ReadWriteWeb

By now - the beginning of a new decade and well into the 21st century - it's a story we've long come accustomed to: the music industry is dying a slow, painful, sputtering death at the hands of the Internet.

According to analyst firm Forrester's latest report, 2009 was "a lousy end to an even lousier decade" for the music industry and we shouldn't expect much different until at least 2013. Last year, as a matter of fact, was one of the worst years yet, with a 13% decline from the year before.

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.

Last month Walmart gave consumers the number 1 reason why DRM isn't the answer when they announced that they would be shutting down their DRM server come October 9th. Since then, Walmart relaunched it's online music store on Tuesday. The new music store offers the latest hits at only $.79 per song, while standard songs are offered at $.94. With competitive pricing options Walmart could give iTunes stiff competition.

We'd like your help in predicting the following: Will iTunes change its pricing from $.99 a song or go to a subscription music site by the end of 2008?

If you have been on the Internet for long enough, you will surely remember the old MP3.com, which was first geared towards independent musicians, but later also allowed you to listen to your own music collection online. Lala, which launched yesterday, features a similar concept. It is first and foremost a music store with a unique sales pitch: pay 10 cents for the right to listen to a song online and between 79 and 89 cents on top of that for the DRM-free MP3 file. For a lot of users, however, the fact that Lala also clones MP3.com's online music locker will be the real attraction of this service.

This week we interviewed one of the founders of online music service last.fm, Richard "Mr Scrobble" Jones. We're running the interview in 3 parts, over 3 days. This is Part 3 about design and features; following on from Part 1 about last.fm and its competition and Part 2 about business models.

In this post we explore last.fm's feature set, how it compares to MySpace Music, and what we can expect to see from last.fm in the near future. Richard Jones also discusses how last.fm has managed to avoid the legal difficulties that have plagued Pandora.

This week we interviewed one of the founders of online music service last.fm, Richard "Mr Scrobble" Jones. We wanted to find out last.fm's reaction to the launch of MySpace Music and the rise of Imeem, discuss business models in online music, and find out what's new at last.fm. We're running the interview in 3 parts, over 3 days. This is Part 2 about business models; following on from Part 1 about last.fm and its competition. See also Part 3, on design and features.

In this post we explore business models in online music, both for last.fm and for independent artists looking to earn a living in this new Web-based music industry.

Music-based social networking site Imeem has launched a re-design, which according to a blog post by founder/CEO Dalton Caldwell makes it "easier for you to discover and enjoy new music on imeem". Imeem has been growing its market share steadily over the past year and its licensing deals with all 4 major record labels makes it unique among online music services (both MySpace and last.fm have only 3 of them). But one of the few issues that Imeem has had up till now is a kludgy design that makes it difficult to navigate and a bit of an eyesore - not unlike MySpace's design in fact. This re-design aims to change that.

To complement the poll we ran this week about streaming music sites, we sourced data from comScore about the Internet Radio industry. comScore's data shows that the big Internet companies still dominate, specifically AOL Radio and Yahoo Music. In contrast, our poll - the second annual time that we've run it - shows that last.fm and Pandora are the favorites of our readers.

Is this a case of geek trends being at odds with mainstream? Or is it that the mainstream hasn't yet caught onto the cool music sites? Let's check out and analyze the stats from both comScore and our poll....

In yesterday's episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, our topic was online music and we had 3 very special guests on the show: Dalton Caldwell, founder and CEO of Imeem; Lucas Gonze, founder of Webjay and until recently a senior member of the Yahoo Music team; and Rob Williams, Senior VP of Music Software at RealNetworks. Also on the show were Sean Ammirati (host), Richard MacManus and Marshall Kirkpatrick. The audio is archived below for your listening pleasure.

In this post we feature some of the highlights from the show, which included many interesting factoids about Imeem, Yahoo Music and Rhapsody. But more importantly there was a lot of fascinating discussion of online music trends and where the music industry is headed.

The latest episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, is set to begin shortly at 3.30pm PST (6.30pm EST). This week's topic is online music and we have 3 very special guests on the show to discuss this: Dalton Caldwell, founder and CEO of Imeem; Lucas Gonze, whose startup Webjay was acquired by Yahoo in January 2006; and Rob Williams, Senior Vice President of Music Software at RealNetworks. The show is hosted by Sean Ammirati and also features myself and Marshall Kirkpatrick. We encourage you to listen to the show live and ask questions via the chat in TalkShoe (our hosts). The podcast widget is below...

This week's RWW Live podcast show (Monday 3.30pm PST) is on the topic of online music. We have 2-3 very special guests (so far we have representatives from Yahoo and Imeem, please email me if you're interested in coming on the show, we have 1 final place to confirm). We've been writing a lot about online music lately. Last week Marshall asked: What would the perfect streaming music look like?. We got some great comments to that. But we're also interested in what your current favorite streaming music service is.

It's the weekend, so time to review the week's web tech news, reviews and analysis on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we looked at the first reported Android phone, checked out the winners of the Firefox 3 Extensions contest, reviewed Microsoft's new 3D online photo app, dabbled with screencasting, and reported on Pandora's imminent demise. On the trends side we tried to define our perfect online music service, investigated whether FriendFeed's popularity is fading, checked out 10 emerging Web platforms, and polled you on the most exciting web apps on the Web today. We also introduced you to ReadWriteWeb's new feature: the Enterprise Channel!

Music-based social networking site Imeem is getting a lot of the right kind of press currently, based on strong traffic growth and key deals with record labels. We last wrote about Imeem in March, when they launched a developer platform that enabled read/write access to user information and more. As we explained then, Imeem is a site where users can listen to licensed streaming music, as well as upload music and blog about it - all for free.

As SfGate.com reported tonight, Imeem is the third-largest social network in the United States after MySpace and Facebook; and it's now the No. 1 streaming music site in the US.

Today online music service last.fm released the new design they've been working on since May. At first glance it looks quite different to the Facebook-like UI that we saw in the beta in June. However as we noted in our review of the beta last month, the beta UI was much criticized - so the fresh lick of paint is probably due to that user feedback (and, as you can see in the screenshot below, the new header literally looks like a lick of paint!).

Ian Rogers, VP Video and Media Applications at Yahoo! (prior to that GM of Yahoo! Music) has just published an epic post based on a talk he gave at a music industry conference in December. In it he outlines his vision for an open Media Web. It's very long, but is an excellent overview of how current Web music and video trends are slowly usurping the 'old media' world of the record companies and TV networks. His central theme is that "there is more opportunity in leveraging the scale of the Web than trying to create scarcity." He says that we can "do this together by creating a loosely-coupled value chain including users as value creators."

Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.

Highlights this week: Richard MacManus ended 2007 with a review of the top 10 Web Tech stories of the year. Marshall Kirkpatrick produced an awesome toolkit to keep track of Web Tech trends in 2008; he also showed how to fall in love with tagging again and asked some big questions on privacy in the Web age. Josh Catone offered a guide to Online Giving to start the new year and he explored how the Web is affecting the US presidential primaries.

An interesting new online video series, called Open Media Web, debuted today. The first episode is an interview with Yahoo's Lucas Gonze - who created music playlisting service WebJay, acquired by Yahoo! in January 2006. The interview was conducted by Chris Messina and Brian Oberkirch. In it Gonze discusses his thoughts on the Open Media Web, on user-respectful business models and coercive business practices, and business opportunities for open systems and data.

The University of Oregon (my alma mater, coincidentally) is believed to be the first US educational institution to refuse an RIAA demand to hand over the names of students alleged to have illegally downloaded music. Detailed reporting and lengthy discussion can be found at SlashDot - one alumni tech blogger's perspective below.

The Oregon Attorney General, working with the University, has filed a motion in court to quash the legal move by the Recording Industry Association of America, which the University says is trying to force the educational institution to perform a legal investigation for the benefit of a private corporation. The agrieved parties ought to perform their own investigation, the University argues.

A number of the names requested are of students living in University of Oregon dorms, making it impossible to determine which of the students living there downloaded the music, representatives of the school said. The U of O is infamous for its inhumanely cramped dorm rooms, though, making it improbable that one resident could have committed such an act without the other being intimately aware.

According to the elderly gentleman in line at the coffee shop this morning who first told me about the news (we were discussing In Rainbows, which was playing on the stereo there) - the music industry needs to get with the times and stop taking their giant profits from the old business model for granted.