ReadWriteWeb

As an entrepreneur, blogger and the investor in charge of the Founders Fund seed investment program, Dave McClure knows the importance of a proven revenue model. In a recent blog post he makes the assertion that "subscription models are the new black," despite the fact that startup monetization has focussed heavily on cost-per-click advertising. He writes, "This Don't-Be-Evil-AdWords-Click-Happiness..It's made us a bunch of lazy, ad-happy, Web-Tards with crappy ROI...We have largely WASTED an entire web decade of time, energy & venture capital on extremely inefficient revenue models." While we might not have chosen this exact phrasing, we cannot agree with McClure more.

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.

In a move of ninja swiftness, MySpace has acquired and subsequently shuttered iMeem in its entirety, even trashing the streaming/sharing music startup's API, which had heretofore supplied much-needed resources to a small but vibrant ecosystem of apps.

The acquisition was announced just yesterday, and developers were given no warning that their creations would become useless digital paperweights overnight. Among the detrius of the deal is twt.fm, a popular Twitter music-sharing app created by web dev Lee Martin, who tipped us off to his plight today in a blog post.

UPDATE: Users are also reporting problems with blip.fm, a popular music-streaming site that integrated results from iMeem.

MOG's $5 all-you-can-eat streaming music subscription service has finally launched. Although we interviewed CEO David Hyman in mid October, the music industry has changed considerably in the last two months. Imeem sold to MySpace for a song, and competitor Spotify is rumored to be delaying a United States launch as it refuses to enter North America with a paid-only version. We spoke to MOG CEO David Hyman to find out his thoughts on the industry and why his service is different from his competitors.

It appears that the time for freemium music services in the US has passed. Earlier this week streaming music site Imeem sold to MySpace for under $10 million dollars while laying off a large number of staff. For a company with all four major record labels signed, more than 15 million uniques a month and well over 5 million tracks in its catalogue, it came as a sobering blow to the industry. While many companies move to a subscription model, 8tracks continues to forge along in what some describe as a convenient loophole. As of this weekend the company is publicly launching its API for Boston's Music Hack Day.

In 2008 the idea of another subscription-only music service was enough to get your knickers in a torrent. Sure Rhapsody was doing well, but they'd been around for forever and in 2008, freemium was the music model du jour. With a year to reflect, co-founder of the Future of Music Coalition and longtime San Fran Music Tech Summit organizer Brian Zisk tells us what it takes to survive in today's music environment.

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.

One year ago we reported that music-based social networking site Imeem was experiencing strong growth and making key deals with record labels. Our conclusion at the time was that "Imeem's growth rate and buzz is reminiscent of that of YouTube just before it got huge."

Big words indeed. To see if that You Tube comparison was justified, let's check back in with Imeem one year later and assess how they're doing now.