After signing up for Audiolizer, you only have to export your iTunes library and upload it to the service. We tried this out with a relatively small, 1000 song library, and Audiolizer was able to import almost all of them. Unlike Lala, however, which offers a similar service, Audiolizer does not upload and store any of your songs that are missing from its database.

This, however, is typically not a major problem, as Audiolizer is able to draw upon a very large database of songs. While Audiolizer bills itself as a streaming music service, it actually gets its music (and accompanying videos) from YouTube. For some reason, however, Audiolizer downplays this reliance on Google's popular video sharing site and the videos are not even linked to their original YouTube pages and only appear in a very small window.

One feature we would still like to see is the ability to share your playlists with friends. Audiolizer is also still working on a music suggestion feature, which should be available shortly. Even without these, however, Audiolizer is definitely a music service worth trying.

According to initial plans being discussed, the new company, which will likely go by the name "MySpace Music," will offer MySpace's 68.6 million U.S. visitors an ad-supported music player, which could be embedded on other web sites or blogs. It's possible that this player could be from Snocap, since they are already powering the MySpace Music services that currently exist. There is also talk of a partnership with Amazon, in which Amazon would build a white-label version of their mp3 music store for MySpace, offering DRM-free downloads of tunes.

Although the initial reaction to hearing this news prompts most people to immediately think iTunes killer (which very well may be true), a secondary victim would be streaming music services and web radio services, like the currently popular Last.FM. Similar to the way that a Walmart comes into a town and mom-and-pops go out of business, I can see a possible impact on the smaller, niche streaming radio services...how will they compete when MySpace will offer it all - the big names artists and the independent artists?

A Great Music Wiki

Sites like Last.fm, Imeem, Myspace, iLike, and more are limited when it comes to music. There's only so much information these sites give about music genres and music as a whole. Their only purpose is to promote material rather an educate the masses on other areas of music outside of just artists and the most popular songs out. WikiAudio does the exact opposite. There's a host of educational information about music and the production of it. The site offers a range of information about the jargon that only serious musicians would use and understand.

Conceived by Bill Turner and co-founded by Lathan Hodge, WikiAudio is essentially one enormous wiki on music. However, it's not about artist. The wiki's sole focus is the "art and science of anything audio or sound related". At WikiAudio you can learn about a new recording technique, build an API preamp from scratch, get tips on how to use features in music production software, and a host of other great things. Using the site is the same as using any other wiki. You just type in what you're looking for to get the information. Though it's necessary to sign-up in order to create or modify a new article or tutorial, registration wasn't necessary for browsing the site and accessing the majority of the site's features.

Education Meets Social Media

WikiAudio does a great job of combining both social networking and "Wiki" landscapes to create a hybrid that incorporates articles, videos, audio files, tutorials, user profiles, forums, blogs, RSS feeds, and more. Producers, musicians, and music majors will find WikiAudio to be a candy store full of free and useful sweets. There are plenty of tutorials available and veterans of audio production are encourage to help the beginners of the site by creating tutorials of their personal productions and techniques.

last.fm 32% (207 votes)
Pandora 30% (197 votes)
Yahoo Music 9% (61 votes)
iTunes Music Service 8% (52 votes)
Rhapsody 4% (27 votes)

Note that FineTune and Live365 were added late to the poll, but both have more votes currently than AOL, MSN and Zune. There's still time to cast your vote though, so please do so in the poll below:

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.

Note: there's no way we could mention every single online music streaming service in this poll, but if we happened to miss a major service then do shout it out asap in the comments!

YouTube goes out of its way to state that this move has nothing to do with the record labels. Patrick Walker, YouTube's Director of Video Partnerships, Europe, Middle East and Africa, lays the full blame on PRS for Music - and PRS, of course, blames Google for being too greedy. Walker, however, also says that the negotiations continue, so we might just see a solution in the near future. For now, however, users will have to resort to illegally uploaded videos if they want to watch music videos on YouTube in the UK.

Until now, online music advertising has been a somewhat unsolved - sometimes controversial - problem. Today Lirix unveiled at DEMO an intelligent and elegant solution to the problem, called AdLirix. It is a smart, context-sensitive advertising solution that will allow musicians to make money off their music in a fair way.

The ads are inserted between tracks, never interrupting the user experience. But more importantly, the ads are contextual - because they are based on the lyrics of the songs! The advertisers bid to place ads in an auction fashion, but they are not charged unless their ad is played. The system also rewards artists, because even if their music is pirated - they will be paid because ads play. All and all it seems like a well thought through and elegant solution.

Here is what DEMO staff said about Lirix:

‚ÄúProtected by a recent patent, Lirix‚Äôs dynamic ad-insertion platform delivers targeted, dynamic advertising in streaming music and enables interesting new business models for over-the-air digital music services. The Lirix platform offers particular benefits to MVNOs, which can now supplement branded phone service with a potentially richer ad-supported music service offering as well.‚Ä?

• SoundFlavor
• MusicIP
• Owl Multimedia
• Elbo.ws
• The Hype Machine
• SeeqPod Music
• Upto11
• 9ViBe
• Jamendo
• Goombah
• iLike
• Last.fm
• ChartU
• Mog
• MyStrands
• Qloud
• U.[lik]
• herkesdinlesin

If you've used any of the above services, let us know in the comments. I'd like to check out a few of these and see how their recommendations stack up.

The post also predicts what will happen in digital music in 2008. Here's what Steve expects to happen with DRM:

Citing the popularity of iTunes Plus, in October Apple slashed the price of DRM-free tracks offered on iTunes, and early reports suggest that Amazon MP3 has also been a huge success (making it the number three digital music store in just one month). It therefore appears that ditching DRM has to some degree achieved the dual aims of invigorating the marketplace for digital music and creating a serious competitor to iTunes. As a result, many are predicting that 2008 will be the year that DRM is ditched completely, as all the major labels come on board, and I think this will be true for traditional music downloads.

However, in another context, DRM’d music looks like it’s here to stay for the foreseeable future at least. Subscription-based services still require the use of DRM and may become more acceptable to consumers as broadband becomes ubiquitous, enabling our music collection to “live in the cloud”, accessible anywhere and anytime.

Check out the full post for more; including details on mobile music stores and services, Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want experiment and other alternative models. You can also digg the post here.

And in a way that process is a very conducive way to listen to music that you haven't heard before. Just tune in and get on with your life. Soon you will hear a track you really like and think, I have to have this! On a site like Pandora or Last.FM, usually that means going out and buying the track. But since everything on Fresh Hot Radio is born on the Internet, free to download, you simply click on the link provided and get it. Mission accomplished.

We think Fresh Hot Radio hits its design goals perfectly. We've been listening to it for over an hour and the music has been great. If we want to keep a copy of the music, it's just a click away, and the site even has a URL and embed code for each track. We'd say it's the perfect accompaniment to our work day.