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.

It's a new year and it's time for you to try some fabulous new web apps. We look at new apps all day around here and would like to share 3 of the very best we've found already this new year.

Music discovery, social Q&A and sharing your plans - that's what these apps are all about. Read on, I'm pretty sure that at least one of these will get you jumping up and down, clapping your hands. It's stuff like this that makes me love the internet.

EMusic, the popular subscription-based music service, just announced that it has signed a deal with Warner Music, the world's third-largest music company. This is eMusic's second deal with a major record label. In its early days, eMusic mostly focused on featuring music from independent labels. Since the middle of 2009, however, eMusic has worked on expanding its reach by bringing more mainstream music to its catalog. The company announced a deal with Sony Music in June 2008.

Every now and then, we come across cool apps that allow geeks to conveniently manage their musical tastes in a way that encourages more real-world fun.

Last year, we met up with Livekick's founders in New York to talk about their very thorough site for helping web geeks get out to more shows and concerts. Today, we've discovered Roadie, a much simpler app that focuses on album releases. Roadie creates an RSS feed or iCal based on a user's Last.fm favorite acts or a custom list of manually entered bands. Essentially, it allows users to keep up with album releases quickly and painlessly.

The only reason streaming web music hasn't completely killed all other forms of music distribution is the fact that it's not available when you're traveling across wireless networks - say, in a car. Well hold on to your hats and start canceling your satellite radio subscriptions, Pandora is taking to the road.

Ten years ago, Napster revolutionized commercial music by - we're all grownups, let's call a spade a spade - democratizing piracy.

Without doubt, consumers in 1999 needed better access to music. They needed the opportunity to preview full tracks, to pick and choose songs from an album and to have instant gratification through online downloads. And 10 years later, consumers still have all those lovely perks. Napster ate it (thanks, Metallica!), but Kazaa sprang from its ashes. Then there was Limewire and its cadre. Due props to Apple for monetizing the system as it stood when the iTunes store came on the scene, but users are now ridiculously entitled about what kinds of readily available (a.k.a. easily stolen) files they are willing to pay for and their justifications for stealing media. Yet musicians, as much as they've tried to adapt, are still getting screwed by the Internet and their fans.

The new "artists" are curators of other people's created content, if sites such as Tumblr, Ffffound, WeHeartIt and newcomer Awsm.fm are any kind of zeitgeist.

Awsm.fm is a digital multimedia scrapbooking app that regards copyright issues with a gleeful abandon, allowing users to pick images and group them with text, tags and uploaded songs. But, licensing aside, the app does allow users to display their lovely and deeply sensitive tastes in pop music and evocative photography.

It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. With that in mind, over the coming weeks ReadWriteWeb will look back on the defining Web trends of the past 10 years. From the dot com boom, to the nuclear winter after, to the passion and enthusiasm of the pre-Web 2.0 innovations (such as RSS and podcasting), to the highs and hype of Web 2.0, to the current era of the real-time Web, to the near future of the Internet of Things. We'll explore all of this and more.

We're starting with online music. No industry, except arguably the newspaper one, has been rocked (pardon the pun) more by the Internet than the music industry.

Shazam, the music discovery iPhone application which gained widespread adoption thanks to its appearance in an iPhone TV commercial, is now getting a ton of new features thanks to the launch of a premium application called Shazam Encore. This new application adds music recommendations, trend charts, music searches and more to its core set of features already made available in the free version of Shazam.

Does this mean Shazam is about to give Pandora and the like a run for their money?

We had almost forgotten about Orb, the media-sharing software that lets you stream video from your home computer to your iPhone or any other internet-connected device. In fact, the last time we had even looked at the application was November of 2008 when the company announced an update to their iPhone application which allowed you to stream live TV over the 3G network. At that time though, the desktop software portion of the Orb product was PC-only. As in Windows PC-only. Today, that has changed. Orb for Macintosh has finally been released so Mac OS X users can now stream their media over the net, too.

Magnatune, a small and eclectic online record label, just released its first iPhone app. As far as we know, this is the first time that a record label has released an iPhone app that allows its users to play every song of every artist on its label for free and as often as they want. The only restriction on the app is that every song is followed by a short announcement with the name of the artist and title of the song.

Yahoo just announced that it has upgraded its video search product with new features that make it easier to discover music videos. Yahoo Video Search now recognizes and shows the most popular albums and songs whenever a user searches for an artist or band. A sidebar on Yahoo Video Search now displays an artist's most popular albums and songs. The album view then allows users to drill down even deeper and see videos for all the songs on this album.

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.

Google has just announced the launch of Google Music. This new service is powered by Lala and MySpace's iLike. Other partners include Gracenote, iMeem, Pandora and Rhapsody. Google has also partnered with the major music labels: EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music. Through Lala and iLike, Google will also be able to feature music from a large number of independent labels. This new service will be available only in the US for now and will be integrated in the default search results page.

Yesterday, amid all the news of Twitter's arrival into both Microsoft's Bing and the Google search engine, another major announcement was being made. MySpace is giving up on trying to be a major social network. According to MySpace CEO, Owen Van Natta, Facebook is no longer their competition. "We're focused on a different space," he says.

That "different space," as it turns out, is music...and it really isn't all that different, especially considering MySpace's roots. If anything, this major overhaul of the social network is an attempt to return the site to becoming the popular entertainment hub it once was.

In a surprisingly candid post on Spotify's blog, company co-founder Daniel Ek recently shared his thoughts about where the popular streaming music company stands today and where he hopes it can go in the future. The main point of his post was to clarify that Spotify, despite being a media darling these days, is nowhere near becoming a sustainable company with a stable revenue model. However, that's their end goal, Ek says, and they're in it "for the long haul" with no intention of simply "flipping" the company after the hype reaches its crescendo. But in the meantime, the company struggles with the exorbitant per-play fees enforced by the music industry while not finding success with an ad-supported model.

Warner Music, which had removed its videos from YouTube after licensing talks with Google broke down last year, just announced that is has reached a new deal with YouTube and that Warner's music videos will once again appear on YouTube. The partnership, according to the official announcement, covers the complete Warner catalog and "includes user-generated content containing WMG acts." Warner will be able to monetize user-generated content thanks to Google's Content ID technology, which can detect copyrighted content in YouTube videos and then allow the copyright holders to sell ads against this inventory.

European music service Spotify is one of the most highly anticipated applications coming to the U.S. The service, best described as a streaming music version of iTunes, consists of both desktop software as well as complementary mobile applications for Apple's iPhone and the Google Android platform. Already, the service is wildly popular overseas in its current markets which include the United Kingdom, Sweden, France, Spain, Norway and Finland where it has accumulated over 5 million users. There, the company offers two versions of its service - a free application and a premium, ad-free subscription version.

According to recent reports, however, Spotify may do things a little differently when it reaches the States. Says Andres Sehr, Spotify's global community manager, the company is considering going the "freemium" route for the U.S. market.

Rhapsody, the online streaming music service, just launched its iPhone and iPod touch app (iTunes link). While there had been some discussion about whether Apple would actually allow this 'iTunes competitor' on the iPhone, the approval process looks to have been relatively smooth for Rhapsody. The app feels very similar to Apple's own iPod app. From within the app, you can search Rhapsody's library of 8 million tracks, surf genres, create playlists, or find new music released this week. Overall, we came away quite impressed after testing the app out for a while, though the $14.99/month subscription fee (after a free 7-day trial) will surely keep some potential users away.

The "iTunes LP" is just one of the many new iTunes features revealed yesterday during Apple's announcement at their "It's Only Rock and Roll"-themed event. But the iTunes LP, unlike the other new features which get to exist as simple and fun enhancements in iTunes 9, has a heavy burden on its shoulders. It's supposed to revitalize the music industry by encouraging consumers to once again purchase entire albums as opposed to single tracks. With this new digital album format, the idea is to replicate the experience of buying an album, complete with lyrics, liner notes, album art, photos, and more, giving music buyers extra content to peruse while enjoying their new music. The only problem is that this so-called "interactive" format isn't all that interactive. And what's more, innovative artists are already discovering how to monetize their music while engaging fans in new ways that have nothing to do with a re-imagined LP. Instead, the "interactive format" of the future isn't the album, it's the app.