Online music services

If you're not using Grooveshark to try out music on-demand before buying it, you should be. I've found no other service that offers its combination of simplicity, features, and song selection--10 million and growing, according to the organization.

Today, Grooveshark announced a couple of extensions that should increase awareness. If you're on Facebook like most of the world seems to be, Grooveshark Share Song will let you share any song in Grooveshark's database in only three steps. There are other Facebook apps that offer similar features--iLike has been offering full-song playback on Facebook since last August… Read more

The recording industry is increasingly looking at live-music revenue as one way to make up for falling sales of recorded music, and as a consequence, concert-listing sites are sprouting like mushrooms. I've been a longtime customer of Jambase, and have been impressed with Bandloop's iPhone application enough to keep it installed long past my usual testing time, but Wednesday I added a new one to my bookmarks: Livekick.

Founded last year by Aviv Eyal, who helped found video-sharing site Grouper and sell it to Sony in 2006, and his partner Yarden Tadmor, Livekick's been in public beta … Read more

Music subscription service eMusic has always puzzled me. While it was the first site to offer DRM-free downloads, I never downloaded enough music to justify paying even the lowest subscription rate. The fact that it makes you navigate a long sign-up screen and enter a credit card number before showing you the song selection and other features of the site--even if you just want a free trial--drives me nuts. But despite my skepticism, the site has some big fans among voracious consumers of indie music.

Judging from the angry comments on the site's message board, some of those … Read more

Last week, producer Danger Mouse (best known as half of Gnarls Barkley) finally released his new album, a collaboration with noise-pop artist Sparklehorse called "The Long Dark Night of the Soul." The catch: because of an ongoing legal battle with record label EMI, the "album" isn't an album at all, but rather a blank CD-R with artwork created by movie producer David Lynch. If you're interested in supporting the cause, you can order the CD-R with a poster ($10) or full book of artwork ($50) here.

But how do you get the music? NPR … Read more

After a rocky start, online streaming service Imeem has raced to the head of the pack, thanks in large part to an effective search engine and the variety and large selection of music that users upload and share via the site.

It also helps that Imeem has deals with the major labels, so it's in no imminent danger of facing a Seeqpod-style shutdown. (However, Warner Music recently wrote down its investment in Imeem and rival Lala.)

Imeem launched an app for Android last year, but iPhone users were out of luck--until now.

I just downloaded the free Imeem app … Read more

A friend pointed me to Sourcetone Interactive Radio, which offers a sort of New Age twist on Pandora. Sourcetone's main gimmick is a colorful mood wheel--select your mood by clicking on the wheel, and the service will begin streaming appropriate music.

There's a lot of verbiage on the site about how Sourcetone is basing its selections on scientific research, including some conducted by a team at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, but so far there's only one published research paper on the site. The scientific angle is not particularly interesting to me--any music fan knows that … Read more

The rumor mill has been all atwitter about a link from Seeqpod's newly sparse home page to the search page for Microsoft's Web site. (Not to be confused with Live Search, Microsoft's Internet search engine.)

Seeqpod was a playable search engine for music files--essentially, its crawlers scoured Web sites looking for MP3 files, then it transformed those MP3s into streamable audio files. It offered its own user-facing Web page, as well as APIs for third-party sites, and was used as the back-end for Songerize (which no longer works) and Bandloop. After being hit by copyright infringement lawsuits … Read more

Talk about a race to the bottom: a week after I pondered which digital music distribution service was cheapest, WaTunes made the question irrelevant by offering digital distribution for free. That's right--for no money down and no cut of the royalties, WaTunes promises to distribute your digital downloads to iTunes, Amazon's MP3 store, Rhapsody, eMusic, and Rhapsody.

So how does the company expect to make money? The answer became clear this week when WaTunes launched its premium-priced service, WaTunes VIP. For $29.95 a year, artists and labels will get distribution to more stores (including the Zune Marketplace), … Read more

Updated, 8:15 p.m.: I heard back from Kluivers, and without going into details, he was concerned that Apple was taking a long time to approve Lyrics--he submitted it in January, but didn't get it approved until earlier this month. Consequently, the explicit filter was made very protective, to avoid any chance of offending the App Store gatekeepers. Jelle Krins, who co-developed the app, told me of an Easter Egg that lets you turn off the filter: just scroll all the way to the bottom of the "About" screen three times, and a filter on/off … Read more