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Streaming music services like Spotify, MOG, Rdio, Grooveshark, Slacker Radio and others are making headlines for their innovations in today's digital music economy and its extension onto our mobile devices, into our homes and even into our cars. But when it comes to who's paying for the premium (i.e., "paid") level of these services, a new study shows that it's often indie music fans who are footing the bill.

Slacker Radio, an Internet radio service similar to streaming music giant Pandora, has just introduced a new tier to its subscription service: a $9.99 per month Premium version which offers music on-demand. Previously, as the name implies, Slacker Radio was more focused on a radio-like experience, where you listen to a station built around your favorite artist, just like in Pandora. For example, type in "Lady Gaga" and you'll be presented with her hottest tracks, as well as those from "related" artists.

To ditch the advertisements and skip songs you don't like, a $3.99/month subscription (Slacker Radio Plus) was made available. And today, Slacker has launched another option: a $9.99/month Premium Radio subscription for playing the songs, albums or artists you want to hear on demand. This is similar to a number of other services out there today, including two of our favorites, MOG and Rdio.

Which one is right for you?

Google is finally launching its Google Music service at this week's Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, a year after its reveal at the last event. The new service will be similar to what Amazon launched in March, an online storage locker where your songs will be stored in the "cloud." In this case, the "cloud" refers to Google's servers. Once your music is uploaded, you can stream it to your Android-powered mobile phone or via the Web to your computer.

While both Amazon and Google's offerings have the same basic concept behind their design, there are some notable differences between the two, as detailed below.

Disruptive discount provider Groupon and live events company Live Nation have teamed up to launch GrouponLive, a new site for ticketing deals. Live Nation Entertainment, formed by the combination of concert promoter Live Nation and ticket seller Ticketmaster, currently promotes over 20,000 shows per year. But with the economy's downturn, selling out a show is hard these days. The new venture, GrouponLive, will address that problem, not only by discounting seats, but also through the power of the Groupon brand, which brings the news of concerts and other events to Groupon's worldwide user base of millions. Many of these users represent new business for Live Nation, as they may not have heard of the events being promoted beforehand or they decide to buy a ticket at the last minute, but only due to a deal.

I don't know about you, but when I hear the word "Lollapalooza," I think about beer, grunge rock and application programming interfaces. Wait, what?

Okay, so maybe an API isn't exactly what comes to mind, but this year, the rock festival that once helped propel bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam is looking to launch something else entirely: an open API chock-full of real-time scheduling data, stage geolocation and more.

Google is in talks with European-based streaming music service Spotify, according to a report today on CNET. Google has been rumored to be working on launching a streaming music service of its own for years now, with clamor over the potential service reaching a peak last summer when Big G was said to have a service near ready for launch last fall. That rumor did not, however, come true.

Spotify has had a similar past, but perhaps this sort of deal could get both companies what they really want - a piece of the musical pie in the U.S.

Now if there's one oddball fixation we revel in here it's ancient sound. Whether it's Babylonian language, Shakespeare's accent or chirping Mayan temples, we're going to pull you aside like an irritatingly insistent music fan who just knows he can turn you on to Hawkwind.

Well, it's that time again, folks. This time, it's the sound of the two trumpets, one bronze and the other silver, that were buried with the boy Pharaoh, Tutankhamum. They laid sealed away for over 3,200 years in the Pharaoh's tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, until that tomb was opened up by Howard Carter in 1922. It was played for the first time in for a BBC recording in 1939.

The launch of Amazon's Cloud Drive may not have seemed like an innovative move as more consumers are opting to stream rather than download their music. But it was a disruption enough to cause some record labels to bark back at Amazon and chastise the company for not getting their permission to launch a cloud-based storage and music player. Their permission, and of course, their licensing.

But Billboard reports that Amazon has responded to some of these music industry complaints with a letter contending that since the launch of Cloud Drive two weeks ago, that MP3 sales are up.

The Android Developer Console has been experiencing numerous issues and outages over the past several days, Google confirms. As of this morning, these problems remain unresolved. Beginning March 31, many Android developers began reporting trouble accessing the Developer Console, Google's backend system that allows for the publication of Android Market applications and updates to existing apps. In the official Android Market Help Forum, developers said they've encountered error messages, problems with data and statistics not updating and failures in loading application lists.

However, Google tells us that the problem is only affecting "some" developers.

Amazon has just launched a suite of music products that allow users to store their tracks online and them stream them over the Web or to any Android device courtesy of the Amazon MP3 mobile application. The launch has the tech world abuzz, not only because Amazon beat Apple and Google to the punch, both of whom are reportedly working on digital lockers of their own, but because Amazon hasn't even received the record labels' permission to host these tracks on its servers as of yet.

But is Amazon's cloud-based music storage service really all that innovative? Some journalists and analysts are saying it's not. Do you agree?