Online music services

Grooveshark, my favorite free music streaming service, made an important announcement earlier today: the company has settled a lawsuit brought against it by EMI, one of the big four record labels, and has licensed EMI's catalog.

The company is still negotiating terms with other copyright holders, but to my knowledge EMI was the only one that had sued Grooveshark. So with this legal uncertainty out of the way, I can more confidently recommend Grooveshark's $3-a-month premium service, which offers early access to new features (the latest update includes better organization of search results and a slider to move … Read more

Microsoft is banking on multitouch support as one selling point for Windows 7, and HP--traditionally a loyal supporter of Microsoft's consumer strategy--is helping the push by releasing an update to its TouchScreen PCs.

HP has worked with several partners to create touch-enabled versions of various consumer entertainment apps, including Hulu, Netflix, and Pandora Internet Radio, but hard-core music fans will probably be most interested in the touch-enabled version of Rhapsody.

Among the cool features: you'll be able to write the name of an artist directly on the screen, and Rhapsody will take you to that artist's page … Read more

YouTube's a great source of music, including live shows and bootleg recordings that are hard to find anywhere else, and application developers are taking advantage of YouTube's relative openness to help users find and organize that music in new ways.

Last month, London-based start-up TubeRadio.fm launched a Web application that lets you search YouTube, organize the content into playlists, and share those playlists with friends via an e-mail link, Twitter post, or Facebook profile update. If you go through the free registration, you'll be able to save playlists as well. The concept is very similar to … Read more

Online music provider 7digital is bringing over-the-air music downloads to recent BlackBerry phones, such as the Storm, Bold, and Tour. The rumors have been circulating for several months now. On Tuesday the company is set to launch its application--developed by DevelopIQ--on the BlackBerry App World store, as well as on the 7digital Web site.

After installing the free app, BlackBerry users will be able to buy and download more than 6 million songs from all four major labels and all the big independents, all in unprotected MP3 format. The app adapts automatically to the speed of the user'… Read more

Free All Media, an Atlanta-based start-up, is the latest company to propose an ad-supported music downloading service. The company, which just announced its first seed round of funding Wednesday and expects to begin public beta testing by December, hopes to differentiate itself from flameouts like SpiralFrog with a unique advertising model that asks users to participate more directly in choosing the ads they'll see.

The company's CEO, Richard Nailling, explained how the company's Web site, Free All Music, will work. Users will select an MP3 they want to download and a sponsor they'd like to "… Read more

JamBase, one of the first and certainly most famous online concert-listing services, released its free iPhone app last October. It was a simple affair: you entered your ZIP code and the app returned a list of live music shows in your area over the next few days. If you had a list of favorite artists stored at the JamBase Web site, it would track those artists for you. Since then, competing apps like Bandloop and iConcertCal have upped the ante with more sophisticated interfaces and GPS targeting, which lets them find nearby shows without forcing you to enter any data. … Read more

When Dada.net, a music site run by a joint venture between major label Sony BMG and Italian mobile-entertainment company Dada, first launched, $9.99 got you 15 "tokens" that could be redeemed for ringtones or MP3s.

Unfortunately, it offered only songs from Sony BMG, as other download services with a much larger selection--notably Amazon.com and Apple's iTunes--began to offer DRM-free downloads for a buck or less.

The service now has a free tier that offers unlimited streaming, and unlike other free streaming services such as Grooveshark or Spotify, you also get three free MP3 downloads … Read more

If you were hoping for Apple to announce a subscription-based music service for the iPhone and the iPod Touch on Wednesday like I was, suppress your disappointment: early this morning, Apple approved Rhapsody for iPhone, and it's available in the iTunes Store.

It's the second such service Apple has approved, but the first, Spotify, is not available in the United States. (The Rhapsody application is not showing up in search results quite yet, but it is showing up within iTunes.)

Rhapsody was a pioneer in subscription-based music, and I'm a big fan of the service; in 2005, … Read more

A couple of weeks ago, my favorite free music-streaming site, Grooveshark, began rolling out version 2.0. It's currently available to paying VIP customers only, but I managed to finagle a pass and can report that it's a solid upgrade, although nothing groundbreaking.

Grooveshark's selection of free songs compares favorably with big commercial download stores like iTunes and Amazon MP3, and the improvements in version 2.0 are mostly geared toward helping you sift through search results more efficiently. For instance, now you can organize results alphabetically by song, artist, or album, and with one click you … Read more