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New York cultural periodical the Village Voice has named @discographies, an anonymous Twitter account that publishes 140-character reviews of the life work of musicians and bands, as its music critic of the year.

Twitter spokesperson Matt Graves called it a "milestone"; whether he's serious or not, ("dead serious," he later said) @discographies certainly carries a certain seriousness throughout today's interview in the Village Voice. "Twitter," the account holder says, "may be the first mass communications system that also functions as a meritocracy: it actively promotes good ideas and good content, regardless of where they come from."

RIM and Amazon have teamed up to launch a new mobile music application for BlackBerry smartphone users: Amazon MP3. The app download, available now from BlackBerry App World, delivers Amazon's catalog of music with over 14 million songs, all of which can be downloaded either over-the-air or via Wi-Fi.

Ping, Apple's half-hearted attempt at its own music-focused social networking site, has finally received an update worth noting: Social Playlists. On Friday, the iTunes-only website Ping added a new feature which lets you create a playlist of your favorite songs. Those playlists can then be published for your Ping followers to rate and review or even collaborate on with you.

Google unveiled its long-awaited Chrome OS, notebook and Web store today and already we're itching to see what life lived entirely in the cloud is like - not that we're far off as it is. While we don't have our hands on a Chrome OS notebook quite yet, if we did, MOG would be one of the first apps we would install.

MOG has announced a beta release of its music player for the Chrome Web store and we have to admit, we're excited to see one of our favorite cloud-based music players hit the shelves.

Yesterday, Apple teased visitors heading to its homepage at www.apple.com of a major announcement, coming this morning at 10 AM EST. "Tomorrow is just another day. That you'll never forget," the homepage text read. Initially, people were hoping that the news was related to the long-rumored "iTunes in the Cloud" service, which Apple has been building large data centers in N.C. to support, reportedly.

However, later in the day, a number of folks had figured it out: the news was that the Beatles were finally coming to iTunes. The WSJ confirmed. As it turns out, they were right.

When Apple launched Ping, its new music-focused social network found within iTunes 10, the response was decidedly lukewarm. The effort felt incomplete, as if its social features had been rushed out the door before the service was fully built. Ping lacked the most basic functionality, including the ability to rate non-music purchases and an inability to take into account your own music ratings. It also lacked personalized recommendations for artists to follow (apparently everyone likes Lady Gaga) and, at the last minute, Apple pulled Ping's Facebook integration, too.

Still, we cautioned that disappointed new users shouldn't give up on Ping yet - the features it needs to be successful aren't beyond Apple's grasp. And this weekend, Apple added two new features that prove the company isn't giving up on Ping yet, either.

Napster, the once peer-to-peer music sharing service turned pay service, has finally entered the mobile music market for Apple users with today's release of a Napster app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

Though it's entering the market a bit later than some competitors, it comes with a larger catalog than some and features similar to those that have tipped the scales for other services.

I thought the affair was long over - I'd thrown everything away and I'd changed all of my habits. I'd moved on with my life and everything was going along just fine and then, out of nowhere, it happened. For the first time in nearly a decade, I went and did something I was pretty sure I wouldn't ever do again - I spent money on music...on the Internet.

What had changed? A service had come along with the flexibility, catalog, and feature list that finally convinced me it was time.

Later tonight, at an event in New York, online music service Slacker Radio plans to unveil a major upgrade to its service that will turn it from an Internet radio service into an on-demand music platform similar to Rhapsody, MOG and Rdio. Right now, Slacker only allows users to set specific songs and band as the basis for their custom radio stations (similar to Pandora), but users don't have control over the actual songs that will play in these stations. Now, for $9.99 per month, Slacker users will be able to subscribe to Slacker Premium Radio and pick the exact songs and albums they want to hear.

There's an interesting chart making its way around the Net this morning comparing the number of iTunes app downloads to the total downloads of songs. The surprising reveal is that it shows apps are being downloaded much more rapidly than songs. In only 2.2 years, the iTunes App Store has reached the same total downloads as the iTunes Music Store did after five years. And before the year is out, the two curves on the chart will be around the same height - 13 billion downloads each.

Why is this happening? Why are apps becoming more popular than music?