NPR music podcast All Songs Considered just released a show about breaking up with your favorite bands. It got me thinking about favorite web apps or services that I've broken up with. So in the tradition of Internet era music, I'm going to directly rip NPR's idea and breakup categories.

In this post I tearfully discuss past relationships with MySpace, Last.fm and Soup.io. I finish with a love story that has a happier ending: Flickr. I'd love to hear your own tales of web app woe in the comments.

I admit it, I broke it off with MySpace and hooked up with Facebook. Despite the fact that Facebook is loose with my privacy and takes away things I want from it (like third party widgets and tabs).

But MySpace brought this on itself. It became garish and trashy over time. All of my friends hated it. Even its corporate parent, News Corp, wants MySpace out of the house now. It's sad how MySpace declined after those party days of 2005-07.

Remembering The Good Times: Last.fm

I used to have a ball with music streaming service Last.fm. We'd sing together and dance the nights away. Last.fm would constantly surprise me with new music, bringing a joyful smile to my face. It even tracked my music listening (our pet name for this was "scrobbling").

Then Last.fm latched onto a big shot called CBS and it stopped surprising me as often. That's ok though, because new subscription music services have come along to take my breath away. My current favorite music squeeze is MOG, which lets me pick and choose which albums I listen to. Last.fm never did that.

(I still "scrobble" with Last.fm though, for old times sake.)

It's Not You, It's Me (Apps/Sites We Grew Apart From): Soup.io

This particular story breaks my heart, because I so wanted Soup.io to become popular. It's a lifestreaming service very similar to Tumblr and Posterous. Of the three, I felt that Soup.io had the best features. It still does, in many respects. My favorite feature is the full-text import of content from third party services (like Last.fm and Goodreads). Aggregating your content from all around the social Web is so much easier - and works better - in Soup.io than in Tumblr and Posterous.

Yet, this year I moved to Tumblr. Why? Because of its slickness and its far superior social network, which I admit I wanted to tap into. I feel so shallow, like I dumped a smart and quirkily cool nerd for the prom queen. Shame on me.

App or Website You'll Always Stand By: Flickr

Here's a 'happily ever after' story, to cheer you up. Despite having Yahoo as its parent (which has a reputation for not being able to look after its children), Flickr has been a mainstay for me over the years.

I'll always have a soft spot for Flickr, because it guided me into the new world of online photos back in 2004. Over the years Flickr has continued to host my photos, despite other sites like Facebook trying to woo me away. To this day I pay to be a premium member of Flickr - that's how much I love it.

(note: the lead photo of this post is from Flickr user crimfants, who photographed himself after a 1991 breakup - "It worked out for both of us," he concluded.)

So there you have it, 3 sad break-up stories from my life on the Web and 1 happy story. Thanks again to NPR All Songs Considered for inspiring me to write this.

Which web apps or services have you broken up with; and why?

It needs to be said, though, that Facebook's user base has exploded over the last year, while Digg's traffic 'only' grew by about 50% according to Compete. During its fifth year, Facebook's traffic more than doubled from about 28 million visitors to over 73 million.

As Jay Meattle points out in his guest post for Compete, Digg will have to come up with something very special if it wants to continue to match Facebook's growth.

Can Digg Become Mainstream?

In a way, though, comparing Digg to Facebook isn't even necessarily fair, as they provide two completely different services, but in terms of the users they want to reach, both have very similar aspirations. For now, Digg, however, hasn't been able to break into the mainstream (even though Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht made an appearance on Jimmy Fallon last week), while there is a good chance that even your mother is now joining Facebook. If Digg wants to continue its growth, it will have to find a way to attract more mainstream users without alienating its base.

There are more than 650 stores currently, with over 250,000 songs in the catalogue - most appear to be available at $0.99 per song or $8.99 per album. The site claims to be "working with" 4,500 labels, including 4AD, XL, Rough Trade, Matador, Dominio, and Ged Day's own Warp.

Other than the lack of major label music, there is another minor annoyance for those of us who don't live in the U.S. - international users will frequently run into a "we're sorry, but this release is not available in your country" message. However on the plus side, all the music available for download is DRM-free and at high quality 320Kbps.

Founder Ged Day set up People's Music Store because he felt that no one company, including his own Bleep.com, can manage music expertise at a large scale. People's Music Store is hoping to tap into the Long Tail and enable music fans to create thousands of unique music stores. In a way it's like 'MySpace meets Etsy'.

On some of the more popular stores, for example one called walpod, we can see plenty of evidence of social media:

• Profiles
• Storekeeper comments - basically a form of blog post
• Shoutbox - like Facebook's Wall
• RSS feeds
• Favoriting stores (kind of like the 'friending' concept in social networks)
• Ability to add items from other peoples stores to your own, with one click
  

However there's work to be done with the social elements on the service - for example it's not intuitive where and how to add content such as 'news' and other multimedia into one's storefront.

Overall I found the concept of setting up my own online record store to be a compelling one, despite the limited range of music currently available and the relatively minor quibbles with social media elements. And in terms of music discovery, People's Music Store does a great job of enabling music fans to find new music. In the 'alternative' music stores I browsed, I discovered several interesting new acts I hadn't heard before. So if you're a music fan, People's Music Store is worth checking out. Let us know what you think in the comments.

More Noise to Signal

We think it's CBS Radio and not Clear Channel which has made the biggest strides. CBS' partnerships with AOL and Yahoo!, along with its ownership of trendy online radio app last.fm, have effectively made CBS Radio the most powerful force in Internet radio in 2008.

Kevin Conroy, executive vice president of AOL, recently wrote in a guest blog post at Radio Business Report about the evolution of AOL Radio. Conroy wrote that the partnership with CBS Radio allowed AOL to tap into the "core competency in traditional radio" that CBS had. At the same time CBS got access to "AOL's substantial online listener base, and allowed it to connect with the AOL Network, which reaches more than 110 million unique visitors a month", wrote Conroy. He also noted that AOL got "an improved player, built by CBS Radio" that works on both PCs and Macs.

At the end of August we published data from comScore about the Internet Radio industry. It showed that the big Internet companies still dominate, specifically AOL Radio and Yahoo Music. At that point AOL Radio had been showing excellent annual growth, with a 56% increase over the past year. However Yahoo Music had decreased 19% annually since July 07. According to Reuters, in October comScore data had AOL at 3.99 million unique visitors, while CBS Web properties had 3.95 million unique visitors and Yahoo! Launchcast had 2.87 million. When you look at who powers both AOL and Yahoo now, it's clear that CBS has significantly increased its market presence since mid-08.

At ReadWriteWeb we've tended to focus on the innovative Web native apps that have risen independently of the big radio stations. According to comScore Pandora rose 89% from July 07 - July 08, while last.fm had 62% annual growth. But both the traditional radio broadcasting and Internet bigcos have been steadily increasing their influence - none moreso than CBS, which in addition to the AOL/Yahoo! partnerships this year also acquired last.fm in May 2007.

And then there's mobile. As Reuters pointed out, the iPhone has had a big influence on radio for mobile devices this year (see our post Top 5 Streaming Music Apps for the iPhone for examples). Other mobile devices, such as Blackberry and the Internet phones from Nokia, are also ramping up.

What other trends have you noticed in 2008 from Internet radio? What do you expect to see happen in 2009?

The Top 10 tracks is absolutely dominated by Coldplay's Viva la Vida, with 6 songs - including numbers 1 and 2. The title track was number 1, with more than three million listens in about 6 months. Coldplay also features at 5, 6, 8 and 9. This is reminiscent of the dominance of the Billboard singles chart the Beatles enjoyed in April 1964!

The only other artist to make the top 10 tracks was Katy Perry at number 7 with 'I kissed a girl'.

Guess what's the number 1 album? Coldplay's Viva la Vida. Coldplay did have an impressive online launch for that much-anticipated album, which certainly helped. Indeed the album was also the biggest selling iTunes album download of 2008.

These charts, although depressingly dominated by a few bands, show that last.fm is a data generating machine. Its Scrobbler technology tracks what users listen to on a variety of media players - such as iTunes, Songbird, Hype Machine, Blip.fm. It tracks data at the rate of about 650 songs per second, from a community of over 25 million users worldwide according to the analytics firm Omniture. Last.fm claims this is the largest global database of online music behaviour.

Head of The Long Tail Wins Again

Last.fm says it currently has 43 million distinct pieces of music from more than 12 million artists in its database. Of course, even with such a 'long tail' of music data, clearly the Coldplays of this world will continue to dominate. It's not just Coldplay either, Radiohead probably would've been just as successful in 2007. According to one digger, last year "Radiohead would have been the entire top 10 tracks...". We can't verify that claim, but it sounds all too plausible given the 2008 data.

Although it's disappointing that mainstream artists can dominate charts even on the Internet, the beauty of online music services is that users can create their own Top 10's too. Thousands of those won't include Coldplay (including this author's!).

The complete "Best of 2008" lists from last.fm:

Best Artist (artists who have released their debut album this year)

1. MGMT - Oracular Spectacular

2. The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing

3. Sara Bareilles - Little Voice

4. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

5. Katy Perry - One Of The Boys

6. The Last Shadow Puppets - The Age of the Understatement

7. Foals - Antidotes

8. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

9. Does It Offend You, Yeah? - You Have No Idea What You're Getting Yourself Into

10. Santogold - Santogold

Best Album

1. Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends

2. MGMT - Oracular Spectacular

3. Portishead - Third

4. Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I-IV

5. The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing

6. The Kooks - Konk

7. Death Cab for Cutie - Narrow Stairs

8. Hot Chip - Made In The Dark

9. Jack Johnson - Sleep Through The Static

10. Sigur Rós - Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust

Best Track

1. Coldplay - Viva La Vida

2. Coldplay - Violet Hill

3. MGMT - Time To Pretend

4. MGMT - Electric Feel

5. Coldplay - Life In Technicolour

6. Coldplay - Cemeteries of London

7. Katy Perry - I Kissed A Girl

8. Coldplay - 42

9. Coldplay - Strawberry Swing

10. MGMT - Kids

Is this a case of geek trends being at odds with mainstream? Or is it that the mainstream hasn't yet caught onto the cool music sites? Let's check out and analyze the stats from both comScore and our poll....

Note that last.fm isn't categorized as 'Internet Radio' by comScore and as far as we know, it isn't part of CBS Radio listed above. We asked CBS (which owns last.fm) to send us the comScore data they have on last.fm, and here it is for the same period:

Notable Trends

AOL Music, with 23.9 million unique visitors in July 08, is the strongest. It recorded a 56% increase over the past year, so its growth is very good. Yahoo Music is second with 18.7M uniques in July 08, however it has decreased 19% annually since July 07. Clear Channel Online, the largest operator of radio stations (amongst other things) in the US, is a clear third with 9.4M audience in July 08.

As for the online streaming sites that began as startups, despite its continuing legal woes and the fact it can't be heard throughout much of the rest of the world, Pandora's US growth has been very impressive: an 89% increase from last year, to 4.8M unique visitors in July. Its competitor last.fm had just over 3M unique visitors in July 08, and 62% annual growth.

We also checked Compete and their stats are fairly similar, in terms of the trends, to comScore's. Compete has Pandora at 81.8% annual growth, with last.fm at 72.6%:

So the overall trend here is that both Pandora and last.fm are showing strong growth. But AOL Music continues to set the pace. Yahoo Music must be worried about its decline.

ReadWriteWeb Poll: last.fm and Pandora Still Most Popular

Our poll asked: what are your favorite online music streaming services? We ran almost the same poll last year. The results have shown that there is more diversity this year in the number of online music services that our readers tune into. While Last.fm and Pandora once again came out a clear first and second (respectively), other apps made a strong showing. Last.fm got 19% and Pandora 15%. Last year last.fm was at 31% and Pandora 29%, although last year's poll wasn't multi-choice.

Of the smaller services, Highnote, lala.com, Seeqpod all polled at the 8-9% range this year. Non-radio services such as Imeem and iTunes Music Service drew around 4-5%, while small but trendy services Hype Machine and Muxtape both came in at 4%.

So last.fm and Pandora are still favorites among the early adopter and tech-savvy people that read our site. But it's great to see so much interest in the many new online music startups (some of whom we didn't manage to fit into our poll, it must be said). As a matter of interest, here are some Compete stats for a few of the well performing smaller sites in our poll:

Hype Machine is perhaps the one to watch here, with 177% growth annually and on an upward trend. It grew 10.2% last month alone.

Conclusion

So AOL and Yahoo still dominate music streaming in the US, but last.fm and Pandora are beloved by many of our readers, and are growing fast in comScore too. We asked our panelists in our podcast show this week (link below) which sites they think will be popular this time next year. We'd like to ask the same question here. Do you see any dark horses amongst the smaller services, that may even show up in next year's comScore charts?

See also: Future of Online Music - Industry Players Discuss. This presents highlights from our podcast show earlier this week, in which senior representatives from Yahoo Music, Imeem and Rhapsody discussed online music trends.

By default, WikiFM loads the artist or band in the right side frame, but by clicking through the tabs at the top, you can also load the Wikipedia article for the song, a web site of the lyrics, or your own profile page at Last.fm.

Unfortunately, this is one mashup that just doesn't perform. To begin with, the site is, quite frankly, unattractive. It features a black background with white text on the left side, where the Last.fm player's frame is located, and on the right, there is the white background of Wikipedia with its blue links and black text. Then, of course, when you browse to the Last.fm tab, the frame is filled with Last.fm's red. All these disjointed colors make browsing the site hard on the eyes.

Even so, design issues could be overlooked if the service functioned. But as Eliot van Burkirk (blogger at The Listening Post) found out - the site would not work while he was signed into Last.fm. Only upon signing out of the Last.fm service could he enjoy the mashup's features.

We had the same problem here, and we have to question the value of a Last.fm mashup that doesn't even allow you to be signed into your Last.fm account.

In addition, the site would get hung up while buffering the track, but instead of being able to load up the Last.fm frame and click around the site, you would be stuck staring at a white page until the service gave up, announcing "Oops! We had a problem connecting!" Only a refresh of the page can get the site going at this point - the tabs stay permanently non-functional at this point if you don't reload the page.

Broken WikiFM

So, unfortunately, this mashup did not follow through very well.

Better Options

Instead, we would like to point you to a couple of places where you'll find a much better Wikipedia/music mashup experience.

The site called MusicPortl, for example, does a nice job.  Besides incorporating Wikipedia content, the site also offers flickr photos tagged with the artist's name, photos of the releases that link to Amazon and allow you to download cover art, tags that link you to similar artists or genres, links to blog entries about the artist, links to videos, and even links to search for that artist on Google, Yahoo! Music, or Pitchfork. MusicPortl is also an attractively designed site, especially when compared to WikiFM. Unfortunately, there is no option to actually stream the music itself.

Music Portl

For streaming, there is FoxyTunes Planet, a Yahoo! Music service that provides much of what MusicPortal offers, but also links directly to top tracks and albums while compiling results, including links, photos, videos, and lyrics from Wikipedia, Last.fm, Rhapsody, Yahoo Search, flickr, YouTube and Amazon. But most importantly, music from the band or artist can be streamed via either Pandora or The Hype Machine right from the artist's page.

FoxyTunes Planet

Either of those sites provide a better mashup experience than WikiFM, to get you through until a better Last.fm/Wikipedia mashup can be found.

Getting Prompted to Buy on Last.fm

Not only has this on-demand service been good for Last.fm - minutes spent on site are up 118% month-on-month - the service is good for partners, too, like Amazon, whose overall CD and download sales through Last.fm increased by 119%. And since the service launched, Last.fm users are purchasing 66% more albums than before.

The service, which launched January 23rd, was made possible by deals Last.fm forged with the major labels, EMI, Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner. However, independent artists and labels can also take advantage of the service to gain more exposure among music fans and make money, too, since Last.fm pays every time someone streams a song, either through a royalty collection service or, for indies, the artists can be paid directly.

Currently, the on-demand service features over 5 million tracks, which makes it easy for music fans to find the songs from their favorite artists and bands.

These numbers prove something that we've known all along - sharing music (or videos or any files, really) encourages people to buy more of the product in question, as opposed to leading to lost revenue, as once feared.

Martin Stiksel, Last.fm's Co-Founder agrees, stating, "In just over two months it's become clear that people will buy CDs and downloads if they get access to the kind of service we offer."

I would say Last.fm could even drop the play-3-times prompt and the numbers would still hold up given properly advertised affiliate links, but something tells me the labels aren't ready for that step just yet.

Why Firefox 3?

The folks at Last.fm felt that Firefox 3 offers many improvements over Firefox 2 regarding general navigation and performance, which will make it a better browser for across the board usage, music included. Specifically, though, new features like bookmark tagging and microformats could lend themselves to the development of great, next-generation music plugins.

Bookmark tagging lets you easily separate your links into categories. As with tagging on Last.fm, this could give you fine-grained control over your links, which could allow you to organize your links by music genre or type of music site.

Another new feature for Firefox 3 is native support for microformats. This functionality will be exposed to extension developers so they can take advantage of music-related microformats like hAudio and hPlaylist. Not only will this allow for new types of music plugins, but it should help spread the adoption of music (and other) microformats by publishers.

Of course, Last.fm is also likely betting on the fact that with the development of music apps for Firefox, more users will discover the Last.fm web site and services. Recently, the site launched a showcase of Last.fm apps, built using Last.fm's free tools at http://build.last.fm. This addition to the site added 19 million new users to the Last.fm user base as of January. A host of popular Firefox extensions could bring even more music fans to sign up for the service.

Currently, there are not many Firefox add-ons featuring Last.fm - a search on the add-ons site revealed only six. Meanwhile, on the build site at Last.fm, there were well over 100 apps. Developers looking for inspiration may want to consider starting there to find ideas.

The winner of the contest will be flown to the Last.fm office in London to meet the team behind the service and will attend a Last.fm/Presents live event as a guest of Last.fm. They will also receive a Logitech Squeezebox network music player.

Lucas Gonze is one of the smartest people around in online music. In the video he discusses not only Open Media Web theory, but practical examples including last.fm and MySpace. He says the latter doesn't allow their music Flash player to be used externally in badges, which he generally labels "coercive behavior".