Many of the rumors circulating about the iPad 2 involve the upgrades to the tablet's hardware, which according to a number of reports is expected to be thinner than the current model and therefore lighter as well. It seems a given that the iPad 2 will have at least one camera, something lacking in the first version, and there are several reports that it will have two - a front-facing camera for video, perhaps, and a rear-facing camera for photos. There's also talk that the new iPad will have more memory and a better graphics processor. ReadWriteWeb's live coverage will begin right here at 9 AM PST - we hope you'll join us.

And what would rumors of a new Apple device be if there wasn't speculation that you'll be able to get this latest iPad in white.

An Apple event always showcases the device itself, of course, as well as the iOS. But it's also an opportunity for the company to highlight its partnerships with various developers and publishers and to show off the range of the Apple ecosystem. With that in mind, here are some other things to look for tomorrow.

Any Fallout from Apple's New Subscription Policy

Since announcing its controversial (and confusing) subscription policy last month, Apple will likely want to assuage the fears of developers and customers that the books, movies, and music they've purchased will continue to to be accessible and that the apps they love - whether it's the Amazon Kindle app, Pandora, or Netflix, or the like - will continue to work. The new subscription service was first rolled out to coincide with the launch of New Corp's The Daily. As that's been widely panned, it will be interesting to see which magazine or newspaper - if any - takes the stage tomorrow.

A Better Bookstore? A Better E-Reader Experience?

Although not tablet devices, e-readers are often lumped together in the same category as the iPad. And while the iPad is, for many people, their e-reader of choice, there are lots of things about the iPad that make it inferior to other devices that are specifically designed for e-books. The screen, for example, on the original iPad is absolutely horrible if you're trying to read outside, and there are reports that a less reflective screen is in the works for the iPad 2.

But it isn't just the hardware that's inferior; it's the Apple iBookstore. Random House, one of the world's largest publishers, has agreed to the agency pricing model for e-books, the last of the big six publishers to do so. As agreeing to this model has been a stipulation for joining the iBookstore, we may the publisher announce it's availability there tomorrow. But it may take more than a better book selection to make people start embracing the iBookstore the way they have Apple's rival e-bookstores Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Apple in the Cloud?

Apple announced recently that it would no longer be selling retail box copies of MobileMe, its Internet calendar, mail, and contacts syncing service. Some took this as a sign that Apple would be making a move to a cloud-based storage service, where users can upload their media - movies, music, TV shows, and so on - online. I'll use this as the opportunity to lament, once again, Apple's acquisition of my once favorite music streaming service Lala.

Apple has long been expected to make an announcement about the cloud, whether it's storage or streaming. I hope Apple's new data center in North Carolina is ready. And if nothing else, I hope there's announcement about cloud syncing that means I can get rid of the pile of white cords I have lying around the house that are necessary to sync my iPhone and iPad with iTunes.

Apple Gets Social?

NPR called Ping, Apple's music-oriented social network, one of the worst ideas of 2010. And Apple's Game Center, promising a more social bent to mobile gaming, has fared no better. Will Apple try again with a new social effort? Will social be a feature or a footnote to a new iOS?

The invitation to tomorrow's event says "come see what 2011 will be the year of," a clear reference to 2010 as the year of the iPad. But as the the tablet market heats up, there are a number of competitors hoping to steal a bit of the iPad's thunder. Will 2011 be the year of the iPad again?

Tune in tomorrow here as we'll be liveblogging the event, scheduled to begin at 10am PST. And tune in to the tech blogosphere shortly thereafter, when the rumors for the iPad 3 will begin in earnest.

Oh, and it's free.

AudioBox.fm, founded in 2009, started making the rounds in the blogosphere back in February of this year. The free, cloud-based service lets you upload your files to the company's secure servers for access from any device that has an Internet connection and a Web browser.

Included with the service is AudioBox's online music player, which looks strikingly like Apple's iTunes software. Here, you can create and manage playlists, search for songs by artist, title or genre, shuffle songs and more.

Previously, the company had only offered a native Android application and its HTML 5-enabled website, the latter being the only way iPhone and iPod Touch users could take advantage of this service. But now, with the new native iPhone application, users can upload up to 1 GB of music to the cloud for free. If upgrading, it's only $3.99 per month for 11 GB, $7.99 for 26 GB or $9.99 for 151 GB. The subscription service is commitment-free as well, allowing you to unsubscribe at any time.

Also notable is AudioBox's integration with other cloud-based and social services, something it called "AudioMashes." In addition to the support for Last.fm scrobbling as noted above, it also allows you post what you're listening to via Twitter and Facebook, and, for those with paid levels of service, it lets you browse and add YouTube videos to your Playlists and access files stored on Dropbox. (Support for Amazon Web Services is coming soon.)

Music Heads to the Cloud... Where's Apple?

The trend of Web-based music services is gathering momentum, thanks to a number applications now growing in popularity, including Spotify (still awaiting its official U.S. launch), MP3tunes, and MOG, to name a few of our favorites.

The elephant in the room, of course, is Lala.com, a popular cloud-based streaming service acquired by Apple in December 2009. Rumor (or perhaps hope?) has it that Apple will re-launch Lala as its own cloud-based offering in order to compete with the scores of up-and-comers now available in its own iTunes App Store. How well any of these startups will fare once (if?) Apple enters the room is anybody's guess, but AudioBox's rallying cry of "one platform to rule them all" - referring to its ability to integrate other cloud services - not to mention its cross-platform support for devices like Android makes it a compelling alternative to whatever Apple may or may not launch in some unknown future.

For a closer look at MP3tunes, also see our in-depth review of the service from earlier this year. MP3tunes currently offers all of its users free 2GB music lockers, but the company is in the process of upgrading all of these accounts to 10GB of free storage. For $4.95 per month, users can also expand their lockers to 50GB.

Competitors: Other Music Lockers and Streaming Music Services

Apple is rumored to be launching an online version of iTunes in the near future, though the chances that Apple will offer users the ability to wirelessly sync this music with an Android phone are rather slim. Other MP3tunes competitors include MeCanto, which offers streaming to Android and Symbian phones, and pSonar, which offers unlimited storage but doesn't offer mobile streaming or downloads.

In addition, the growing popularity of streaming music services like MOG and Rdio also poses a number of challenges for music locker services like MP3tunes. Some of these - like Rdio - already scan their users' library for music that is also available on their services and then make these songs easily available on their services without forcing users to upload their complete music library. This was one of the features that made Lala so popular, though it remains to be seen if Apple plans to offer a similar service once it relaunches Lala.

Until then, here are 5 online music services that either allow you to stream your own music collection or give you access to large libraries of streaming music. Some of these even allow mobile streaming, which is something Lala never offered.

Streaming Music Locker

MP3tunes

If you don't want to be limited to playing the music that the music industry made available for on-demand streaming and you don't mind paying a monthly fee, MP3tunes is also worth a look. Just like Lala, MP3tunes allows you to upload all your music to an online music locker and then stream it. MP3tunes offers a web interface, mobile apps and support for a range of other devices like the Chumby, Wii and Logitech Squeezebox. As we noted earlier this week, MP3tunes now offers up to 10GB of free storage.

Streaming Music Services

MOG

For $5 a month, MOG's users get access to more than 5 million songs on demand. At this year's SXSW festival in Austin, MOG also announced that it will offer mobile apps for the iPhone and Android platforms in the next few months. The service also offers artist-based radio stations that are similar to Pandora's and Slacker's offerings.

Napster and Rhapsody

While the name harks back to the early days of illegal MP3 downloads, Napster is now a pretty standard MP3 store that also allows you to stream any of the 9 million songs in its library. For $7 per month, you can stream all the songs in Napster's library and download an additional 5 DRM-free MP3 files (more if you sign up for an annual plan).

Rhapsody also offers 9 million songs for on-demand streaming ($10/month), but unlike Napster, it also offers mobile apps (iPhone and Android).

Do-It-Yourself

Sockso

You can, of course, also use your own computer at home to stream music over the Internet. Simplify Music used to be our favorite service for doing this, but the company shut down last month.

A good alternative to Simplify Media is Sockso, an open source program, that can be installed on any Windows, OSX and Linux machine with very little effort (though you will need to set up the port forwarding on your router). The application gives you total control over your music experience and you can even share your music with anybody else on the Internet if you feel like doing so (and, of course, you have the legal rights to do so).

For a simplified version of this, also have a look at Opera Unite, which offers a built-in streaming music server for all Opera users.

Getting Started

To get started with MP3tunes (even if you don't have the 10GB upgrade yet), simply sign up for an account and download the company's desktop software, which is available for Mac and Windows. The desktop software will upload your music to the cloud (and watch for new music on your desktop as well). MP3tunes also offers a nifty browser plugin that allows you to send MP3 files from music blogs directly to your locker.

Once you have uploaded some music, MP3tunes biggest advantage quickly becomes clear: you can now listen to your music on virtually any device. We tested the Airband app for the iPhone, which actually feels a lot like the native iPod app. Unless you are offline, it's easy to forget that all your music is actually streaming over the network. We tested Airband on a slow Edge connection, as well as over 3G and WiFi connections and didn't run into any issues.

MP3tunes also offers a nifty web interface that is somewhat reminiscent of iTunes and MP3tune's competitor Lala. Just like iTunes Genius mixes, MP3tunes also organizes automatic playlists for you.

Competition

MP3tunes closest competitor is currently Lala, which was bought by Apple in December 2009 (we actually called Lala the reincarnation of Robertson's early my.mp3.com music locker when we first reviewed it). Currently, it is not clear what Apple's plans for Lala are, but the service remains online and doesn't have an upload limit for its music locker, which makes it a nice alternative if you just want to stream your music over the Web. Unlike MP3tunes, however, Lala doesn't offer any mobile clients.

Invites

MP3tunes will give the first 150 ReadWriteWeb readers who use the invite code 'RWW' access to the expanded lockers today. You can sign up here. The next 150 people who use the code will be in the first batch of additional invites that MP3tunes will send out soon.

What Will This New Feature Look Like?

In this new implementation, users can't choose between the Lala or iLike widget. Instead, Google will randomly decide which widget a user sees. This gives Google the option to switch between services and to include other services in future as well.

Buy Songs from Rhapsody - See Lyrics from Gracenote

Underneath the music onebox results, Google will feature links to its other partners, like Rhapsody and iMeem, where users will be able to purchase MP3s.

Google's partnership with Gracenote also allows it to show lyrics in the search results now. As Marissa Mayer pointed out in today's announcement, finding lyrics is still very hard on Google. Now, users can type lyrics into the default search box and Google will return results from the music search feature, and users can play the song right on the search results page.

Big Winners: Lala and MySpace

The big winners here are obviously Lala and MySpace/iLike. For Lala, this has been an especially busy period. Just last week, Lala announced a partnership with Facebook. It now powers Facebook's music gifting service.

iLike has a traditional streaming model. The company streams some song full length and some as 30-second samples. Users can buy MP3s from iLike for between $0.99 and $1.29. MySpace bought iLike earlier this year, and the widget on the Google search results page will be MySpace-branded.

Lala's business model is more interesting. Users can stream every song on the service once for free. After that, customers can buy the right to stream it for $0.10 or buy the MP3 for $0.89. Users can also upload their own music library to Lala and then stream those songs freely over the Internet.

How important this move is for the two streaming music services becomes clear when we look at the current traffic data for music-related searches on Google.

Update: We just had a quick chat with Lala's CEO Geoff Ralston after the event. The Lala team is obviously very excited about the partnership with Google and as Ralston told us, the company worked with Google for quite a while to get this new feature up and running. According to Ralston, Lala's partners in the music industry were very supportive of the integration. We also asked him if he was worried that the new influx of traffic was going to bring Lala's servers down. Google, however, stress tested Lala's servers and couldn't bring the service down with up to 550 queries per second.

What Does Google's Current Music Traffic Look Like?

Hitwise's Heather Dougherty took a close look at Google's music traffic earlier today. According to Hitwise's data, about 6% of last month's top 1000 search terms on Google were music-related. In total, Google sent about 1.48% of its traffic to music sites. The majority of these searches (15.32%) lead to a Wikipedia site, but almost 10% currently go to YouTube, 5.7% to Yahoo Music and 3% to MySpace.  Now that users can listen to music right from the search results page, these services - including Google's own YouTube - will likely see a drop in music-related traffic over the next few weeks.

Eager North Americans have been waiting for the Spotify service to launch stateside; nevertheless, because the company looks to sign major label deals before its American release, there is no hard date for launch. According to paidContent, "Spotify hopes to launch in the U.S. in Q3 or Q4." Meanwhile, Florida-based Grooveshark just launched a premium service available to both US and international members, and an iPhone service has been submitted to the App store. While Grooveshark's current app does not allow for cached offline music, the company plans to incorporate this feature in an upcoming version. Not to be outdone, Rhapsody also submitted an iPhone app early this week. If Spotify launches in the US when Grooveshark's cached music app becomes available, it will be an interesting battle for streaming music supremacy.

Billboard.com currently attracts about 4 million unique visitors each month. Compare that to the conservative Quantcast estimates of MOG at 7.7 million monthly visitors and Imeem at a whopping 16 million monthly uniques. Although it is expected that Billboard will see a traffic spike due to its recent web redesign, it's doubtful that it will increase its numbers to rival those of today's top music communities. We need to remember that while Billboard is still a reputable music industry news source, it is completely irrelevant to cool hunters.

By the time a single reaches Billboard's charts and gets featured for streaming, Hype Machine and Imeem users are more than familiar with them. In fact, they've probably grown bored with the multiple remixes and have decided to form a backlash movement against them. Let's face it, Billboard, Spin and Rolling Stone magazine have become irrelevant to the younger generation of music fans. In fact, Forbes just published a story on how music network Pitchfork is replacing them. And you know if Forbes thinks Pitchfork is the next big thing, then the über hip have already left in droves.

One of Threadless' top selling shirts bares the slogan, "I listen to bands that don't even exist yet." If you're on the bleeding edge of music, you probably want to stick to your favorite music site rather than switching to the bubblegum selection of Billboard's mainstream offerings.

According to Forbes journalist, Javier Espinoza, "Another looming threat [to Spotify]: Microsoft is launching a very similar music streaming service later in July, a service that also allows users to download the music, something Spotify still won't allow members to do." Nevertheless, the question is, will Microsoft be able to provide cross-format support and separate itself from its lackluster music devices in order to build a site that consumers will enjoy? If it can't, Spotify will have nothing to worry about.

Besides, in late June, Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek made the following statement to the Register, " We're working on a one-click download solution with 7Digital, press buy, press OK and you buy a recording. My hope is to get it out in the next couple of months."

Demonstrated at Google's late May I/O conference, Spotify's Android already caches music for easy offline play. An iPhone app version is already reportedly in the works.

If you can play all of your favorite music from your cached play list, how important is it for the average user to have the access to the original file? Below is a look at the current Android app, let us know your listening habits in the comments below.

Trend: Illegal File Sharing Sites Go Legit

The interesting trend, here, though, is that a lot of companies and services that were previously known for being 'illegal' hubs for file sharing are now trying to go legit. Napster, the grandfather for Kazaa and most of its brethren, is now a respectable paid service, and the Pirate Bay may offer a legal version of its service soon.

As Eric Pfanner pointed out in the New York Times, we are now getting to the point where using legal services like Spotify or Lala are actually so much more convenient than illegally downloading music. Given this trend, it makes sense for centralized services like Kazaa to slowly drift to a legal model. At the same time, decentralized file sharing options like BitTorrent, which don't depend on a single company to work, will still continue to be popular. Chances are, though, that users will probably share less music through torrents over the next year or so, as more cheap and free options allow users to legally access music more conveniently.

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.

Upload with AIR - Play Over the Air

You upload your music with an Adobe AIR app which allows you to upload songs directly from your hard-drive, but also has a convenient option that lets you browse your iTunes library to pick songs you want to transfer to imeem. In our tests those uploads worked just as expected and went relatively fast. The sounds quality was also surprisingly good.

Similar to the iPhone apps from Pandora, Last.fm, and and Slacker Radio, you can also easily create custom radio stations, though the functions here feel a bit limited compared to the options that imeem competitors now offer.

Like its competitors, the app suffers from the fact that it can't play in the background on the iPhone. Sadly, imeem also doesn't remember where it left off after you exit the app.

Pricing

You can store up to 100 songs, 10 videos, and an unlimited amount of photos on imeem for free. For $30 a year, you can upload up to 1000 songs and 100 videos, and $100 a year buys you storage for 20,000 songs and 500 videos.

Alternatives

We are also big fans of Lala, which allows you to listen to all of your songs online without any restrictions. Sadly, though, Lala does not offer a mobile application.

If you want full access to the music on your desktop while on the go, Simplify Music 2.0 also does a great job at streaming your collection over WiFi, Edge, and 3G. One of the nice features of the Simplify Music app (iTunes link) is that it gives users easy access to lyrics and artist biographies. Imeem only provides access to artist biographies.

Verdict

Given the quality of the apps that imeem's competitors have released, this app still has a bit to go before it can fulfill all of its promises. However, if you are looking for a simple way to expand the capacity of your iPhone or Android phone then imeem might be worth a look, especially if you don't keep your music on a home server where you can easily access it with Simplify Media or Simplify Music.

Pandora: Humans Only

Pandora, one of the most popular music recommendation and discovery services on the Internet today, bases its recommendations on data from the Music Genome Project. The Music Genome Project assigns up to 400 attributes to every song. This, however, has to be done by trained musicians and the process can take up to half an hour per song. While the results of this method are often great, and we ourselves have often discovered interesting new music through Pandora, this approach simply doesn't scale very well and Pandora's library can often feel somewhat limited.

Mufin: Algorithms Only

Maybe the best known proponent of a music recommendations system that is purely based on algorithms is Mufin. Mufin's software analyzes the fundamental properties of a song and makes recommendations based solely on the musical similarity between songs.

While Mufin's approach generally works surprisingly well, the problem with this technique is that the system is simply oblivious to the cultural context of a song. Thanks to this approach, you might get to hear Christmas songs in February, for example, as the algorithms simply can't understand the cultural context of your music library.

At times, however, being agnostic to the cultural context of a song can also have its advantages, as Mufin's recommendations can often help you to rediscover music you had forgotten about. Mufin also works with any song, no matter whether it's from your own band, Kanye West, or an unsigned local band.

While Mufin's web service turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, we did like the company's iTunes plugin, which analyzes the songs in your library.

Lala: Explicit P2P Recommendations

Other services, like Lala, have decided to not feature any real recommendation technology at all. Instead, Lala purely relies on users following each other on the service and recommending new music to each other.

At least for Lala, this approach seems to work very well. When we talked to Lala's founder and CEO Bill Nguyen last week, he pointed out that 70% of all the music listened to on Lala was new music that was not already in a user's music locker, and that 18% of new music listened to on the service is bought and added to collections.

eMusic: Hybrid Approach

EMusic, the second largest online music store after iTunes, introduced a new recommendation system on its site late last year. This new system is based on technology from MediaUnbound, one of the larger providers of personalization and recommendation services. MediaUnbound, for example, provides the recommendations for MTV's Urge, Napster, and Brazil's Terra Sonora (eMusic, by the way, dropped Choicestream as its recommendation service in favor of MediaUnbound).

As MediaUnbound's CEO and co-founder Michael Papish explained to us last week, the company believes that a hybrid approach, which uses both algorithms and human input from experts, will provide the best results for users.

For eMusic, this means that the recommendations on the site are constantly fine-tuned by your own actions on the site, MediaUnbound's algorithms, and eMusic's editors, which, together with MediaUnbound's high-level teams, constantly evaluate the resulting sets of recommendations (Papish called this the "mosh pit" approach).

Genius: Apple's Black Box

It is hard to evaluate how Apple's Genius feature in iTunes really works, but Apple does have a few advantages. Because iTunes users often rate the songs in their library, Apple gets a lot of explicit information about a song's popularity. Users also regularly transmit information about how often they played and skipped a song to Apple's central servers.

Besides this, however, we can only speculate about what Apple looks at to give its recommendations. They surely evaluate playlists and the similarities between different users' libraries, for example. We can only assume that Apple uses a mashup of various recommendation techniques to come up with its own suggestions.

The results are generally quite good, though often either very predictable or completely random.

Opening the Black Box

In general, a black box approach similar to Apple's is still common for most recommendation services. Very few services give users a clear insight into why a certain song was recommended and the ability to fine-tune these selections (Pandora is a good example of a service that readily provides this kind of information). We are, however, seeing a trend towards users getting slightly more control over these recommendations. Slacker Radio, for example (see our review of their iPhone app here), lets users choose whether they want to hear more hits or more obscure artists on their radio stations. Mufin, too, gives users some control over how similar the recommended songs should be.

What Does Your Ideal Music Recommendation Engine Sound Like?

In general, we feel that every one of these approaches can provide us with relevant suggestions, depending on what kind of recommendation we are looking for. Of course, sometimes the easiest way to find great songs is to simply forget about the algorithms and editors and just look at what the people around you listen to on a service like imeem.

Do you have a favorite service for music recommendations? Or do you have some recommendations for these services that might help them to improve their service? Just let us know in the comments.

ReadWriteWeb Resources for Recommendation Technologies

We will be profiling other recommendation companies in upcoming posts. We also invite you to explore our custom ReadWriteWeb Resources:

• RWW Recommendation Industry Feed Favorites OPML file (save link)
• RWW Recommendation Industry Feeds - Best of Feed (copy and paste to your reader)
• Click to preview the above feeds before subscribing (pop-up window)
• RWW Recommendation Site Search (Visit and Bookmark)

CC-licensed logo image used courtesy of Flickr user shankar, shiv.

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?