ReadWriteWeb

On-demand streaming music service Spotify just announced the addition of more than 90,000 releases to its catalogue. The announcement came on the heels of their recent deal with CD baby, and users will be pleased. The company published two lists sorted by artists and labels early this morning.

While Spotify is not yet available to North American audiences, legal streaming music services have certainly proved their demand with competitors like Grooveshark, Lala and Tunerec seeing steady growth.

Imeem, the popular but financially troubled streaming media and music discovery service, launched its iPhone and Android application today. The new app (iTunes link) allows users to stream songs they have uploaded to Imeem's servers while on the go, something that only very few of imeem's competitors can offer right now. The app, which is available for free, also allows users to create custom radio stations and it features a small set of preset stations, including a list of the top 100 songs on the service.

Thanks to MP3s and the Internet, we now have millions of songs readily available to us with the click of a button, but, paradoxically, this has often made it even harder to discover new music to listen to. Every online music store and every social network that focuses on online music, however, now features some kind of music recommendation system, and some services like Pandora or Slacker Radio are indeed nothing else but highly sophisticated music discovery engines. In this post, we will look at the different approaches behind some of the most popular music recommendation and discovery services.

These days, everybody's talking about cloud computing - the notion that computing's future lies in web-based applications and services and not in software tied to the desktop. After years of web app releases, we now have many solid alternatives to desktop tools ranging from office document creation tools to photo editors. Yet still, some programs remained tied to the desktop with seemingly no plans to move elsewhere. iTunes is one of those programs.

We don't really expect Apple to create a web-based iTunes anytime soon. Why should they? The company's iPods and iPhones dominate the mp3 player market and are locked down so that they, in theory, could only work with the company's iTunes software.

Successful Creative Commons music store Magnatune announced today that they have made another radical transformation in their business model. Customers can now pay as little as $5 per month for unlimited streaming and $10 per month for unlimited DRM-free downloads, they can purchase as little as 1 month of membership and they can use Paypal's recurring payments feature to stay subscribed if they wish. The company, whose motto is "we are not evil," then gives 50% of revenues to the artists.

We really like what Magnatune is doing and we think this business model is great, but we're concerned that the service is still too antiquated in its music delivery to get customers beyond the fact that it has a really obscure catalog.

If you have been on the Internet for long enough, you will surely remember the old MP3.com, which was first geared towards independent musicians, but later also allowed you to listen to your own music collection online. Lala, which launched yesterday, features a similar concept. It is first and foremost a music store with a unique sales pitch: pay 10 cents for the right to listen to a song online and between 79 and 89 cents on top of that for the DRM-free MP3 file. For a lot of users, however, the fact that Lala also clones MP3.com's online music locker will be the real attraction of this service.