2. Deezer: Deezer offers users free and legal streaming music while sharing advertising revenue with artists and rights owners. The site launched with a Sony BMG partnership and signed a Universal Music deal in 2008. Users can share their favorite music by connecting with friends within the social network, or embedding playlists in 3rd party sites.

3. Spotify: Heralded as one of the best music streaming experiences on the market, Spotify is only available in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Spain, France and Finland. TechDigest TV uploaded a fantastic looking preview of Spotify's much anticipated iPhone app.

4. Tunerec: Swedish company Tunerec allows users to create music libraries and playlists from recorded radio play. Because libraries are taken from recorded music, it takes a while to populate playlists; however, according to RWW's initial review by Frederic Lardinois, the service is worth the wait.

5. Last.FM: If you haven't heard of Last.FM, you've probably been living under a rock. The site offers users the ability to create radio stations and stream them complete with AudioScrobbler-powered recommendations.

6. Pandora: To the user, Pandora and Last.FM are similar recommendation-based radio services; however, where AudioScrobbler makes statistical inferences, Pandora's recommendations are determined by the Music Genome Project's 400 distinct musical characteristics.

7. Slacker: Slacker is another popular radio recommendation service. Users input tracks and receive recommendations. Slacker first launched with custom mobile hardware and has since expanded onto other mobile devices.

8. The Hype Machine: This is a fantastic service for those willing to leave music selection to the experts. Like other sites, this one allows listeners to search for music and stream playlists; however, the files on the site are actually streamed from the blogs of top labels, DJs, promoters and music start ups.

9. Blip.fm: Blip.fm is another site where music lovers can access millions of streaming songs. Members receive their own station and the ability to share station programming responsibilities with friends. The site also offers integration with blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed and Last.fm. The act of blipping refers to the act of linking to a song and attaching a 150 character comment to it.

10. MOG: MOG is a music blog network that encompasses more than 300 blog posts per week. The site offers an in-depth look at new artists and includes music recommendations, videos and streaming audio clips. A good place to start with this service is to play audio from it's Recently Popular Posts page.

11. Lala: Lala also offers users a playable web browser interface. The service contains 7 million free online songs and the ability to purchase additional web songs at 10 cents each or downloadable MP3's for 80 cents and up each.

12. Imeem: Imeem is considered "the new social mixtape". The streaming music site allows users to create playlists and share them across the web. RWW recently covered Imeem's iPhone and Android launch.

13. SoundCloud: SoundCloud also allows users to upload tracks and share them via the cloud. Listeners receive shared files via an email-style interface. From there, they can choose to either play the music from the site or download the tracks they've received from friends.

14. 8Tracks: This service lets users upload 8 tracks as a playlist and share the playlist with friends. This service is essentially what Muxtape used to be.

15. Muxtape: Muxtape has transformed from one of the early mixtape-style music sites (users uploaded and shared playlists) to a directory of bands. It remains a great place to discover indie bands.

16. Project Playlist: Project Playlist indexes music from across the web. Again, users create playlists and share links to music files with their friends. Reviewers see this as one of the best music search engines in existence.

17. Skreemr: Skreemr is also a search engine and music indexing site. It claims to offer users access to "6 million mp3 files from over 100,000 web sites".

18. Fizy: Similar to the now defunct Seeqpod, Fizy is an extremely bare bones approach to streaming music with a simple search bar. Like Seeqpod, the site offers speedy music video results and audio results, and unfortunately, legally questionable content. Perhaps the site's recent acquisition will change that.

On the Horizon: Microsoft is set to launch a streaming music site at the end of July. For more info on this project check out our coverage.

Can Microsoft find the right balance of monetizing music without being over-bearing, enabling multi-platform use without being confusing and satisfying millions of mainstream users without being boring? Those seem to be the looming questions.

Could Seeqpod Be Under The Hood?

It's possible that the new project is being rolled out quickly because it's built on acquired technology. This Spring there was widespread speculation that Microsoft had acquired failed but awesome MP3 search engine Seeqpod. Seeqpod did a great job searching for media around the web and offered an API that developers liked quite a lot - but the company got slammed by repeated lawsuits. Seeqpod argued that it was only indexing media files that other people were posting, not posting them themselves. That kind of argument tends to hold up best when you are big enough for music companies to look the other way. Surely Microsoft wouldn't be so bold, would it?

Bale says the new Microsoft music service will compete based on scale and quality of product. If it can simply deliver more variety than Pandora or Last.fm do, that alone will make it a viable competitor for many users.

The service now also shows display ads on its website, which, to be honest, don't seem to fit into the general design of the site and look like they were just added for the sake of it.

In the Bloomberg interview, Westergreen also acknowledged that Pandora's struggle with the music industry to negotiate royalty rates could still stop the company from becoming profitable, though Westergreen also said that he is optimistic that these negotiations will come to a positive conclusion for Pandora.

With this new emphasis on stations, Last.fm also redesigned the 'recent stations' section in order to allow users to see far more of their recently created stations. Users can now also easily delete stations from this same dialog.

While the new visual features are a welcome change to Last.fm's online radio, the real game-changer here are the multi-artist and tag stations. These allow users to create more interesting and diverse stations, while still exercising a large amount of control over the content of these stations.

Sponsors

It is also important to note that the radio player now features visual branding from Last.fm sponsors (Budweiser seems to be the current sponsor). In its press release, Last.fm stresses that this new layout will give advertisers and sponsors the ability to create a more immersive experience than standard audio advertising.

Privacy Mode

The new player also features a private listening mode, where scrobbling is turned off so that you can listen to your favorite Jonas Brothers songs in total privacy.

iPhone App Still Lagging Behind

Hopefully, Last.fm will also soon update its already excellent iPhone application to include these new features as well. Although, today's announcement did not mention the company's mobile applications at all.

It's a dramatic move that could pave the way for other media companies to do the same and effectively open up international markets. People complain, but do you think that viewers would pay a similar monthly fee for international access to Hulu, for example? We do.

We're still waiting for examples of US customers willing to pay for online services (the iPhone app store is a related example) but it will be interesting to see if the rest of the world is. Last.fm's announcement is an interesting response to the advertising market's belief that only eyeballs from certain countries are "worth" advertising to.

Meanwhile, the vehement insistence by users that every damn thing on the web be free works hand in hand with the rise of over-saturation in advertising. Let's see what kinds of user experience, features and services we can get by paying a little cash - shall we?

Overall, Slacker feels a lot like satellite radio, which is probably no surprise, given that XM Radio's co-founder Lon Levin is Slacker's Senior Advisor.

With regards to its user interface, every Pandora and Last.fm user will feel right at home. One nice addition to Slacker, though, is the ability to see which songs will play next.

Customization

One advantage of Slacker over its competitors is that it gives you more options to directly customize your stations. You can direct it to play songs from different decades, and decide if you want it to mostly play hits or also more obscure songs.

Competition

Slacker's reviews and biographies can't quite compete with the depth of information offered by the Last.fm app, which can also display tour dates. Slacker also doesn't feature any of the social networking functions that have made Last.fm so popular.

Just like its competitors, Slacker only allows you to skip six songs per station every hour. Unlike Pandora and Last.fm, however, Slacker does play 30 second radio ads after every fifth song. For $3.99 a month, however, you can buy a premium membership that lets you skip songs as often as you want and which removes the advertising from your stream.

Like all the other streaming music apps on the iPhone, Slacker can't play in the background while you surf the web or read your email. This, of course, is a limitation that Apple has put on its developers, even though Apple's own music player on the iPhone does this without causing any problems.

Verdict

Even though Slacker Radio is very similar to the Last.fm and Pandora app, we think it is definitely worth a try. Whether you prefer one over the other will depend on how happy you are with the music recommendations it gives and how important the social features of Last.fm are to you.

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.

Could SoundCloud Set Us Free?

But then we saw the player from SoundCloud, the company that "moves music." Until now, SoundCloud has been focusing on their service that lets musicians and fans freely distribute and share tracks with each other via the web. Using widget-based dropboxes combined with a social network of fellow music fans, SoundCloud makes it simple to move large files over the web without having to resort to FTP, bitTorrent, or other complicated services.

Right now, their new Cloud Player doesn't do all that much, we'll admit. In fact, we're sorry to say that it actually seems overwhelmed and broken. When trying to create a playlist, we just see the spinning circle. When we tried to play a track, all we got was a message: "transferring data from api.soundcloud.com." Obviously, this app is nowhere near ready for primetime. It looks like a great idea, sure, but one that's only a pretty picture of what could be. We love that idea, though - an app for finding and playing tracks, discovering music, saving playlists, even creating smart playlists - all in the cloud.

Yet with the Cloud Player's iTunes-like interface, we could begin to imagine a new world where music could be shared, distributed, organized, and played, all over the web. The only missing piece to total music domination is device support. Assuming the Cloud Player ever worked, how could we get the music from the web to our iPods and iPhones?

The easy answer would be iPhone app, of course. But given that SoundCloud's service is essentially a new platform for music distribution and discovery, it would actually be a competitor to iTunes, and Apple doesn't tend to approve apps that offer competing services. To get approval, they would have to integrate with iTunes somehow, perhaps by presenting links to purchase songs in the iTunes online store. Alternately, they could forgo the iTunes App Store altogether and build something for the open-source Android OS instead...no worries about app approval there.

Yes, It's Broken...But Is It Unique?

Let's backtrack a little. We see that the Cloud Player is simply not a worthwhile app just yet. It doesn't even work, so why are we bothering to review it? The answer is because SoundCloud, the company behind the app, is doing something different that many other online music streaming services do not: distribution and monitoring. Let me explain...

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we love services like Lala, The Hype Machine, and Last.fm for example. Hype Machine tracks mp3 blogs, Last.fm uses free music to encourage legal music sales, but Lala looks the most promising for a true move to the cloud. At least, so far. The company's latest business model revolves around not just being your "jukebox in the sky" but letting you own tracks for streaming forever. 10 cents per track. $1 per album. With four major labels on board and lots of indies, the catalog looks good.

But how does Lala amass its music collection? From you, the user, uploading your mp3s to the web. Lala gives you the rights to the unlimited streaming of your own tracks, and everything else can be streamed just once. Combine that with an iPhone app and you've routed around iTunes altogether. (Guess that's why it's not approved yet).

Lala has it all except for one thing: the source of the tracks themselves - they had to come from somewhere, right? You probably either torrented them or purchased them...possibly even from iTunes. For Lala to beat iTunes at its own game, Lala needs direct access to the artists and their music.

That's where SoundCloud is different. With their service that "moves music," an artist could upload a track to SoundCloud, which then could immediately become available in your web-based iTunes replacement app (The Cloud Player), and perhaps then it could be instantly streamed over your mobile device, too. Meanwhile, when you're on your desktop or netbook, you only need browse to the cloud player's web site to have a fully functional music management tool where you make playlists, share them with friends, and seek out new music. Combine that with Lala's and Last.fm's model which lets you stream tracks for free to encourage purchases, and you have a system that no longer needs the desktop, the music labels, proprietary software or hardware. In addition, on the flip side, the artists using SoundCloud can track the distribution of their tracks, the number of plays, and more.

Sounds great, right? Well, if only it worked. The Cloud Player is open source, though. Maybe you can fix it?

Sponsored Lyrics Pages?

Interestingly, Last.fm also announced that it will allow sponsors to advertise on these lyrics pages, including the ability to skin the entire page. We cannot help but wonder if this is a prelude to similar advertising options on other parts of Last.fm's site.

800,000 Lyrics

Even though 800,000 is a large number, this still leaves the majority of Last.fm's catalog without lyrics. The music industry has always been highly protective about lyrics and has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with many of the independent (and often user generated) lyrics sites.

LyricFind, too, started as a rogue lyrics site in 2000, but has licensed content from over 1,700 music publishers since then, including EMI, Sony, and Universal BMG.

Overall, adding lyrics to song pages is a smart move by Last.fm, as it turns Last.fm into even more of a one-stop music experience and also gives the service yet another feature that sets it apart from other music recommendation and discovery sites.

In this post we explore last.fm's feature set, how it compares to MySpace Music, and what we can expect to see from last.fm in the near future. Richard Jones also discusses how last.fm has managed to avoid the legal difficulties that have plagued Pandora.

RJ: Well, we liked the Last.fm/YouTube mashup Tim Bormans made so much that we hired him! Internally we've been working on multi-tag search which is available at our Playground, which allows you to search for music using multiple genres (folk + rock + gabba, etc); also on Playground we've been tweaking our Musical Soulmates app, which you could possibly consider the prototype for a future Last.fm dating service ;)

And of course, scrobbling continues to be an almost default setting for new music services now - from Hype Machine to Muxtape (RIP) to Blip.fm to the new version of VLC (which has 4 million downloads already since launch a couple of weeks ago), it seems like everything has to integrate scrobbling now. Great for us obviously, and great for our recommendations which will continue to improve as more people scrobble. People are scrobbling at a rate of 800 million times a month currently.

RWW: In terms of features, Pandora is similar to last.fm, in that both services have great recommendations and allow the user to discover new music. Both are streaming music services, yet it just seems to be Pandora - of all the 4 major services we've discussed so far - that has been having legislation issues. Can you clarify for our readers how last.fm has managed to avoid those sticky issues, when Pandora hasn't? I think many people are confused about that.

Last.fm is about more than just online radio. We've got millions of tracks available free-on-demand as well, and beyond that there's a massive social network element to the site. We also offer videos, the biggest events listings on the web (personalised to your taste), and our own audio and video content under the Last.fm/Presents banner. So the point is, online radio is only one of the things we do, so the legislation affects us only in one particular area of the Last.fm experience. As online radio is pretty much the single focus for Pandora, it understandably hits them harder.

The wider issue here, of course, is that royalty rates are high, and the debate around this needs to continue so we can reach a mutually beneficial and economically workable resolution. We don't want to see legitimate online broadcasters stifled by this - it's not good for music fans, artists or the wider music industry.

RWW: Lastly, one of the most interesting aspects of online music is its ability for new artists to be discovered. It's something MySpace has done well in the past, but we get the sense the perfect solution hasn't been found yet. As our own Marshall Kirkpatrick asked recently:

"How about a service that scans my iTunes library and my online listening history, determines my genres of interest and then never plays music from artists I've already listened to. Or makes sure to play some that I haven't."

Does last.fm have a feature like that coming up? ;-)

RJ: Do you think Myspace has done this well in the past? As you can tell from my reply to your first question [see Part 1], I would argue that Myspace has been a rather difficult site to navigate unless you're after popular stuff - and it's possibly going to be more of the same on Myspace Music, as the major labels jostle for frontpage real estate and push more indie/obscure music off the page.

Our recommendation system is being constantly refined to give music fans the best music discovery service on the web. I think we've got that covered. What's equally important is that these artists being discovered, if they're Long Tail or DIY, get the same kind of licensing and royalty breaks that more established artists get, which is why our Artist Royalty Program exists.

We've been doing this for 6 years, as I said, which is why it's kind of funny to be talking about this now because of Myspace Music. They're just catching up to free-on-demand after we pioneered the model almost a year ago. Now they've got to figure out how to make it easy to discover music that suits your taste (sharing playlists is one thing, but how do you find that music to share in the first place?), which we've been doing since 2002. After that, maybe they'll start paying unsigned artists. I would hope all this will come to Myspace Music at some point in the future - but it's happening on Last.fm now.

See also: Interview With Last.fm Founder Richard Jones: Part 1, The Competition and Part 2, Business Models

In this post we explore business models in online music, both for last.fm and for independent artists looking to earn a living in this new Web-based music industry.

RJ: The opportunities are obviously huge, especially in terms of raising our profile in the US. We've been working with CBS on some hugely effective cross-promotions in the States, most recently the 'Listen Again' campaign in tandem with CBS Television shows like Swingtown - where viewers of the show were directed to Last.fm by an on-screen overlay when music was featured. 22,000 people came to Last.fm weekly, directly from the Swingtown call-out.

It's that kind of promotion that reflects how much CBS understands the Last.fm experience and how to weave it into their established brands in a way that makes sense to audiences on both sides.

The challenge is basically keeping up the pace to make the most of these opportunities! We're growing massively, over 100 staff in the London HQ now - including hirings from Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Skype, and a rapidly expanding sales force on both sides of the Atlantic.

RWW: What is last.fm's business model going forward? We've seen you release albums online (e.g. the latest Kings of Leon album) and you have advertising. And a related question, how will last.fm and CBS work more together on building revenues for last.fm? We imagine that will become more important part of your business model going forward.

RJ: Advertising continues to be the driving force, and we're working hard to create new kinds of campaigns that haven't been seen before. Last.fm functionality can be incorporated into our campaigns now - something we call "Smart Ads" (and we'll be unveiling the first couple of smart ads next week in fact.)

We're confident here because no one else on the web can do this stuff: we can draw on an incredible amount of music data, we've got a deep understanding of our users through their music taste, and an amazing developer team (both in-house and third party) who can create unique ad functionality.

What does it all mean for the user? They get an immersive experience that complements their day-to-day Last.fm experience, and is individual to them, making it much more engaging. Advertisers are really enthused about this. What we're doing now is working with CBS to continue to get that message across to all key brands in the US, continue to build our sales force and continue to build our profile.

RWW: Earlier in the interview [in Part 1] you mentioned that last.fm gives a share of revenue to unsigned and DIY musicians, via the Artist Royalty Program. But if you could put yourself in the shoes of an independent, unsigned musician, what kind of things would you do online to get your work out there and maybe, just maybe, even make some money out of it. Signing up to the Artist Royalty Program is obviously a start, but what then?

RJ: The Artist Royalty Program is just one of the ways you can utilize Last.fm as an independent musician. Upload as many tracks as you can, tag them well, join some groups to spread the word, kick off a Powerplay campaign to start the ball rolling, and the system makes sure your music reaches the right ears. Getting your music heard by people who are actually receptive to the sound you're making, in an effortless way, is one of the main benefits of Last.fm as an artist - and obviously ARP means you can actually see some revenue from it now too.

Leaving aside playing live (still the best way to build an audience - but I realise you're talking about online exclusively here), it's a case of creating an engaging, constantly updated web presence around your music. Blog, respond to your fans on whatever platform you're making your music available (and beside the obvious big-hitters it's worth looking at sites like Amiestreet and The Sixty One, both of which have communities of users who actively seek out new music to listen to), encourage people to remix/rework your tunes and create their own content from your stuff (Trent Reznor's a pioneering example here), and above all make sure you're offering people regularly updated content - whether that's blog posts, new tunes, T-shirts, whatever.

A great example of someone doing all this successfully is Jonathan Coulton - who incidentally has joined the Artist Royalty Program, which is exciting considering he has almost 1.5 million plays on Last.fm.

Part 3 of this interview, on Design & Features, will be published tomorrow.

See also: Interview With Last.fm Founder Richard Jones: Part 1, The Competition and Part 3, Design & Features

We started out by asking about the increasing competition in online music this year.

RJ: The space is crowded, I agree, and people now have a lot of choice if they want to listen to music for free. That's great for music fans - but what it means is that navigating through that mass of music is now the priority for them. It's all very well having millions of tracks at your disposal on Myspace or Imeem, but what's the use if you can't find what you want?

We have a unique recommendation system, drawing on the data of over 43 million individual songs, and the listening habits of 25 million music fans, enabling us to guide users through a 5 million + catalogue of freely streamable tracks and help them find stuff suited to their taste.

Recommendation and discovery is key in this space now - and we've been working on this for 6 years, and every day we continue to refine the process, so we're confident that we can continue to offer a better, more personalised music experience than anyone else online.

RWW: One of the things that's made Imeem a success this year - it's reportedly now the No. 1 streaming music site in the US - has been its licensing deal with all 4 of the major record labels, plus by their estimates around 80% of the indie music market. MySpace Music has 3 of the majors and has been criticized for its lack of attention to the independents. Can you clarify for our readers where last.fm sits in terms of licensing with the 4 majors and independents?

RJ: We have music from 3 of the majors, and renegotiations with Warner are ongoing. Our indie catalogue is equivalent to Imeem's - it includes millions of tracks from IODA, The Orchard, CD Baby and thousands of independent labels and artists - and we are currently in negotiations with Merlin. We continue to aim for the most comprehensive music catalogue online, and are making great progress towards that.

What's even more important, though, with regards to this point, is that we ensure all labels and artists are paid when their music is streamed on the site - and since the launch of our Artist Royalty Program, that means unsigned and DIY artists too. No one else is offering a share of revenue to unsigned musicians in this way.

RWW: You recently released a new version of the last.fm iphone app -- how crucial do you think mobile apps will be when competing against the likes of MySpace, Imeem and Pandora? Do you think you have any advantages over your rivals in this area?

We want the Last.fm experience to be accessible everywhere, so mobile is hugely important to us. At the moment the iPhone dominates, and our only competition there is really Pandora, which is limited to the US whereas our app is available in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, Spain and France, with more countries to come. Plus it's much more feature-rich and draws on a much larger music catalogue.

It's a cool app and I think it's the one that real passionate music fans choose because we really reach into the Long Tail in the music we play.

See also: Interview With Last.fm Founder Richard Jones: Part 2, Business Models and Part 3, Design & Features

However, we think this update to the Last.FM app is incredible and will probably improve its ratings. Here's a hands-on review of the latest update to the Last.FM app.

Yesterday evening Last.FM updated their blog with an announcement of what users will find in the latest update of their Last.FM app. Users can expect the following:

• VASTLY improved user interface all around (tap to zoom album art included)
• Ability to tag songs
• Personal tag radio
• Calendar based events view
• Common artists when viewing a user profile
• Many other usability and back-end features

So how do we think users feel about the latest features and improvements? We think you'll love them.

Tagging
The new tagging feature was highly requested and Last.FM delivered in full. You can not only submit new tags to a song, but also select from any of your previously used tags. Users can still see tags that other users have submitted. The new ability to play radio stations based off of tags takes things to the next level. Simply start typing a tag and the Last.FM app will auto-suggest tag stations as you type. The list of tags available to choose from is endless!

Common Artists
The common artists section on user profiles will be highly appreciated. This section provides up to five artists that you have in common with another user. Selecting any of the artists in the 'common artists' section will take you directly to that artist's radio station. We think this feature is a little overrated now. In the future, we'd also love to see related artists from our friends in order to branch outside of our current listening habits.

Calendar View
The new calendar based events view replicates the Calendar app interface on the iPhone and it looks great. Users still have the option to switch back to list view, but we find the new calendar view to me.

A Must Grab Update

This is a must grab update for the Last.FM app. We did run into one stability issue in our tests. When trying to view our friends profiles the app would suddenly crash. However, a restart of our iPhone seems to have solved the problem. We found streaming quality to be much faster over our EDGE connection. We were not able to test streaming quality over 3G and Wifi. The update to the user interface is great and feels less cluttered. The simplistic new design also means more taps for users. However, we felt the trade-off was worth it. So head on over to the App Store in iTunes or on your iPhone and grab this awesome update.

As is typical for Apple, the company is not exactly transparent when it comes to describing how the 'Genius' feature actually works. It looks as if Apple compares your music selection to that of other users and then builds its recommendations based on this. We assume that iTunes looks at data about play and skip counts, beats per minute (which is available for all songs in the iTunes store), ratings, and playlists.

Because these recommendations are at least partly based on the libraries of other iTunes users, iTunes periodically downloads updated recommendations. You can also force an update from the 'Store' menu.

One fact that surprised us was that Apple often returned playlists for songs that were clearly mislabeled, which has led us to speculate if Apple, during the first run of Genius, actually creates an acoustic fingerprint for every song.

According to Apple, all the uploaded information is anonymized.

Does it Work?

In our tests, the recommendations and playlists were often spot-on, but also a bit inconsistent. Sometimes we would get great recommendations based on songs from rather obscure bands, while we sometimes couldn't get any recommendations based on songs from more popular and contemporary artists. For classical music, the recommendation feature basically didn't work at all.

We also noticed that the recommendations tend to favor more popular mainstream artists, but that could easily be a function of the current user base.

Apple points out that the recommendation engine will get better over time, as more users start uploading their information. It would be nice, however, if Apple also gave users a chance to tweak settings for themselves or at least gave us more information about how these recommendations are calculated.

One minor annoyance when using the recommendations is that if you decide to build a Genius playlist based on a song that is already playing, iTunes starts the song over after creating the new playlist.

What about Last.fm and Pandora?

As Last.fm co-founder Marting Stiksel pointed out in an interview with Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk, the 'Genius' feature basically validates what other music recommendation services have been doing for a long time.

It's also important to point out that a lot of other music recommendation services have strong, built-in social networking functions. Apple, even though it now has information about the listening habits of a large chunk of its users, does nothing to connect these users. One neat function, for example, would be for iTunes to show playlists from other users that have a certain songs in it. For now, though, it doesn't seem as if Apple is interested in adding these social aspects to iTunes anytime soon.

Rediscovering Music

For now, when it works, Apple's recommendations are actually a very nice way of rediscovering a lot of music that had long been sitting in our jukebox but never saw the day of light. We also assume that the shopping recommendations in the sidebar will drive more traffic to Apple's music store, especially once the recommendations get a bit better and users get comfortable with trusting Apple's recommendations.

What if the perfect service rose from the noise and gave you exactly the user experience you wanted? What would such a service look like?

Note: it's not clear how viable any of this is going to be if small players aren't able to compete with innovative features. If you haven't yet, read the bad news about Pandora. Justin Dorfman has a good little blog post about things you can do to save Pandora.

Assuming that the pace of innovation online in music streaming can continue, here's what we're looking for in our dream service.

Quantity and Breadth of Music

The music business fights a constant battle against homogenization and in favor of the long tail, or at least some people in it do. It's hard to judge the quantity and breadth of music on a given service, it's a "I know it when I see it" kind of phenomenon.

Obviously many people want to make sure all the big hits are included, but we'd love to see the crowd pleasers be followed up with high quality music just being discovered. The infinite distribution of the web should make this a fundamentally different content experience than commercial radio has been.

Services that allow users to upload MP3 files offer a powerful opportunity to engage the long tail of musical tastes. That's becoming an increasingly common feature.

International Support

We'd be doing our friends in the rest of the world a real disservice if we said any music service was perfect if it didn't make itself available to listeners anywhere on the planet. For all the love it gets, Pandora is limited to US users. Copyright in music rears its ugly head again.

Continuous Playback

Services like Seeqpod and Imeem require too much intervention. It's preferable to at least have the option to click play and leave your music player alone for hours. Hey Muxtape, how about letting me turn on a mode that automatically follows all the fans and "fan of" connections from any collection I start with?

DRM Free Purchases

We love Amazon MP3 for its DRM free downloads and highlighting DRM free links to buy is one of the many things we love about MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine. Sometimes streaming just isn't enough and you want to buy tunes. There are any number of ways to get music files for free, but when you find an artist you really respect - it's nice to send them some money.

We like the GrooveShark model of P2P downloads with revenue distribution to artists. The revenue sharing among listeners seems a little silly and we'd probably prefer lower prices, but whatever.

Good Recommendations

Music recommendation is something many, many people have aimed for. Few have nailed it like Pandora and Last.fm. Grooveshark rolled out a new recommendation feature today, but after just a little bit of use we found it unsatisfactory. The service generally has too much down time and it wasn't clear what recommendations were based on.

Social Features

It might sound silly, but there are two reasons that Last.fm really rocks and the social features are one of them. It's easy to discover other users and to listen to what they listen to. We've had a lot of fun going through our FriendFeed connections and seeing what different people we know online like to listen to.

Compare this to Pandora, where social features are buried in the back of the feature set and the gestures that result in populating your social profile (bookmarking songs or bands) aren't at all the most common gestures that users make (thumbs up or down). Even though there are millions of users, Pandora feels like a solitary place.

RIght: Sometimes we like to listen to what Chris Pirillo likes to listen to, just to see what makes him tick.

Atractive and Easy to Use Feedback UI

Pandora makes it easy to like or unlike songs, even if you haven't created an account. It's UI is more attractive than Last.fm's and these two services are among the only ones to really make the feedback UI simple and powerful.

Quality Ancillary Content

In addition to the social features, the second thing that makes Last.fm awesome is the additional information about artists. It's nice to be able to browse bio and background info, to see photos, etc.

It's nice to be able to view the lyrics of the song you're listening to sometime. LyricWiki is ok for this. Favtape pulls in lyrics from LyricWiki when they are available. The service plays your favorites from Pandora or Last.fm, using the Seeqpod API. It also links out to ringtone download sites. It's pretty cool.

We want to love IdioMag more than anyone for this. This little service grabs your publicly available musical taste data from other services, like Last.fm and Pandora, and then builds a "personalized music magazine" for you. For whatever genre you like, IdioMag identifies new and interesting bands, then plays them through an interface that supplements the music with photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube and text from syndicated blog posts. It even uses the dominant colors from the photos to determine the color scheme for the associated "pages." It's totally hot, in theory. In practice the writing tends to be unbearably bad and layout ends up being sloppy. We hope the service will improve because it's a great idea that we honestly tell people about weekly. Idiomag and Grooveshark are doing some cross-promotion for each other; we're happy to see that.

Playlist Publishing With Good Interface

Everyone likes to share good music with anyone who will listen. It's one way we win cool points and express ourselves. From the austere Muxtape to the super cute if unscalable casset tapes of MixWit, there's a world of interface options.

There's no reason for a service like Seeqpod, who are already being sued anyway, to offer such an awful playlist publishing widget. We're guessing that almost no one ever uses that part of the service.

Band in Town Notifications

When a band we're listening to on a service is going to be in our town any time soon, we'd love to know. It's a real lost opportunity whenever a service doesn't provide this kind of information - there are any number of ways to get it.

A Space for New Bands to be Discovered

How about a service that scans my iTunes library and my online listening history, determines my genres of interest and then never plays music from artists I've already listened to. Or makes sure to play some that I haven't.

Desktop Notification

You know how good online IM programs will sound a tone and show a message in your browser tab when a new message comes in? That way you can be using other applications but still know what's going on with your IM. Music apps should do something like that. Growl notification of artist and song title would be awesome.

MP3 Blog Discovery

Have you seen the Hype Machine? It's an MP3 blog aggregator and it's fantastic. Any music discovery system should include links to recent blog posts about the song you're listening to. It's a great way to learn about an artist and discover related music.

Oh So Much More

Friends of RWW have also told us they would like good mobile access and a clear path to revenue sharing with artists. What would your dream service for music streaming look like? Let us know in comments - maybe someone else will read this discussion and build it.

Photo at top "I Love My Music" by Flickr user shankar, shiv.