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Music has been a huge part of the Web since the days when Geocities-hosted fan sites offered Nirvana MIDI files and 15-second clips of songs in WAV format. A decade ago, we saw the rise and fall of Napster, the remnants of which were recently sold yet again. From the ashes of Napster rose a new era of digital music, fueled in large part by the iPod and iTunes Music Store. The traditional structures of the music industry may never return to what they once were, and that's okay. Today we have access to more music than ever before and the tools for creating it are available to anyone who can afford a laptop.

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.

Europe's hottest music-streaming service may have launched to much fanfare in the U.S. over the summer, but not everybody is enamored. Spotify's royalty payments, it turns out, bring significantly lower revenue to artists than digital and physical music sales. For a growing number of smaller artists, this has quite literally become a deal killer, as many of them have opted to keep their music off of Spotify and similar services.

ST Holdings, a music distributor that represents over 200 labels, recently asked those labels if they would like to keep their catalogues on services like Spotify and Rdio. Four of them said yes. So, citing a recent survey showing that streaming services hurt music sales, ST Holdings pulled its music from Spotify, Rdio, Napster and Simfy.

Despite all of the great innovation happening in online music, there are 3 frustrating things for consumers that need to be addressed by Apple, Google, Facebook and others.

It's been an eventful week for online music, with the launch of Apple's iTunes Match and the public unveiling of Google Music (along with a new MP3 store in the Android Market). This follows on from continued innovation in the music streaming market, in particular the integration of Spotify and similar services into Facebook. It's great to see so much action in the online music space. But... there are some major problems with these services. Here are the top three issues, in my opinion.

The world's biggest search engine company turned its music initiative up a notch today. Google Music now includes an MP3 store, in addition to the cloud-based music storage that launched into beta in May. At the company's event in Los Angeles today, they removed the "beta" label from Google Music and made it available to all U.S. users. For the cloud storage part they launched originally, they're keeping the "free" price tag firmly applied.

Rather than charging for storage, as Apple and Amazon do, Google is allowing users to store up to 20,000 tracks for free. So how will they make money? They've partnered with three of the four major music labels (Warner Music didn't sign on) and several independent ones to sell high-quality, 328 kbps MP3 files to users. Google will take a 30% revenue share on each track sold.

Google Music went live for U.S. users today, leaving the invite-only beta announced this summer. It's free, and it lets you host up to 20,000 of your songs and stream them to your devices. You can also "pin" songs from the player, which will cache them on your device for playing offline.

You can also now purchase music from the Android Market. It's available in high-quality, 320kbps MP3 format, and you get a 90-second preview before you buy in the store. But to drive more sharing and purchases, the service is integrated with Google+. Music that's shared to Google+ can be played back in its entirety by anyone in your circles.

Continuing our series about the Consumer Cloud, today we compare the three leading music cloud services: Apple's iTunes Match (just launched today), Amazon's Cloud Drive and Google Music. With these three highly competitive services, online music fans have never had it so good.

There are two main battles going on in the online music market, each of which is benefiting consumers greatly. One is between the three so-called cloud lockers mentioned above, which are competing to be the online archive for your digital music collection. The second battle is about whether you even need an online archive at all.

Apple device owners who want to store their music collections in the cloud and listen to them on their iOS-powered devices had better keep waiting for iTunes Match. Using competing services like Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive, it would appear, is off-limits for iPhone and iPad owners. There's a setting within iOS 5 to activate iTunes Match, but the feature won't work until the next version of iTunes is released.

Apple recently pulled a third party app that let users stream music from their Amazon cloud locker, reportedly due to legal concerns.

In May, Google launched a long-awaited music service that landed with somewhat of a thud. Compared to some of the rumors that were flying around, Google Music turned out to be a rather basic offering. It was nothing more than a "cloud locker" for one's own music files. Not a streaming service. Not an MP3 store. Instead, the service was more analgous to Amazon's Cloud Drive, except without an accompanying music store.

That's about to change, according to a report from the New York Times. Google is currently in negotiations with music labels to launch an MP3 store as part of Google Music. The move would put Google in more direct competition with Amazon and Apple, the latter of which is the market leader in digital music sales.

Did you miss out on the initial round of invites to Google's newest cloud locker service, Google Music? Well, today's the day to hit up your Google Music-loving friends for an invite. Existing users have been awarded just two invites each, which they can give out to anyone they choose. However, the service is still U.S.-only, so you may want to hold off on sharing with your overseas friends just yet.

Best Buy is joining Amazon, Google, and Apple in offering customers a cloud-based storage and streaming service for digital music. Using its "PlayAnywhere" technology, the Best Buy Music Cloud will let users upload their songs to the cloud, then stream the music across multiple devices, including Blackberry, Android and iOS.

But with stiff competition from the other big companies who've entered the cloud music locker space lately, can Best Buy offer something that will make customers use its service? Based on what's available today, the answer is "probably not."