Music plays a large role in our lives. Since the web now plays an even bigger part, combining the two together has become unavoidable. The greatest thing about this powerful duo is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time searching for music you like  — just use this nifty guide list and you’ll find just about everything you need to enjoy hours of good music. The sound quality changes from service to service, but overall, it’s good enough for regular web usage.

Please note that this is a list of services that you can use over the net without the need to download anything to your computer. This is why I’m not listing any P2P software: i.e., Spotify, as well the fact that most of us can’t really test it or use it for all that matter. This is also only the first half of this guide; part two will include more web music players (including MySpace Music, Streamzy, and others) as well as music search engines and services that make it easy to share songs on Twitter and other social sites.

Music Recommendations:

Pandora is a service that can be used only in a specific locale, this one being within the U.S. Luckily, I had the chance to test the service when it was first released and became available to everyone. Launched way back in July 2005, the project had been in the initial testing phases for five years prior to launch date. Pandora recommends music to you by matching similar musical attributes. All you really need to do is choose an artist or a band you like, and Pandora will do the rest. Pandora delivers high quality 128Kbps audio streams, offering recommendations similar to the artists you have chosen. Pandora’s player looks like a radio, you can open up to 100 stations and navigate through them quickly. Registering for Pandora will provide you with a free account (advertising-supported). Free Pandora accounts will play up to  40 hours of music for free per month, you also have the option to pay 99 cents for unlimited listening hours for the rest of that month, or pay $36 to upgrade Pandora for one year. If you want to download music from Pandora, you can do it through iTunes or Amazon. You can see our past Pandora coverage here.

With almost 3 million unique visitors a day, Last.fm is one of the most powerful social music communities on the Web today. Like Pandora, the service allows you to enjoy music that you like, but unlike Pandora, Last.fm analyses what you and your friends listen to and like, and then suggests more music based on that analysis. When you recommend music to a friend or you tag it, or you write about it, or simply just listen to it – you shift the song’s importance on the site, and will in turn get recommended to more people. Based on the music you’ve already listened to, Last.fm will recommend new music you might like, as well as suggest other users with a similar music taste to yours, which you might be interested in friending, and you can also easily communicate with them. If you live outside the U.S., U.K. or Germany, you can listen with a free 30-track trial or subscribe for a low price of $3/month for unlimited radio streaming. (Launched in 2002!)

This is how BlogMusik, looked in 2006, and this is how Deezer (formerly BlogMusik) looks today – pretty impressive change, don’t you think? The French-based service is one of the largest and happens to also be a very successful music recommendation search engine. Once registered here, you can create your personal profile and reach the Deezer community. You can create playlists, send messages to your contacts, leave comments, add artists and albums to your favorites, and more. But here’s what I like the most – The SmartRadio, which is an intelligent radio that automatically generates 3 hours(!) of continuous listening based on one artist – completely free. Priceless! You can see our past coverage of Deezer here.

I think the first Adobe AIR application that I ever tried was Finetune. Finetune provides you with the most interesting new playlists of related music from your choice of artists. Besides the site’s community where you can browse, listen to music, create a profile, connect with other users and more, Finefune also has some cool feautures to complete their suite, and each tool gives you an extraordinary music experience. Take for example the Finetune Wii project (which can be played also over the web), it’s a great sight and sound for the eyes and ears. Just enter an artist’s name and Finetune will create a playlist with similar music that will play for hours. Best of all it’s free, and you also get an iPhone, Facebook and a Desktop app that all sync with your music playlist, no matter where you play it from. You can see our past coverage of FineTune here.

Also worth mentioning in this same topic group are, of course: Ilike.com (acquired by Myspace), and music.strands.tv

Independent Music:

Amie Street is a home for musicians. The service allows music fans to discover new and independent music. Visitors at the site can search for new music based on genre, region, or recommendations. Fans can also search for music according to its price -  Amie Street is actually the only marketplace where listeners determine the price of the music. How does it work? Every song is originally priced free or very inexpensive and increases in price, up to 98 cents, as more and more users purchase it. Musicians then get 70% of the revenue from each sale. Additionally, Amie Street matches you with music that you might like, for example: I couldn’t locate Coldplay on the site, but I got more than 70 results that sound similar to the band. Obviously, this exposes me to music that I’ve never heard before, which is always a welcomed experience. You can see our past coverage of Amie Street here.

Why is Jamendo one of my favorite music services? It offers the largest catalog of music under Creative Commons licenses – worldwide. And, not only are all of the albums free to download, there’s also a large chance you won’t know any of the artists. If you already have an open mind about music, surely it won’t stop you from listening to some new albums, right? The best way to find music at this site is to search by the genre tags. Found something that you like? You can review, comment, rate, share and as I’ve said download it for free.  The service is available in seven languages, and has an iPhone app that you can download for free. Business model? Yes they have one too.

SoundCloud is by far the best looking music application there is today. It offers a great interface, a great user-experience and above these all, great music! SoundCloud lets music professionals receive, send and distribute their music. The service allows professionals (and non-professionals) to exchange, and follow music and musicians at the site. It’s a full community where people can easily communicate with each other based on shared tastes, but it is also a place where musicians can store and showcase their music using high quality standards. With the free account, you can only upload 5 tracks maximum per month, but if you are an industry fanatic and you find this plan to be somewhat lacking, you can check the pro page for packages that are more suitable to your needs. See our past coverage here.

TheSixtyOne allows artists to upload their songs and lets thousands of listeners decide whether they like it or not. The most popular songs hit the front page. Think about it as a Digg for music, the more people heart a song, the higher it goes. The site connects musicians and fans, giving them all the tools to communicate with each other. For artists, it’s good place to promote their work. For anyone else, it’s a wonderful place to discover and support new music.

Create & Listen to Playlist:

I’ve never been very much of a Project Playlist fan, but I have to say it’s a good service. Ultimately, it’s a community based on playlists. You don’t have to register to be able to listen to the music, but once you do, you can start building your playlist and enjoy more features such as the Playlist IM, which is a chat system similar to Facebook where you can connect your ‘playlist’ friends or even friends from AIM, Facebook, Yahoo Messenger, etc. What else? You can write blog entries, upload photos, privately connect with other members, browse thousands of other music playlists, comment, share, and much more. My guess is that people use this site mostly to share their playlist on their blog/site or social network. Playlist allows you to grab a playlist code and embed it anywhere you want. One thing that bugs me though is that the member’s search feature is missing. Today, when everything is so connected to your identity, this is a must have feature. On the other hand, I was impressed to see they saved my playlist from 2006…

Jiwa.fm allows you to create personalize playlist and share it in the Jiwa.fm community or with friends & family. As a member, you are able to share, exchange, and explore music. You can also expand your tastes with the SmartRadio tool. I found this service to be unique in a way because no matter what you are doing at the site, it won’t prevent you from listening to your playlist, it just plays in the background. Amazingly, when you click on an artist from within a mixed artists playlist, it will automatically create an album playlist of that artist. You might find the site to be a bit cluttered at first time, but once you get it, it works like a charm – highly recommended.

At Jogli, you don’t really need to create a playlist – they create it for you. Think about it as a giant web-based CD store where you can search for an artist, see all of his/her albums, and then listen to them exactly as listed in original CD  Let’s take Michael Jackson for example: Here you can find all his discography, and listen to his CDs one by one. Clicking on the button ‘Play Radio’ will open a radio station generated from music you might like from similar artists. As a registered member, you are able to save playlists, write reviews, and more. You can also import your playlists to Last.fm or iTunes to make it a video playlist. Check out our past coverage of Jogli here.

MixTube would have been better and easier if they allowed you to search for Youtube videos on their site to create a playlist. But no, you have to supply them with a Youtube URL, which means, you’ll have to go directly to Youtube, search for a song, then copy-paste that song URL back into MixTube. Thus, I found it to be frustrating. But looking at the bright side, you can always search for someone else’s playlist, and save yourself time and agony. One word about the Youtube music integration – lots of services use it, but unfortunately, it doesn’t offer you much control of your playlist, and what plays today, may not play tomorrow..

Lala is another great music store/playlist maker that we’ve covered extensively since the site relaunched last year. It allows users to listen to any song they want one time. If you want to listen to a song more than that, you buy a 10 cent ‘web song’ that lets you stream the song from the cloud as many times as you want (you can also purchase a full download of the song as you would from iTunes or Amazon). The site has a great integrated music player and a variety of pre-made playlists built by other users.

Worth mentioning: Imeem, and Maestro.fm

Music Visualization:

There’s no doubt in my mind that Musicovery has a strong following of avid users. The site is an interactive and personalized webradio enabling its users to generate in a few clicks a musical program adapted to the various listening situations and their preferences. Their unique mood matrix proposes a relationship between music and mood in an ergonomic and attractive manner. I’ve submitted this item about the service to Digg in 2006 and it’s good to see the site still works . But things have changed. You have limited navigation if you’re not a pro user ($15/3 months or $48/12 months), but once you are – the sky is the limit. In any case, this service will blow you away.

CitySounds.fm is perhaps just a mashup site, but it’s a good one! CitySounds.fm collects music from SoundCloud and pictures from Flickr to create a wonderful music experience from a single page. You can listen to the latest music from cities all around the world. At the top are the most active cities and the list is constantly changing as new music is being created.

Web-Radio:

Very similar to Last.fm in concept, Jango allows you to create your own custom radio stations and share them with friends. Just type in what you want to hear – and your station will immediately play the music you want along with similar favorites of other Jango users who share your tastes. You can customize your stations further by adding more artists and rating songs. Each artist get a page, containing the web-radio, the music playlist, biographies, events list, comments from members at the site, and fan list for easy communication. The service claims to be legal and says it pays royalties due to all labels/artists every time a song is played. Moreover, Jango runs a program called Jango Airplay. This program gives emerging artists an unprecedented opportunity to be proactively exposed to the millions of visitors at the site. See our past coverage of Jango here.

RadioBeta is an efficient way to locate radio stations in your area or around the globe. You can search stations by geography, genre, band, language or tags. You can listen without signing up, or you can log in and create your personal dashboard with favorite stations that  you can then listen to on a daily basis. We mostly hear radio on the go, but now you can easily track your favorite radio stations on the web. All the radio stations are public so you aren’t asked to pay anything to use the site.

OK, TheRadio is also one of my favorites because of its simplicity. Entering an artist or a genre gets you custom channel, but if you go over the channel listing, you will find much more interesting suggestions. I don’t know about you but I actually like when someone else picks the music as long is it in the range of my request. Anyway, TheRadio does a great job on finding music that I like – it simply works.

Aupeo fits in the Recommendation list as well as this category. The service lets you experience music in a fours different ways: by Stations, Artist, Mood, and Personal. The Stations area is pretty limited if you don’t have a pro account, but you can still get the feel of it. In the Artist zone, you enter your favorite name and choose from a variety stations suggested. The coolest way is the Mode area, which plays music based on your chosen mode. These stations are created by music experts, says Aupeo.  The Personal station streams music based on your music behavior at the site. Overall, very intensive and powerful!

Worth mentioning: Tun3r, Mugasha, and  Play.fm

That’s it for Part 1 of this music guide. If you have any other suggestions related to these groups, you are more than welcome to add them in the comments. In the next part of this post, I’ll offer the best options for Music search engines, Music web-players, Twitter-Music craziness, and more. Stay tuned!

Image by RossinaBossioB on Flickr.

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I showed up at their offices and guess what I found? A pile of servers sitting in a corner waiting to be delivered to the RIAA. Sure, they said they were just old servers… likely story.

I also discovered that Last.fm is getting into a new business: Michael Arrington Target Practice Kits ™. I got a demo in the office (see video below). Ev, can I put you down for a case?

michael fires me from sarah lacy on Vimeo.

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In a notice on the site’s blog, Miller writes about the company’s humble beginnings and its journey to CBS, as well as its continued growth since the acquisition:

After two years running Last.fm within CBS we feel the time is right to begin the process of handing over the reins. This is the latest stage in a long journey for us founders, which began in a living room in East London in 2002, and took us to the headquarters of one of the biggest media companies in the world.

It’s been a privilege working with the incredible team here in our London office, and we’re extremely proud of what we’ve achieved together. Last.fm’s users have more than doubled in the last 12 months (we are now at an all-time high of 37.3M monthly unique visitors), and we’re confident the site will continue to go from strength to strength

The news comes soon after our reports that Last.fm’s parent company CBS may have transferred user data to the RIAA or record labels (an accusation they deny, though the issue remains cloudy). But it’s more likely that the timing is less sinister: Last.fm was acquired almost exactly two years ago, and it is common for earn-out deals to mandate a two year stay. It’s no secret that the employees at Last.fm and CBS haven’t always gotten along, and the founders may well be tired of living under their corporate overlords.

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Music service Last.fm, which was bragging about server uptime a week and a half ago, shuts its doors for the afternoon, claiming “datacenter temperature issues beyond our control” required them to go offline. The outage began around 12:30 pm PST, so we’re at two hours and counting. Updates are on their Twitter account.

The twitter from May 20:

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Before posting Erick reached out to the RIAA, Last.fm and parent company CBS for comments. The only response was from CBS – “To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA.” The CBS spokesperson, Katie Gunion, subsequently emailed us to say “would you please attribute the statement to Last.fm, it is currently reading as though CBS issued the statement” Gunion’s email lists her title as Public Relations, CBS Interactive, and her first statement did not name Last.fm (this is important, see below). A subsequent statement by Shannon Jacobs, VP of Communications at CBS: “this is a last.fm issue, as far as I am concerned. It is not a corporate issue. This is a last.fm issue, not a corporate issue. The posting represents last.fm’s response.”

After the story broke all concerned parties had no problem commenting publicly.

Last.fm cofounder Richard Jones said “I’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue.” He followed up with a blog post “Techcrunch are full of shit, “I denied it vehemently on the Techcrunch article, as did several other Last.fm staffers. We denied it in the Last.fm forums, on twitter, via email – basically we denied it to anyone that would listen, and now we’re denying it on our blog.” One blog called us a “tabloid masquerading as a legitimate news outlet.” Lots of others piled on.

Apart from updating the original post we’ve been quiet on this story. The person who first leaked the news was terminated from CBS for the leak, says our original source, and threatened with legal action. He understandably went very quiet. But the outrageously shrill denials by Last.fm just didn’t ring true. Once you got past the personal attacks, the denial language itself was too carefully worded.

Now we’ve located another source for the story, someone who’s very close to Last.fm. And it turns out Last.fm was telling the truth, sorta, when they said Erick’s story wasn’t correct.

Last.fm didn’t hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it. That corresponds to what our original source said in conversations we had after our initial post and before CBS lawyers became involved. But we didn’t want to update until we had an independent source for that information, too.

Here’s what we believe happened, based on our sources: CBS requested user data from Last.fm, including user name and IP address. CBS wanted the data to comply with a RIAA request but told Last.fm the data was going to be used for “internal use only.” It was only after the data was sent to CBS that Last.fm discovered the real reason for the request, say our sources. Last.fm staffers were outraged, say our sources, but the data had already been sent to the RIAA.

Here’s an email from the original source, partially redacted. A screenshot of this email is here.

Re: touching base

From: [redacted, a CBS employee]
Sent: [redacted]
To: [redacted]

[ _____] We provided the data to the RIAA yesterday because we know from experience that they can negatively impact our streaming rates with publishers. Based on the urgency of the request they probably just wanted to learn more about the leak but who knows. Seriously, can you blame them? [______] Our ops team provided the usual reports along with additional log data including user IP addresses. The GM who told them to do it said the data was for internal use only. Well, that was the big mistake. The team in the UK became irate because they had to do it a second time since we were told some of the data was corrupted. This time they transferred the data directly to them and in doing so they discovered who really made the request. Shit really hit the fan, I even got a call [______] Obviously, I can see their POV but what they don’t understand over there is that we are in the analytics business and it’s not like this is the first time we’ve provided this data to a third party. Someone over there should be more forthright with users about the data policy instead of complaining about BD to upper management like I’m here trying to destroy the business. We’re just trying to help them stay afloat here it’s not like Pro memberships are earning any revenue! [______________] So if you hear of anything, I’m even open to possibly moving West now for the right opportunity, let me know.

Our new source, which hasn’t seen this email, says much the same: that Last.fm didn’t know the nature of the CBS request until after the data was sent and that the data was in fact subsequently sent by CBS to the RIAA. This source’s information comes directly from Last.fm employees who he has spoken with.

It’s important to note that while sources are in agreement that it was the RIAA that made the request, it may have been one or more music labels acting independently. The suggestion in the email above that the compliance was made because of the ability for the requester to negatively impact streaming rates suggests it was a label request. But the end result is the same. So if CBS/Last.fm deny sending data to the RIAA but don’t say anything about the labels, they’re being shifty again. Also, there are whispers that someone may have put a stop to the data transfer before it left CBS – that gives them a denial out if they paint with broad strokes. Much better would be if they simply, honestly, told us what really happened and we could move on.

We believe, based on information supplied by our sources, that CBS lied to us when they denied sending, or at least intending to send, the data to the RIAA, and that they subsequently asked us to attribute the quote to Last.fm to make the statement defensible. Last.fm’s denials were strictly speaking correct, but they ignored the underlying truth of the situation say our sources,, that their parent company supplied user data to the RIAA, and that the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users. We believe that the outrage they aimed at us for reporting the story, which we believe was materially correct, should have been aimed at CBS instead. But Last.fm never spoke publicly of the real facts of the story.

We believe Last.fm and CBS may have violated their own privacy policy in the transmission of this data. We also believe CBS and Last.fm may have violated EU privacy laws, including the Data Protection Directive, and should be investigated by the appropriate authorities.

And to the CBS employee who was, according to our original source, fired and threatened based on this story – we believe certain U.S. Whistle Blower laws may protect you from retaliation from CBS in this matter. We’d like to provide you with legal counsel at our cost.

Update: Last.fm denial.

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Radionomy, based out of Brussels, Belgium (yes we do have a startup scene here), has secured more funding in order to bring more enhancements to and enable scale for its personalized web radio application, which it is debuting in public beta today.

The size of the financing round wasn’t shared in detail, but the startup did say its total capital now exceeds €1.5 million (roughly $2 million).

Radionomy essentially offers everyone a chance to set up their own Internet radio station free of charge and share a personalized radio show complete with music programming, jingles and commercials with friends and the rest of the world. Users get to tap into readily available music libraries and jingles and add custom sequences, interviews, reports and podcasts to the mix, enabling anyone to build a genuinely personalized radio show and broadcast it for free, worldwide. Radionomy takes care of the associated costs (including royalties), and shares advertising revenue with radio station creators, relative to the size of their audience. Read more about the project, which is European in scope, right here.

I’ve known the company and its founders for a while and have always been quite skeptical of the concept, since there are so many options these days for users to build custom music playlists and stream purchased (or non-purchased) tunes on the Web, leading me to believe few people would bother to set up their own radio station. But I’ve been playing around a bit with it earlier this morning, and have to admit it’s all pretty well executed, with lots of social features and decent search functionality.

Turns out traffic to the web radios built by users is picking up nicely too. The company reports a growth of 175% in terms of audience in the past 4 months, and also says nearly 1 million unique users paid a visit to the platform in December 2008, citing independent research performed by Médiamétrie//NetRating. Also, about 26,000 users have registered for the invitation list so far, waiting to be accepted to the public beta version, which the company is launching today. The company has set its goal to 5,000 user-created radio stations by this Summer.

Radionomy says it’s going to put more focus on developing its presence in France, where it claims to have become the number one music streaming website, before Last.fm, Jiwa and other more established players. They were probably cheering when Last.fm yesterday announced that they would be turning Last.fm Radio into a subscription-based paid product for its users outside of the US, UK and Germany.

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Big Media’s love affair with the Internet ebbs and flows with the markets. When they see money pouring into Web startups, they feel threatened and rush to do the same. They ramp up their digital divisions, which usually are no more than venture arms, and hope to strike it rich. When the markets are down, as they are now, their attention drifts elsewhere—exactly at the time when they can pick up innovation on the cheap.

“M&A is gone,” the digital media chief at one of the largest media companies tells me. Other than a few targeted acquisitions to fill out business or technology holes, “you look foolish making any purchases,” he says, “especially if prices are still going down.”

And those prices are way down. Consider, for example, that CBS’s entire market capitalization is now only $2.5 billion, which is not much more than the $2.1 billion its digital division CBS Interactive paid in cash over the past two years for Cnet ($1.8 billion) and Last.fm ($280 million). (It also made a number of other smaller acquisitions and investments). As of December 31, 2008, CBS only had $419 million in cash on its balance sheet.

When it bought Cnet last May, CBS’s market cap was $16.5 billion. If CBS had instead paid in stock for CNET, that stock would be worth only $273 million today—less than what CBS paid for Last.fm two years ago.

But the media company that went on the biggest buying spree was News Corp. Its digital division, Fox Interactive Media, was lucky enough to pick up MySpace, which paid for the rest of its acquisitions. Now that FIM doesn’t seem to be buying much anymore, it is not clear why it exists. Most of its properties could be integrated into other News Corp divisions or sold off. It does have some ad targeting technology and a budding ad network which is seeing some success, but that could be a stand-alone business or combined with MySpace.

And that is kind of the whole point. It is not clear why media companies even need separate digital divisions anymore. Even the digital media chief I spoke with thinks that “it is silly to have a separate division.” Disney, Viacom, NBC, and News Corp. each have digital revenues that are close to or are approaching $1 billion. But that revenue is typically spread across many different businesses. And, as big as it is, the digital side of the media business is still overshadowed by the many billions of dollars more brought in by the traditional side of the business—TV, movies, radio, even print.

The executives leading those businesses have too many other fundamental problems to deal with to worry too much about having a Facebook strategy or how to market their movies through Twitter. The last time the big media companies pulled back from the Web, it was because the Internet sector led the downturn. And every Web-related business became toxic. Now, it is more that the general economic crash is hurting overall revenues across the entire media landscape.

Media executives are going into self-preservation mode. They know that all media businesses are going digital, eventually. But right now, they are more concerned with sheltering their core business than with pushing forward a digital business that will leech attention and profits from the core business.

So the digital divisions have to transition from M&A mode to business-building mode. But without money or attention, the most talented executives in those divisions may not stick around for long. Mika Salmi, who sold Atom Entertainment to Viacom and then became the president of Global Digital Media at MTV Network, is already headed out the door. NBC lost its digital chief last November. And digital media executives with M&A backgrounds like Quincy Smith at CBS don’t have a lot of money to spend these days.

That leaves building the digital part of the media business to the old-school executives in charge of the other businesses. How many of them get it?

(Photo by atomicjeep).

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Update: Last.fm vehemently denies this rumor. See below.

That leaked U2 album is causing all sorts of trouble. The unreleased album, which is due out on March 3, found its way onto BitTorrent and was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. That, apparently, sent music industry lawyers over at the Recording Industry Association of America into a fit. As a result, word is going around that the RIAA asked social music service Last.fm for data about its user’s listening habits to find people with unreleased tracks on their computers. And Last.fm, which is owned by CBS, actually handed the data over to the RIAA, according to a tip we received:

I heard from an irate friend who works at CBS that last.fm recently provided the RIAA with a giant dump of user data to track down people who are scrobbling unreleased tracks. As word spread numerous employees at last.fm were up in arms because the data collected (a) can be used to identify individuals and (b) will likely be shared with 3rd parties that have relationships with the RIAA.

Supposedly, the operations team which handed over the data in the first place weren’t told the true purpose for the transfer or who was getting the data until after the fact, and only when they had to help with some corrupted data. It sounds like it was more of a corporate decision. I’ve contacted both CBS and the RIAA. Most of the Last.fm team is in London, where the weekend has already started. For now Last.fm says: “To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA.” (The RIAA declined to comment).

Setting aside what actually happened to the data, and assuming this rumor is true, why would the RIAA target Last.fm? It wasn’t streaming the U2 album, and it is not an illegal download service. But Last.fm has millions of users who are heavy music consumers, and many of them download Last.fm’s Scrobbler software which keeps track of every single song you listen to on your computer, no matter which music player you use. In other words, it captures tracks played from illegal BitTorrent downloads just as easily as from iTunes.

Last.fm members knowingly share what they are listening to with the rest of the Last.fm community, and in return receive social recommendations of music they might like. That is the whole point of the service. And Last.fm’s privacy policy does clearly state:

. . . your record collection (including your skipping history) may be viewed by all other users of Last.fm (who may include other organisations or representatives of other organisations who have registered as Last.fm users) and that they may easily associate this information with your Last.fm username.

But most probably never even considered it a possibility that individually identifiable information about their listening habits (legal, illegal, or otherwise) could be handed over to an organization known for taking consumers to court for file-sharing. What makes this even more egregious is that it appears to be absent any legal precedent (such as a pending lawsuit) for which Last.fm could at least hide behind as an excuse.

Incidents like this highlight how the social Web can sometimes bite back if you are not careful. It also raises the issue of who owns all of this data about you and what they can do with it. (The same issue that caused Facebook to backtrack on recent changes to its data policy). Unfortunately, it’s come down to this: you really shouldn’t share any data on the Web you wouldn’t feel comfortable seeing in a court of law.

(Please contact us at tips [at] techcrunch if you have more information about this).

Update: Some more denials from Last.FMers, including one of the co-founders, Richard Jones, in comments, who says this story is “utter nonsense and totally untrue,” and another one from Russ Garrett, a systems architect.

Update 2 (2/21/09): There are a lot of angry questions being raised about this post in comments and elsewhere. Lots of demands for retractions and some people questioning the timing of the post late on Friday night.

First, on the timing. The reason this story was posted so late was because I had contacted a Last.fm spokesperson in the U.S. earlier in the day who promised me a response, and I decided to wait for it. Several hours passed, with assurances that a statement was being prepared. So I was a little surprised when it was only one sentence:

To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA.

That statement is hardly a categorical denial. It leaves open all sorts of holes. Was the data collected internally, but never actually handed over? Was it made available to a specific record label or group of record labels, perhaps at the request of the RIAA. Or did the whole thing never happen? I asked for clarification, but again was referred to the single vague statement. After I posted, I again contacted the spokesperson to see if she had any further comment she would like to make. She didn’t.

Soon after I posted, however, plenty of unofficial but heartfelt denial came from Last.fm staffers in London, two of which I linked to last night in the update above. The one from Russ Garrett, in particular, raised even more questions. His denial starts out unequivocal, but then he adds a squishy disclaimer:

I’d like to issue a full and categorical denial of this. We’ve never had any request for such data by anyone, and if we did we wouldn’t consent to it.

Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we’d never personally identify our users to a third party – that goes against everything we stand for.

Hmm, so could the RIAA or a record label use the data to identify people? I never suggested that it was Last.fm that was singling out individuals listening to unreleased tracks. The issue is whether the RIAA or any of its member companies are trying to do so and whether or not Last.fm is helping them.

As Garrett points out, Last.fm shares aggregate listening data with the labels. Are there any unique identifiers associated with this data that could lead back to an individual, despite any precautions Last.fm might take? (It wouldn’t be unprecedented—remember that leaked AOL search data a few years ago?) I sent Garrett an email about 5 hours ago asking him some of these questions.

From the very beginning, I’ve presented this story for what it is: a rumor. Despite my attempts to corroborate it and the subsequent detail I’ve been able to gather, I still don’t have enough information to determine whether it is absolutely true. But I still don’t have enough information to determine that it is absolutely false either. What I do have are a lot of unanswered questions about how exactly Last.fm shares user data with the record industry.

Update 3 (2/22/09): Garrett got back to me. He responds:

The data we make available to labels is aggregate data about their artists – it’s a slightly more detailed version of what you see on the site. We release no data linking users and plays to any third parties.

The only data we provide to labels (in addition to the data publicly available on their artist pages) are historical graphs of listeners and plays. There’s no way to link these to individual users.

If a label was trying to work out who’s been listening to their leaked track, the closest they can get would be to look at the publicly-available listeners on the music pages. I would doubt that would be enough evidence to convict someone, and users can opt out of being displayed there in their settings.

Update 4 (2/23/09): Last.fm co-founder Richard Jones expands on his denial in comments with an official post on the Last.fm blog. He also adds this:

We never share personally identifiable data such as email and IP addresses. The only type of data we make available to labels and artists, other than what you see on the site, is aggregate data of listeners and number of plays.

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Fring users (also referred to as fringsters) are now able to fire up streamed music radio channels, including their own Last.fm library, tag favourites, ban disliked tracks, view album artwork and basically take their Last.fm music account mobile. In addition to getting those features into the client, fringsters can also opt to view in real-time what their contacts are currently listening to, with the help of a friends list embedded into the Last.fm add-on.

Like Last.fm’s own Android application, which it introduced just last week, the add-on can be run in the background enabling users to listen to streamed music channels while they’re using other fring features.

Third parties can built add-ons on top of fring using its API, for which you can find more information here.

The Israeli company, which recently laid off 20% of its workforce but continues to surge with on average 400,000 new downloads per month, has made it public that they’ve raised 3 rounds of financing so far, although they’re only disclosing two rounds of funding amounting up to $13 million for now. Although they’ve recently started showing ads to mobile users, the jury is still out if there’s enough sustainability in the business model for the service to keep them alive.

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The company says the application should be available here, but I’m not seeing anything there yet so maybe we should just be patient until they get around to effectively have the app up for download on Android Market. (It’s also nowhere to be found when you actually search from the G1).

Update: it’s available from the phone now.
Update 2: app is listed online now too.

First impressions: music quality is fine but not staggering, the streaming speed is ok, the tagging process is seamless and it’s really cool to discover similar artists when you’re listening to a song from your mobile phone. Also, you get to purchase songs straight away via the Amazon MP3 store on Android.

The application enables users to access their Last.fm profile and millions of streaming tracks on Android-powered phones, and supports ‘background playback’ so you can listen to music while you access other programs. Last.fm has been offering an application for the iPhone / iPod Touch for about 6 months now with the same feature set apart from the background playback functionality.

Last.fm, which was acquired by CBS in May 2007 for $280 million, was recently forced to reduce its headcount by 20 percent but continues to report impressive growth figures.

One of their competitors, social music network Imeem, has been available on the Android platform since October 2008 (get it here), and their mobile application also took home the award for Best Mobile Application at the recent Crunchies ceremony. Now all we need is an Android application for Pandora and the race is on.

It’s also worth noting that we could find 3 unofficial Last.fm-related apps on the Android platform (Last.fm: Android Edition, Last.fm Player and Last.fm Client) although these generally received poor ratings and reviews, so there was an apparent need for a better, official one.

Co-Editor’s Update (Erck Schonfeld): I’ve been testing out the Last.fm app today. It works great, and I especially like the ability to create stations by tags or artist. But the stream just doesn’t sound as good as imeem’s, even though Last.fm is streaming at 128 kb/sec and imeem is streaming at 64 kb/sec. The reason for this is that imeem streams in AAC format, whereas Last.fm streams in MP3 format. As a result, the imeem app sounds twice as good at half the bit rate. Last.fm should consider switching to AAC as well.

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MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today includes a media player plugin that records and analyzes your music habits, a website that has a dedicated page for every artist, album and song with user generated reviews and posts, and an advertising network that provides revenue for 300 top music blogs. Users can also stream music via an excellent front end to Rhapsody.

All of that brings about 5 million unique visitors a month to their network, and the company says they should bring in about $5 million in revenue in 2009.

Now they’ve created a new music streaming product that breaks away from Rhapsody and its limitations. Like competitor ilike, which also uses Rhapsody, users can only stream 25 songs per month for free. That doesn’t compete well with free streaming services like MySpace Music, iMeem, Last.fm and others.

The new service, dubbed Mog 3.0 internally, is a fully free music streaming service that lets users play whatever songs they like on demand. The user interface is as good or better than LaLa, a service that we love despite the fact that streaming isn’t completely free. Founder David Hyman and VP Product T Jay Fowler gave me a demo of Mog 3.0 earlier today.

The service combines the ease of use of LaLa with free, which is enough to get our attention. But it also has a recommendation service that rivals Pandora when it comes to discovering new music.

The interface is genius. Users search or browse songs, artists or albums and then start listening to the music. More songs from that artist are suggested and added to the results as you play the songs. And if you move the slider to the right (see image to right), related music is added as well. That lets the user decide if they want a playlist-driven on demand music experience, or to change things up and add Pandora-style related music to the mix.

It doesn’t stop there. Users can also create playlists with the best tool on the market – it’s easier to create and share playlists than even Project Playlist offers, and users can associate a name, description and image with each playlist as well.

MOG plans to make other changes to the service as well, including adding streaming music to content pages, and creating user profiles that highlight the music you listen to and like. It brings in the best social aspects of Last.fm.

The product is compelling.

But it will quite possibly never launch.

MOG has label deals with Sony BMG and Universal locked up. They’ll provide streaming music rights for free in exchange for a revenue share. But Warner and EMI remain on the sidelines, and MOG says they won’t launch unless and untill they have all four major labels under agreement.

I, for one, really hope to see MOG 3.0 launch sometime soon. And if the last two labels don’t jump on board, MySpace should strongly consider buying MOG. MySpace has label deals locked up but their product continues to have unacceptable technical glitches. The music player is very slow to load and songs have an annoying tendency to skip during playback. Perhaps the MOG team can put that right for them.

More screen shots below – top image is the playlist tool, below that is a user profile page.

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Just in via Twitter: Pandora has registered its 20 millionth user. The three-year old music streaming service is trying to hold its own despite tough economics and recent layoffs.

Its music-recommendation engine pumps out personalized radio stations over the Web, and its iPhone app remains one the top free apps on iTunes (currently No. 21).

How many of those 20 million registered users are active? Most of its listeners are in the U.S. According to comScore, Pandora had 5 million unique U.S. visitors in November, more than CBS-owned Last.fm (2.8 million) and close to Imeem (5.5 million). (MySpace Music, in contrast, had 17. 8 million). Here is a Google Trends chart showing a similar relationship.

Update: According to the company, 40 percent of its registered users, or 8 million, have been active in the past 90 days.

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Today, CBS Interactive is laying off people across several of its properties, I’ve confirmed with the company. CBS is not saying which divisions or how many people are affected. It is positioning the layoffs as part of the integration process it began six months ago when it bought CNET for $1.8 billion. But it is not just the CNET businesses that are being cut.

I’ve also confirmed that earlier today employees at social music site Last.FM were let go. CBS bought Last.fm in 2007 for $280 million. One source puts the number of layoffs at as many as 40 people, mostly from LAst.FM’s London HQ, which has a total staff of 95. A spokesperson for CBS Interactive says that number is inaccurate on the high side, but won’t provide the correct number. In any case, it is likely a small fraction of the overall number of employees being laid off across CBS Interactive. Update: CBS says the number of Last.fm layoffs is less than 20, which would put it at about 20 percent.

Last.fm never really became a big money maker from what I can gather, and all of those engineers and other staff members are not cheap. Even after a redesign last July, growth has been flat. According to comScore, Last.fm had 9.2 million global unique visitors in October, a 6 percent increase from July. Imeem is still much more popular, with 22.1 million global visitors. And in the U.S., even Pandora has a bigger audience (4.97 million uniques in November, versus 2.75 million, see chart below).

If you know which other CBS Interactive divisions are going through layoffs today or the total number of layoffs, leave us a tip and we will add it to our Layoff Tracker. Update 2: There were also layoffs at CBS Sports where, a tipster who is a former employee tells us, “the entire accounting department” was lost, as well as jobs in Database Applications and Data Warehouse .

The Last.fm staff learned about the layoffs a little more than an hour ago. Below is a screenshot from one of their friends, showing their reaction on Facebook. That first status message is in Swedish and says, “better start planning for the future.” Update 3: Matt Hillman says that his status message below was not related to the layoffs.

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Yesterday, CBS sent out a press release touting the success of Last.fm’s month-old redesign, citing a 20 percent increase in unique visitors and a 36 percent increase in total minutes between June and July. Despite a few bugs on the day of launch, the redesign seems to be paying off. But why is CBS so keen on beating its chest when it comes to Last.fm?

Ever since CBS bought Last.fm in May, 2007 for $280 million, it’s been under pressure to justify the purchase. At the time of the purchase, Last.fm was running neck-and-neck against social music network imeem and music radio service Pandora.. Today, imeem is killing Last.fm (see Google Trends for Websites chart above), and Pandora is still holding its own.

Since CBS cited comScore numbers, though, let’s look at those. In June, 2007, the first month under CBS ownership, Last.fm has 2.5 million unique U.S. visitors. A year later, in June, 2008, it had 2.4 million. In other words, it had gone absolutely nowhere. In July, after the redesign, it had 2.9 million. Meanhwhile, during the same time period, both imeem and Pandora doubled to 7 million and 4.8 million unique U.S. visitors, respectively. And these numbers don’t include imeem’s widgets, which the company says reaches about four times as many people as its site does on a worldwide basis.

And in terms of time spent on each site (engagement), imeem is heads and tails above both, with visitors spending 295 million minutes on the site in July, compared to 56 million minutes for Pandora and 20 million minutes for Last.fm.

The comparison with imeem isn’t completely fair because it is a broader social network centered around sharing videos and photos as well as music, although music is its main driver. (In fact, it is leading the move towards advertising supported music streaming, with a more comprehensive catalog than Last.fm’s). And Last.fm isn’t doing so well against Pandora either, which is a more direct competitor.

So did CBS totally screw up its acquisition of Last.fm, or will the redesign be enough to put it back on track?

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Then in 2007, in response to iTunes, Doug Morris at Universal Music had the brilliant idea of bundling music subscriptions into the price of digital music players. The effort was called TotalMusic, and the idea was to get all the record labels on board, until the Department of Justice launched an antitrust investigation that killed the idea. Or so everyone thought.

Multiple sources in the Web music industry (including two CEOs and another executive) have told us that the music labels are mulling over another attempt at creating their own digital distribution business, or at least one they can control. Details are sketchy, but the buzz is increasing around a project to create a free, advertising-supported streaming service that would be licensed or white-labeled to other Websites. Each stream would link directly to a paid digital download. Some believe that a revived TotalMusic and this project are one and the same.

TotalMusic, Like, Totally Doesn’t Want To Die

Indeed, TotalMusic lives on, although in a different form. A search on LinkedIn for “TotalMusic” returns four people who list it as their current employer (Ted Ferguson, Troy Denkinger, Robert Broome, and Derek Reeve). All four live in Chicago and all four previously worked at MusicNow, another music service that changed hands between Circuit City, AOL, and ultimately the new Napster (not a good omen). A couple job listings, like this one posted on July 15 for a senior software engineer, describes TotalMusic as being based in Herndon, VA (near AOL old headquarters):

TotalMusic, LLC is a new digital music platform offering the integration of music discovery, streaming and downloads into a wide variety of online and mobile environments. We have solid financial backing and a staff with decades of combined experience in online music.

Compensation is competitive, and the work environment is highly distributed with most members of the team telecommuting, however, our Headquarters is located in Northern Virginia, and have a group in Chicago and Boston. So if you prefer an office environment, Northern Virginia should be your choice.

Free, As in Music

The idea of combining ad-supported streaming with paid downloads is very similar to the upcoming MySpace Music (due to launch next month), except that it will be available to other sites. In that sense, it is closer to what Rhapsody has done, powering music streams for Yahoo Music, iLike, and MTV.com, and trying to up-sell full subscriptions or paid music downloads.

Full-track, on-demand, advertising-supported music streaming (as opposed to randomly-sequenced Internet radio) is gaining steam as a business model. The music labels have licensed their catalogs for uninhibited streaming to imeem and MySpace Music. And a number of other sites, including Lala and Last.fm, have signed more limited deals that still provide access to a broad range of artists. For example, Rhapsody offers a limited version of free streams (25 songs a month) to their songs.

What the music industry should do is make music streaming free. Treat it like a marketing expense to sell digital downloads, concert tickets, and other items. That’s probably not going to happen. But what could happen, and what Web music startups are hoping for, is for the music industry to lower its licensing fees for streaming music.

Or At Least Disruptive Pricing: The $1 CPM

Right now the going rate for streaming music is a penny per track, which comes to an effective CPM (cost per thousand) of $10. That means that music streaming Websites need to be able to charge more than $10 CPMs just to cover the music licensing. And $10 CPMs are not economical. A $1 CPM would make more sense.

As one music startup CEO says, “The only guys who have negotiated terms are guys who have gotten sued.” That is certainly true for imeem and MySpace. With others, the threat of a lawsuit might have been enough to bring them to the table. Although, interestingly, as part of its deal with Warner Music or some time after, imeem received a $15 million investment from Warner, it was revealed today in Warner’s quarterly SEC filing. (Warner also invested $20 million in Lala).

Yet even imeem—which attracts 26 million unique visitors a month to its site, according to comScore, and claims 70 million to 100 million total uniques if you add up its widgets all over the Web—does not expect to make money based on ads related to streaming music alone. It is trying to create a bigger experience that includes videos and photos, and sells other forms of display advertising and sponsorships. MySpace Music, similarly, has its own economies of scale.

For everybody else, offering on-demand streams won’t become feasible until the licensing fees come down. Whether or not TotalMusic is the answer they are waiting for remains to be seen. But don’t count on it. Industries are rarely able to disrupt themselves.

Horror Stories Tend To End Badly

Another, more sinister strategy could be to simply continue to make life difficult for other music streaming services, and let TotalMusic come out with its own a cost-advantaged model. This would be aimed squarely at iTunes as well.

Although it is actively being developed with a rumored time horizon of three to six months, TotalMusic could end up being just a hedge. One source believes the project has yet to receive the final green light from the music-label bosses.

And even if TotalMusic does launch with a disruptive economic model, there are still the antitrust issues to deal with. Since there are only four major music labels, anything that smacks of price-fixing or collusion will be torn down by the Justice Department. The labels need to be very careful about this. (One story I heard: when MusicNet was forming itself among the record labels, it had to rent out an entire hotel floor with a different label in each room, and the lawyers had to go from room to room to seal the deal because the music companies couldn’t be in the same room together).

TotalMusic needs to get around the collusion issue somehow, while still offering a comprehensive catalog. The music industry is desperate to figure out how to shift from physical to digital distribution and it will just keep trying things until it is all spent out. But like any good horror movie, there will always be another sequel.

(Photo by darkpatator).

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Last.fm has a new look today that simplifies the navigation of the main site and makes finding music easier. Or at least, it would make finding music easier if the site wasn’t so buggy. (At least for me. I couldn’t even log in without getting an error. This may be due to fans rushing to check out the new features, or simply poor planning).

The new features a library of songs that you can now add to with a single click, instant recommendations based on the song you are listening to, and charts showing the popularity of each recommended song.

The site is now organized by music, videos, charts, and events. And for each song, there is increasingly the ability to play the entire song.

At the top of the page is a search bar, where you can enter a song or artist and hit play. That’s very Songza of them.

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What Last.fm is doing here is creating an alternative to the official royalty-collecting organization for musicians (i.e., SoundExchange). Last year, the royalty rates for music streamed over the Internet were raised, making it more difficult for ad-supported music startups to stay in business. Last.fm got bought by CBS, so it’s not in danger of going under. And for any song owned by a label or artist who participates in SoundExchange, Last.fm continues to pay the going Internet radio royalty rate. But it is beginning to bypass Sound Exchange by giving new, unsigned artists an alternative.

By cutting out the middlemen (labels, SoundExchange), Last.fm claims that artists that sign up for the program will receive more than twice the royalty rate they would see if the same song played on commercial radio. That’s because the money goes directly to the artist. (The total royalty, though, is less than what it pays SoundExchange). The royalty that Last.fm is paying unsigned artists is equivalent to 10 percent of the advertising revenues associated with their songs (update: in certain cases, see below). Musicians get a quarterly check, and can withdraw the money once it reaches $10.

We’re not talking a lot of money here, a few fractions of a penny per song. But as the online music industry grows, and along with it online advertising targeted at music listeners, these numbers in aggregate could start to become meaningful.

More importantly, it creates a direct economic link between Last.fm and up and coming artists that have not yet been discovered or signed by a label. The program is also appealing to tiny labels that don’t participate in SoundExchange because they are too small or it is too much of a hassle. (Anyone who already collects royalties through SoundExchange is not eligible for the program). Of the 170,000 signups so far, 30 percent are labels. And daily artist account creation in general is up 60 percent since the announcement in January.

Since it is Last.fm’s program, it controls the royalty rates it pays out, which it can adjust according to how much advertising revenues these songs generate. Now, does anyone actually want to listen to these songs and ill musicians shift over in massive numbers from the labels to this sort of direct arrangement? That is what will determine how disruptive this really is.

Update: Last.fm is offering tiered royalty rates. From the FAQs:

* If your track is played on our free radio service you will accrue a 10% of the Share of Last.fm’s Net Revenue (see the definition of “Share” and “Net Revenue” in the terms and conditions) from the free radio service.
* If your track is played on our personalised premium radio service, you will accrue the greater of either 10% of the Share of Last.fm’s Net Revenue from the personalised radio service, or US $0.0005 for each complete transmission on the personalised radio service.
* If your track is played on our free on-demand service, you will accrue 30% of the Share of Last.fm’s Net Revenue from the on-demand radio service.
* If your track is played on our premium on-demand service, you will accrue the greater of either 30% of the Share of Last.fm’s Net Revenue from the premium on-demand service, or US $0.005 for each complete transmission on the prepaid or subscription on-demand service.

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Even on the Web, radio is local. People still tune into their favorite college or hometown radio station from hundreds of miles away. Today’s relaunch of AOL Radio (in beta) embraces that aspect of radio in many ways. First and foremost is its partnership with CBS Radio, which is replacing XM Satellite as the provider of music for 150 radio stations on AOL Radio (AOL itself continues to program another 200). Along with providing much of the music people can listen to for free, CBS is also taking over selling the ads. CBS sales teams are already selling local radio ads, and now those teams will be selling ads on AOL Radio as well. CBS Radio’s ability to sell local ads was major reason why it won the partnership deal, especially with online music royalties increasing sharply. Lisa Namerow, the general manager of AOL Radio, tells me:

The royalties have gone up significantly. We had to reevaluate our business. We needed to partner in order to monetize radio better. We have grown advertising year-t0-year 100 percent, but with the increasing cost of royalties, we need to do a better job by leveraging local markets and advertisers. CBS has a string foothold in that local sales market, with over 140 sales teams.

That statement is an eye-opener for any music service hoping to make money from advertising. If AOL Radio, with three million unique listeners per month (according to Namerow), is having a hard time, how are smaller ad-supported music startups supposed to survive? And affiliate links are not going to cut it. Every song on AOL Radio has a link to iTunes or Amazon, yet Namerow cautions that “those commerce links are a very minor revenue source.”

So how does the new AOL Radio stack up versus other free music services on the Web? It is not bad for basic radio-listening, but is lacking any social features beyond the ability to share a station via email or AIM. It is definitely a vast improvement over the old AOL Radio, which didn’t really work that well in most browsers other than Internet Explorer. The new AOL Radio pops up in a separate Flash player that works on IE, Firefox, and Safari. There is plenty of music and sub-genres to choose from. Some stations: Rock Anthems, ’80s Alternative, Salsa, Rockabilly, All Stevie Wonder, Sports, and Opera. You can also search stations by city (that local thing again). The player highlights 10 preset stations, but you can manage an unlimited amount of presets and change them around.

AOl has also done a better job of deep linking into AOL Music. If you mouse over any album cover, links to album, artist, and song information appear. The service also keeps a history of every song you listen to so you can learn more at your leisure. There is also a pause and skipping ability. You can skip six songs per hour. And right now there are about four video ads per hour. I don’t mind the ads as long as there aren’t too many. But one suggestion: don’t subject people to an ad at the very beginning before they can even listen to one song.

Two more suggestions: 1) Make personal music recommendations based on my listening habits; 2) Integrate with CBS-owned Last.fm for more music choices and social recommendations.

Update 6/12/08: AOL Radio also designed an app for the new iPhone, which was one of the winners of the Apple Design Awards. The iPhone App notes your location and serves up the nearest CBS tradio stations, so it acts like a regular radio in that regard.

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Sonific

Gerd Leonhard, Co-Founder & CEO writes:

1) There are countless startups providing access to any and all music streams without any license whatsoever. However, when we approached the major record label decision makers in order to obtain licenses for some of the music in their catalogs we have routinely faced demands for very large cash advances and fixed per-stream minimum payments, pressure to give them ‘free’ company equity, and requirements of utterly bizarre usage restrictions. It seems that the industry’s major stakeholders still prefer this turf to remain unlicensed rather than to allow real-life, workable and market-based solutions to emerge by working with new companies such as Sonific. This is not the way forward.

2) We therefore had to realize that a company that wants to provide interactive streaming music services must either a) risk the constant complaints of their users, due to the lack of hit content b) proceed to use any and all music (this is routinely done by allowing users to upload their own MP3s) without the required licenses, and therefore be at the total mercy of the record labels at some point in time, and c) build a huge audience very quickly, based on having the content available – permission or not -, and then very quickly sell themselves to a large company that will take care of placating the labels while the money is plenty and the pockets are deep.

Unfortunately we don’t like any of these choices.

Sonific joins the TechCrunch Deadpool

thanks to Andrew Watson for the tip

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MyPlayList

MyPlayList uses the XSPF xml format to combine the images from the Flickr image sharing service, with music that is hosted across the internet, and similar to Seeqpod does not host or cache any of the music to avoid any copyright issues.

To use, users enter the name of any band or singer, and the system automatically compiles a Flickr – music combination, or suggests an existing playlist if one is already in the system. Registered users can create custom playlists and the site offers various embedable versions as well.

We covered GrooveShark’s new player yesterday, and MyPlayList works in the same space (along with Seeqpod). The visuals delivered by MyPlayList is a nice touch, particularly in full screen mode. Mark the site down as another free music provider that may challenge the likes of the play five times then buy Last.fm and the geo-retarded Pandora.

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For those unfamiliar with the company, Grooveshark allows users to upload and share their music collection with friends, but with a twist: every song uploaded can be purchased DRM-free with the uploader getting a cut of each sale (the rest goes to the record companies, and the service is 100% legal).

The new Grooveshark Lite player is not dissimilar to what Last.fm offers, but without the silly restrictions like being able only play the single five times. It also helps that Grooveshark has a huge selection of music; I don’t have comparable numbers but Grooveshark returned better results on a couple of more obscure searches, where as Last.fm failed or only had 30 seconds of the song. Unlike Seeqpod, another service that allows you to search for and play music uninhibited (and until now my music service of choice), the music on Grooveshark is of a more reliable quality as it’s vetted for sale, although unlike Seeqpod you cant illegally download the track, if that’s how you like getting your music.

The player offers music by artist, album and song title, and is free to use and doesn’t require registration, although registration is required to use Grooveshark services such as playlists and sharing.

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Users can select their favorite artist via the iLike website or on their social network applications. Or the service decides what you like based on your playing habits on iTunes (they have an iTunes plugin – if you listen to a song ten times, it thinks you like the artist).

The news feed for favorite artists can be viewed via the iTunes plugin, the website, the social network applications, or via a new iPhone app (just go to iLike on an iPhone and log in).

The company continues to dominate the Facebook music scene. Their U2 page on Facebook has 1.9 million fans. Compare that to just 168,000 friends on the MySpace U2 page, and 933,000 on Last.fm. The fact that a previously unreleased U2 song was first heard on iLike didn’t hurt those numbers, either.

In July 2007 iLike had 4.5 million users of its Facebook application. Today they have 14 million. But more than half of their new members today are coming from their iLike.com site and other social networks – OpenSocial gave them access to Bebo, Hi5 and soon MySpace. On their website alone they see 3.5 million worldwide monthly visitors, which isn’t bad considering most users interact with iLike via their iTunes plugin, or on Facebook and other social networks. Last.fm, which was acquired last year for $280 million, has 4.7 million.

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While you’d think the main advantage of a download is portability, most people won’t be able to take songs off their computer because they use iPods that can’t play the WMA files. See more details in our earlier coverage.

The songs come from some pretty unique deals with the big labels UMG, EMI, and BMI. In exchange, labels get a share of the ad revenue and affiliate song sales on the site and the comfort of control through the service’s DRM.

However, SpiralFrog was over a year in the making and only officially launched last September. A lot has changed since then. Music prices have dropped, DRM is dead (for paid tracks at least), and new legal/questionably legal sites have popped up to serve up free tunes. Competition includes HypeMachine, RadioBlogClub, Deezer, InTune.fm, Mog, Last.fm, Imeem, and a bunch of other sites. One key difference is that users on these sites stream music instead of downloading it, but that doesn’t seem to be slowing down their growth rates. Imeem, which follows an ad splitting model similar to SpiralFrog, did over 3 million monthly uniques around the time SpiralFrog launched last year. Lets not forget that Yahoo may be treading in this territory as well.

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Last.fm has signed deals with all four major record labels and most independents to stream their tracks in the U.S., UK, and Germany, with other countries coming soon. And for unsigned artists, instead of paying one-time fees per song that don’t make economic sense on the Web, Last.fm announced it will launch a new royalty program that will give artists ongoing royalties based on how many times each song is listened to. The details of how much Last.fm is paying per song were not revealed, but moving towards a pay-for-performance model is good for both online music services and the music industry.

Music needs to be sampled before most people want to buy it. The current Web industry norm of the 30-second clip just won’t cut it anymore. Perhaps Last.fm will help to set a new precedent here with limited full-track streams. It might be difficult for iTunes or Amazon to abandon the 30-second preview, however, because neither one has an ongoing revenue stream from advertising or subscriptions with which to pay an ongoing royalty. At least, not yet.

Also see MOG’s recent integration of full-length tracks from Rhapsody.

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Internet radio is already a very crowded space dominated by entrenched startups like Last.fm and Pandora. Smaller players and recent entrants such as SpiralFrog, Jango and Slacker are not increasing the breathing room. MeeMix wants its share of the pie, too, and is keeping its crosshairs focused on the U.S. market and its dominant revenue potential.

MeeMix’s public beta launch is marked by the addition of new features:

• Meeps: Comment-based conversations users can have regarding a song, album or artist.
• Station Home: Every MeeMix station now has a dedicated page allowing users to interact in its context and shape its playlist.
• Mee Feeds: This is basically MeeMix’s version of Facebook’s News Feed. The feed indicates songs favorited, stations rated, friends added, etc.
• Mee Journey: Users can see other members’ public log or “journey” of actions in MeeMix.
• Station Gift: Users can now send other members a station as a gift. The station is then the “property” of the recipient who can customize it without affecting the original station.
• Twitter Integration: Users can update their Twitter accounts with songs they’ve listened to, their favorite stations, etc.

MeeMix claims to have doubled its music catalog, but a search for my personal favorites ‘John Coltrane’ and ‘Miles Davis’ came-up empty. The same searches on Jango and Slacker both came-up positive.

I would like to have seen the addition of “genre” to the channel creation wizard which is still limited to artist and song. A widgetized player also would have been a welcome addition, especially the desktop kind.

In my original post, I hypothesized that licensing its engine could become MeeMix’s core business. Looks like this might not be far fetched as the company says they have been approached by a mobile operator for the purpose of powering a taste-based cellular music streaming service. The company has also shared with me some interesting offline deals on the horizon that should keep MeeMix’s potential on a positive note for 2008. We’ll post another update soon. In the meantime, let us know how you think MeeMix compares to the competition.

Update: MeeMix also sent out an email to some users today saying that they will be discontinuing the service in Israel for now due to licensing issues (Thanks Orli):

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