Meanwhile, the company has made significant inroads into becoming the defacto streaming music site of choice. Its recently launched Spotify Play Button means that embedded tracks from Spotify can now appear anywhere on the web.

In an effort to accelerate launches in other terroritories, Spotify has formed a partnership with Coca Cola. The news was revealed at a press briefing last week in New York with Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek saying “Coca-Cola is partnering with us to bring free music to the world.”

That’s a big vision and shows just where Ek wants Spotify to be. If other streaming services teamed with a major brand like this, the partnership be considered incongruous but for Spotify, battling outmoded terroritorial licensing laws that inhibit the platform from launching in every country of the world, the partnership makes sense. Coca Cola can underwrite Spotify’s expansion in countries it could not previously afford to launch in, setting it on its way to becoming the defacto global subscription service as well as gaining visibility in world events like the Olympics.

In return, Coca Cola will harness Spotify APIs in all of their apps, sites and social network sites citing that the partnership is “the opportunity to create a truly global music network.” The company will also be working with other major brands like Intel, McDonalds and Reebok on branded apps.

Spotify’s big gamble is to integrate itself into every fabric of life where music can exist. The service is attempting to make itself indispensable and everywhere. If it can do that then future partnerships will mean the company will be able to turn a profit while covering the costs of streaming royalties for the entire world of music makers.

Doing that kind of work in the past required dedication, travel and a lot of recording tape. Which is exactly why field-recordist Alan Lomax is so revered and important to the history of music. For most of his lifetime, Lomax travelled around the US to the UK, Ireland, the Caribbean and mainland Europe archiving and recording folk music of the world. He was the first man to capture Lead Belly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie to tape. When he died in 2002, he left 5000 hours of audio recordings behind (along with 3000 videotape and 5000 photographs) and a trail of invaluable ethnomusicology.

In February, 17,400 songs from the Alan Lomax archive were published online for all to hear at research.culturalequity.org. Every false start, every interview, ambient recording, mic checks and abandoned performance is available. Dating from 1946 up to the ’90s, there’s a lifetime of exploration. Chicago blues man Big Bill Bronzy performing in Paris, calypso concerts captured in New York, West Indies folk, English children’s lullabies, chain gang songs recorded in Mississippi State Penitentiary, New Orleans jazz, Soviet wedding songs, Transylvanian funeral laments and Moroccan courtship music.

Of particular interest to Irish listeners is the collection of music recorded here in 1951 and 1953. Made in co-operation with the BBC, Radió Éireann and the Irish Folklore Commission, it includes performances captured in Donegal, Galway, Kerry, Cork, Dublin as well as renditions of songs from Seamus Ennis, singer Margaret Barry and Brendan Behan in London. The world is now an instant global jukebox but Lomax was the originator.

Sure, the constant infostream of Twitter or the geo-tour guide of Foursquare are cool but there’s always been a gap between the fabricated reality of social networks and actual real life. The latest apps at SXSW in 2012 addressed this issue. This year’s buzzwords were “social discovery” and “ambient location”. Most people have used social networks have had that awkward moment where “someone they know from the internet” has introduced themselves in the flesh. You know who the person is but they look different to their online picture or avatar.

Highlight is an “ambient location” app for iPhone that will prepare you for such situations. Bridging the gap between networking application and conversation enabler, Highlight sits on the background of your phone and alerts you when you’re in the near vicinity of a friend of yours on Twitter or a person with likeminded interests from Facebook. It’s a conversation starter, an excuse for new genuine, real-life friendships or conversations.

After installing Highlight on my iPhone a few weeks before SXSW, I promptly forgot about it. When I was in Austin, my phone buzzed a few times with a message telling me that a blogger I had long admired was in my immediate vicinity and the shared interests we had. Perfect. We finally said hello after a few years of Twitter talk and it wasn’t weird at all.

Highlight isn’t the only hot new location-aware connection app, there’s also Sonar, Banjo, Gauss, Glancee and of course, Grindr, the geolocating app for gay men that was ahead of the curve in 2009. It looks like 2012 may be the year of “ambient location”, a next generation of apps, ones that are location-aware, people-aware and socially-aware.

A good place to start as ever is the American radio network NPR and their always excellent home for music on the web. Their SXSW microsite (npr.org/sxsw) features a handpicked list of 100 of the best bands playing the festival playing as a continuous 7 hour mix that you can tune into at any time. It features tracks from Alabama Shakes, Cults, Hospitality, The Men, Young Prisms and more. 71 of the songs are available for free download too. Not only that but NPR’s own showcases featuring Sharon Van Etten, Dan Deacon, Magnetic Fields and Andrew Bird are being webcast for a limited time. It’s expected that Fiona Apple’s return to live music as a headliner will be available too, as long as Ms. Apple is happy with it. What a diva.

If volume is what you want SxswTorrent.com is back with BitTorrent files featuring a whopping 1,219 song downloads taken from each official band playing the festival from the SXSW website.

The long standing Stereogum blog keeps it trimmed to 25 songs from bands who they’ve championed in the past including Candy Walls from the Austra side-project TRUST and the Whigfield-sounding I’ll Never Know bounce pop from Londoner Charli XCX.

Highly recommended from the newly formed Portals Music blog collective is their SXSW 2012 sampler available for free from Bandcamp featuring some of the smaller, more underground names at the festival from the skittery dreaminess of Florida’s Hundred Waters to the catchy acoustic folk pop of You Won’t. More from SXSW 2012 next week.

The five-piece band, signed to revered indie label Rough Trade are already doing quite well in the UK thanks to the blessing of NME. They’ve garnered comparisons to The Strokes and have been hailed as the latest saviours of guitar music (snore). Back home however, it’s a different story for Howler and to increase their visibility in the US they have enlisted the services of Mono, an advertising and branding company from their hometown to help them make an impact in the lead up to SXSW. Mono have worked on campaigns for Apple, MSNBC, NBA and Sesame Street. So how are they approaching advertising a rock ‘n’ roll band?

Rather than spending money on one big budget video, the band, or specifically their North American independent label Beggars Group spent the money on a campaign based on the title of the band’s debut album – ‘America Give Up’.

The americagiveup.com campaign features an elderly black man passing commentary on all things that could be attributed to the decline of American civilization from canned cheese to the Kardashians to social networks. The hope is that enough chatter will be created around the campaign that it will work positively for the band going into the festival but it’s hard to see how the an elderly man will appeal to kids looking for some genuine rebellion or energy.

Of course, lots of bands using marketing or branding to stand out these days so this is really nothing new. If anything, authentic indie artists need only look at the reaction to Lana Del Rey to see how manufactured authenticity can backfire. We’ll know post-SXSW, just how successful this campaign was.

Kid A
This Virginia musician released an imaginary movie soundtracks last year with lyrics mostly in Japanese. That may sounds pretentious but the English-sung BB Bleu sounds like something Massive Attack might have made if they were still making Blue Lines material.

Nite Jewel
Ramona Gonzalez has been releasing lo-fi pop-funk for four years now but her new and second album One Second Of Love has seen her add some bite and swerve to her sound.

Amanda Mair
At just 17, this young Swede has eschewed the reality music TV route and signed with the cool Scandanavian label Labrador. Popjustice hailed her previous single as one their favourites of 2011 and Sense, her new song finds the middleground between radio-friendly and indie-appeal.

Madeon

Hugo Leclercq, a 17 year-old “pop house” producer from France has established a reputation based on tracks posted on Youtube and Soundcloud recently. His first big single, the big pop electro rush of Icarus should see him hit the mainstream.

2:54

Moody shoegaze rock from two Irish sisters Hannah and Colette Thurlow who grew up in the UK. The single You’re Early will fill any Warpaint-sized holes you may have.

Algiers

An “experimental gospel no wave soul pulp band” (of course), Algiers debut single Blood is all of those things plus a big dose infection of voodoo blues.

Mia Sparrow

Pairing post-rock guitar lines with melodious vocals, this three-piece Dublin alt-rock band released their debut album for free on Bandcamp last week. Lovely noise.

The collection which numbers 40,000 vinyl singles and 25,000 vinyl albums will be archived from May. The collection will include some of his personal notes, stories from contributors along with video interviews with family and those musicians that were close to him. You will be able to browse the artwork for 2,500 of those albums, at the rate of 100 per week, from May to October, though due to copyright limitations, only the BBC Peel Sessions archives have been confirmed for listening at this point. Watch the brilliant 2005 documentary John Peel’s Record Box for a taster of what to expect from the hero’s collection come May from thespace.org

So what are the results? Out of 45 million internet users in France, 822,000 people were sent first round warning letters about their infringements. That number drops to 68,000 people for second round repeat offenders. The number of people who received a third letter of warning? 165. That’s a significant drop that suggests the three-strikes policy is more useful than litigation or site blocking. Discuss…

As of February 29th, the site moving to a different format away from .torrent files and to Magnet files. The site also moved to a Swedish domain to stop any potential seizure from US authorities.

These latest moves angered the Recording Industry Association of America whose Vice President Mitch Glazier went on the offensive. “It is, in a phrase, one of the worst of the worst,” Glazier wrote. He went on to call on responsible leaders in the tech community to come up with constructive ideas to address these “foreign rogue sites that steal American jobs.”

The Pirate Bay, ever ready to snark back responded in an article on the TorrentFreak website. “The recording industry is like a kid screaming for candy. The problem is that the kid has diabetes.”

But perhaps the grandest idea that The Pirate Bay has come up with has yet to be unleashed. Forget digital files, the site is now talking about “Physibles”. With 3D printing on its way to mass-market, TPB is predicting that the next big thing will be downloadable models for constructing 3D physical objects that will allow you to print your vehicle spare parts or sneakers, for example.

“No more shipping huge amount of products around the world…No more child labour. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal.”

The Pirate Bay’s battleground has shifted to a more difficult and open terrain – the real world.

Oliver Tank
Daydreaming folk songs played with modern instruments is 21 year-old Sydney musician Oliver Tank’s modus operandi. His emotive rasp is reason enough to stay under a warm duvet with his Dreams EP playing in the background.

Trust
The drummer from dark synth pop band Austra Maya Postepski and her friend Robert Alfons have a not too dissimilar musical project entitled Trust which would sound perfect in a creepy midnight disco.

Fun
Calling your band Fun is pretty is a pretty brazen move but judging by their song Some Nights, a modern jukebox pop hit which sets the harmonious bravado level to “QUEEN”, it may well signal the iconic intent of this new US chart-topping band.

Chromatics
Fans of the Drive soundtracks should delve into the back catalogue of these Italo disco revivalists. They also have a new album forthcoming entitled Kill For Love which has already spawned three video singles, most notably the muted atmospheric funk of Lady.

Hundred Waters
A promising Gainesville, Florida band who specialise in scattered and skittered pop music somewhere between the dream pop and eclecticism of Twin Sister, Stereolab and Múm. Their debut self-titled record also arrives at the end of the month.

SpaceGhostPurrp
One of the new breed of rising rappers, Miami’s Spaceghostpurrp dropped his new God Of Black Volume 1 mixtape showcasing his mind-warping blend of cosmic blunted Southern rap.
Listen at Soul Culture

Burial
Electronic music’s most revered anonymous producer returned with a new EP of spooky atmospherics entitled Kindred this week. No-one does dark and haunted inner city soundtracks quite so well.
Listen at Hyperdub