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The social Web space is abuzz with new developments and entrants these days. Facebook's IPO. The explosion of Pinterest. The rapid evolution of Google+ into a place where the President of the United States hangs out. One name you never hear is one that was all the rage just a few years ago.

MySpace has been losing traffic since 2008, when Facebook first surpassed it on Alexa. Last year, the company was sold for $35 million by News Corporation, who bought it for $580 million six years earlier. Its new owners, Specific Media, have tried to reposition the site as an online entertainment hub rather than a full-fledged social network. If early numbers are any indication, the refocus appears to be working.

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.

iTunes Match, the cloud music-matching service that Apple launched last year, is a great way to sync one's music library across numerous devices. If your collection happens to contain songs with profane lyrics, however, you may be in for a surprise.

Apparently, iTunes Match has been inadvertently replacing certain tracks with the "clean" version of the same song, Cult of Mac reported.

SoundCloud, the up-and-coming social audio publishing platform, is endorsing HTML5's role in the future of the Web. Today, the Berlin-based startup is officially rolling out its HTML5 audio player as the service's default, knocking the original, Flash-based player from that esteemed position.

The new player first went into beta in November, giving those curious enough an opportunity to experiment with it. Now that the bugs have been ironed out and a few new features added, the widget is ready for prime time.

In 2011, we collectively listened to 64,876,491,602 songs on the Internet. Whether it was on YouTube, SoundCloud, Rdio or MySpace, the citizens of the Web listened to quite a lot of music last year. Bands and musicians made over 3 billion new fans, who viewed artist profiles over 16 billion times. These are just a few data points recently released by Next Big Sound, a startup that tracks the popularity of music and individual artists across a range of digital music providers and social services.

Digital music only continues to grow and mature, as streaming services explode, Internet radio companies go public and developers begin using the power of open APIs to mash up sounds and services. SoundCloud alone saw 231% growth last year, while Twitter saw a 104% increase in music-related activity.

That the Web has revolutionized music is not exactly a news flash, but most people typically think about that in terms of music consumption. iTunes. YouTube. SoundCloud. Spotify. Group listening sites like Turntable.fm. Recommendation engines like those of Pandora, Last.fm and the Echo Nest. Now voice-controlled Internet radio apps are coming pre-installed in new cars. There's no doubt that they way people discover and listen to music has changed radically, and will continue to do so.

The Internet and mobile technology are beginning to have an equally significant impact on the creation of music itself. Extremely powerful recording, DJing and sequencing software is making its way from laptops to tablets and smartphones, for example. Now, the way people learn to play music in the first place is changing as well.

Looking for a quick pick-me-up in those late afternoon hours, I've found myself heading over to my Spotify account to check out what Facebook friends are listening to. While this has been a neat way to notice shared music tastes, there's still something awkward about it. Unless I've already had some sort of communication about music with a friend on Spotify, or at least some recent contact on Facebook or otherwise, I feel weird scrolling through their playlists.

Facebook must have foreseen this problem because today it announced yet another way to listen to music through your account. The catch here is that you're actually listening with your friends rather than voyeuristically peering into their playlists and, unbeknownst to them, clicking on their songs.

In 2012, anybody who starts a band or begins recording their own music at home is probably not quitting their day job and awaiting huge financial returns. If they're good at what they do and the Web helps them build a huge audience, then great, but that's unlikely to be their chief motivator. Of all the ways for artists to make money early in the game, selling music is generally not seen as a cash cow. For many, making their music available for free and getting it on streaming services is a better way to get exposure and monetization is a strategy best saved for later.

The state of online music sales for independent artists may not be as abysmal at it feels though, according to some data recently shared by Bandcamp. The artist promotion and e-commerce site found that some of their paid music downloads were being initiated by users who had searched explicitly for pirated content.

When it comes to downloading digital music, there is free and then there is legal, but seldom can you have both from the same site, and make money too. Noisetrade.com has been doing this for the past three years.

Certainly, there are lots of other music download sites, and we have written most recently about Soundcloud, as one example. But it is worth looking at what Noisetrade is doing to see what could be the ideal small-business content download site.

What becomes possible when technology cuts out the middlemen in music publishing and distribution? A lot of very strange and sometimes wonderful things.

Berlin based music and audio sharing network SoundCloud has raised a reported $50m more venture capital from the super prestigious Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mike Butcher at TechCrunch Europe reported today. The company had raised about $16m in two previous rounds. If you're not familiar with SoundCloud, now is a good time to learn about the site. It's a vibrant and innovative community, about to either blow up huge or go down in flames with the change that comes from a large and high-priced investment like this.