ReadWriteWeb

For the most part, digital music has killed the liner notes that used to come with CDs. Now, MusicDNA, a new file format that looks a lot like Apple's iTunes LP format, wants to bring liner notes to the 21st century. MusicDNA is a new rich-media extension for digital music files that enriches songs and albums with additional data like lyrics, videos, RSS and Twitter feeds, as well as up to 14 additional pieces of metadata like mood and tempo. Artists and record labels will be able to ship up to 32GB of data with these files.

By now - the beginning of a new decade and well into the 21st century - it's a story we've long come accustomed to: the music industry is dying a slow, painful, sputtering death at the hands of the Internet.

According to analyst firm Forrester's latest report, 2009 was "a lousy end to an even lousier decade" for the music industry and we shouldn't expect much different until at least 2013. Last year, as a matter of fact, was one of the worst years yet, with a 13% decline from the year before.

Centuries of struggling by artists and musicians to make a living have come to this. While the rest of the music industry is fighting to figure out how to stay viable when so much content is available for free on the internet - the band Weezer may have solved the problem.

Weezer released its latest album today, with a Snuggie. See the video below.

When Radiohead keyboardist / guitarist Jonny Greenwood shrugs off the issue of audio fidelity, indie musicians should take note. Given that Radiohead is perhaps one of the biggest proponents of alternative music monetization, it's ironic that Greenwood is discrediting one of the industry's key price differentiators. Musicians with tracks on iTunes, Amazon and DIY stores like Bandcamp have often chosen to price MP3s at lower rates while higher quality recordings have fetched more per track. In a recent article with The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones, Greenwood admits there is little reason for the MP3 generation to look for a higher quality experience.

Fresh Hot Radio is a slick new web application that aims for some very specific objectives: High quality, fresh, free-to-download independent music that you can start listening to right away. Part Pandora, part YTMND, and as minimalistic as you can get, Fresh Hot Radio always brings hand-picked, high-energy tracks that you can enjoy while you work.

New service ffffoundtape attempts to re-create the same positive sharing environment of its sister site Ffffound, but with music instead of pictures. Once bookmarked, songs can be bundled up into playlists that you can share with friends. Registration is free and creating an account is easy, once you get through their Mad Libs-style registration page. Unfortunately, the process after that is not as straightforward as it could be.

People's Music Store is a newly launched DIY online music store. It was created by the founder of MP3 reseller Bleep.com, Ged Day. People's Music Store styles itself as "the first music store entirely powered by music fans." Basically the service allows you to set up your own custom-designed record store, with music chosen from a catalogue of indie record labels (so far no major record label music). The idea is that you earn points, equivalent to 10% of the price of the single, EP or album that you sell. These points can only be used to buy other music items on the People's Music Store site.

If you have been on the Internet for long enough, you will surely remember the old MP3.com, which was first geared towards independent musicians, but later also allowed you to listen to your own music collection online. Lala, which launched yesterday, features a similar concept. It is first and foremost a music store with a unique sales pitch: pay 10 cents for the right to listen to a song online and between 79 and 89 cents on top of that for the DRM-free MP3 file. For a lot of users, however, the fact that Lala also clones MP3.com's online music locker will be the real attraction of this service.

Electronics retailer Best Buy today announced that it plans to acquire music retailer Napster for $121 Million. According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal values Napster at $2.65 a share, almost double its closing price on Friday. However, while Napster was a major success story when its name was still synonymous with illegal P2P file sharing, it never quite caught on with users after it turned into a legitimate business. Judging from the press release, Best Buy is mostly interested in Napster's mobile business, where, with the help of Best Buy's marketing power, the company might just be able to create a profitable niche for itself.

The demise of Muxtape, the popular mixtape service, clearly left a void on the Internet that a number of new companies are now trying to fill. Most clones, from 8tracks to the self-hosted OpenTape, have followed the Muxtape model very closely. Tumbltape, which launched today, takes a slightly different route by using the Tumblr for storing and posting the actual MP3 files. While Tumbltape has some limitations, it is a great way for Tumblr users to share their audio files.

Real Networks' Rhapsody music service, which had only been a subscription service so far, is joining into the every expanding fray of music services selling DRM-free MP3 files. Real has signed deals with Universal, Sony BMG, Warner, and EMI to sell songs at $.99 cents a song and $9.99 per album.

By embracing DRM-free MP3s as its format of choice, Rhapsody is driving yet another nail in the coffin of DRM'd music.

Hype Machine, the much-loved MP3 blog aggregator service, has long been the place to go to find great tracks and music reviews on the net. In October of last year, the site got a big makeover, which included new social networking features like user profiles where you could list your favorite blogs, bands, searches, and friends. Now, Hype Machine has taken the social aspect a step further with their revamped Dashboard section, which introduces social scrobbling features, just like Last.FM offers, along with other new features and an updated layout.

Are you into multimedia? Do you stream music over the web, share photos on Flickr and Picassa, watch videos at YouTube, share links with friends, and hang out in social networks? A new startup from Ubuket wants to help make access to your content from anywhere even easier. The service they provide will let you access all your media from your desktop, social network, blog, or even your mobile device.

It's getting trendy these for top-tier musical artists to buck the music labels and release their albums as free or cheap downloads via the Internet or some other means. The latest to do so is Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails, which today uploaded part one of its new four part album Ghosts I-IV to BitTorrent sites (you can grab it here). The free piece encompasses the first 9 tracks of the 36 track instrumental effort which was recorded over a 10 week period.

Telephony-head Russell Beattie added an MP3 search and download feature to his mobile service Mowser tonight, powered by music search engine SeeqPod. The service makes it remarkably easy to search for, download and listen to any song online. All. From. Your. Phone. It's nice.

This is just one of a number of "powered by SeeqPod" announcements you'll likely be seeing if you are interested in music search. Josh Lowensohn reported on yet another, called Songerize, today. Enjoy the music and the API action while you can, because SeeqPod is too good to be true and is headed for court.

The long-delayed but much-anticipated service from Qtrax is finally going to launch - supposedly going live this Sunday at 12:00 am Eastern. Qtrax, in case you haven't heard, is a P2P file sharing network that has been in the works for eight years. However, it's not just any P2P file-sharing network - it's the world's first free and legal P2P file-sharing network that has the support of all four major record labels (EMI, SonyBMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group).

Online BitTorrent client BitLet has released a new service that lets users stream MP3 and Ogg encoded music directly from torrent files. The new music feature, called westeam, works by prioritizing bits at the beginning of each track -- and then subsequent to the one you just listened to, but also gives preference to rare bits to achieve optimal speeds. WeStream is a Java applet that works in any browser that support Java.

In October, Radiohead released their new album, In Rainbows, as an online download with a name-your-own pricing scheme -- you only paid if you wanted to, and only as much as you thought the album was worth. Our unscientific poll showed that a majority of ReadWriteWeb readers thought that downloadable albums were worth between $5-14 -- though we framed the question such that we can't make any determinations about how many people would actually be willing to pay that much.

Radiohead's widely heralded experiment with free downloads plus a premium package and request for donations (effectively) remains shrouded in mystery, but Trent Reznor and Saul Williams released some numbers this week about a similar experiment. Those numbers indicate that very few people want to pay for recorded music these days.

A lot of things happened in 2007 that seemed to threaten Apple's stranglehold on the digital music market. Microsoft launched its new Zune MP3 players, which received mostly glowing reviews, and they kept their installed user base happy with major firmware updates for old players. Meanwhile, Amazon launched a major DRM-free MP3 download service at a cut-rate (compared to Apple's). But generally, the facts still point to Apple dominance for awhile to come.