ReadWriteWeb

Despite all of the great innovation happening in online music, there are 3 frustrating things for consumers that need to be addressed by Apple, Google, Facebook and others.

It's been an eventful week for online music, with the launch of Apple's iTunes Match and the public unveiling of Google Music (along with a new MP3 store in the Android Market). This follows on from continued innovation in the music streaming market, in particular the integration of Spotify and similar services into Facebook. It's great to see so much action in the online music space. But... there are some major problems with these services. Here are the top three issues, in my opinion.

Continuing our series about the Consumer Cloud, today we compare the three leading music cloud services: Apple's iTunes Match (just launched today), Amazon's Cloud Drive and Google Music. With these three highly competitive services, online music fans have never had it so good.

There are two main battles going on in the online music market, each of which is benefiting consumers greatly. One is between the three so-called cloud lockers mentioned above, which are competing to be the online archive for your digital music collection. The second battle is about whether you even need an online archive at all.

A music discovery app for iOS that went live recently shows just what's possible when digital music services open up their libraries and functionality via powerful APIs. Twist Radio takes the music recommendation engine from Last.fm and uses it to help users explore music from SoundCloud.

The result is an app that lets users discover more obscure, independent and often homemade music, rather than a catalogue of music that's only been formally released by record labels. That's because SoundCloud hosts mostly user-generated music, including covers, mashups and original compositions. Some more established artists and labels have even embraced Soundcloud and uploaded commercially released albums to the service. It's essentially the YouTube of audio.

If you were having trouble streaming dubstep remixes hosted on SoundCloud lastnight, you're not the only one. The site fell victim to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the company confirmed on its status blog today.

The social audio-sharing site experienced several hours of intermittent downtime yesterday as SoundCloud's engineers fought off the attack.

Wouldn't it be great if MTV documented and showcased emerging bands on its television network, instead of making uninspired, irritating reality TV shows? Well if MTV won't do that, then a new web site that launched this month will. Noisey is a video-based "new music discovery platform" that is profiling new bands and local music scenes from around the world. The site was built using HTML5 and as a result it delivers a visually appealing app-like experience. This could be the future of music TV. I for one hope so, at least.

Noisey, currently in public beta, features mini documentaries of bands alongside videos of live music. I tested Noisey out by viewing the coverage of a young band I discovered via this year's SXSW Music festival.

There are no shortage of consumption apps on the Web, especially since the iPad (in many ways the ultimate Web consumption device) arrived on the scene. But what about content creation apps? In the Web 2.0 era, we saw the rise of blogging platforms, social networks, and media sharing services like Flickr and YouTube. Some people say that 2011 will be about content curation, via services like Twitter and Tumblr. But I think there's still a lot of action in the content creation space. I'll be exploring some of the best and most promising content creation services over the coming weeks here on ReadWriteWeb, in a series called 'The Creative Web.'

The first service we'll look at is a startup from Berlin, Germany, called SoundCloud. It's a platform to publish music and audio to the Web - and it's been experiencing rapid growth.

Tonight the band Radiohead once again set a new standard for album releases in the digital era, by unexpectedly making available its latest album The King of Limbs a day early. Not only that, everything about this release was done via the Web and independent of a record label.

Along with the early launch of the digital version tonight, Radiohead posted the music video of its first single off the album, 'Lotus Flower' - on, you guessed it, YouTube. While the new album doesn't have the pay-what-you-like innovation of its 2007 release, In Rainbows, it is notable that Radiohead went 100% online this time. The announcement on Twitter and a special eCommerce website, the digital download, the video on YouTube. Plus, the social media reaction is astounding.

The latest set of online music research reports has just been released by We Are Hunted, an online music chart. We spoke to We Are Hunted co-founder and CTO Stephen Phillips to identify the overall trends.

A big mover over the past 6 months has been Arcade Fire, which Phillips said is "a masterclass in the use of social media." More intriguing though is who the number 1 most talked about artist in social media was over all of 2010. It wasn't Lady Gaga, or Kanye, or Arcade Fire. Who could it be then? Read on to find out!

Kanye West is savvy and smart when it comes to promoting himself and his music, so it's no surprise that he's taken to Social Media in a big way. Kanye's Facebook page has 5.6 million fans, he's a regular tweeter with 2.2 million followers, and Twitter is a prominent part of his website.

Since social media is now an integral part of the entertainment business, services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have become key to a musician's success. Kanye West released his latest album at the end of last year: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Both leading up to the release (with music leaks and controversial tweets) and after (further mouthy tweets and a 34-minute epic video released on YouTube and his website), West has utilized the social Web masterfully.

At the end of last week, last.fm suffered an outage that lasted up to 24 hours. In her report on the story, ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez noted that she no longer uses online radio services like last.fm and Pandora. Instead, she's "moved on to bigger and better things" in the form of new subscription-based services like MOG, Rdio and Spotify. There are others, including long-time subscription service Rhapsody and the hip Grooveshark (popular with RWW readers).

For the purposes of this post, we're going to focus on the 3 new kids on the block - MOG, Rdio and Spotify - and look at what makes them so compelling. Firstly, you may be wondering what exactly is the difference between MOG and last.fm, or Rdio and Pandora?