As predicted, Google unveiled its own all-you-can-stream music subscription service to compete with Spotify, Rdio, Deezer and MOG. It's a crowded space with challenging economics, but if anybody is well-positioned to win this game, it's Google. 

Google Play Music All Access will offer on-demand access to millions of songs for $9.99 per month, which is the same as every other music subscription service's premium tier. Unlike the existing market leaders, though, All Access won't include a free tier of access, a fact originally reported by the New York Times.

All Access will include "millions" — Google didn't say how many — of songs within 22 genres, a Google-powered recommendation engine, Pandora-style radio stations, editor-curated playlists and the ability to blend your own library with Google's. 

At first glance, it's a pretty compelling offering. If you sign up before the end of June, it will cost $7.99 per month. And that's just the first competitive advantage Google has over the incumbents. 

Google Is Already A Streaming Music Giant

Spotify is virtually synonymous with streaming music, but it's worth noting that Google is already plays a massive role in the discovery and consumption of music. These days, when teenagers want to hear a new song, they don't turn on the radio or buy a CD. They go to YouTube.

That's because the Internet's biggest repository of videos also happens to host millions of songs, which are readily available to stream for free. It's the world's biggest accidental music streaming service. 

With All Access, Google is making a far more official foray into  the streaming music space, having recently signed licensing deals with all three major labels in the U.S. It's not linked directly to YouTube and its massive repository of free music, but rumor has it that the video giant could get its own paid subscriptions for on-demand music. In the meantime, All Access is another attractive gateway into Google's content ecosystem, which hosts a hell of a lot of music. 

Google's Biggest Advantage: Being Google

The only reason we're talking about this new music service is because of who made it. By virtue of being a Google product, All Access has the potential for massive cross-promotion throughout Google's array of popular Web services.

More important, All Access will be built directly into the world's most popular mobile operating system. That's where the magic of streaming music really lies: In our ability to take it with us. It's why Spotify, Rdio and MOG all wager that the simple ability to access all that music on our phone is enough to convince people to shell out $10 per month. Spotify has done a decent job of proving that thesis by amassing 6 million paid subscribers at an impressive 25% conversion rate. 

Of course, Spotify, like Rdio and the rest of its competitors, has to compete for users' attention via app store rankings, social integrations and plain old marketing. All Access, by contrast will be much more front-and-center within the Android ecosystem. That's huge.

Who Needs A Business Model? 

Another advantage of being a Google product is that All Access won't have quite as much pressure to make money. Spotify and Rdio will ultimately need to find a way to profitability (or get acquired by a giant), something that isn't easy under the current economics of the streaming music business.

A company like Spotify will have to find a way to minimize its enormous music licensing costs, which are easily its biggest expense. Google's entrance into this space might make that harder, since the company can afford to pay out huge sums without investors holding the profitability gun to its head. 

Spotify and Rdio's other biggest challenge is converting paid subscribers. The streaming model, the theory goes, will work much better when there are many millions of people paying for services like this.

So far, Spotify has done the best job of converting those free listeners to paying subscribers. But with a competitively price competing service now shipping on hundreds of millions of handsets, the incumbents may have to get much more creative about courting subscribers. 

In a recent interview on WYNC's On the Media, technology journalist Tim Carmody suggested that this might be how the streaming music business will work:

Probably the most likely thing that will happen is that someone, whether it's an Apple or a Google or an Amazon or a Sony, comes along and essentially agrees that we’re gonna run music at a loss and we’re going to support it with these other businesses. How do you make money on the music business? Don't make money on the music business. That's the answer to that question.

That may well turn out to be true, but it's probably not quite what Spotify, Rdio and their ilk had in mind. 

All Access: Merge Your Library With Google's 

Last week, I wrote that as good as Spotify and Rdio both are, neither is perfect. Spotify's user experience could be better, while Rdio doesn't let its users upload or merge their own music. What I described as the ultimate streaming service would need to nail both design and music selection, at the very least. From the Google I/O stage, the All Access interface certainly looked nice, although I have yet to get my hands on it to try it out.  

The second part of that equation — the ability merge one's own library with a cloud-based repository of music - appears to be a feature that All Access subscribers will indeed enjoy. By launching alongside the Google Music cyberlocker first unveiled in 2011, All Access effectively allows users to blur the line between Google's library of licensed music and their own collection of tunes. 

One detail that was glossed over at Google I/O was exactly how wide of a selection All Access users will have. Rdio and Spotify both have about 20 million tracks in their libraries, which includes not just the major labels, but a partnership with indie label rights body Merlin and countless smaller labels. How many tracks does All Access have? The Google Music integration makes that question a little less crucial, but more casual listeners without hard drives full of MP3s will want to know when they're eyeing up $10 music services. 

Related Stories

• Why Google's Rumored Spotify-Killer Makes Perfect Sense
• 6 Million People Pay For Spotify - Is That Good Enough? 
• Next Round In The Google-Amazon Death Match: Streaming Music
• The Ultimate Streaming Music Service: Just Merge Rdio and Spotify

Images by Nick Statt for ReadWrite

The Verge, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are all reporting that Google will launch a streaming-music service at its Google I/O developers conference on Wednesday. 

While Google hasn't commented, according to the reports Google has already struck licensing deals with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment - it already has a deal with Warner Music Group. 

No word on pricing yet, but the Times said that there would be no "free" tier of service. The new service is expected to be accessed via the Google Play store for Android devices, but Google is also said to be working on a streaming-music product for its YouTube division. 

Details are expected to be announced at the Google I/O keynote on Wednesday. 

The unofficial leaders of the streaming-music market, Rdio and Spotify, are both awfully good services. But neither is close to perfect, which led me to wonder just how you'd create the ultimate online music service.

The answer isn't hard: Just merge Spotify and Rdio. Alternatively, the two sites should just copiously steal features from one another. Or someone could found a new service that blends the best of both. Whatever. I want the best of both, and I want it now.

Allow me to explain. Almost two years ago, when Spotify finally launched in the U.S., I signed up. Within 48 hours, I had canceled my Rdio subscription and agreed to pay Spotify $10 per month to access its service on my phone, ad-free. 

(See Also: How To Choose The Right Music Subscription Service)

But for the last few weeks, I've had the luxury of using a premium Rdio demo account, and I've gotta say: It's sometimes tempting to switch back. As impressive as Spotify is, Rdio is much, much better designed. On the other hand, Spotify has a few excellent features Rdio lacks. (Both sites offer approximately the same amount of music, which is often available via high-quality 320 kbps streams.)

Frankly, I'm torn. But I'd rather not have to choose at all. I suspect many other music fans — whether they know it or not — feel the same way.

What Rdio Gets Right: Design and Music Management

When it comes to design, Rdio wins, hands down. Spotify's apps aren't terrible, but Rdio sports what feels like a cleaner, more minimalist design. The blue and white color scheme is more refreshing and it feels like the company put some thought into typography. 

More importantly, Rdio organizes your music much, much better than Spotify does. It has long blown my mind that Spotify refuses to display your music library in a way that's at all analogous to how you'd organize music in real life. There's no collection. There is no "Albums" tab.  It's just playlists, starred tracks and search. If I find a new album I want to routinely listen to, I have to star the whole thing or add it as a playlist. It's bizarre. 

By contrast, Rdio lets me easily add albums to what is intuitively labeled my "Collection," which is organized by artist. To anybody who's ever used an iPod, scrolling through a list of artists is an familiar, almost expected interface. Spotify users, for whatever reason, don't have this simple luxury. 

Rdio's built-in music discovery is also superior. The "Heavy Rotation" tab recommends music to me based on what I listen to and who I follow on Rdio. Depending on those two details (especially who one chooses to follow), the suggestions can actually be pretty spot-on. I don't know what powers the "Recommended Albums" carousel in Spotify's "What's New" tab, but the fact that it thinks I'd enjoy Kelly Clarkson's new album suggests it's not paying very much attention.

What Spotify Gets Right: Add-On Apps & Infinite Music

What Spotify lacks in native recommendation features it makes up for via third party add-ons available through its built-in app platform. Spotify might not be aware of what I actually like, but Last.fm is — and its Spotify app is a mere click away. If I want music to match my mood, there's MoodAgent, which builds playlists based on things like tempo and the emotional qualities of a given song. 

For less robotic, more human-curated recommendations, there are apps like Hype Machine and Shuffler.fm, both of which corral the best new stuff from influential music blogs, broken down by genre. Then there are good, old-fashioned hand-picked recommendations from individual critics via the Rolling Stone, Guardian, Pitchfork or NME apps. 

Spotify's third party app platform is by far its most promising feature, aside from the music itself. Realizing that it can't build the end-all, be-all music service for every listener, Spotify has smartly opened up its platform to developers, who can use HTML5 and related Web technologies to build applications that plug into Spotify's vast music library.

These add-ons have yet to find their way into Spotify's mobile apps, but they continue to push the desktop experience forward in a way that makes it hard to break the Spotify habit. 

And Another Spotify Win: Imports

The other chief advantage Spotify offers — and that Rdio and others should just steal outright — is the ability to import your own MP3 collection into the service. This is a huge perk.

No matter how many licensing deals these companies strike, their music libraries are never going to include everything. There will always be big-name holdouts like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, not to mention a score of smaller, independent artists who either haven't done the leg work to get their music onto streaming services or simply don't want to. 

Allowing users to effectively merge their personal music collections with Spotify's music library makes for an experience that feels more comprehensive and focused. As more of our music consumption moves online, the listening experience inevitably becomes fractured across sites and apps. We might not be able to avoid this entirely, but Spotify's integrated approach makes it easier to at least minimize the problem.  

There are, as always, technical limitations to implementing this feature. Since Spotify primarily exists as a desktop app, it can easily scan your hard drive for music tracks and index them, iTunes-style. The alternative would be to allow users to upload their tracks directly to the service, a la Google Music and the Amazon Cloud Player.

Waiting for thousands of songs to upload doesn't present the most compelling user experience, but it is one possible technical solution. For the most part, Spotify's local indexing approach works pretty well. 

Rdio has desktop apps, but they're more or less a clone of its Web interface without much extra functionality tacked on. If Rdio were to include the ability to import and manage music, I'd be that much closer to ditching Spotify. The desktop app is also a crucial component to syncing local MP3s to users' phones and tablets, another feature unique to Spotify in the U.S. (Deezer does this, too). 

Toward The Ultimate Streaming Service

Music is a pretty personal thing. If these companies want us to shift our listening habits into their respective clouds, they need to be particularly sensitive to what works for users. I've presented one framework here. Perhaps you have your own ideas, which I encourage you to leave in the comments. A flawlessly-designed, super-comprehensive, extensible and flexible music subscription service would be well worth the money. 

It's a little frustrating, because Spotify and Rdio collectively have most of the pieces required to build the ultimate streaming service. It's almost as if the two could merge and we'd be set. It'd be unlikely, but if this new hybrid music dream service could steal a page from Tomahawk's playbook and integrate additional music sources like SoundCloud and YouTube, it'd be even better. 

Whether or not Rdio, Spotify or any of its current direct competitors deliver this mythical dream service, somebody will. The music subscription space is going to heat up substantially this year, as Google and Amazon are both rumored to be entering this market. Meanwhile, MOG will be reborn as Daisy and Deezer is expected to launch in the U.S. 

We already have a few very awesome, yet imperfect music subscription services. As the space gets more crowded, there exists a real opportunity to launch something truly, thoroughly compelling. Who will it be? 

Twitter put months of speculation to rest this morning when it launched its own music-focused service for iOS and the Web. Twitter #Music is a standalone app for discovering, following and listening to artists that draws its intelligence from Twitter's own user activity data. At first glance, it's a win for artists, but the value it adds for fans remains to be seen. 

First and foremost, Twitter #Music is undoubtedly good for Twitter. The app takes something that is hugely popular among consumers — music — and intimately ties it to its own service. It also integrates with Spotify and Rdio so tracks can be streamed in their entirety from within Twitter #Music. That feature, the company is betting, will keep listeners glued to the app, where much of what they do is tied to Twitter's core functionality: tweeting songs and following artists. 

Putting Artists Front and Center 

For artists, the potential advantages here are huge. At every turn, Twitter #Music encourages you to follow bands and musicians, which of course can lead to longterm engagement and even sales. Whether they're already trending or Twitter thinks you might like them (based on your existing follows), this app puts artists and their Twitter handles front-and-center, never missing an opportunity to stick a "follow" button in front of the user. 

Twitter #Music also lets users buy tracks directly from iTunes, which is a major plus for artists who still aren't making all that much money from those Spotify and Rdio streams. 

If widely adopted, Twitter #Music could become a potent source of exposure for up-and-coming musicians. And while there a million services that promise to enable music discovery, seldom do they directly make money for artists. 

We Are Hunted, R.I.P.

Twitter #Music is built on top of the guts of We Are Hunted, a service that ranked the popularity of online music so effectively that some people wondered whether it could replace Billboard. Twitter gobbled it up to build this, and you can tell. Twitter #Music's design is strongly reminiscent of We Are Hunted's, even if Twitter appear to have gutted much of the service's original functionality. 

We Are Hunted's flagship feature was its Emerging Music chart, which analyzed a wide range of data signals to determine what music was most popular online. Twitter #Music appears to replace that more complex algorithm with something that more heavily favors Twitter's own data. That's not surprising, but it makes for a less thorough analysis and for music fans, a less useful experience. 

In the process of launching this new product, Twitter also appears to have gutted some of We Are Hunted's core recommendation technology in favor of a more Twitter-centric approach. Whereas We Are Hunted used a complex array of data to associate artist to one another, Twitter #Music appears to be relying heavily (if not exclusively) on data about the relationship between artists on the service, such as who follows who.  When I look at The Flaming Lips on Twitter's new service, it recommends Taylor Swift. Really? 

Do We Need This? 

With We Are Hunted effectively neutered and Twitter entering the digital music space with a big splash, the big question remains: How useful is this new app for users? 

It depends. Let's consider Twitter #Music's key selling points: You can discover music that's popular on Twitter, get new music recommendations and listen to it all within the app. Those are all useful things, although to varying degrees. 

The music-listening part is only really worthwhile to those of us who pay for premium Spotify or Rdio accounts. Otherwise, we're left with a mere iTunes snippet and the option to buy the whole track. And if you do have Rdio or Spotify, you're going to continue to use those services' apps for the majority of your listening. Listening to music isn't the main draw of Twitter #Music, just a very nice touch. 

The most compelling aspect of the app is Twitter's data about artists, songs and the social relationships between them. If you can get over the fact that We Are Hunted pulled in much more data and was thus much more interesting, this is useful, especially if you happen to be active on Twitter.

Where Twitter-Based Music Discovery Fails

But just being a voracious tweeter isn't enough. As many users have pointed out, the "Me" and "Suggested" tabs of the app are of limited value if you don't follow a lot of musicians on Twitter. Indeed, using Twitter follows as a barometer for one's music taste is a curious choice. Sometimes musicians have worthwhile Twitter accounts, sometimes not.

Either way, most people probably don't follow all the artists they like. Unlike the Facebook "like", the Twitter "follow" is not an explicit statement saying "I enjoy listening to this band." Instead, it's saying, "I think this band, whose music I happen to enjoy, might have interesting things to say, so I'm listening."

Of course, if you're not following a lot of artists, that's something Twitter #Music is explicitly designed to change. But out of the box, this is a real handicap for some users.

It's also worth mentioning that at launch, Twitter #Music only appears to acknowledge verified artist accounts, at least as far as the "Me" tab is concerned. When I click on my own profile, it shows eight bands that I follow. There are certainly more artists that I follow, but they're less well-known and thus have no official designation from Twitter. As a result, they are presumably not factored into my recommendations. 

Personally, I'm not all that interested in what music is generally popular on Twitter. You mean to tell me that lots of people are listening to Psy, P!nk and Maroon 5? No kidding! The "Emerging" tab is a bit more interesting, as this is where a hidden gem or two is bound to surface. 

The other tabs are more personalized, and thus likely to be more relevant to users. It's not clear exactly what kind of data is fueling he "Suggested" tab, but it does a reasonably decent job of recommending artists. Many of its suggestions are spot-on. Some are questionable. It's not terrible, but it could be better. I've tested a lot of services that utilize music recommendation engines.

For my money, algorithms like the ones behind Pandora, Last.fm and the Echo Nest do a much better job of making music suggestions than this app does. Twitter #Music is also competing against beloved and impressive music recommendation apps like Shuffler.fm and Hype Machine. 

On the whole, Twitter #Music is a decent app. If you like music enough to subscribe to a streaming service and are interested in finding new music, this is a pretty good, social-fueled way to do it. If your tastes are more particular and nuanced, tools with more complex algorithms and granular data points are likely to be more useful to you. Either way, it's worth taking it for a spin.

Is Twitter moving on to bigger and better things? Maybe louder, more musical ventures? That's what it sounds like as the seven-year-old San Francisco micro blogging site confirmed Thursday that sometime last year it had acquired We Are Hunted, a music discovery service. 

Welcome to Twitter! “@wearehunted: We want to share some news with you. We Are Hunted has joined Twitter. wearehunted.com”

— Twitter Comms (@twittercomms) April 11, 2013

Social music is a huge space,  with social music apps bringing like-minded listeners together and exposing them to new music. This process is known as music discovery. Spotify is one such discovery service, with a freemium streaming music library valued in the $3 billion range. Rhapsody and Pandora are other major players in streaming music and discovery.

In the pure discovery realm, Shazam has become the go-to app to find out just what song is playing whenever you hear a track for which you just have to know the title. There's countless others, with the mobile market becoming a fast-evolving sector for engagement between musicians, brands and listeners. It's a new way to gain loyalty from fans and online exposure for artists. 

Twitter's purchase, We Are Hunted, tracks popular songs on social media, which means Twitter is likely prepping its own music app. This morning All Things D wrote that Twitter Music could launch as early as today, or by this weekend - timed to match the opening of the Coachella music festival. The new service would recommend users music based on who they follow on Twitter.

Ramping up that likely possibility, a landing page aptly titled Music.Twitter.com has gone live to help facilitate the process and get users to sign in to authorize the new music-trending app.

It's still early morning, but expect Twitter to reveal its sing-songy plan later today, or this weekend at the latest. Now it looks like Twitter is stepping into the same arena. Are your ears burning yet? 

Image courtesy of Twitter.

Well, that didn't take long. Two months after its launch, the social video-sharing app Vine has received its first copyright takedown notices. The complaints were sent by NPG, the record label owned by Prince, whose music appeared in a few six-second videos on Vine. 

This is absurd. Uploading an entire Prince album to YouTube is one thing. But six disjointed seconds in smartphone camera quality? Something tells me four clips of that nature aren't going to eat into Prince's album sales. 

Prince, who three years ago declared the Internet to be "completely over," is known as a stalwart, sometimes overzealous defender of his intellectual property online. In fact, it was the use of a Prince song in a YouTube video that led to Lenz v. Universal, an often-cited 2008 court decision dealing with copyright and fair use.

In that case, the court ruled in favor of Stephanie Lenz, whose video of her baby dancing to Prince's song "Let's Go Crazy" was the target of a copyright infringement claim by Universal Music. Lenz argued that video constituted fair use and the court agreed that Universal didn't adequately weigh the fair use principle when issuing takedown notices, something it has a reputation for doing rather aggressively. 

Let's (Not) Go Crazy 

Whether or not six seconds of a Prince song in a user-generated video constitutes fair use is something for a court to decide. If it's not, though — if uploading a crappy, six-second video that contains someone's song turns out to be illegal — we have to ask ourselves some pretty fundamental questions about copyright and what it's for. 

Of course, that there's a need to rethink copyright in the 21st century is hardly breaking news. The original framework doesn't work that well for anybody, as has been evident for at least a decade. Last month, the U.S. Copyright Office itself called for a dramatic overhaul of copyright law, with Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante saying "it is time for a new law." 

Whatever replaces the current copyright framework will need to balance the rights and financial interests of creators with the fact that we have a completely new way of creating and sharing culture and media than we did a few decades ago. That will mean changes in how creative works are distributed and monetized, sure, but it also opens up a whole universe of new cultural possibilities, which shouldn't be squashed without a very good justification.

To say that things have changed since Prince recorded "Let's Go Crazy" in 1984 is an understatement. When you consider how dramatically (and mostly for the better) the Internet has changed how we live, work and yes, create and experience culture, the idea of waging an all-out war against tiny pieces of content like this seems, well, kind of crazy. 

For an industry that has such a hard time making money, digital music sure is hot right now. Everybody wants in. Amazon is now the latest tech giant rumored to be eyeing a slice of this increasingly tempting pie, according to a report on The Verge. But why? 

News that Amazon is in negotiations with music labels comes mere weeks after Google was revealed to be having similar discussions of its own. The search giant already has a huge presence in digital music thanks to YouTube, but seeks to solidify its role by launching a Spotify-style subscription service on top of its existing music products.  Like Google, Amazon already has content relationships and infrastructure in place that will simplify the process of entering what is typically a very challenging and cost-prohibitive marketplace.

It will still be an expensive endeavor, given the high cost of licensing music from the major labels, but companies like Google and Amazon are well-positioned to negotiate those dollar figures down and, if necessary, operate at a loss without discernibly denting their bottom line. 

Fine-tuning the financial details is what these negotiations are all about. And it's important to note that they are just that: negotiations. They could wind up hitting a roadblock, as has allegedly happened with Apple in its rumored quest to launch a Pandora competitor. However it pans out, it's now known that Google and Amazon are at least attempting to enter the streaming music space. If all goes according to both companies' plans, they'll soon be in direct competition for digital music subscribers.  

Google vs. Amazon: From Frenemies To Rivals

The rivalry between Google and Amazon is expected to heat up this year, and this would just be the latest source of competition between the two companies.  While they started as two very different, seemingly unrelated businesses, the companies have both evolved into new territories, occasionally bumping into each other in the process. Today, both companies sell digital content like ebooks and music, as well as the hardware required to read and view that content. Like Google's arch nemesis Apple, Amazon is now rumored to be building its own mapping service as well. 

Digital music is not an easy business to be in. Six million people are now paying for Spotify,  with 18 million more listening for free on the desktop. That's stellar growth in just under two years and an impressive conversion rate for any freemium business. Still, Spotify isn't touting massive profits, and nor are any of its competitors.

That's because they're all paying a massive chunk of their revenues to rights holders (record labels, mostly) and struggling to find ways to drive those costs down. Pandora's legislative efforts haven't met with much success on that front.

Why Streaming Music? 

A company like Amazon might be able to use its might to negotiate better licensing deals. Even if it fails to do so, running an unprofitable streaming service (or bundling music with Prime) could rope enough additional people into Amazon's ecosystem to make the effort worthwhile. 

Or, if nothing else, it could prevent Google from getting a leg up on Amazon in the broader digital music space, in which both companies are already present. In an excellent post, The Verge's Tim Carmody points out that "few of these larger tech companies embracing streaming music seem to be doing so as an affirmative strategy, because they ultimately believe streaming music will help sell their other devices or services. Instead, they're primarily worried that if they don't offer a streaming music service, they'll be seen as deficient in some way."

It's also worth keeping in mind the mobile aspect. Google's stake in mobile is obvious, and Amazon's is expected to get even more serious if, as expected, the company eventually unveils a smartphone of its own.  As Wired's Mat Honan wisely points out:

Subscription and streaming only took off once 3G made it possible for you to carry your music with you everywhere. Pandora, Spotify, and Rdio have proved there’s an attractive market. But imagine what happens when a streaming-music app ships with your phone, with every phone, and all you have to do is turn it on, using an account you’ve already set up for billing. Or even worse (if you are an existing streaming-music provider) if it’s a free, advertising-supported service.

All this action in the streaming music space leaves little doubt that this model will be a crucial component of how we consume music in the future. It's the "music like water" model that music futurists once dreamed about. Exactly how it takes shape will depend on economic questions: how the business model evolves, how artists get paid, which companies will dominate distribution.

This year was already poised to be an interesting one in digital music with the impending U.S. launch of Deezer, the arrival of Daisy and ongoing rumors about Apple's plans to build a Pandora competitor. Now Google and Amazon are also both gunning for Spotify.

Google is reportedly working on a music subscription service to compete with the likes of Spotify, MOG and Rdio. It might seem crazy to jump into a crowded market whose basic business model is already questionable – but for Google it makes perfect sense. 

The company is already a huge, albeit unofficial, player in streaming music. YouTube is now a top destination for listening to songs and albums, not to mention the trove of remixes and parodies that get uploaded everyday. Today, when teenagers want to hear a new song, they don't turn on the radio or buy a CD. They go to YouTube. 

There's good reason for that. First off, it's free. It also has an enormous amount of music. I've had premium subscriptions to Rdio, Rhapsody and (currently) Spotify. As extensive as those services' libraries are, there's lots of music they don't have. Whenever I can't find something on Spotify, I check YouTube and SoundCloud. It's usually there. Want to stream the Beatles from your phone? Their songs are all over YouTube, not Spotify. 

YouTube: The World's Biggest Accidental Music Service

If there was any question about the critical role YouTube plays in music discovery, it was answered last week when Billboard announced it will factor YouTube listens into the formula behind its Hot 100 singles chart. In a post-"Call Me Maybe" world, it's impossible to accurately analyze the popularity of a song without taking YouTube plays into consideration.     

Of course, the music-streaming use case is not quite what YouTube was designed for. It's a video site. It may work as a one-song-at-a-time music search engine to fill Spotify's gaps, but it's pretty poorly organized compared to existing music services. That's why Google Music is a more logical and likely home for this rumored streaming service, presumably with some cross-promotion via YouTube.

The fact that people turn to YouTube for music is something that evolved organically thanks to its user-generated nature and Google's willingness to pay licensing fees to keep the music playing. There's still plenty of copyright infringement going on, but Google is getting more aggressive about dealing with that. The RIAA may still complain, but more and more, Google is catering to copyright owners. Initiatives like this are exactly why the Plex is so eager to please the content industry.

Thanks to YouTube and the Google Music MP3 store, the company already has relationships in place with labels, songwriters and other copyright owners. But those existing partnerships aren't enough. The subscription-based streaming model is fundamentally different and requires unique, rather costly licensing deals.

Music Streaming Is About To Get Even More Crowded

If you think the music streaming space is crowded now, just wait. Deezer, a hugely popular streaming service now available in 182 countries, is in talks to launch in the U.S. sometime this year.  This summer, another much-hyped streaming service will go live, this time from Beats Audio, which acquired MOG last year.  Then there's the ongoing rumor about Apple taking aim at Pandora with an iTunes-based Internet radio product of its own.  

Exactly what Google's streaming service will look like is anybody's guess. That will depend in large part on what kind of content deals it can manage to negotiate. But the company is in a very good position to enter this space. After all, Google already has millions of streaming music users. It just needs to polish (and almost certainly rebrand) the experience and make it official with the major labels. 

Lead photo by Alexandre Normand

A museum under construction is an awesome scene. It's like peeking backstage before the premiere of Broadway play, seeing the outer experience taking shape.

The Exploratorium - a unique museum of science, art and human perception - is still two months away from its grand reopening. The lower floor is strewn with half-built exhibits and criss-crossed with caution tape. The upstairs is a buzzing office full of people planning for the big day and beyond. This vast new space on Pier 15 in San Francisco opens to the public on April 17.

But on Monday the museum released Sound Uncovered, its second free iPad app, which the creators showed me during a visit to the unfinished museum. As I explored the app's exhibits, the tablet disappeared in my hands. When you launch this app, you're in the museum, no matter where you are.

Everywhere Is A Laboratory

The design of physical Exploratoreum starts with the goal of creating an experience and builds up from there. An iPad is just as good as a room in the museum if it's the right place to focus the experience of an exhibit. "What makes the Exploratorium a unique place is that it's the combination of a museum, a laboratory, and a developmental studio," says Rob Semper, executive associate director of the museum.

Semper is a physicist whose tenure at the Exploratorium goes back to designing some of its original exhibits with founder Frank Oppenheimer (also a physicist, who worked on the Manhattan Project with his older brother Robert Oppenheimer). Semper took a little time off from the Exploratorium to run the collaboration between Apple and Lucasfilm. Now he's back creating museum exhibits again, both in San Francisco and at partner museums around the world.

Extending its exhibit design to the iPad is a natural move for the Exploratorium. This museum came online in 1993, making its website among the first 600 in the world. The Exploratorium is like a laboratory for turning things into laboratories. In the same way it is turning its new U-shaped port building and the walkways and docks outside into a delightful maze of science experiments, it can turn flat, pixellated spaces into exhibits as well. And on the iPad, these experiments come to life, gaining the inputs of touch, movement, light and sound.

It's All About Perception

The two Exploratorium iPad apps so far are both "buffet-style" collections of short, multi-sensory exhibits. You can select from a table of contents or swipe through like a magazine. The first was Color Uncovered, which uses properties of the tablet's display to demonstrate properties of light. The new app, Sound Uncovered, uses both the speakers and microphones, as well as text and video explanations, to show off some of the surprisingly bizarre properties of sound.

"Perception is a strong subject for us," says Sound Uncovered project director Jean Cheng. Designing a museum exhibit at the level of user experience comes right down to perception. "This app is about sound, but it's really about you." By causing you to notice weird things about your perception that you usually take for granted, the Exploratorium forces you to think more critically about your environment, and it does so purely through fun.

I'm not going to spoil the illusions for you. If you have access to an iPad, you should download Sound Uncovered for free and try it yourself. Right now.

But I will tell you about my favorites:

I love "Find the Highest Note," which presents a circular organ and demonstrates the mind-bending auditory Möbius strip known as the Shepard scale. As you move upward and downward in base pitch, the eerie Shepard tone's partials replace each other at the top and bottom range of hearing. As a result, even though you're moving up or down in pitch, it ultimately never sounds like it's getting higher or lower. It's the auditory version of the barber-pole illusion, where the corkscrewing shape seems to move upward or downward forever while remaining in the same place.

What's also cool about this exhibit in the app is that it doubles as a musical instrument.

Another great social exhibit is the "How Old Are Your Ears?" test, which lets you slide down from an inaudibly high frequency into the ranges that humans naturally lose the ability to hear over time. The younger people in the room will start to hear an ear-splitting whine, but the elders won't hear a thing until lower down.

As we ran through the illusions at the museum, the construction crews periodically tested the fire alarm in the building, which pierced through our conversation. It was uncomfortable for a second, disrupting this carefully arranged social situation, but then we realized the building itself was demonstrating the very kinds of sensory and cognitive tricks we were playing with on the iPad.

Simply Social

The Exploratorium is not afraid to take risks with its apps. One exercise in Color Uncovered asks the user — with plenty of caution — to put a drop of water on the screen, which creates a magnifying bubble in which one can clearly see how pixels work. The team laughs about some of the App Store reviews they got from people who didn't handle that part carefully.

But the apps are simple and magazine-like, going out of their way not to overwhelm people less used to figuring out how iPad apps work. "We don't want to further mystify people with this tech," director of online engagement Lowell Robinson says. "Frank [Oppenheimer]'s dream was to demystify people about how the world works." Accordingly, these apps are not about deep-down, immersive virtual experiences. "We're trying to give you physical ways to test," says Cheng. The apps ask you to try things, try them on others, and pass the tablet around.

The Exploratorium apps are social, but not in the Facebook way. "Social in the old-fashioned sense where you're sitting next to somebody," Robinson says. We had a good laugh about that.

Sound Uncovered for iPad is available for free on the iTunes App Store.

Photos by Amy Widdowson.

2012 was a very good year for SoundCloud. The social music and audio-hosting platform saw a massive uptick in user activity, according to data released by music analytics firm Next Big Sound. 

The State of Online Music report contains some big, but not altogether unexpected numbers: More people are listening to music online and artists saw more activity on Twitter and Facebook than they did in 2011. Across a variety of online sources, the Play button was clicked more than 93 billion times, a 45% increase over 2011. Pretty impressive, to be sure, but not a total shocker. 

Triple Play

Perhaps the most striking chart contained in Next Big Sound's interactive report is the one showing how SoundCloud's user activity tripling over the course of 2012. The service was already enjoying healthy year-over-year growth throughout 2012. Then in September, it saw a massive jump in monthly plays per artist, and the trend line kept shooting north until the end of December. Of the music services tracked by Next Big Sound, it was far and away the fastest growing. 

What gives?

The service's growth was probably aided by a major website overhaul, which put more focus on user engagement with continuous track-by-track playback and added more social functionality, such as a retweet-style sharing button designed to help audio content spread across the service. 

SoundCloud's redesign may have been the company's biggest project of 2012, but it didn't eat up all of the team's time. They also managed to push out major updates to most of their mobile apps, forge a ton of new content partnerships and convert the service's default player to HTML5.

Fueled by a few hefty rounds of funding, these initiatives no doubt helped SoundCloud better position itself as a sort of "YouTube for audio." The goal, in the company's own marketing speak, is to "unmute the Web." 

YouTube Still Rules

YouTube itself was another enormous source of online music last year. It didn't see  spikes as dramatic as SoundCloud's, but for most of the year, the video behemoth delivered more than 20,000 average monthly views per artist, in some months quadrupling what artists saw the previous year. 

Indeed, YouTube remains a much bigger source of music than SoundCloud, but the growth of the Berlin-based startup  is remarkable enough to make it serious contender in the online music space. 

Don't call it a Spotify killer either. For whatever reason, Next Big Sound's report doesn't include data from the dominant subscription service, but regardless of what the numbers say, the two companies' models are very different.

The Independent Alternative

For one, SoundCloud doesn't have to contend with the gargantuan music licensing costs that subscription services like Rdio and Spotify do. Whereas those services boast content deals with all the major labels and big indies, SoundCloud has a much larger selection of unsigned, under-the-radar musicians, remix artists and DJs. Indeed, about two-thirds of SoundCloud's fan activity in 2012 was centered around independent and unsigned artists.

What will ultimately become of SoundCloud? It's tempting to envision it getting gobbled up some Web giant like Google, but for now it's focused on building out a massive trove of content, weaving it all into the Web and making it easier to share. The "YouTube for audio" analogy looks increasingly apt, especially if its metrics continue to shoot skyward. 

Myspace may have picked a bad day to open up its redesigned site to the public. While the dethroned social networking giant quietly opened its gates Tuesday morning, everybody in the tech world was busy preparing, and then dissecting, Facebook's announcement of Graph Search.

But let's not bury Myspace just yet. Called the New Myspace, the redesign, which entered beta last July, is not aimed at yanking anyone away from Facebook or Google+. Its goal, under the wing of pop singer/actor/Sean Parker-playing co-owner Justin Timberlake, is to do what Myspace did best in the waning days of the site's mid-2000s popularity: give musicians, both professional and aspiring, a better way to interact with fans and help fans discover new music.

In some ways, though that means Myspace is now competing with music streaming services like Pandora and Spotify, and that's not going to be easy, even with Timberlake's music industry clout.

Fresh Look, But No Groundbreaking Advances

Anyone who was interested last September got a look at the new Myspace when Timberlake tweeted a vimeo link to a preview of the redesign. Not much has changed since then.

To recap, the site jettisoned the vertical flow used by most other social networks, opting instead for a horizontal stream that naturally lays out status updates, shared songs and photos. All interactions also hinge on Myspace's version of Facebook's "Like" and Google's "+1," called Connect. Symbolized by a Venn diagram that unites when you decide to subscribe to a musician or find a friend, the Connect option is logical and looks nice, but it's nothing you haven't seen before.

The true innovation - in the minds of Timberlake and Specific Media, who co-purchased the site from News Corp. in 2011 for $35 million - is the black bar running across the bottom of the site.

While it resembles the 'Now Playing' bar at the top of iTunes and other streaming sites, Myspace's implementation is meant to make playing and sharing music a central aspect of the experience. It puts the Home button, your Profile link and your Notification Center right alongside it, with Discover and Search options as well. Discover is the key to exploring Myspace, letting you see what's trending and listen to custom radio stations and mixes.

Myspace's music discovery service comes together in the interactions between the artist profiles and your own. Essentially, users connect to an artist, get updates from that artist, and can stream shared tracks - or even whole albums - while interacting with other fans, amateur musicians, DJs, producers, etc. To help facilitate this music-based interaction, new Myspace subscribers are asked to put themselves into one of a handful of categories, ranging from musician or venue to fan or promoter.

Early experimentation yields some interesting results. For instance, pulling up the Search tab next to the Discover button lets you type in the name of a band, and yields a list of streamable and sharable tracks, band info. Presumably as time goes on, the service will add actual updates from bands that agree to hop back on the Myspace bandwagon.

That's the key, of course. The New Myspace looks and works fine. But the revived social network's biggest, and most likely insurmountable, obstacle is that it's a ghost town right now, and it will probably stay that way.

What Good Is Myspace In A Facebook/Spotify World?

The problem is that it's simply too late for Myspace to capture any ground from its competitors.

Spotify, with its ever-increasing library of available music, Facebook-anchored sharing and playlist making, and tiered accounts for mobile and offline use is not going to lose users to Myspace, despite Justin Timberlake's enthusiasm.

And that brings up another issue. Timberlake's face plastered on Myspace's homepage has been getting a lot of flak, and for good reason. Debuting his new single, "Suit & Tie," on the homepage of the social network he co-owns may be good marketing, but could also be seen as a cheap, self-promotional move.

Myspace may have once been the king of social networking, but those days are gone forever. If Timberlake is able to convince fellow musicians to partner with the site, it's likely to hang around for at least a while, but that's about it.

Now here's something the record labels never would have agreed to tens years ago. With the purchase of select CDs, Amazon customers will get a free MP3 copy of the album, which is instantly available in their Cloud Player account.

It's a great idea. No longer will people who buy CDs from Amazon have to go through the trouble of ripping them onto a computer for the inevitable (and pretty much only) use case: listening to the music on a portable device. They'll even retroactively rip your past purchases from as far back as 1998, assuming the CDs you bought previously are AutoRip-approved.

Sounds Good?

This is a pretty useful feature for people who buy CDs, but that's a population that's been quickly dwindling for some time. Personally, I ripped all of mine about ten years ago and got rid of them. The only time I've considered buying a new CD is the rare event that a favorite artist of mine puts out some super-deluxe, premium-packaged disc mixed in 2.1 surround sound or it's bundled with a DVD. Like most people, most of the music I consume is from the Internet. For years, that meant digital downloads. Today, that's supplemented by Spotify's massive library. If I really love something, I'll buy it on vinyl and cash in the free MP3 download right away.

And there are problems with the service itself. When I went to try AutoRip, my Cloud Player library was still completely empty. If I've purchased any CDs in the last 7 years, they apparently weren't AutoRip-supported. Oh well. 

Too Late To Help

While AutoRip is nice a bonus for CD buyers, it's probably not going to reverse the inevitable trend: Physical album sales have been slashed in half since 2000 and as digital grows (it's now more than 50% of the recorded music market), there's no way those numbers are ever going to pick back up. Everyone's streaming from Spotify and Rdio or redeeming their iTunes gift cards. Vinyl has been seeing a bit of a resurgence in recent years, but that's still a niche market filled with audiophiles and super-fans. 

Good riddance to the compact disc. At least with vinyl, you get a tangible, collectible good with a free download. With subscription services, you get access to unprecedented quantities of music, which you can access from any device. With CDs, all you get is a plastic disc that will inevitably start getting scratched as soon as you remove it from its breakable, poorly designed case. I moved on from CDs years ago. As convenient as AutoRip is, I'm not any more likely to return to a physical format. I can't imagine anybody else is. 

Now, if Amazon would come out with AutoRip for books, that'd be a whole other story. 

Lead photo by Fanch the System. 

As the annual Consumer Electronics Show grows away from its humble roots as, you know, a consumer electronics show, its focus increasingly turns to things altogether unrelated to technology - like celebrities!

Last year I recall spending three hours chasing down Justin Bieber with my telephoto lens - he made a brief, grumpy appearance promoting some entirely forgettable robotics company that I have since entirely forgotten. This year, the celeb safari is back on.  Here's who is showing up to CES this year and why you should - or shouldn't - care.

Get your bingo cards ready. No really... why not make a bingo card? Fill one up, find me and I'll buy you a shot. (Just don't blame me for knowing more about smartphones than pop culture - this is who I think these people are, anyway.)   

Felicia Day

This year's "CES Celebrity Ambassador," you might know Felicia day from the World of Warcraft spoof web series The Guild, or just from being generally cool and having preternaturally perfect skin. She tends to appear at every geek-adjacent event known to man, and we imagine that she'll spend most of the week in a cocktail lounge in an ivory tower somewhere in the South Hall. She's the CES celeb bingo equivalent of a doubleword score.

Maroon 5

Qualcomm Incoporated Preshow Keynote / 6:30-7:30pm, Monday, January 7, The Venetian, Palazzo Ballroom

This is a band, I think. I'm honesty not totally sure. It sounds like a racecar. Or a craft beer.

will.i.am

The Next Generation of Innovators Keynote / 11am-12pm, Tuesday, January 8, LVH Theater

This dude is from The Black Eyed Peas and has the cojones to downstyle his name like an Apple product. He's A+ in my book.

Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson

SMS Audio (LVCC, South Hall 1, #20206) / 3pm, Wednesday, January 9

Isn't this guy blatantly sexist and homophobic? Surprise! He's at CES 2013 representing SMS Audio, a brand that I will now ardently choose to not give a shit about. 

Travis Barker

Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. (LVCC, North Hall Booth #1101) / 12-1pm and 1:30-2:30pm, Tuesday, January 8

The Blink 182 dude? Really? Don't make me make the "what's my age again" joke.

Dana Cohen

Haier America (LVCC, Central Hall, #10939)

I have zero idea who this woman is, but apparently she was dubbed the “Scallop Queen” on season 10 of Hell’s Kitchen, which is the best title I've ever heard of. All hail the bivalve queen!

I Fight Dragons

Bém Wireless / 7pm, Wednesday, January 9, Luxor, Flight Lounge

This is probably an indie band. Okay, yeah, I looked it up and it is definitely an indie band. I hated them at first based on their name alone, but apparently they are into the chiptune retro video game sound thing, so now I'm totally into it.

Lil Twist

Nikura (LVCC, South Hall 4, #37134) / 1pm, Thursday, January 10

A young rapper of sorts, I imagine. And apparently Justin Bieber's BFF.

LL Cool J

CNET (LVCC, South Hall 3, CNET Booth) / 4:30pm, Tuesday, January 8

This guy is kind of actually famous! All these years and he never changed his name to something more pretentious or with fewer vowels - props to you, Mr. J.

Rohan Marley

House of Marley (LVCC, Central Hall, #10544) / 11am-3pm, Tuesday, January 8 - Thursday, January 9

Bob Marley's son is here every year with his crazy bamboo headphones and a big smile on his face. He's a super nice guy and he'll take a picture with you and you can almost pretend you met the "real" Marley instead of Lauryn Hill's ex boyfriend.

Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi

Zeikos/iHip (LVCC, South Hall 1, #21142) / 1-3pm, Wednesday, January 9

Yep, Snooki.

Tim Tebow

SOUL Electronics (Venetian Tower, #31-234) / 9am, Thursday, January 10

Isn't this that sanctimonious football player guy who never actually gets to play? We geeks come to these events to get away from you people. Whatever.

Chris “Ludacris” Bridges

SOUL Electronics / 10pm, Thursday, January 10, TAO Nightclub

Rapper turned actor Ludacris seems like a nice dude. I count this as a real celeb.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

Digital Health Summitt (LVCC, North Hall, Room N250) / 9-10:15am, Wednesday, January 9

CNN's overexposed rockstar doctor guy. If he had accepted the job as Surgeon General, that would be one thing.

Dr. Oz

Digital Health Summitt (LVCC, North Hall, Room N250) / 10-10:50am, Thursday, January 10

Maybe Dr. Oz can tell you what that weird growth is on your foot. If not, try Sanjay Gupta.

Carrot Top

Gibson Guitar Corp. (LVCC, CES Central Plaza, CP-30)

We all know that the obnoxious comedian Carrot Top is just hanging out here in Vegas anyway. I don't know what he brings to Gibson's brand, but now that CES celebs are like trading cards, you might as well collect 'em all.

Danny DeVito

Panasonic (LVCC, Central Hall, Booth #9406) / 2:30pm, Wednesday, January 9

Okay, Danny DeVito is actually kind of awesome. If he's anything like his character on It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, I'd like to commit a misdemeanor or drink stale beer with him. 

Ryan Vogelsong

JVC Americas Corp. (LVCC, North Hall, Booth #1810) / 11am and 2pm, Wednesday, January 9

A pitcher for the World Series Champion San Francisco Giants. Who let all these athletes in here?!

Brian Singer

Private Event, Parnassus Group / 5:30-7:30pm, Thursday, January 10, Cili's at Bali Hai

Singer directed the first two X-Men movies, which were awesome. But I'm still mad that he bailed on the trilogy to make a Superman movie. If you see him, ask him about that.

Want to track down even more weirdo celebs? Check out the full list.

After more than a decade of hand-wringing over the music industry's tumultuous decline, there's a glimmer of hope. Last week, more people paid for digital music than during any week-long period in history, according to Nielsen SoundScan. 

In the week ending December 30, 55.74 million digital songs were purchased. The week following Christmas is typically a prosperous time for digital media and mobile platforms, as gadgets and gift cards are exchanged during the holidays. This year's spike was the biggest since the same week in 2008, when consumers bought 47.73 million songs.

These new numbers show that, when given a way to easily and conveniently do so, many, many people will pay for digital music. In this case, the growth appears to have been fueled by the exchange of holiday gift cards to services like iTunes and Amazon.

Digital Music Challenges Remain

Things started looking up in 2011. That's when IFPI reported that the industry saw its first year-over-year growth in music sales since it started tracking the business in 2004. That growth was only a measly 1.4%, but it sure beat the 13% decline seen in 2010. As 2012 unfolded, the outlook for digital music sales continued to brighten. 

But although the bleeding appears to have stopped, the music industry remains a long way from recapturing its former prosperity. From 1999 to 2009, music industry revenues imploded by 56%. Even with the more recent promising trends, nobody expects the music business to return to its heyday any time soon. 

Contrary to popular perception, though, compared to other traditional media industries disrupted by the Internet, music has fared relatively well in the digital age. According to the IFPI (which, somewhat ironically, stands for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) 32% of music industry revenue came from digital in 2011 (a number most expect to have increased in 2012). For newspapers, that number is closer to 5%. The digital transition for book publishers is similarly slow and precarious. 

Why Digital Music Is Growing

So why is music growing? Services like iTunes have been aggressive about expanding globally. The biggest digital music services more than doubled their global reach in 2011, with iTunes alone launching in 16 Latin American countries.

The proliferation of connected music devices have also helped drive music revenues. As consumers snatch up millions of smartphones and tablets, many are heading straight for the digital storefronts of Google, Apple and Amazon to load them up with their favorite songs. Meanwhile, streaming music services like Spotify, Rdio and Deezer (which is aiming for a U.S. launch in 2013) are also exploding, with mobile access being the key selling point for their premium subscriptions. While it's perfectly feasible to pirate the latest albums and load them onto your tablet or phone, it's finally becoming easier to just type in a credit card number. 

The global fight against piracy also appears to have had an effect. Draconian anti-piracy laws like SOPA and PIPA may have failed in the U.S. Congress, but other initiatives have succeeded in driving down piracy. For one, Google has grown more accommodating to copyright owners, nixing piracy-related terms from auto-suggested search terms and making DMCA takedown requests easier (some would say too easy). 

There's also early evidence that the availability of legitimate music services can help reduce the rate of piracy. Sweden saw a 25% drop in illegal filesharing after the public launch of Spotify, according to one study. There are now 500 legitimate music services available worldwide, according to the IFPI. As streaming services and MP3 marketplaces expand across the globe, it shouldn't be surprising that people feel less inclined to download music without paying for it.

A Smaller Industry, But A More Level Playing Field

The music industry may never return to what it looked like 15 years ago. But maybe that's okay. Today's playing field is far more level and the tools to create and distribute music are cheaper and easier to use than ever before. Artists still face major challenges, but the Internet has loosened the grip of the record labels and opened up new possibilities in terms of financing the creation of music projects - including crowdfunding and selling music directly to fans via platforms like Bandcamp or via digital distribution platforms like TuneCore and CDBaby.

Maybe the Internet isn't killing the music industry after all. Sure, the Net upended the old business model and irreversibly changed how music gets distributed to consumers. But clearly all is not lost. 

Lead image courtesy of Don O'Brien.

2012 was a big year for music. No, I'm not talking about Adele, Call Me Maybe or the Tupac hologram. The big news this year were the shifts at the intersection of music and technology that occurred as the industry continued to figure out its digital future. 

Indeed, the biggest moments in music tech this year all had to do with piracy or the tricky evolution of a business model to replace the one that started dying a decade ago. 

1. The Death Of SOPA / Megaupload Raid 

These two events were not officially related, but they happened within 24 hours of each other and they both helped frame the debate about content piracy. In late January, the uber-controversial anti-piracy bills called SOPA and PIPA were tabled by the U.S. Congress after massive online protests. The death of SOPA meant the fabric of the Internet would be spared from the wrath of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and set the stage for new legislative battles.  

Just as that attempt at fighting piracy ended, an even more dramatic one began when New Zealand police - by request of the U.S. Justice Department - arrested Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and several of his colleagues in a military-style raid. The hacker group Anonymous responded with large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that took out the Department of Justice's website. For the first time, the so-called "piracy wars" started to look like an actual war. 

The Megaupload raid marked the beginning of a lengthy legal procedure, but it also raised major questions about the rights of non-infringing cyberlocker users and caused similar services to get more serious about fighting piracy, if they didn't shut themselves down all together. 

2. Lars Ulrich Hugs Sean Parker, Embraces Spotify 

There could hardly have been a more symbolic official end to the Napster era and more importantly, the beginning of one in which all-you-stream music subscription services are seen as a legitimate way forward for the industry. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich not only shared a stage with Napster cofounder Sean Parker to announce the band's arrival on Spotify, he hugged him. 

Major questions remain about the viability of Spotify's business model and whether it can fairly compensate artists, but it's still early in the game and the fact that Metallica has embraced the model is a positive sign. Don't hold your breath for The Beatles, though. 

3. BitTorrent Goes Legit

2012 was the year the strict association between the word BitTorrent and piracy started to erode. It still has a long way to go, but BitTorrent, Inc. has been aggressively marketing itself as a legitimate content distribution platform and teaming up with established artists and authors to prove it. 

Author Tim Ferriss may be the most high-profile content producer to partner with Bit Torrent, but musicians have been experimenting with the platform as well. After Pretty Lights published a bundle of free music and videos on BitTorrent, it soared to the top of Pirate Bay's download chart, the DJ saw a 700% increase in traffic to his website, collected 100,000 email addresses and, probably not coincidentally, sold out two concerts at the Red Rocks amphitheater in Colorado. For musicians, BitTorrent may provide an unexpected path to revenue.

4. Internet Radio Fairness Act Introduced

Internet radio providers like Pandora and iHeartRadio are expensive to operate. That's largely because these companies operate under a different royalty rate regime than terrestrial and satellite radio stations, both of which pay far less than Pandora to copyright holders. 

In September, a bill called the Internet Radio Fairness Act (IRFA) was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that aimed to level the playing field. Record labels, royalty collection organizations and some artists were less than thrilled with the IRFA. Congressional testimony and debate got underway in November and the issue is expected to continue to be a contentious one in 2013. 

Whatever happens with the IRFA as it was originally drafted (many predict its demise), something needs to give, and that something will have to balance the need for innovation with the rights of those who create music for a living. The end result of the debate that kicked off in 2012 will have a huge impact on radio's future. 

5. Amanda Palmer's Blockbuster Crowdfunding Experiment

2012 was the year that independent musicians, desperate for a new business model, started taking the crowdfunding craze seriously. In an age when revenue is harder and harder to come by for musicians, many turned to fans to help fund the recording of their album, production of music videos and other projects.

There were plenty of successful campaigns, but none got more attention than that of Amanda Palmer. The singer took to Kickstarter to fund the release of her album and ended up blowing past the $100,000 goal to rake in more than $1.1 million. Suddenly, crowdfunding looked like a viable model for musicians. 

The Amanda Palmer example is not without its caveats, though. For one, not all independent artists will have a fan base as rabid as the famously social media-savvy Palmer. About half of all music-related Kickstarter projects fail to reach their goal. For the right projects and artists, though, crowdfunding can work quite well, as Palmer demonstrated. 

Any artists that do luck out on Kickstarter might want to do their best to avoid the public relations headache incurred by Palmer after she invited unpaid musicians to play with her onstage - and was subsequently lambasted across the Web. 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

If you ever wanted to print out your favorite albums at home, that weird little itch of yours may soon be scratched. Amanda Ghassaei, an editor at Instructables and DIY audio hardware geek, recently succeeded in 3D printing 12-inch records containing music by artists like Nirvana, The Pixies and Daft Punk. It sounds terrible, but the achievement is still pretty impressive. 

Ghassaei used Processing to write a program that translates digital audio into 3D models, which can then be printed on a plastic material using a high-resolution 3D printer. The end result can be played on any turntable, although as you can hear in the video below, it doesn't sound very good. 

That's because even at the highest resolutions available in 3D printing, you can print audio grooves only fine enough to capture a fraction of the resolution and sampling rate of a even decent-sounding MP3. There's also a very tiny grain and residue on 3D printed objects that interferes with the turntable stylus' ability to pick up a clean audio signal. Still, the songs are clearly recognizable, making what Ghassaei has pulled off from a technical standpoint very impressive. 

Don't Get Too Excited, Hipsters

Just be careful about envisioning a not-too-distant future in which we can all print out our favorite albums on vinyl-like material and listen to them in high-fidelity stereo. Music-industry executives jazzed about the recent resurgence in vinyl record sales should also take a chill pill.  

For one thing, this method of creating records is pretty expensive. Between printer usage time and the raw materials needed to print a 12-inch disc, it probably costs several hundred dollars per record. For the price tag of two or three 3D-printed records, you could press 100 real vinyl albums. 

Resolution is the biggest stumbling block. Although the cost of 3D printing has been dropping into more consumer-accessible territory, the resolution of the printers hasn't changed much in the last few years. The types of things people use 3D printers today for just don't demand the super-high resolution required to print tiny, clean grooves like the ones created by pressing an aluminum master disc into hot vinyl - the old-fashioned way to make a record. Ghassaei might be able to get that Daft Punk song to sound clearer on 3D-printed records than it does right now, but it's not going to be a viable, listenable alternative anytime soon. 

Who knows, though? Maybe in a few years we'll see lo-fi experimental noise bands in Brooklyn selling limited edition, 3D-printed LPs. They won't come cheap, though. 

The new Philip Glass album is completely mesmerizing. I don't mean the CD, or the MP3 download or even the vinyl version - I mean the app. In addition to more traditional formats, the famed composer has released REWORK, a compilation of remixes, as an iPad app. An immersive, interactive and incredibly cool iPad app. 

Normally, releasing an album in the form of an app would seem like a dumb idea. All the open-source-minded, anti-walled-garden, Web-is-better-than-native-apps advocates out there would agree. Why trap your creative hard work behind the impenetrable wall of a proprietary mobile application? I couldn't agree more, in theory, but something about the REWORK_(Philip Glass Remixed) app for iPad has me wondering if this apps-as-albums concept might be a surprisingly large part of music's future. 

As I'm writing this on my laptop, my iPad is propped up next to me. Just beyond my direct field of vision, there's an array of cubes floating in 3D space, flowing like water to the rhythm of the drums backing this electronic soundscape I'm listening to in my headphones. If I touch the screen, some of the blocks fly upwards. If I move my finger across the screen, more blocks are disrupted in its path. 

Limited Functionality Never Felt So Good

That's about the extent to which I can interact with the music as it plays. I can't even fast-forward through each song. But that's okay. Like a vinyl record, I'm forced to listen to each song or skip it entirely (which takes a few taps, so it's slightly more cumbersome than we've become used to). I can't help but feel like this app was deliberately designed to encourage me to enjoy the album from start to finish. To quiet my brain's 21st Century instinct to jump around, to fast-toward, to hit Shuffle. If I want to dip my finger into the liquid digital visualization going on as the song plays, that's fine. But I can't skip around. I can't minimize this app and do other things without cutting off the audio. 

It's incredibly simple functionality, but it's mesmerizing, like some kind of futuristic boombox. 

The best part is Glass Machine, a stand-alone feature that lets users remix and build their own minimalist compositions using an interface that is both atypical and easy to use. The controls along the bottom let you adjust tempo and rhythm, filter the sound and choose between piano, organ and synthesizer. The rest of the screen is occupied by two giant circles, both of which contain a single, smaller circle that can be pinched and moved around to adjust the melody. It's a way of manipulating sound that will look unfamiliar to even experienced digital audio producers, but is completely intuitive to just about everyone. 

REWORK for iPad costs $10. That's pricey for an app, but pretty cheap for a full-length album you can interact with. 

With Some Tweaks, This Model Could Work For Artists

REWORK_(Philip Glass Remixed) could be even better. People should be able to record and save their Glass Machine compositions. Then they'd be free to share them online and bring them into other audio-editing software to build something completely new on top of them. Weaving in such an open-source spirit might help counter the "walled garden" issue of putting an album into a native apps. 

If the app came with a code to unlock a digital download - much like vinyl records do these days - purchasing it would be a no brainer for just about any fan. That way, you could experience the interactivity and fluid animations, but also be able to take the music itself with you anywhere and play it on any player. Musicians complain about how easy it is to download MP3s without paying for them. 

In age when artists are struggling to figure out how to thrive in a digital, mobile world, apps like REWORK offer a few hints about how the music-as-an-app model could work. An experience like this would be much harder for people to pirate, for example. Building stuff like this is expensive, of course, and limiting sales to a single platform is an issue. But there might be a real opportunity here for a smart startup to sell app-building tools to labels and artists.

If artists can design something fans would love interacting with and that offered enough value above and beyond the audio itself, the people who care most would shell out $10 or $15. I know I would. 

Maybe Tim Westergren has a point. The Pandora cofounder has been making the rounds in the last few months, arguing that the music licensing costs his company has to pay are crippling and should be changed by Congress. Music labels and many artists aren't thrilled about the proposed changes. So what's the deal? Could licensing costs actually kill Pandora? 

Probably not anytime soon. But it's certainly true that these high licensing costs make it much more difficult to do business. For evidence of that, look no further than Last.fm. Next month, the algorithm-fueled Internet music service is scaling back its most radio-like feature in several countries.

In the United States, Canada and the UK, Last.fm's radio streaming feature will still be available via Web browsers, but using it from their desktop client - just like its mobile apps - will become a subscription-only feature. The reason? You guessed it: The cost of securing rights to that music is too high for Last.fm to make the end product freely available, the company says.

In the UK, music licensing costs are even more onerous than they are in the United States, says radio futurologist James Cridland. It's exactly why Pandora isn't available there, nor is there an equivalent service. Last.fm is probably the closest thing the UK has, and it's about to see its functionality scaled back. 

"I'm not sure what the magic bullet is," says Cridland. "But at some point people need to stop and ask why there isn't a Pandora in the UK, which after all is one of the countries that produces the most music in the world." 

Cridland has done the math. Running a service like Pandora in the UK would require a company to pay out more money in licensing fees than they could conceivably earn in revenue.  

Internet Radio Is Expensive And Hard to Monetize

For Last.fm, licensing costs aren't the only part of this equation. It's also worth looking at the other end of the business model - namely, the revenue side. The fact that Last.fm is cutting its free radio service out of its desktop app suggests it's tightening up its freemium business model overall. 

It makes sense. Last.fm's desktop app collects a lot of listener data, but it doesn't appear to directly make money. I can play personalized stations from this app all day long without ever seeing or hearing an advertisement. Starting January 15, I'll have to go to the Last.fm website, where the entire layout is wrapped in display ads and before my Notorious B.I.G.-inspired station starts playing, Taylor Swift will try to sell me some perfume. 

The fact that Last.fm is pulling radio out of its desktop app all together - as opposed to augmenting it with audio ads - suggests that audio-only Internet advertising isn't quite as potent a force as once thought. Personalized, targeted radio ads seem powerful in theory, but they're far more lucrative when paired with video and display advertisements. Paying subscribers are even more valuable. Clearly, Last.fm is hoping to push users in either of those two directions as it continues to navigate a digital music marketplace that looks very different than it did when Last.fm was founded almost a decade ago. 

Last.fm isn't the big fish here - it's the canary in the coal mine. Pandora is far better-positioned than Last.fm, its chief U.S. competitor. Yet even at the head of the pack, business in the streaming music space is brutal. Music licensing costs may not kill Pandora, but Last.fm's troubles make it clear that the issue can wreak havoc on a music service's core functionality. No wonder Tim Westergren won't shut up.

The Swedish sure do love them some Coldplay. The Japanese? They're more into The Beatles and Radiohead, but not quite as much as they adore Utada Hikaru, a 30-year-old J-pop singer based in the U.S. 

These musical insights and many, many more can be gleaned from a massive, interactive data set published by Last.fm, the Internet radio and recommendation service. Its user base might not be a representative sample, but the numbers are still fascinating. Last.fm has also put together an interactive timeline breaking down music milestones and trends tied to its own music playback data. Rick Astley saw a big spike in listens in 2008, for instance, when "rickrolling" was at its peak. 

Last.fm has now been tracking everything its users listen to for a decade. Its "scrobbling" technology has been watching us hit the Play button since the iPod was a chunky white brick with a big click wheel. Today, it's baked into Spotify, a Chrome add-on and a host of digital music platforms and apps. 

The Value of Last.fm's Aggregate Listening Data

The service may not get the attention it once did, but Last.fm holds a uniquely significant, if underrated asset: Big Data. By embedding itself on desktops, mobile devices and within music services, Last.fm has an unparalleled, platform-agnostic view of what people are listening to. As a user, I can see which artists, empirically speaking, I listen to the most. Which songs I played excessively six months ago. 

Last.fm, of course, uses this data to recommend new music to me, which it actually does quite well. But there's also huge value in the aggregate data it collects.

What good are traditional music sales charts when people download torrents, stream albums on Rdio and check out new bands on YouTube? Not much actually.

But if we permit it, Last.fm can watch all of that activity, compiling rich and detailed data about what we listen to, both as individuals and as a group. That aggregate data could be a goldmine of insights for radio DJs and other tastemakers, argues radio futurologist James Cridland. He's right.

I hope Last.fm keeps spreading its API far and wide, and that more people opt to use the service, even if it does lack the buzz of Spotify or the headline-grabbing power of Pandora. The company should push hard to forge partnerships with music apps, hardware manufacturers and mobile platforms to keep collecting all that data. 

The insight we stand to gain would be pretty incredible.

Lars Ulrich wants you know that he's cool with Sean Parker. To show it, the Metallica drummer and anti-filesharing crusader didn't just share a stage with the Napster cofounder this morning - he hugged him. The occasion? Metallica's catalog is newly available on Spotify, the music service in which Parker is now an investor.

The company also announced a significant update to its service, which will aid in music discovery and make it more social overall. Like Twitter, Tumblr and now SoundCloud, the new version of Spotify will let you follow friends, artists and other influencers whose music tastes you trust. This should be a lot more useful than just seeing what everybody you know is listening to in real-time, all balled up into one stream. 

Spotify is also adding a "Discover" tab, which sounds like it will borrow a page from some of the service's third party add-ons, displaying music recommendations based on listening history and social data. Digital music discovery is a notoriously tough nut to crack, so we'll have to wait and see how effective these recommendations are. Other promised features include mobile push notifications for new releases and - at long last - the option to add music to your collection without starring it or adding it to a playlist. 

The new features will roll out in a desktop app update within weeks, while cross-platform availability is due next year.

Metallica's Stamp Of Approval Is A PR Win For Spotify

The Metallica deal is a significant win for Spotify, not just because the popular heavy metal band has long been a stubborn hold-out from subscription streaming services, but because of the PR coup it represents for the company. Since launching in the U.S. last summer, Spotify and similar services have faced criticism from some artists who bemoan its low royalty payments and fear that making their music available there could further cannibalize album sales. 

In response, Spotify has argued that its payouts aren't as paltry as some of the early checks make them seem and that, at any rate, the service is still new and needs to build up its subscriber base to bring in more revenue. Today, the company announced that it has paid out $500 million to rights holders (mostly record labels). It now hase 20 million total users around the world, about 5 million of whom pay for the service. 

In some ways, Spotify isn't all that different from Napster, at least from the consumer's perspective. It's a place you can go, search for music you want to hear, click a button and get access to it. One difference is that on Spotify, you can't download the tracks and keep them. More importantly, the Swedish startup has crafted a business model that allows it to pay music labels and other rights holders, a detail Napster never bothered to worry about and which ultimately led to the service's demise. 

Crafting that model - and getting buy-in from artists and labels - hasn't been easy for Spotify. That's why it took the service so long to secure deals and finally launch in the U.S. Even now, as it grows in leaps and bounds, the company struggles with artists threatening to jump ship over the royalties issue. 

That's why the endorsement of Lars Ulrich is a huge deal. Here's one of the most prominent, most vocal critics of Napster and unauthorized file-sharing giving a very public nod to streaming services. Ulrich is essentially acknowledging that this might in fact be the future of the music industry, or at least a central part of it. 

There's no word on how much Spotify had to fork over to get the rights to stream Metallica's music (nor should listeners hold their breath for The Beatles or Led Zeppelin to show up soon). But whatever the price tag, it's a big deal for Spotify to simultaneously assuage artist concerns and nab a few more listeners in the process.