functionality itself is nothing new. This is what Last.fm has done for years. But now that it's baked right into Spotify, it enables you to stream every recommended song or album in its entirety, all from a single interface.

If you're already a Last.fm user, the addition of this app alone blows the old Spotify experience out of the water. The integration breathes new life into Last.fm while making Spotify a much more useful service.

Another service that's available as an integrated app is Moodagent, a service that recommends music based on very specific musical qualities such as tempo and mood. It allows Spotify users to choose any song that happens to suit their mood at the moment, and then automatically build out a lengthy playlist of songs that are likely to evoke the same emotional response.

This is Just the Beginning

Other apps that are launching with the new Spotify platform include one for music aggregation site We Are Hunted, social listening service SoundDrop and Billboard. Songkick shows upcoming concerts by artist you've listened to, while TuneWiki displays lyrics in time with when they're sung during a song.

As much value as these apps add to the experience of using Spotify, it's really just a handful of partners the Swedish service has opted to launch with. This is really just the beginning. The platform is now open to developers, who can use the same HTML5 and JavaScript they're accustomed to using to build Web apps. Spotify is requiring apps go through an Apple-style approval process, but hopefully it won't be unreasonably rigorous and will help to keep the directory clean of useless apps and malware.

Developers are wasting no time getting started. Andy Smith, creator of an Echo Nest-based recommendation app for Spotify told us he's working on an official version for Spotify's consideration. For developers who want to start coding apps for Spotify, Music Machinery has a detailed introduction to the process. Be warned, though: for now the company is not offering any kind of revenue share to developers, as all apps are free to install.

The digital music space is a busy place these days, from tech giants launching cloud storage lockers and streaming services duking it out, to developers all over the world participating in music hack days and building new and interesting things everyday. As Spotify grows into its new role as a platform, we expect to see nearly limitless new integrations and features added as time goes on.

I never abandoned purchasing music all together, but the MP3 struck me as a far more convenient format than the compact disc, and Napster gave me quick and easy access to a world of MP3's. When Radiohead's "Kid A" showed up on Napster weeks before the CD was available in stores, what was I supposed to do? Ignore it?

The Napster brand lived on for years to come, having been converted to a pay subscription music service. Unsurprisingly, it never quite returned to the levels of popularity it saw in 1999, as new digital music services popped up left and right. Most recently, the company was purchased by one of those services, Rhapsody. Today, Napster will officially be absorbed into the Rhapsody brand and even that iconic, headphone-wearing logo, once a symbol a generation's digital defiance, will cease to be used.

Ten Years After Napster, Digital Music is Still Evolving

As we head toward 2012, the digital music landscape looks very different, and in fact is still evolving into something that works well for fans, music labels and artists alike. The record industry as we once knew it may never return, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Today, people can record multi-track demos on the tiny computers they carry in their pockets and produce complete, studio-quality tracks on their laptops later. Once everything is mixed and mastered, they can publish it online audience at little to no cost.

Naturally, DIY artists who get started on the Internet don't have quite the reach of a record label, but many musicians have launched their careers online and some established artists have relied on the Web in lieu of the record labels that once supported them.

Consuming Music is Even Easier Without Napster

As far as consuming music, it's never been easier. Just as one used to be able to find new albums on Napster or LimeWire within days of their release, most major label and indie releases are available on Spotify, Rdio or MOG pretty much right away. If not, you can try Grooveshark, as long as it's still around, anyway. If those freemium streaming sites don't have what you're looking for, Apple, Google and Amazon all have massive MP3 stores with cloud-based storage services alongside them.

In addition to being legal, today's digital music services go beyond the desktop and are readily available on our smartphones, those little gadgets could have hardly imagined a decade ago. They're even starting to get integrated into smart TVs, cars and a growing number of household appliances.

For a more serendipitous listening experience, there's personalized Internet radio services like Pandora, Last.fm and Slacker Music. If you prefer human recommendations over algorithms, services like Shuffler.com scan hundreds of popular music blogs and build genre-based, curated music stations, even on the iPad. You can even listen to others DJ their own setlists in real time using services like Turntable.fm or one of its many copycats.

Of course, if none of these options give you what you're looking forward, less-than-legal means to acquire music still exist, but you didn't hear it from us.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well. This is a new feature at ReadWriteWeb so we covet your feedback. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments below or reach out to me directly at robyn at readwriteweb.com.

ReadWriteWeb writer Jon Mitchell has mixed feelings about the Timeline-esque app, Path. He explains that while the app's design is amazing, it still has some issues, including mainstream user adoption and extreme similarities to Facebook's Timeline. Of course, Timeline only wishes it was this elegantly done.

From Matt Albert, ReadWriteWeb commenter:

For me as a father and a son and a brother to technophobes with iphones and no facebook accounts this is exactly what I want out of a social network. Oh hell yea there is an awful lot of this "ego streaming" but isn't that part of the fun. As a designer myself its refreshing to see something so elegant and new come onto the "scene".

Here are a few more must read posts, chosen by your fellow community members.

Marc Benioff Live from Cloudforce Winter 2011 Keynote

Google: Tablets Are For Fun, Laptops Are For Work [study]

Spotify Launches Music App Directory, Integrates With Last.fm and Rolling Stone

ReadWriteWeb reader, Baxter Tocher, wonders:

Any word from them about whether they intend to use any of this new-found energy towards bringing the user gapless playback, like every other music player on the planet has had for the last who-knows-how-many years?

Top 5 Online Music Trends in 2011

Au-to-do: Google Releases App Engine Ticket Tracker

Why Hasn't Google Put ChromeOS Out to Pasture?

Browsers in 2011: Chrome & Mobile Safari on The Rise

Reader, Jonathan Bray, commented:

"So Safari on mobile is now almost the equivalent of IE on desktop." Thanks to the same bundling tactics.

Blue vs. Pink: What Role Does Gender Play In Mobile Phone Usage?

Siri, You're Never Going To Take Over Search If You Can't Find Abortion Clinics

This was our Big Question for today, so to see reader reactions, check out Big Question (Answered): "Siri Can't Find Abortion Clinics. Purposeful Policy or Search Oversight?"

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Music is still a huge - and growing - part of the Web today. This year, we watched a number of trends unfold in the digital music space. Picking the five most significant was no easy task, but we manage to narrow it down. This space is still evolving, and we can only imagine how it will look another decade from now.

Buzz about "the cloud" in general has been building up for a few years now, but 2011 was the year that we saw our music collections begin to make their way toward Web-based repositories. First, there was the rise of all-you-can-stream music services like Rdio and Mog. That particular space was lit afire by the July U.S. launch of Spotify, which did not go unnoticed by its competitors, most of whom dropped their entry level price tags down to zero in order to keep up.

With these services, consumers move from playing MP3s on their hard drives to streaming tracks from the cloud, whether at their desktop or from their smartphones and tablets. In the case of Spotify, that cloud-based library of millions of tracks can even be merged with one's own local collection, providing a theoretically infinite library of music.

This year, we also saw the emergence of cloud music lockers. This model is a bit different from the streaming services in that it takes a person's existing collection and allows them to store it online for playback from any connected device. Amazon launched their Cloud Drive in late March, having already operated their own MP3 store for some time. The service allows music fans to upload and store their collections to Amazon's servers for streaming later.

Amazon's model is quite similar to the one offered by Google about eight months later when it publicly launched Google Music. The new initiative, which was first unveiled at Google I/O in May, took the cloud music locker concept the company originally built and added a digital music store on top of it, putting the service in direct competition with Amazon Cloud Drive.

Not to be left out of the cloud music game, Apple unveiled iTunes Match alongside iOS 5 and iCloud in June. Ten years after the company began revolutionizing digital music with the iPod, Apple decided to place a big bet on the idea that the cloud is where people will store their ever-expanding music collection in the future. Like Amazon and Google's solutions, iTunes Match enables access to one's collection across devices. Crucially, Apple's offering does not support streaming, but rather requires listeners to download tracks locally.

2. Online Music Gets More Social (or Annoying)

For as long as there have been Web music services, there have been attempts to bolt on social networking features. Some, like the Ping feature in iTunes, have fallen flat. Pandora has managed to become a relatively successful service without baking in very many social features at all. By comparison, Last.fm and Rdio are way more social.

As popular as it is in Europe and now the U.S., Spotify never had any ground-breaking social features of its own; Just the ability to share playlists and tracks over Twitter and Facebook and plug into other services like Last.fm. That all changed at the f8 developer conference in September when Spotify became one of a number of music services to get tight integration with Facebook.

Rather than try and take on Google, Amazon and Apple and smaller players in the music space, Facebook decided to partner with the likes of Mog, Rdio and Spotify to advance it's so-called "frictionless sharing" philosophy. By linking their Facebook account with any one of these services, users can automatically share every single track they listen to with their Facebook friends and start amassing aggregate monthly data about their listening habits on their Facebook profile.

The partnership has helped fuel enormous growth for Spotify and delighted some users, but not everybody is thrilled with the concept. CNet's Molly Wood wrote a biting critique of Facebook's new approach to sharing, and our own Marshall Kirkpatrick weighed in with a thoughtful critical analysis. ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus had some concerns about it as well, but thinks Facebook is simply redefining sharing, rather than flat-out ruining it. Scott M. Fulton III reminded everybody that these features require users to opt-in, so avoiding the discomfort is as easy as doing nothing. If you've already connected Facebook and Spotify, but have had a change of heart, you can always turn the integration off.

Love it or hate the execution of it, Facebook's integration with music services is just the beginning of a more social experience when it comes to listening to and discovering music online.

3. Recommendation Evolves: Man vs. Machine

Digital music recommendation engines are nothing new. Pandora and Last.fm have provided listeners with algorithmically-determined suggestions for years. In 2011, as new music services cropped up left and right and the selection of available music continued to expand, listeners still found themselves with a thirst for solid recommendations for what to listen to next. Pandora, which filed for a $100 million IPO in February, continued to serve as an attractive Web radio option, with its powerful recommendation engine fueled by the Music Genome Project.

Even though it's overshadowed by the newer, all-you-can-stream music services, Last.fm still boasts a robust community and its music recommendation algorithm is often used by other apps (including Spotify), from which users can "scrobble" their music, creating a detailed profile of listening habits that can be used to discover similar artists.

A music recommendation system many have used, often without knowing it, is The Echo Nest. Their platform powers dozens of music apps with over 5 billion data points about music and various associations between different artists, albums and songs. To date, the Echo Nest Platform has indexed over 30 million songs, far more than Pandora.

As powerful as these machine-driven recommendation engines can be, there's still something to be said for human curation. For evidence of this, look no further than the popularity of apps like Shuffler.fm, a service that turns human-edited music blogs across the Internet into dynamic, genre-based radio stations. It takes a step away from the algorithm in favor of tastemakers, kind of like in the old days. Shufflr.fm received heaps of praise from the tech press over the summer and recently launched its iPad app, making unique music discovery experience portable.

4. Group Listening: Turntable.fm and Beyond

The value of this human touch in digital music curation was also seen in the rise of group-listening apps in 2011. The biggest and most buzz-worthy was Turntable.fm.

When the creators of mobile barcode scanning app Stickybits decide to pivot, as they say, to an entirely new type of mobile application, they didn't expect it to blow up quite the way it did. Turntable.fm, their virtual group-listening and DJ'ing Web app, became wildly popular and sparked several copycat sites, including one that was a near total rip-off of the original.

Turntable.fm allows users to get together in a virtual room and take turns playing DJ for one another, using music stored on their computer's hard drive. In September, the company brought this group listening experience to the mobile space when it launched an app for iPhone and iPad.

5. Music Creation Goes Mobile

It wasn't just music consumption that got a big boost in 2011. Creating it is now easier than ever, thanks to a growing array of digital tools.

Mobile apps geared toward creating music started appearing shortly after the launch of the iTunes App Store in 2008. As platforms like iOS and Android have grown more capable, so too have these kinds of applications. There's no shortage of apps that synthesize real instruments, and even ones that let you record your own samples, make beats and create songs from scratch.

In 2011, we saw Apple roll several of these concepts into one when it launched Garage Band for iPad, and then scaled it down for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It's not the first music recording and sequencing mobile app to appear, but for the price tag ($4.99), it's easily the most powerful. Garage Band for iOS includes dozens of synthesized instruments, which can often be pretty expensive when purchased as stand-alone apps. It also has several "smart" instruments for the less musically inclined.

Like its desktop counterpart, the core function of this app is to record and sequence multiple tracks of music. Using external accessories, one can even record vocals and guitars. Garage Band for iOS and apps like it provide an early glimpse of what's possible on tablets and smartphones, two categories of devices that are still relatively young.

It was a good year for SoundCloud, a social audio-hosting site that has grown quite popular among amateur and professional musicians alike. Big labels and known acts are using SoundCloud to post and promote music, while smaller artists and laptop hobbyists are finding audiences there as well. Think of it as sort of a YouTube for audio.

Like so many other popular Web services, SoundCloud pushed further into the mobile space this year, launching apps for iPhone, Android and iPad, among others. Users can not only use the service's mobile apps to stream and comment on music, but they can also record and post their own tracks right from the app.

Developers have already built apps with features like the ability to find and purchase concert tickets, the means to display a song's lyrics on-screen through TuneWiki and deeper Last.fm integration for better music recommendations.

The move attempts to rebrand Spotify as more of a platform, much as Facebook once did when it opened up the ability for developers to build applications on top of the social network. It's a wise move for Spotify, which faces a rapidly-expanding user base and only a limited capacity to roll out new features itself. By opening up its platform to developers, Spotify allows for more rapid innovation without distracting itself from the core product.

Other available apps include SongKick, The Guardian, Billboard and Soundrop, presumably with plenty more to come. Any developer can code apps for Spotify but they do have to be approved by the company before appearing in the directory.

Slowly Opening Up Spotify's Walled Garden

The catch? For now, the new third party apps are only available on the desktop client, although Ek did indicate that popular features would find their way onto the company's mobile apps.

There's no word on whether the same JavaScript API used by Spotify app developers would be available to everyday Web developers. This would enable music publications and other music-related websites to create an experience much like Rolling Stone has done from within Spotify, but they could do so on the open Web. Of course, one of the obstacles to a seamless experience is the fact that Spotify does not have a Web app of its own, requiring a native desktop or mobile application for song playback.

Spotify first launched in the United States in July, after a prolonged and anxious wait by American music fans, who had been hearing more than a little buzz about the European music service. Today, the company has 2.5 million paying subscribers, Ek said.

Today's announcement comes just two weeks after the public launch of Google Music and Apple's iTunes Match. While neither service is a director competitor to Spotify's freemium streaming model, the two tech giants are inching closer to the space and upstarts like Spotify need to be on their guard.

An early and central component to this new type of all-or-nothing sharing is Facebook's integration with Spotify and similar music streaming services. In theory, it adds a useful new social layer to the experience of listening to music online. In practice, however, it's not well-executed enough for me to keep it activated.

Yesterday, I logged into Facebook and saw that my friend James had shared a song I hadn't heard. It was a collaboration between hip hop artist MF Doom and two members of the band Radiohead, hosted on Soundcloud. The link was shared manually and deliberately with a note reading, "This is awesome."

This type of curated, intentional sharing is what makes social networking useful. I knew that a friend of mine had not only listened to the song, but that he especially liked it. And it was just one song. Not several dozen.

What's far less useful to me is seeing that my friend Evan listened to two entire albums on Spotify, or that my friend Kait is apparently listening to her entire library on shuffle. While some of this information has value, a constant flow of it just amounts to noise.

The Data is Excessive, But Still Not Comprehensive

Even though Spotify spews a massive amount of data onto the news feeds of my friends on Facebook, it's still not a comprehensive representation of what I'm listening to each day. I happen to use the Spotify desktop client and mobile apps for most of my music consumption, but many do not. They still have a library in iTunes or a Windows music app. For those people, something more akin to Last.fm's scrobbling feature would provide a more thorough representation of their listening habits, which on the whole could paint a bigger picture and make an interesting addition to their Facebook profile.

Yet even for those of us who exclusively use Spotify, the picture is not complete. Facebook will post an update about every song I listen to that happens to be in Spotify's streamable library, but not the songs I have stored locally on laptop. This is a side effect of the way the integration works; If the song isn't hosted on Spotify's servers, my friends can't listen to it from Facebook. So perhaps it doesn't make sense to post each song to the news ticker, but Facebook could still make a note of it every time I listen to The Beatles or a less well-known band that isn't available on Spotify.

So-and-So is Listening to Such-and-Such, But Nobody Else Cares

Perhaps for a certain cross-section of music fanatics and people you're friends with on Facebook, what you're listening to right this very moment might be of some interest. But for the vast majority of people on your friends list, it doesn't matter. To many of them, seeing a constant flow of songs in the news ticker is at best irrelevant and at worst annoying.

When people check in to bars, restaurants and other venues on Foursquare of Facebook places, there's value in that. Even better if they add a sentence or two about their experience. Imagine if instead of "Dan is at Oscar's Tavern" you saw a flood of updates saying things like "Dan is walking down Chestnut Street" and "Dan just turned the corner." You don't care about every single physical location your friends inhabit (which is why Apple's Find My Friends app is so weird). But you might care if they're at the baseball game or a restaurant they highly recommend.

Similarly, most people don't care or need to know about every single song you listen to, or every news article you read.

How the Experience Could Be Better

This isn't to say that the data Facebook is collecting and publishing isn't potentially valuable. Some of the aggregate information found on Facebook's music dashboard is worth looking at. That's where I can see things like which songs are most popular among friends and which artists are being enjoyed by multiple people I know. Even much of the summary data Facebook posts to my Timeline is useful. For example, a monthly or weekly digest of top tracks or artists would make sense on one's Timeline.

If instead of barraging other users with real-time activity data, Facebook's music integrations displayed the information in a more measured way, I could see keeping Spotify and Facebook connected. The social giant is trying to reposition the user profile as a timeline of one's life, including as much information as possible. I like this idea, but for it to work, some kinks need to be ironed out in the current, so-called frictionless model.

Music blogs have become a huge component of how people discover and hear new music, especially in smaller scenes that may be overlooked by more mainstream channels. Shuffler.fm taps into this phenomenon by aggregating audio from countless music blogs and then using the Last.fm API to divvy them up by genre. What results is a new way to explore and discover music, and the experience feels like it was ready-made for the tablet form factor.

The phrase "Flipboard for music" should probably be taken with a grain of salt. While Shuffler.fm's iPad UI and the way it loads content are somewhat reminiscent of the popular social reading app, the similarities end there.

Most notably, Shuffler.fm is not a personalized music discovery app, fueled by your preferences and listening history. In fact, it doesn't even have a recommendation engine. Instead, the service adopts the very pre-Web notion of content being curated by editors and tastemakers, the crowd be damned. As counter-intuitive as that may sound for a buzz-worthy new digital content discovery app, the model actually works quite well in this case.

Whereas services like Pandora and Last.fm have long offered streams of music based on things like one's personal listening history and complex, algorithm-driven recommendation engines, Shuffler.fm takes its cues from the tastes of established music bloggers. The only way to personalize the content within the app is by saving a track as a favorite, which effectively builds out a playlist.

Shoegaze? Chillwave? An Endless Selection of Genres

Instead, users can browse music by genre, the list of which is actually quite extensive and granular. Broad categories like Rock, Indie and Electronic are there, but the app is populated with more specific ones like Shoegaze, Post-Punk, Chillwave, Psychobilly and Melodic Hardcore. The list goes on. And on. In fact, as you swipe to the right, the app slides through a seemingly endless array of music genres to choose from. You can also stream music from a given country or time period.

When a track loads in Shuffler.fm what it's actually doing is loading a recent post from any number of music blogs, reformatting the title and summary Flipboard-style, and then extracting the audio from the page, whether it's from a YouTube video, SoundCloud embed or BandCamp track. Even in cases when the audio is displayed using Flash, the app grabs the original audio and streams it regardless.

The result is a kind of genre-based, blog-fueled radio station. At the bottom of the app lies standard audio controls. Tapping the skip button loads a new blog post and a new song. You can share each one on Facebook or Twitter, email it or just copy the link.

If you want to find out more about a song or artist, simply swipe down to view the original blog post. As it turns out, this is also a great way to discover and start following individual music blogs themselves.

In testing the app out, I found a number of new artists that I hadn't heard before. I then did a search for them in Spotify and grabbed entire albums to listen to later. Smaller, unsigned artists may not be so easy to find via a streaming service like Spotify and Rdio, but if you really like them, you can often purchase tracks directly from the artist, via Bandcamp or another service.

By aggregating music from blogs, Shuffler.fm effectively lets lesser-known, more obscure artists bubble to the surface and exposes people to a world of new music. This includes everything from experimental rock bands from Germany in the 1970s to brand new, DIY artists who are self-distributed their homemade music.