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It's a familiar refrain from the music industry: revenue is down and piracy is to blame. That's the gist of the the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's (IFPI) annual Digial Music Report, which points to a slowdown in the growth of digital music sales.

While digital music revenue has grown 1,000% over the past seven years, the entire music industry has lost a third of its value over that same time period. And while digital music seems to represent both the best hopes and the worst fears of the industry, even its growth is slowing - only 6% last year, down from 9.2% growth in 2009. Digital sales comprise about a third of the industry's total revenue.

Last week, the word on the street was that everyone's favorite European music service, Spotify, was finally nearing a deal with major music labels in the U.S. and would soon enough be on its way across the pond. Today, Media Memo's Peter Kafka reports that the company "has finally signed with Sony for U.S. distribution deal."

While this doesn't necessarily get the company onto North American shores, it certainly brings the ever-mysterious app one step closer.

In an attempt to combat digital piracy, Sony Music and Universal have announced that they will put digital singles for sale the same day that the music hits the airwaves. According to record label executives, the move is meant to combat what The Guardian calls the "impatient X Factor generation" who are unwilling to wait what is sometimes up to six weeks between a radio release of a song and its actual sales release.

Whether or not that length of time is what's contributed to rampant piracy of digital music, there's no doubt that early releases of songs on the radio do tend to find themselves available for download illegally shortly thereafter.

Nokia has announced that its free music streaming service originally titled "Comes with Music" is going to shut down in most markets. The service, which was bundled with select handsets from the mobile phone manufacturer launched in late 2008 with the support of the four major music labels: Universal, EMI, Warner and Sony.

According to Nokia, the reason the service didn't perform is because of its inclusion of copy protection on the tracks, which locked the music to the device. "The markets clearly want a DRM-free music service," a Nokia spokesperson said.

Streaming music service Spotify has such an air of mystery in the U.S. that even a glimpse of the program's interface draws in readers. For the past year, we've discussed again and again when the company would make its way overseas and now the New York Post reports that the popular European company is "finally crossing the pond."

"After trying to crack the US market for more than a year, Spotify is close to a deal with one major music company in the US and has gained the support of at least one other," reports the Post. But is it too little, too late?

A YouTube video is viewed on a mobile device on average more than 200 million times a day, Google announced today. That's a 3X increase over the end of last year. The service's incredible momentum was announced alongside version 2.0 of YouTube Mobile for Android, which puts a heavy emphasis on music videos from Vevo, the YouTube joint project that includes content from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and EMI.

App users will now be able to read artist bios, find related artists and ponder mobile advertisements galore in the new version of the app. People who use YouTube by mobile use it a lot. It will be interesting to see if making some of the most popular content, music videos, even easier to consume by mobile will lead to an even bigger jump in use than has been seen to date. One thing's for sure, it's now been 3 years since the words "broadcast yourself" were removed from the YouTube logo - and those days when the site emphasized user generated content sure are gone.

Two notable paid subscription streaming music services have announced partnerships and programs aimed at expanding their offerings beyond the desktop and mobile platforms where they currently reside. MOG, an on-demand service providing around 10 million songs for $10/month, has launched its MOG Fusion program, a manufacturer-focused toolkit for integrating MOG into consumer electronics and automobiles.

Rdio, a similarly priced service, but one that's more social-networking focused, has partnered with Sonos, makers of music systems for the home, to bring Rdio to the living room and elsewhere around the house.

How long have you been hearing about both Apple's and Google's much-anticipated cloud music and media offerings? While we spent much of 2010 waiting to see which of the two Internet giants would get there first, another player was lurking in the background and is now stepping into the fray with an offering of its own. RealNetworks, the company behind RealPlayer, previewed Unifi at the Consumer Electronics Show today and we think that its device- and platform-agnostic offering could give the other guys a run for their money.

We sat down with Peter Kellogg-Smith, VP of emerging products with RealNetworks, who showed us around the cloud-based music and media offering that it plans to release in early 2011.

Rumor round-up time! According to news from an unaffiliated, unofficial Samsung-watching blog site called Samsung Hub, the electronics giant has confirmed it will announce a new Android-based Galaxy Player at the Consumer Electronics Shows (CES 2011) taking place in Las Vegas in January. If true, the Galaxy Player would likely be a popular Android-based iPod Touch-like media playing device, although not the first one of its kind.

But what we want to know is this - does this music player's impending launch mean we're going to see Google Music launch soon thereafter? We can only hope.