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It seems like every advance in digital music brings with it a debate about whether the latest format degrades quality in exchange for convenience. This was true when CDs first came onto the scene, and it's probably even more true today with MP3s and their digital audio brethren. Heck, even the advent of the gramophone in 1889 sparked debates over whether its sound quality was worse than Thomas Edison's phonograph.

Last week, rock veteran Neil Young chimed in with his assertion that the digital music files we listen to today are of much lower quality than the original recordings. Speaking at the D: Dive Into Media conference, he said that the technology now exists to deliver much higher-quality audio to music fans, and that he had even talked to Steve Jobs about a possible solution.

The hardest part of finding good music online these days is discovering what you should look for in the first place. Almost all our old favorites are available on demand but finding good new bands and songs remains a challenge. Various services are competing to fill this need as effectively as possible, but it's a tough nut to crack.

My new favorite entrant into the field is an iPhone app from long-time MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine. Hype Machine Radio is being sold for $2.99 (iTunes) and is worth every penny. The company says the app is "the Hype Machine evolved into a lean back, non-stop rich radio experience." It's essentially a mobile music blog browser, complete with continuos play, album covers, blog posts reviewing the songs, subscriptions, automatically personalized playlists and offline caching of the music posted by particular blogs. It's a great compliment to other music services and it's very nice looking, too.

While not quite a truism, it's pretty widely accepted that a music startup is a bad idea. The record industry is at best unsupportive and at worst litigious when it comes to digital music sales and sharing and when it comes to welcoming (or crushing or suing) new companies and technologies.

So it's hard not to be quite skeptical about the claims from a new startup - ReDigi - that it plans to launch a marketplace where you can legally sell your pre-owned digital music.

Music aficionados know: there's a trade-off that comes with the move to digital music. Sure, you can house your entire record collection on your computer. You can fit thousands of songs on your mobile phone. But if you're downloading your mp3s from an online store like iTunes, you're often getting a file with poorer sound quality.

But a report from CNN suggests that Apple is working to improve the quality of its music downloads.

RIM and Amazon have teamed up to launch a new mobile music application for BlackBerry smartphone users: Amazon MP3. The app download, available now from BlackBerry App World, delivers Amazon's catalog of music with over 14 million songs, all of which can be downloaded either over-the-air or via Wi-Fi.

MP3tunes, which was launched by tech entrepreneur Michael Robertson in 2005, allows its users to store their own music in the cloud. Until today, however, the amount of free storage on MP3tunes was limited to a relatively meager 2GB. Now, however, the company has decided to up the ante and plans to give its users 10GB of free storage which can be accessed from virtually anywhere (browser, iPhone, Android, Wii, Playstation, Chumby etc.). MP3tunes already has a backlog of invites, but the company graciously agreed to give 150 of our readers priority access to its expanded music lockers. Read on for more details about how to claim yours.

There is no dearth of streaming music services on the web today, so it takes quite a bit for a new service to stand out from other popular services like Spotify, MOG and Lala. Today, we came across Bitspace, an online music player and backup service for your music files that puts an interesting new spin on this subject. This service stands out because of its great design and the fact that it's fully based on HTML5.

Dan Kantor, the man behind de.licio.us's Playtagger and Firefox extension, has brought us a new toy to play with that literally makes the web your musical oyster. ExtensionFM is a Chrome extension that automatically scrubs the websites you visit, finds embedded music, and adds it to a library of online music.

As time has gone on, we've found fewer and fewer reasons to actually download music and ExtensionFM gives us one less.

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.