ST Holdings, a music distributor that represents over 200 labels, recently asked those labels if they would like to keep their catalogues on services like Spotify and Rdio. Four of them said yes. So, citing a recent survey showing that streaming services hurt music sales, ST Holdings pulled its music from Spotify, Rdio, Napster and Simfy.

200 Music Labels Sounds Like a Big Loss...

The ST Holdings labels weren't the first to pull out of the digital streaming business. A number of small, independent labels have done so and recently bigger acts like Coldplay have declined to make new material available on Spotify.

While 200 music labels sounds like a lot of content, it's worth noting that these are also relatively small labels, most of which specialize in various sub-genres of electronic music. There's very little risk of any of the major labels dropping Spotify, event if a few big name artists with enough clout may follow Coldplay's lead.

In addition to the four (okay, three) major labels, Spotify and its competitors still have most of the bigger independent labels, including more than 12,000 represented by Merlin. For the time being, the majority of popular artists, both mainstream and indie, are available on Spotify.

You Can Still Get Any Music You Want and Put it in Spotify

When Spotify finally launched in the U.S. this summer, I put it through its paces for about 48 hours, and then signed up for the premium account, dropping Rdio in the process. As much as I liked Rdio (and still miss its UI sometimes), one of the killer features of Spotify had for me was its ability to merge my locally-stored music files with its giant library in the cloud.

The truth is, I don't expect every artist on the planet to be included in Spotify's library. As long as a sizable (and growing) selection of artists is there for me to stream, I'm perfectly content acquiring other music directly, especially from local artists who may not be signed to even a tiny label.

When I do, I can download those files to my laptop and listen to them from the same desktop client I use for streaming. When I sync my iPhone and iPad with Spotify, that music is then transferred to those device and is available to me when I'm on the go.

The Music Industry is Still in Transition

Ten years after the demise of Napster, the music industry is still very much in transition. What will have emerged another decade from now is going to look different from what we know today and the shift probably isn't done being disruptive.

To be sure, the concerns artists have over the low payments offered by all-you-can-stream model are perfectly legitimate. It's undeniable that direct downloads and even physical music format sales generate more revenue than services like Rdio and Spotify. However, Spotify has only been live in the U.S. for four months and is still growing. As that happens, its competitors are adapting. In time, the model should become more profitable for arists Both Apple and Google have also stepped up their game in the digital music space recently.

Just as I, as a consumer, have multiple ways to legally acquire music, artists have several choices when it comes to selling and distributing it in this new digital ecosystem. Streaming services are one of them. iTunes and Amazon's MP3 store are others. As of last week, artists can now upload their own music directly to Google Music and set their own prices. Similarly, tracks can be sold via Bandcamp.

Even with these options, it's possible that the recording and distribution of music may not forever be as lucrative as it is today. Tomorrow's model may include a hybrid from music sales, merchandise, performances and perhaps other factors that have yet to fully emerge.

Peer-to-peer music streaming app Grooveshark has had an-again off-again relationship with mobile providers. Last summer, the service hit iOS only to be pulled from the app store just days later.

Today, Google booted the app from the Android Market in "a move that comes after some of the top music labels have accused the service of violating copyright law," according to CNET's Greg Sandoval.

When Apple pulled the app from the App Store last August, we predicted that "the move is likely related to the lawsuit in which Universal Music [...] is suing Grooveshark for copyright infringement," which turned out to be the case. Today's removal from the Android Market seems to stem from a similar situation, in which a letter from the Recording Industry Association of America caused it to be pulled.

A Google spokesperson told CNET that "we remove apps from Android Market that violate our policies."

The company provided a statement regarding its removal:

"It is our full intent to get Grooveshark for Android back into the Android Marketplace, and we haven't received any specific information from Google about what in the developers' terms of service, exactly, we need to address to be re-admitted to the marketplace-only that Google received a letter of complaint from the RIAA.

As a user-sourced service, like YouTube, Grooveshark complies speedily with all DMCA requests to make sure that we operate within the law and respect the wishes of content owners. Unlike Apple's iPhone ecosystem, Android is an open platform, and Google is traditionally a supporter of DMCA-compliant services-indeed, Google itself relies on the DMCA for the very same protection that Grooveshark does.

Grooveshark works night and day to develop new successes in the music industry, as well as pay the many content partners with whom we work. The current unavailability of our app is taking money from the thousands of hard-working labels, artists, and content partners who benefit from a share of Grooveshark's mobile subscription revenue. We look forward to working with Google to get our app reinstated."

Last year's issue with Universal wasn't the first time it ran into problems either. In 2009, the company settled a lawsuit with music label EMI.

Last.fm Radio will remain free via its website and desktop app as well as for U.S. and U.K. users of Xbox Live and Windows Mobile 7 phones.

Last.fm Radio offers a personalized station, playing full song tracks based on users' preferences. Currently, that streaming service is free in the U.S. and U.K. via an ad-supported app.

The change brings Last.fm in line with many other music services that charge you to listen to music via your mobile devices. The $3-per-month fee is less than Spotify's $9.99, but Last.fm does not let you play tracks on demand.

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.

It's been a long time since Napster straightened up and flew right, and the advantage of going legit is that its users can now pay $10 a month for access to a catalog of more than 10 million songs. The app gives users the ability to stream music and download it to their phone for offline listening, much like other apps. In many ways, the Napster iPhone app looks remarkably similar to other apps, like Rdio or MOG, in feature-set, catalog size, user interface and even cost. The big thing it carries that other services don't is name recognition, which is perhaps why Best Buy bought the music service back in 2008.

Right now, the music app market is seeming more and more saturated with apps that do nearly the same exact thing, with nearly the same catalog for nearly the same price, and it may come down to factors like name recognition or ease of use. The other day, we wrote about how MOG got us to pay for music but if another app, like Napster, is suddenly available for the same price with more music, what's stopping us from switching over? Or if social features like community-created playlists are what fuels our music discovery, will a service's popularity be the deciding factor?

For now, it feels like mobile music is anybody's game (and Google or Apple could come in with a cloud-based service at any time and upend everything), but Napster is surely a solid competitor in the current atmosphere.

The app is now available for download in the App Store.

As we noted last month, in the battle between the large streaming music services, we are getting to the point where most of these services offer very similar features. Instead of features, we will likely see these services use the size of their music catalog as their main way to differentiate themselves from their competitors. According to a spokesperson for Slacker, the company will offer four times as many songs for on-demand listening as its "leading competitor."

We've missed it, sure, but now it's back, and this time it's turning your computer into a streaming music server, giving you access to your home library from wherever you are: on any computer and even on your iPhone and Android smartphone.

Unfortunately we haven't launched yet and have been testing the service with limited users. We've disabled new signups and are a couple weeks away from opening our service to the masses. We are moving into a colo-facility soon with starting bandwidth capacity of 300mbit which will allow us to open the floodgates.

When we visited the site last night, we didn't notice anything saying it was in beta or wouldn't be open to the general public and quickly signed up. For those of you who didn't get in, we guess the only thing to do is to wait.

The first thing to note is that this is not the cloud-based music service we've been waiting to see. In order to work, the computer with your music library needs to be on and connected to the Internet - not asleep, hibernating, saving power or being even slightly environmentally friendly.

The program works by installing a client on your home computer which scans your hard drive for music. Then, either via the Web interface, the iPhone App or the Android app, you can access and play your music from anywhere.

The website is supported on the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome, and there's no limit to the size of the collection you can share. The company says it has successfully used Audiogalaxy with a collection of more than 80,000 songs without a problem. The service is is completely free, both on the Web and on your smartphone, and although the company's FAQ mentions paying for "uninterrupted access", we happily listened to an entire Radiohead album without any problem. We were also happy to find that the playing continued in the background when we switched out of the iPhone app.

For some people - those who rely on streaming music services like Pandora or MOG - the service may not really offer any benefits. If, however, you have 100 gigs of music sitting at home and you want to access it from your 16GB iPhone, Audiogalaxy is a sure winner. It's like having it all right there on your phone, with an easily navigable list of artists, albums and playlists that you can create using the website.

Now the app runs in the background, allowing you to listen to music while working with other apps. This, plus a few other features, make the new MOG app the must-download update of the day.

The new iPhone 4-compatible MOG application can now be controlled with the iPhone/iPod Touch's built-in audio controls. When playing in the background, a double-tap of the home button reveals the multi-tasking apps. Swipe your finger left to right to reveal the audio controls for MOG. When the app is playing music but the screen is locked, double-tapping the home button will reveal lock screen controls.

The new app now also supports some external hardware devices, too, including third-party Hi-Fi docks, audio remote controls and headphone remote controls (1 click to pause/play, 2 clicks to move to the next track, 3 clicks to move to the previous track).

MOG vs Rdio

MOG, which offers about 8.75 million tracks at present, is going head-to-head with Rdio, the app backed by KaZaA and Joost creators, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Although Rdio launched with 7 million tracks, it did so without having a firm deal with Merlin, a slight which seemed to incense Merlin's CEO, Charles Caldas. "It is incredibly disappointing that Rdio have launched their new service across North America without having finalized a deal for the world's most important independent labels and artists," he said. "We are surprised that a service, whose success would seem dependent on offering its consumers a comprehensive choice of repertoire, would launch without giving those consumers access to the leading global independent labels we represent, and their artists."

For those into indie music, many of Merlin's artists are household names. It represents Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, The XX, Neko Case, The National, Tom Waits, Spoon, Grizzly Bear, DJ Khaled, Dorrough and Tiësto, to name a few, through its members Rough Trade, Warp Records, Epitaph, Naïve, Tommy Boy, One Little Indian, Yep Roc/Red Eye, Beggars Group, Merge, !K7, PIAS, Domino and Koch/E1.

But services like Rdio and MOG are so new, it's unknown at this time whether a large catalog will actually be the top selling point for attracting new users. For now, MOG has the larger catalog, but Rdio offers unique features, like social networking integration and the ability to preload your iTunes collection into its service.

Rdio, MOG: Data Hogs?

One problem both services share is the ability to jack up your cell phone data bill. After a month of heavy streaming across an iPhone and an Android phone, our household's AT&T bill flew way past the 2 GB limit (on AT&T's "DataPro" plan), charging us an additional $10 per GB over. Although that's a reasonable, non-gouging price, when factoring in the $10/month for the streaming service, you're talking $20/month to ditch iTunes in favor of the cloud. Yes, it's all-you-can-eat music, but at these prices, that's a buffet many won't be able to afford.

The app is much like the one we saw at SXSW in March, providing an "all-you-can-eat" service that surpasses competitors with its ability to download any music available on the service for offline play. It's library of 8 million songs - while smaller than Rhapsody's 10 million - is certainly impressive, but immediately showed some gaps and possible bugs on first inspection. For example, when searching for "The Stereo" - a pop-punk group - the app listed a number of their albums alongside those of "Stereo" - a club/dance electronic group. While this is understandable, all of "The Stereo"'s albums were shown as available, but clicking on the "play album" and "download album" buttons did nothing, as it turned out no songs were actually available. Beyond this, initial tests of the catalog had varied results, with some more rare albums showing up and others not.

Two features, we think, really set MOG's mobile offering apart and they are its radio feature and the ability to download songs, albums and even entire discographies to save locally for whenever 3G is iffy or unavailable. The radio feature, which is much like Pandora, streams music according to whatever artist you chose. It has a slider to tune the station between focusing solely on songs from that artist to sampling songs from similar artists to anywhere in between. As for downloads, songs are downloaded as 64 kbps AAC+ unless you turn on the "high quality downloads" in the settings, which selects a 320 kbps MP3 format, but we found the audio of the low quality just fine for some ear buds. Of course, if you actually have some decent headphones or speakers, you may chose otherwise.

The final aspect of MOG mobile is music discovery. MOG offers a few ways to discover new music, from the just-mentioned radio feature to user created playlists - a feature we know many were excited to see with (still unavailable in the U.S.) Spotify. When searching, you can chose the standards - artist, album or song - as well as playlists. It's a great way to find new music that others are listening to. Beyond that, MOG offers its own charts for popular songs, albums and artists, as well as a selection of popular albums, radio stations and playlists.

The $10 service includes both Web and mobile access, meaning you can set up playlists, browse music and interact with the library on the website before letting the app sync everything to your phone. Unless you're really into creating you're own playlists, however, we see little need for the website. And if you find yourself traveling or on-the-go often, MOG mobile seems like a great way to constantly have access to new music. As for the bugs and glitches, we hope to see them fixed up along the way, but for now they don't get in the way too much.

Roku users who sign up for the company's unlimited $4.99 monthly plan will be able to use the service on their devices. For $9.99 per month, these users will also be able to access the service through the web interface. MOG will also offer a free 3-day trial to Roku owners.

In addition, users who sign up for the $9.99 plan will also soon be able to use the company's iPhone and Android apps. These apps will allow users to download songs to their mobile devices for offline playing. We got an early look at MOG's iPhone app earlier this year. You can find more details here.

Why Are Music Subscription Services are Getting More Popular Now?

MOG is strictly a subscription-based service. So far, these services always remained in the shadow of more traditional music stores like iTunes and eMusic. Now, however, there seems to be a resurgence in interest in music subscription services. With Rdio, for example, Skype's founders just launched a new subscription service that looks quite similar to MOG.

According to MOG's Drew Denbo, a number of fundamental changes are driving this trend. First of all, the arrival of mobile app stores has made it easier for these services to target mobile devices and give users the option to access their music anywhere. In addition, now that some of these services are arriving in the living room (thanks to the Roku and devices like Logitech's Squeezebox), music subscription services are getting to the point where they are more convenient to use than download services.

At the same time, though, there will always be some users who want to own their music, so subscription services aren't for everyone, but unlike download services, streaming music services are making it increasingly easy for their users to access their music wherever they are.

Instead, we got somewhat evasive and allusive answers on when to expect a U.S. version and were left looking to yesterday's announcement of MOG's move to mobile, with full knowledge that Napster is nipping at its heels.

Ek said that he thinks that the day that we allow music to be seamlessly transported between platforms and carried around on mobile devices would be when we saved the music industry.

"Music that I really love, I tend to want to buy and own still," said Ek. "I don't necessarily want to own it in the format it used to be, like in a dumb plastic disk, but I'm more than happy to pay $100 to get a box set with a t-shirt and notes."

He explained that, while many seem to criticize Spotify for giving music away for free and adding to the problem, "it's not free" and that "with all those listings on the Spotify platform, the artists get paid every time" their music is played.

Ek argued that he thought that the music industry would be "radically bigger" today if users could legally have music on any device, using the metaphor of music as flowing water.

We did, however, get to see a quick demonstration of Spotify for Android, but it was a bit quick to glean much in the way of usability. It did, indeed, play music.

In the end, though, we have to wonder why we're all holding our breath for Spotify to land on U.S. shores. By the show of hands, it certainly doesn't seem that hard to acquire and we have some valid alternatives, like MOG and the soon-to-be Napster platform, as well as their web counterparts.

If you're that worried about getting Spotify, our suggestion would be to go get a proxy service set up and get to it already.

Does it often feel like a waste of time to download something just to watch it once and then delete it? Then Don't. Use Put.io. Put simply, Put.io fetches files from the Internet and allows you to either store them there or immediately stream them.

While the immediate question is one of legality, we do want to mention that, aside from pirated movies and television shows, there actually are a lot of videos out there available for download by bittorrent and other means. Beyond that, Put.io addresses the issue of legality and the DMCA, saying that "It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") and other applicable intellectual property laws. Responses may include disabling access for all users to the material claimed to be the subject of infringing activity and/or terminating submitters of the material ability to use the Put.io service at all."

We gave the service a shot and it downloaded a 750 megabyte torrent in less then a minute. Although the service wasn't able to stream the MKV format directly on the site (and we had the wrong DiVX player version), we gave it another shot with an AVI torrent and we had streaming video in under a minute. And Put.io stores the files so you can come back and access them again and again.

Currently, beta testers get 50 gigs of storage with 150 gigs of bandwidth. The bandwidth is not counted when downloading the files to the service, but instead when you access them - so repeated watching of a large file could surely reach that limit.

In addition to the basic functionality, you can share files and folders with friends and access files from anything that supports a browser, from your iPhone to your PS3. In addition to a mobile version, the service is planning to release an API as well as a Boxee plugin. The site is still in public beta, but Put.io is offering 300 invites to our readers. Simply visit this site and get an invite.

While Pandora "has been on the verge of death, struggling to find investors and battling record labels over royalties," according to the Times' profile, a recent move by Warner Music may help to put one Internet radio station above the rest.

As Tom Conrad, CTO for Pandora, told us last month when Warner announced it would pull all of its licensed content from streaming music services, "Pandora operates under a different licensing structure and won't be impacted by Warner's apparent decision with respect to free, on-demand services." This could be huge in keeping Pandora on track to break $100 million in revenue this year, as predicted by William Blair, a digital media analyst, in the Times article.

The Times compares Pandora with other services, such as Slacker Radio, noting that Pandora has one third as many songs but three times as many listeners. We can't help but wonder if the absence of Warner's discography might further imbalance this scenario in Pandora's favor.

Update: Slacker Radio has informed us that they too will carry Warner Music titles. This is from a note from a member of Slacker Radio's PR team:

Slacker has and has had since day 1 voluntary licenses with all major labels and 100's of Indie labels. Slacker negotiated deals and then built a business around those rates. We have good relationships with Warner and voluntary licenses with them. We do offer and will continue to offer music from Warner.

According to last month's article in the BBC, however, services like Spotify and Last.fm could be in trouble of losing a large portion of their music library.

While the sheer number of songs is obviously not the deciding factor here, it could be a big one. With control over artists from Frank Sinatra to the Bee Gees to Puff Daddy, Warner's music catalog could be the distinction between life or death for any online streaming music service. And now, with deals with automakers and consumer electronic manufacturers, it looks like Pandora is here to stay.

And as the Times points out, with last month's hiring of CFO Steve Cakebread, the company looks poised to go public in 2010. In the meantime, we wonder what will come of the competition when Warner music officially pulls the plug and leaves them without a "Stairway to Heaven".

Given its reliance on HTML5, Bitspace currently only works with Webkit-based browsers like Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome (Internet Explorer users can, of course, use Google's Chrome Frame plugin). Firefox's implementation of the HTML5 audio tag currently only works with Ogg Vorbis files and does not support playing MP3 files yet.

Uploading and Playing Your Music

Uploading files to Bitspace is fairly straightforward. You can either pick and choose files through the service's web interface, or, if you are a Mac user, you can also use the company's OSX client. Bitspace uses Amazon's storage services for saving your files. The service can import and play most common audio file formats, including MP3, MP4, OGG, WMA and FLAC.

What's currently missing, however, is an easy way to upload larger batches of files. While you can upload multiple MP3 files simultaneously, you can't pick multiple directories, which slows the upload process down quite a bit.

The central focus of Bitspace is obviously the music player. Here, you can organize your tracks by artist, album name, label and year. In addition, you can also manage your playlists here. The minimalist design of the app is one of the highlights of the service The design puts a lot of emphasis on album artwork and makes very good use of HTML5 and the new features it affords developers. Bitspace also integrates with Last.fm and allows you to sync your scrobbles from Bitspace.

Paid Accounts (No Free Accounts for Now)

Bitspace currently offers three different types of paid accounts: basic (limited to 10GB, or the equivalent of 200 albums and 2,000 tracks for €3.99/month), standard (limited to 25GB for €3.99/month) and premium (limited to 50GB for €14.99/month). Sadly, the free accounts (with a limit of 500 MB) are currently invite-only and you will have to sign up for the service and whip out your credit card (though with a free 30 day trial) if you want to test Bitspace.

Update: we originally reported that Bitspace limited users to a certain number of tracks and albums. This is not the case. Bitspace only enforces the limit on disk space.

Verdict

Other services, including Lala, also offer similar streaming music services that allow you to upload your music to the cloud. Lala's big advantage over Bitspace is that it's offering its service for free and doesn't cap its users' uploads. Given that Lala has been acquired by Apple, though, the service's future remains unclear.

Compared to Lala, Bitspace is definitely the prettier service and it's reliance on open web-standards is commendable. Even though the service offers a 30-day trial, the fact that you do have to enter your credit card information or PayPal credentials when signing up will surely keep quite a few potential users from giving it a try (though the prices for the paid accounts are quite fair).

It's important to remember that these are still the early days for Bitspace and the company's co-founder Niklas Holmgren tells us that Bitspace is also working on mobile apps and integrating more social networks into the service.

As time has gone on, we've found fewer and fewer reasons to actually download music and ExtensionFM gives us one less.

Kantor pre-released the music plugin just over two weeks ago with little to-do, but we can't get enough of it. ExtensionFM runs quietly in the background as you browse, collecting any and all tracks and archiving them. If you decide you'd like to listen as you go, you can simply click on the icon and play individual songs, queue songs, or play or queue them all. If you decide that you like a song enough to own it, you can simply right click on it and chose "Buy", which sends you to the song on Amazon. But even if that were to not work, the program keeps the link to the site where it originally found the song.

Then, when you switch over to the full screen extension, all of the tracks you've discovered while browsing are neatly organized by artist, album, track name and even the site where it was originally discovered, with a link, so you can go back and find out more about tracks you like.

When you first start up ExtensionFM, it has six featured sites, including Spinner, Live Music Archive, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Daytrotter and Tuneage, making it easy to get going.

What's even more, ExtensionFM will let you "scrobble" to Last.fm, which means it will follow along and keep track of your music listening habits and send them to your Last.fm account.

We got in touch with Kantor this afternoon and he told us that he does have plans to make ExtensionFM available as a Firefox add-on at some point in the future, but for now it is only available for Chrome. He also said that right now, music can only be played when the user is online, but that offline playing is another feature they're looking into.

Because we have a supply of just 50 beta invite codes, we've put information on how to get your invite on our Facebook page. Head there now to be one of the lucky few, and if you're so inclined, we'd love it if you added us to your Facebook friends, as well!

According to recent reports, however, Spotify may do things a little differently when it reaches the States. Says Andres Sehr, Spotify's global community manager, the company is considering going the "freemium" route for the U.S. market.

"Freemium" is a word coined to describe a business model where basic services are free while special or advanced features are available for a fee. That's a slightly different spin on the business model Spotify uses today. Currently, Spotify offers its European users a choice between a free, ad-supported application and a paid app which costs around about €10 (around $16.60) a month. With a Spotify "freemium" service, however, there would be just the one application in which users would pay for the extra features they want to use. Details on how exactly this would work and what features would come at additional cost is still unknown. Sehr says it's far too early say at this point. Also unknown is whether this "freemium" model would forgo the monthly subscription fees in favor of the premium upgrades.

In an interview published today in the Wall Street Journal, Sehr explained why the company is considering making this sort of change. "The U.S. is a completely different market, and the competition landscape's different," he said, adding that "when we launch there, it'll definitely be a challenge for us."

What Sehr is referring to is the particularly crowded market here in the U.S. where services like Imeem, Pandora, Last.fm, and many others are already well-known and popular destinations for streaming music online. In other words, Spotify isn't just rivaling iTunes in the U.S., it's going up against a number of other companies doing nearly the same thing, too.

Spotify on the Mobile

Where Spotify has an edge over its competition is on the mobile front. Although there are plenty of streaming music applications available for both the iPhone and Android platforms, Spotify's app does things a little differently...and considering the glowing reviews, better. Instead of simply providing a streaming radio of sorts based on a user's musical preferences, Spotify's mobile users can actually pick and choose the songs they want to listen to and build a custom playlist. That playlist can also be streamed when the mobile device is offline thanks to Spotify's caching technology.

For this reason, there were originally concerns that Apple would reject the streaming music app because selecting tracks, making playlists, and playing music offline puts it in direct competition with iTunes itself. Those concerns were soon discovered to be unfounded as Apple recently approved the app for distribution via App Store - a decision no doubt influenced at least in part by FCC scrutiny over the company's app approval process and anti-competitive tactics.

While the initial launch of the Spotify mobile iPhone/iPod Touch app is only in the European counties where Spotify is currently licensed, the Apple "seal of approval" means that (in theory), Spotify won't have any trouble making it into the American App Store, too. That is, once they get the American licensing agreements worked out.

Although the company already has European deals with Universal, Sony, Warner, and EMI and it solidified an American licensing agreement with the Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA) in July, its the Stateside licensing agreements that are holding up the service's U.S. launch. Still, the company remains optimistic and expects to make its American debut later this year or in early 2010.