ReadWriteWeb

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.