ReadWriteWeb

Hype Machine, the smart, long-running MP3 blog aggregator, has posted its annual collection of the most-blogged-about albums, songs and musical artists of the year. Once again, the project is a pleasure to consume and will unfold throughout the month of January. Top albums 50 through 41, Mumford and Sons through Monsters of Folk, are available now in full for streaming.

The album collection combines weighted rankings - based on submitted top 10 lists from 550 MP3 blogs - with a widget from Grooveshark to listen to the album, and a Creative Commons photo of each band. It's quite nice. The newest addition to the project is unusually low-tech; it's artist renditions of the top 50 musical artists of the year.

Let's face it: the music industry is broken. Labels charge stations and providers exorbitant fees; independent sites have little chance of recouping their costs; and in the end, the listening experience is fragmented and confusing.

In our current model, a company like Grooveshark pays a fee for your stream even if you have access to a song via a separate paid subscription service or download. In other words, labels are getting paid twice on songs you already own the listening rights to. In order to change that, Playdar offers us a chance to search for music by artist and song as well as access the files we already own.

Gainesville-based music startup Grooveshark just signed a major label agreement with EMI Music and EMI Music Publishing. While the company is unwilling to disclose the exact terms of the deal, Grooveshark VP of Marketing Josh Bonnain expressed that the agreement is fair and mutually beneficial. The surprise deal comes after EMI filed a June lawsuit against the company. While Grooveshark members gain access to EMI's huge song catalogue including tracks from the Virgin, Blue Note and Astralwerks labels, it'll be interesting to see if the agreement is actually a sustainable one.

Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek must be ecstatic. The company's iPhone application has been approved for the App Store ahead of competitors Rhapsody and Grooveshark. PaidContent UK reports that Apple has notified Spotify that its app will appear in the store shortly. In late July there was fear that the Swedish site's iPhone service would be denied due to the fact that it was seen as a threat to iTunes. Since then, Apple has come under FCC investigation for its app approval process. The investigation could not have come at a better time for Spotify; the speedy approval is likely due to Apple's interest in deflecting accusations of anti-competitive tactics.

Not to be outdone by recent announcements from streaming music site Spotify, Gainesville-based Grooveshark announced a $3 per month or $30 per year ad-free Grooveshark VIP service. Grooveshark VIP offers users early access to development pipeline releases including early testing on the upcoming Grooveshark iPhone application and early August 24th access to Grooveshark 2 - the site's next generation. In addition to offering users WordPress and Facebook integration, Grooveshark spokesperson Josh Bonnain laid down some key differences between Spotify and Grooveshark.

US audiences are in for a listening treat. It turns out that Swedish on-demand streaming music service Spotify is set to officially launch to US audiences in the late Summer. Up until now, Spotify's American fans have either had to use foreign proxy servers to access the service or they've simply gone without. The service is currently available in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Spain, France and Finland. Despite only being available in a select few countries, Spotify already has more than 5 million users and is often mentioned as a competitor to Grooveshark and Imeem.

According to The Leading Question's recent research report, as many as 65% of UK teens are streaming music on a monthly basis. Meanwhile, file-sharing has decreased significantly since the Digital Britain Report consultation to address illicit P2P file sharing. While music sharing sites have come and gone due to funding, legal issues and lack of users, here are some of the streaming sites that continue to thrive.

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.

In 2008 Blender magazine named Gainesville Florida the Best Place to Start a Band. With this morning's launch of Grooveshark's new Facebook Share Song application, WordPress plugin and release of their TinySong API, the city is making its mark as a music technology hotbed as well.

I did it! I resisted the cravings all week. I did NOT buy an iPhone. It took a lot of deep Buddhist meditation to deal with my cravings. The iPhone is just gorgeous - this is user interface design at the highest level of art. Plus, the developer platform makes developers who dream in design patterns go all weak at the knees. The last time a UI and API induced equal cravings was in NeXt. No that is not a snide comment, Jobs learned from NeXt and this one is a big, big winner. But, oh yes there is a but, iPhone is still a piece of utility electronics.

Here are the highlights from the week's stories on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side, we analyzed the increasing mainstreaming of social news site digg; and we reviewed some awesome new web apps (Grooveshark, SixApart's BlogIt, Twhirl, Alert Thingy, and others). On web trends, there was a meme this week that declared the Mobile Web dead - we begged to differ. We also looked into two 'real world' issues for Web tech this week - the impact of social media on "real people"; and real world data portability.

Gainesville, Florida-based Grooveshark, a music sharing startup that we first profiled in August today launched their latest product: Grooveshark Lite. Lite is a slick, flash-based streaming music service that takes Grooveshark's huge catalog of uploaded music and makes it available to stream, no registration required. Grooveshark Lite is fast, easy to use, and free.

Leave it to Radiohead, the pioneering alt-rock band that released its latest album last fall under a pay-what-you-want price scheme to a lot of fan fare (and some criticism of gimmickry), to push the envelope further. The band is now asking fans to create their first music video for the album in a contest utilizing online YouTube of animation (and Crunchies finalist) Aniboom.

P2P music service Grooveshark is at SXSW Music this week, promoting the upcoming release of an Analytics suite for music artists and labels. The company is also generously offering ReadWriteWeb readers $1000 worth of music vouchers (details below). We reviewed Grooveshark in August last year, when Josh Catone described it as "one part Last.fm, one part Limewire, and one part iTunes store."

Three Firefox extensions were named winners of the Extend Firefox 2 awards this morning after being selected from a list of more than 100 submissions by a panel of tech celebrity judges . The Minimap Sidebar Extension (fast mapping), SamePlace (multiclient browser IM) and Shareaholic (multi tool bookmark submitter) were the award winners and 12 runners up were named as well.

Though basing a business on a browser extension might seem crazy, for the select few companies highlighted in Mozilla events like this it can lead to a big increase in user numbers, especially if support from Mozilla continues.

New customer service site Get Satisfaction, itself a wonder to behold, announced today that it is now accepting requests for access to a beta API (Application Programming Interface). Satisfaction functionality will soon be available for apps and sites all over the web. Fresh off of a successful conference titled "Customer Service is the New Marketing," Get Satisfaction is becoming the hippest place for companies to engage transparently with their customers - whether they want to or not!