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.

While no one is arguing that MySpace has lost its grip as one of the leading music and entertainment destination traffic generators, I disagree with Van Buskirk's choice in SoundCloud as the great equalizer.

Due to the service's ease-of-use and speed, SoundCloud is indeed one of the best file collaboration and music sharing sites. Quite simply, the site does everything right except help indie artists monetize. Meanwhile sites like Mix Match Music and Bandcamp provide solutions for bands to share AND monetize their products.

In particular, Bandcamp's execution is extremely elegant. As with MySpace, musicians upload their cover art, track listings, liner notes, lyrics and audio files. But Bandcamp adds four additional key features:

1. File Conversions: The site converts a single uploaded file into eight different formats to meet device and music player requirements.

2. Monetization: Bandcamp allows musicians to price their tracks and albums as they see fit. There is even the option to let fans decide prices on a sliding scale.

3. Sharing Tools: The service provides embeddable player widgets for Facebook, MySpace and a variety of 3rd party blogs.

4. Analytics: Perhaps most importantly, site analytics measure popular songs, track links and locate where files have been embedded. This means that musicians can search out their best advocates even if they're miles (and sites) apart.

While SoundCloud is definitely a fantastic tool for collaboration and remixing, it's the storefront-style tools like Bandcamp that will either eat or be eaten by MySpace Music. We'll just have to see where the major artists choose to flock in the coming months.

CORRECTION: Earlier the writer described SoundCloud as a P2P site. SoundCloud is not structurally based on a peer-to-peer network of nodes. Instead the company considers itself a "Flickr for audio".

Upload with AIR - Play Over the Air

You upload your music with an Adobe AIR app which allows you to upload songs directly from your hard-drive, but also has a convenient option that lets you browse your iTunes library to pick songs you want to transfer to imeem. In our tests those uploads worked just as expected and went relatively fast. The sounds quality was also surprisingly good.

Similar to the iPhone apps from Pandora, Last.fm, and and Slacker Radio, you can also easily create custom radio stations, though the functions here feel a bit limited compared to the options that imeem competitors now offer.

Like its competitors, the app suffers from the fact that it can't play in the background on the iPhone. Sadly, imeem also doesn't remember where it left off after you exit the app.

Pricing

You can store up to 100 songs, 10 videos, and an unlimited amount of photos on imeem for free. For $30 a year, you can upload up to 1000 songs and 100 videos, and $100 a year buys you storage for 20,000 songs and 500 videos.

Alternatives

We are also big fans of Lala, which allows you to listen to all of your songs online without any restrictions. Sadly, though, Lala does not offer a mobile application.

If you want full access to the music on your desktop while on the go, Simplify Music 2.0 also does a great job at streaming your collection over WiFi, Edge, and 3G. One of the nice features of the Simplify Music app (iTunes link) is that it gives users easy access to lyrics and artist biographies. Imeem only provides access to artist biographies.

Verdict

Given the quality of the apps that imeem's competitors have released, this app still has a bit to go before it can fulfill all of its promises. However, if you are looking for a simple way to expand the capacity of your iPhone or Android phone then imeem might be worth a look, especially if you don't keep your music on a home server where you can easily access it with Simplify Media or Simplify Music.

Overall, Slacker feels a lot like satellite radio, which is probably no surprise, given that XM Radio's co-founder Lon Levin is Slacker's Senior Advisor.

With regards to its user interface, every Pandora and Last.fm user will feel right at home. One nice addition to Slacker, though, is the ability to see which songs will play next.

Customization

One advantage of Slacker over its competitors is that it gives you more options to directly customize your stations. You can direct it to play songs from different decades, and decide if you want it to mostly play hits or also more obscure songs.

Competition

Slacker's reviews and biographies can't quite compete with the depth of information offered by the Last.fm app, which can also display tour dates. Slacker also doesn't feature any of the social networking functions that have made Last.fm so popular.

Just like its competitors, Slacker only allows you to skip six songs per station every hour. Unlike Pandora and Last.fm, however, Slacker does play 30 second radio ads after every fifth song. For $3.99 a month, however, you can buy a premium membership that lets you skip songs as often as you want and which removes the advertising from your stream.

Like all the other streaming music apps on the iPhone, Slacker can't play in the background while you surf the web or read your email. This, of course, is a limitation that Apple has put on its developers, even though Apple's own music player on the iPhone does this without causing any problems.

Verdict

Even though Slacker Radio is very similar to the Last.fm and Pandora app, we think it is definitely worth a try. Whether you prefer one over the other will depend on how happy you are with the music recommendations it gives and how important the social features of Last.fm are to you.

While it takes a while for Tunerec to fill up your database with songs (we assume that for legal reasons Tunrec has to at least pretend to 'record' these songs from publically available sources), the results are actually worth the wait. If you sign up today, make sure to come back tomorrow, as you initially start out with only a few songs in your library.

We liked Tunerec's interface, including the artist pages and cover art, and the sound quality, but one feature we did miss was the ability to browse through your library without having to resort to search.

If you are in Europe, Spotify is still a better alternative to Tunerec (and sadly still not available in the U.S. or Canada), but if you are in a country where Spotify is not available, Tunerec is definitely worth a try. It is supposed to be in closed beta right now, but we signed up and got an invite within a minute.

Tunerec Introduction from gurraman on Vimeo.

Imeem is one of Sequoia's portfolio companies, so it doesn't come as a surprise that it is looking to keep its budget under control, but we do think that Imeem is going to have a hard time finding a buyer in these tough economic times.

Update: We just got a response from Imeem. The company is indeed laying off 25% of its staff (20 positions) in order to cut cost, but wouldn't comment on the rumors around a potential sale of the company.

Imeem's last funding round was a Series C round led by Sequoia in April, though the company did not reveal the actual amount of this investment. Warner Brothers also invested about $15 million in Imeem. Imeem has licensing deals with all of the major record labels, as well as with a large number of independents labels.

$200 Million

While Imeem's valuation is a bit hard to estimate, PaidContent reports that Imeem and its investors would be looking for somewhere "north of $200 million." Given the current economic climate and the strong competition in the streaming music business, $200 million might be a rather high number, however, and this will surely scare off quite a few potential buyers.

This week, Fairtilizer has launched the first part of their new distribution platform: an embeddable player which allows indie artists to share their music anywhere on the net from web sites to blogs to social networks.

We told you about Fairitlizer over a year ago, when the company was still in private alpha. The easiest way to describe the site is to say that it combines the discovery aspects of Hype Machine with the distribution model of Tunecore. At the time of our initial writing, the company let artists upload tracks which visitors could browse through to find music they liked. Now Fairtilizer has opened its doors and is launching the next phase of their service: distribution.

Artists can now use one unified interface provided by Fairtilizer to distribute songs to blogs, web sites, social networks, and digital music stores...yes, even iTunes (The digital stores piece is coming soon, the others are available now). The distribution is aided by an embeddable player which can be added to any web site. The player comes in four different sizes and has shuffle and autoplay options as well as the ability to stream a customizable playlist. Once embedded, artists can then easily track analytics like downloads and plays per country.

The Fairtilzer Player:

Additionally, on the Fairtilizer web site itself, each track page comes with customizable URL, artwork, space for description and links (like to artist web sites, stores, and booking contacts, etc.), and a comment board for listeners. Tracks can be set to streaming only or made available for download, and soon artists will be able to mark them for sale, too, if they so desire. The tracks can also be set to public or private.

That private setting is designed to help artists in the initial phases before the launch of a new tune. Traditionally, launching a new track involves three steps: production, promotion, and distribution. With record companies today, leaks can occur in both the production and promotion phases as tracks are sent back and forth between artists, producers, DJs, journalists, and other taste makers who receive a first look before the track becomes publicly available. To combat those leaks, Fairtilizer provides these "private streams" instead. Artists will be able to send the track to specific people just as they did before, but the track will be protected from piracy and leaks.

The Future of Music

Although Fairtilizer will provide tools for artists wishing to sell their music, the focus isn't just on music sales. Instead, it focuses on providing all the tools an artist would need to get their music discovered, downloaded, shared, and distributed.

In the future, says Olivier Rosset, a former music exec and co-founder of Fairtilizer, it won't be about who owns the rights to a recording anymore. Music will instead center around the URL. And at Fairtilizer, they want to be the company that best helps an artist get that URL, that single track, onto the most sites across the internet.

Note: there's no way we could mention every single online music streaming service in this poll, but if we happened to miss a major service then do shout it out asap in the comments!

And thanks to a new application from Simplify Media, you can now even access all that music from your desktop while on the road.

Simplify Media does something Apple should have built into the iTunes Remote already: it allows you to stream the music in your iTunes or Winamp library right to your phone or iPod touch, no matter whether you are on your home wifi network or the cell network. The interface is very similar to that of the regular iPod application, but adds some nice touches to it, including automatically downloaded lyrics and artist bios.

In order to use Simplify Media, you have to first install a small application on the machine that hosts your music and set up an account with Simplify Media. The application is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and installing it is extremely easy. As a bonus, you can also share your music library with up to 30 of your friends and family members.

We mostly tested the application over AT&T's 3G network, where songs started within seconds. Our tests on the EDGE network were also successful, but it just takes a bit more patience as you have to wait for the buffer to fill up just a bit longer.

Simplify Media is available for free for the first 100,000 users and will cost $3.99 after that. As of now, the app is still available for free on iTunes.

2) Pandora (iTunes link)

The music discovery service Pandora has been a long-time favorite here at RWW. Pandora, if you are not already familiar with it, lets you create your own radio station, based on songs or artists you like. As you listen to more songs, you can vote them up or down, which allows Pandora to calibrate itself to your music tastes. If you like a particular song, Pandora gives you the option to directly buy it from iTunes, or to bookmark the song so you can buy it later on.

Pandora's iPhone interface is similar to that of its web interface and, like most of the music apps listed here, is somewhat reminiscent of Apple's own iPod app.

One thing we noticed was that there is a trade-off between sound quality and network speed. If you are on a wifi network, you get a high bitrate and stereo sound, but if you are on a cell network (even 3G), the bitrate is adjusted to only 64kbps and the sounds is only available mono, which can sounds a bit tinny, but is still quite acceptable while you're driving in a car.

Overall, we love the Pandora application because it has allowed us to discover more new music than any radio station ever would.

3) Last.fm (iTunes link)

Last.fm is somewhat similar to Pandora, but it has more social aspects built into the app. You can, for example, play stations from your friends on Last.fm. The Last.fm application also displays any upcoming concerts by the band that is currently playing.

One limitation of the Last.fm iPhone application is that it can't look at your favorite music on your iPod and make recommendations based on this ('scrobbling'), which has always been one of the main selling-points of Last.fm on the desktop. This is probably due to the limitations of the iPhone SDK and won't feel like much of a limitation to new Last.fm users, but if you are used to this functionality, using the iPhone app will feel limited.

Once you are logged into the app, you can listen to songs you can listen to recommended songs you have already scrobbled on your desktop, listen to your friend's recommendation, or start a new station altogether. If you like a particular song, you can immediately buy it on iTunes.

Last.fm offers a higher audio quality than Pandora, but the price of this is that we experienced longer delays and more drop-outs when streaming over the 3G or EDGE network.

4) AOL Radio (iTunes link)

The AOL Radio application lets you listen to online radio stations, though the selection is mostly limited to CBS owned stations and AOL's own special interest stations (think 'All German Folk Music 24/7'). While it might seem backwards to want to listen to radio on the iPhone given that you have so many other options, a lot of the specialty AOL stations are actually quite good. There is also a nice selection of talk radio stations available, including one called 'Psychic Radio' (their motto is 'We Know You are Listening...").

The application organizes stations by location (and it can use the built in GPS of the iPhone to find your own local stations) or music genre. If you like a particular song, you can, as will all the other apps, buy it on iTunes, or bookmark it, though you can't really do anything with those bookmarks besides buying the song later on.

One restriction of AOL Radio is that some stations are only available while you are on a wifi network and there is no way of telling which stations have this restriction and which don't/

5) Tuner Internet Radio (iTunes link)

If you want more Internet radio stations and the ability to add your own streams, Tuner Internet Radio is for you, but you will also have to pay $5.99 for the privilege. While it is overall quite similar to AOL Radio, you get a lot more options and even a built in OpenGL based visualizer. One area where Tuner Internet Radio shines is in its selection of international stations. While AOL Radio mostly features CBS stations, Tuner Internet Radio also features BBC and PBS stations, among many others.

Tuner Internet Radio can play any AAC+, MP3, PLS, and M3U stream, but note that it does not support RealPlayer or Windows Media stream, which might be quite a limitation if your favorite Internet stations use these formats.

Whether buying this is worth the $5.99 is a personal decision, but if you don't mind the price, Tuner Internet Radio is, in our view, a better application than AOL Radio.

So far, Last.fm has been completely ad-supported, though a premium subscription service is currently in beta. Judging from the payout schedule, however, artists will need a lot of plays on Last.fm to make a reasonable amount from the program. On the other hand, though, MySpace pays out royalties to the major labels, but doesn't pay any royalties to unsigned bands on its site.

Not everybody seems to be happy about this announcement from Last.fm, though. Merlin, the "world's first global rights body for independent music," which represents close to 8% of the US music market, has issued a statement to its roughly 12,000 members, telling them that Last.fm has failed to address its concerns about copyright infringement on Last.fm. Merlin also argues that the license terms of the Royalties Program are too ambiguous.

Regardless of Merlin's objections, though, Last.fm's step to start paying out royalties should be applauded, as it gives musicians yet another way to make money outside of the mainstream music business. While the Royalty Program is limited only to Last.fm and doesn't collect royalties from various sources in the way SoundExchange would, Last.fm is giving musicians an alternative to the more traditional revenue models, which should prove to be especially appealing to smaller, still unknown bands.

Grooveshark is unique for a few reasons. After scanning a user's music library via the downloadable Sharkbyte client, the site puts that music online. Anyone can then download the music -- for a price. A cut goes to the artist, another to the user who uploaded the track, and finally to Grooveshark. One of the service's real strengths, though, is its Last.fm-style recommendations that we've always found to be very good.

Grooveshark Lite leverages all the various bits of the Grooveshark service -- streaming music, paid downloads, music sharing, and recommendations -- and packages them nicely in a gorgeous flash-based player. Lite extends Grooveshark firmly into Pandora territory with a service that lets users build streaming playlists and download tracks directly.

I was keen to see how Grooveshark Lite would integrate with the playlists and music I already had on the service, unfortunately I couldn't get it to properly access my library. The site did display a message today that it "may be unstable" as the company rolled out the new Lite service, so perhaps that was just a hiccup.

Conclusion

Grooveshark's service was very attractive this summer when options for DRM-free music were limited. At the time, Grooveshark was one of the few places people had access to major-label, DRM-free content in a presumably legal manner. Since that time, though, Amazon MP3 and other services have dramatically changed the music download landscape. Grooveshark is smart to extend their service into streaming music. The company also recently demoed their analytics suite for artists and labels, MoneyShark, which is another smart extension of their core product.

Grooveshark is an exciting company in the P2P music market. Along with services like Amie Street, and Last.fm (which was acquired by CBS last spring) small companies are having a dramatic influence on how music is distributed and consumed.