• Music Services - places like iTunes and Rhapsody where you can purchase or subscribe to music
• Music Discovery - places that help you find music - these fall generally into 3 subcategories:
  • Social - wisdom of the crowds sites like last.fm, iLike. Goombah and Qloud
  • Content-based - recommendations based on the music content - Pandora, SoundFlavor, MusicIP
  • Expert based - Music recommendations from people - music blogs, irateradio.com
• Music Experience Augmentation - sites to make your music listening experience more enjoyable - music dashboards like sleevenotez or Snapp Radio
• Playlist Sharing - this includes playlisting sites like MusicMobs, fiql and Webjay
• Music Metadata - add to the data surrounding the music - MusicBrainz, All Music Guide, Gracenote

The content hasn't been fleshed out on a lot of those pages, but still it's a good start and one to watch.

Via Lucas Gonze

"Of course, with webjay, there is a more black-and-white issue. Is the material obviously illegal or not?"

This touches on what I wrote the other day about not being able to link to Lucid 3 and other New Zealand music using WebJay. Following on from Jim's query, I'm wondering how much of popular music is available free online? For example, if I wanted to create a playlist of my favorite songs in the Billboard Top 100 this week, how many of those songs would be available to me as free links? Anyone know an estimate?

How about more 'niche' music - like for example New Zealand music? It would be really interesting to find out what is the ratio of free linkable songs (which I hereby christen with the acronym FLS) to songs you have to pay to listen to, for each genre of music. Does bluegrass for example have a higher FLS ratio than blues? The higher the FLS (Free Linkable Songs) ratio, the better.

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!

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:

Just Burn a CD

As we reported last week, Yahoo was already advising its customers to circumvent its own DRM system by just burning copies of their songs onto audio CDs and then ripping them back onto their computers as DRM-free MP3s. Apparently, though, not all customers were satisfied with this solution, though given the new solution, enterprising customers could also, of course, now burn their songs to CDs and still ask for their money back from Yahoo.

Costly Precedent

Yahoo is setting a (costly) precedent here for other music services than run into similar problems.  When MSN Music shut down, it was originally going to take its licensing servers offline within a year, but because of customer complaints, it is keeping them online until the end of 2011. MSN Music is not planning on returning any money to its customers, though.

When you think of music on the Web, there are roughly three main eras:

2) Enter the iPod and iTunes, which define the current era of online music. Apple's combo of a killer devide (iPod) with an online music storage system that syncs with the device (iTunes), has come to dominate the market. You can hardly walk down a city street these days without seeing those familiar white earplugs in someone's ears. Competitors such as Microsoft (Zune) and Real Networks (Rhapsody) are in the game too, but they're a long way behind Apple and likely to remain so.

3) Perhaps the next defining period in music will be streaming music over the Internet. Already this era is underway, with startups like last.fm (recently acquired by CBS) and Pandora making their mark. Most of the big Internet and media companies have horses in this race - Yahoo Music, MSN Music and AOL Music, to name a few.

Beyond iTunes

This new generation of online music has a big focus on recommendations, personalization and social networking. There are a multitude of startups looking to become The Next Big Thing, from Fairtilizer (our review) to SeeqPod (our review) to MyStrands (who recently took $25 M in funding to enhance their personalization system). Even Apple, traditionally not big on social software, has recognized that it can't sit back on its laurels in online music - they recently announced My iTunes widgets, to enable you to share your music, movies and other media with friends.

My iTunes

So this week the Read/WriteWeb Network (R/WW, last100 and AltSearchEngines) will be exploring online music. If you have any suggestions of things to look at, please leave a comment. Also check out this week's R/WW poll: What is your favorite online music streaming service?

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.

MyStrands.TV is powered by MyStrands APIs and the music videos come from YouTube. Some music data is provided by Muze, Inc. I think there's a great market for this, because in our Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time, we noted that 7 of the top 10 are music videos. So music videos are something that people want to watch online and there is a need for an easy way to organize or personalize this. MyStrands.TV adds an easier, richer and simply more fun personalization layer on top of YouTube's data.

To test MyStrands.TV I typed in (what else) The Velvet Underground and I was straight away treated to an old VU track, followed by a John Cale video I'd never seen before, then the classic Sweet Jane. Excellent work by MyStrands and I can see myself tuning in a lot to this new service!

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.

AltSearchEngines has listed their Top 10 Music Search Engines. There were a few I'd never heard of before, so go check it out if you're a music fan. AltSearchEngines editor Charles Knight suggests you pick your favorite artist, or song, and see which music search engine you like the best. Then go back to ASE and leave a quick comment telling them which one you liked the most and why.

Ryan Jarrett at last100 has written an interesting post about recording concerts onto USB sticks, so that concert-goers have a permanent record of the performance. Ryan says that "this is an excellent way of making money out of every live recording an artist makes — usually only one live recording is sold on through CDs/DVDs — and I think people would love to have a recording of the gig that they were actually at, rather than buy a recording through a record store of one random concert."

Read more on this at last100 and also check out their take on Universal selling DRM-free music with Google’s help.

Specifically, the 5% will be streamed and on-demand music data from AOL Music and Yahoo! Music. They are also looking to include other sources, such as Rhapsody. According to Billboard, digital delivery began playing an important role in the chart's composition in February 2005 - when they factored in the sale of digital tracks, "as measured by Nielsen SoundScan from a comprehensive panel of online merchants."

Via PaidContent.org

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?

This is definitely a service I'll use when I want to buy whole albums and can't make it down to the local, independent record store. I've always felt dirty buying music from iTunes, now I think I'll feel a little less dirty buying DRM free music from Amazon. I saw the news first at Techmeme and there's good music-industry centric coverage at Steven Finch's Crenk. See a longer, more in-depth review of the new service over at our digital lifestyle blog Last100.

Your Music on Lala

You do not have to upload your complete music collection to Lala to be able to play it online. Instead, you download a small desktop client that goes out and looks for music on your computer that Lala already knows, which it then simply puts into your playlist. If Lala doesn't know the song, or if the song hasn't been licensed by Lala, the desktop client will upload it to the service.

Once your music has been uploaded, you will be greeted with a standard music player interface, where you can drag and drop songs into playlists, search your collection (which is very fast and easy), shuffle through your songs, and pretty much do anything you expect to be able to do with a desktop jukebox as well.

The only major restriction of the online music player is that it only displays 50 songs per page. The quick and easy search function and the iTunes like browser at the top of the page make up for this is some ways, but if you are used to just browsing through your collection, Lala will take some getting used to.

Music Store

The music store itself is interesting in its own right, though it is also derivative of its competitors. However, it comes with a number of interesting social features and, unlike in iTunes, you get one full play of every song before you are restricted to a 30 second sample. You can also buy the rights to play the song over the web for 10 cents.

Competition

There are, of course, already a fair number of stores that sell DRM-free MP3s, including Amazon and Rhapsody, while services like Imeem already allow you to play songs in full on the net with fewer restrictions than Lala.

Lala has also announced that it will release an iPhone application in the near future. With that, it will also take on Pandora and services like Simplify Media.

Lala's real advantage over its online competitors is that it is a one-stop shop that already holds all your music. The pricing model is interesting and Lala will surely get a lot of 10 cent impulse buys, but the real power behind Lala is in its ability to bring all your music together in one place on the net, just like iTunes did for the desktop.