As ambitious as Deezer’s plans are, we’ve seen companies in the past year fall at the licensing hurdle. We7 launched last January with a similar offering and before the end of 2011 had shifted focus from a massive streaming music library to recommendation-based internet radio. No doubt that decision was informed by lower license fees for internet radio compared to on-demand streams.

Spotify is still the best hope for a major platform breakthrough worldwide. Its agreements with major labels bring with them lower license fees that allow them to expand, but not everyone is happy – independent labels have been pulling out of the service in protest at the small revenue payments offered in recent months.

Perhaps the most important thing for new services gaining ground this year will be Facebook’s Open Graph. You used to wear your favourite band t-shirt so the world knew your individual music tastes. No longer Sonny Jim! Zuckerberg’s company is already putting the songs you’re listening to on almost all of the above services right into your Facebook news stream, right in front of your friends’ eyes so maybe he holds all of the access keys to popularity already.

From the off, the store was offering a claimed 13 million tracks including songs from majors Sony, Universal and EMI as well as independent distributors including Tunecore, Beggars Group, Merlin, Merge and Warp. In a shrewd move, Google’s Artist Hub allows independent artists to sell the music they own the rights to, at the price they choose, for a one-time fee of $25. They keep 70% of sales and can allow users to listen to their songs for free if they desire.

Of course, it all ties in with Google’s other recent high profile platform Google +. You can share listens of songs purchased with your friends on the social network, much like Facebook’s much touted music sharing of songs on Spotify, Rdio, MOG and more ( which has racked up 1.5 billion shares in the first two months).

Back in Europe, Spotify launched in Belgium, Switzerland and Austria (still no sign of Ireland) in the same week that 234 independent niche dance music labels represented by STHoldings withdrew their songs from Spotify, Napster (it still exists!) and other US streaming services. Their decision was prompted by a review of their accounts which showed that 82% of listens came through streaming services but accounted for just 2.6% of its revenue and a study which concluded that streaming services are discouraging to music purchasing.

“Music loses its specialness by its exploitation as a low value/free commodity,” said an STHoldings press release. “Quoting one of our labels: ‘Let’s keep the music special, fuck Spotify.’”

That move follows the more high-profile rejection of Spotify by Coldplay for their new album. Coldplay’s decision makes sense for them. They’re a huge well-known band with a demographic that is more likely to purchase their music via legal means so offering streams could perhaps have compromised that.

“Fuck Spotify” was also how English composer Jon Hopkins reacted to his most recent royalty payment. Hopkins received just £8 (€9.31) for 90,000 plays of his songs. It sounds like a poor dividend but are Hopkins and STHoldings looking at that figure from the wrong angle? A single stream is not the same as a download and is usually only heard by one person. If you compare that figure to radio where one play on RTÉ 2FM to an audience of around 100,000 for example nets you €9.39 per play (at a rate €3.13 per minute) so all is not as black and white as it looks.

Spotify’s move into the U.S. market makes it the music service most likely to challenge iTunes’ worldwide dominance and it is now one of the few music companies offering its services on both sides of the Atlantic. Currently Spotify is available in a handful of European countries including France, the UK and now the U.S. Regarding an Irish launch, a Spotify press rep told me: “Spotify’s long term aim is to be available in every country. We know just how passionate Irish music fans are but we don’t have any immediate plans to launch there.”

The U.S. digital musical landscape offers much more choice than its European equivalent so Spotify will have a hard job establishing a foothold. Services like Pandora, Rdio, Rhapsody. Turntable.FM and MOG are just some of the active music services operating in North America only. However, Spotify is ambitious. A leaked internal advertising slide from Spotify HQ indicates that the company are aiming for 50 million paying U.S. subscribers in a year to add to its existing 1.6 premium-paying million users and 10 million users total in Europe.

There is hope that Spotify can be the musical service that makes illegal downloading the harder option. In its native home of Sweden, birthplace to the contentious torrent site The Pirate Bay, Spotify has been cited as a key factor in the growth of digital music sales and the cultural shift on the usage of illegal sites.

Spotify is also hoping that Facebook-approved integration will help them spread the word as more and more U.S. users see Spotify activity in their news feeds and in use on Facebook pages. But Spotify is not the only music service that Facebook is cosying up too. Reports suggest that Facebook will launch a music tab that will integrate with other music services too and will include features player control buttons for external music services such as Spotify and Rhapsody and a recommendation feature drawing from what your friends played on those other services.

Spotify is certainly a great service and the free account is an attractive proposition that’s easier and faster to use than that other giant music service – Youtube. If U.S. users flock to it, the knock on effect will also benefit the rest of the global music eco-system.

A chat site with a difference where you talk to an AI robot which chooses its answers from over 20 million conversations that have gone before yours. It’s like talking to the ghost of internet past.

cleverbot.com

Pitchify

Pitchify collates Spotify links for the best-rated albums on Pitchfork and Drowned In Sound.

pitchify.com

All Wired Up

An Irish music technology blog which interviews Irish musicians about their equipment. One for the gearheads.

allwiredup.ie

So it’s inevitable that with success comes scrutiny as commentators attempt to analyse and figure out exactly how Spotify is able to stream such a huge range of music and still afford to operate. It was no surprise really when it was reported in August that major labels owned a combined 18% share in the company.

In Spotify’s native Sweden, the newspaper Expressen claimed that Lady Gaga only earned €113 from one million streams of her ‘Poker Face’ single on Spotify. That has since been refuted by the company who said that figure only refers to a fraction of what Gaga would have received from Sweden’s performing rights society in that country for one period before they actually launched. “Specific payments are of course confidential, but this is certainly wide of the mark,” said the statement.

Staying in the land of Swedes, it seems that the population is serving as a case study for the music industry in general. A report from the record labels association IFPI Sweden says that music sales are on the rise again in Sweden with revenues up 18% in the first nine months of this year after seven consecutive years of decline. Spotify and the tightening of anti-piracy laws are being hailed as the main reasons for this sudden rise.

Which may be good news for proponents of the three strikes rule here in Ireland and the Digital Economy Bill in the UK though they have been dealt a blow thanks to the European Parliament. Eircom’s agreed plan with IRMA to ban internet users found to be downloading copyright-infringing content may have some opposition in the form of a newly approved telecoms package which gives greater protection to consumers.

Eircom and IRMA’s private “three strikes” deal to disconnect users does not currently guarantee a fair and impartial judicial review before a user’s connection is revoked. This would conflict with the “rights and freedoms which have become part of Europe’s values since the French Revolution,” according to Vivane Reding, the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media.

Spotify for iPhone overhyped?
Blogger Nick Fitzsimons shares his disappointment with the Spotify iPhone app pointing to slow caching over Wi-fi and lack of play-in-background functionality as the main bugbears.
http://short.ie/spotop

Coretex – A free iPhone game
Coretex is a free iPhone puzzle game by Irish developer David Kelly which is set within a nuclear reactor core on the brink of meltdown. Grab it in the app store.
http://www.newleafgames.com

The impressive app has a simple but clever “offline mode” which allows you to listen back to recent playlists. As its only available to premium subscribers, Spotify are pinning their hopes on enough people shelling out €9.99 a month to use it.

Another iPhone app which has impressed me this week is RJDJ, a reactive, real-time music experience which is best demonstrated by a video showing how dance act Kids on DSP utilised the format on their reactive music album.

Using RJDJ and the in-built microphone, the listener can change the album’s mood and textures. Sample your own voice over the track or the tannoy announcement in the train station and the RJDJ technology will take it, manipulate it and sequence it appropriately into the existing track. The album also gets louder or quieter depending on your environment.

RJDJ’s innovative technology falls under the umbrella of augmented reality which we’re going to be hearing much more about in the next six months.

One wonders what the likes of Miles Davis would think of such creative musical experiences, or a project in his honour called Kind of Bloop, an 8-bit or chiptune covers version of his legendary jazz Kind of Blue album made with 8-bit synths normally heard in vintage computer games.

The project was brought to fruition by Andy Baio and five chiptune artists with the help of 411 investors sourced through the innovative site Kickstarter.com. Those 411 backers pledged between $5 up to $100 through Kickstarter so they could seem the album become a reality and gain first access to download the album before it was initially released. Kind of Bloop raised over 400% of its target which was used to pay royalties, the artists and print CDs – quite an impressive feat for essentially, a novelty electronic jazz album.

It’s a brilliant service and one which justifiably could live up to the oft-touted “iTunes killer” tag if the company can keep its revenues flowing and keep Apple onside for the upcoming Spotify iPhone app. If there was one criticism of Spotify from a user-friendly perspective, it would be that it lacks a “browse” function. So for those times when you’re not sure what to search for the following sites are here to help.

By uploading your exisiting iTunes music library file, Spotifitunes can give you a web-based links to the artists you already listen to on Spotify. More of a Last.FM user? Another site (http://short.ie/lastspot) will analyse the top 50 artists in your Last.FM charts and recommend you albums to listen to based on this and Last.FM’s recommendation system.

If you are interested in the newest albums available then, the On the Spot blog offers one of the best ways to find out. Other sites include Spotinews and Fresh Spotify which tells you when your favourite bands are added to the library.

After browse and search, playlists are the easiest way to share music. A number of community sites provide facilities to share yours with the world such as http://sharemyplaylists.com and http://listopify.com.

More interesting are the focused playlists such as Indiefy which has created playlists for John Peel’s Festive 50 from 1976 to 2000 or Topsify which creates top 40 UK and US Charts every week.

Finally, how about a virtual festival through Spotify? Invisible Festival is raising money for Cancer Research this weekend by sharing playlists on Spotify by festival artists like The Go! Team, The Invisible and Reverend and the Makers.

MUZU has certainly got off to a good start by getting support from the industry from the outset. Labels like EMI, Sony Music, 4AD, Rough Trade and XL have all licensed their video content to the site. “The site was actually purpose-built for the music industry as a way for them to drive new revenue streams and market their artists in a professional, music-only online environment,” explains Slattery. “The unique thing about MUZU is that all bands — regardless of whether they’re signed or not – have the potential to make money”.

While getting bands and labels on board can be difficult, getting internet users to change their music video habits from Youtube to MUZU will be the biggest challenge of all. To facilitate this, MUZU allows users to create video playlists that they can embed on social networking sites. With the site growing by 30% month by month and with advertisers starting to jump on board, as well as the music industry, it’ll be very interesting to see what kind of an impact MUZU can have on Youtube’s dominance.

Our top video picks from MUZU.TV

1. MUZU Live sessions
Tonnes and tonnes of live sessions recorded right in the MUZU Dublin studio from The Jimmy Cake to Bipolar Empire to Mick Flannery to MJEX to Baddies.

MUZU SESSIONS TV on MUZU.

2. Shoegazing Classics
Taking its cue from Rob Da Bank’s recent compilation this playlist compiles the best of Shoegaze from Lush to Pale Saints to the modern-day Deerhunter.

3. The Tube
Brilliant, brilliant interview footage from Thin Lizzy, Mick Jagger, Sting, David Lee Roth, early U2, Ray Charles and many, many more…

4. Britney Videography
The entire Britney video back catalogue is on display for better or worse.. We say better.

5. Eagle Rock live performances
Live, live live performances from all walks of music – James Brown, Johnny Cash, Top of the Pops, Pixies, Eminem and loads loads more hi-definition.

Anyone can sign up for free and start listening to a band’s entire back catalogue ( I chose Super Furry Animals ), today’s chart hits, full albums and releases from less mainstream artists (MF Doom and Air France), with the (very) occasional advert. More discerning users can pay €9.99 a month for ad-free access.

What really sets the service apart from what’s come before is how easy it is to use. Spotify is fast. Like really fast. Tracks start to play almost instantaneously and in my experience (and many others), the stream was seamless, as if it was playing locally from my computer. The search function is intuitive, fast and accurate. Artist pages include bios, artist radio, top tracks and similar artists. You can create and share playlists with other users or use the radio function or explore.

More importantly: independent, major labels and unsigned artists have embraced Spotify. For example, at the time of writing, 8 of the 10 Choice Music Prize nominees had their shortlisted albums available on the service.

There are still signs that Spotify will encounter ye olde traditional roadblocks. In January, thousands of songs were taken from the service due to global licensing issues. Spotify’s global community manager Andre Sehr responded on the company blog: “These restrictions are a legacy from when most music was sold on tapes and CDs and they have continued over into streaming music, our hope is that one day restrictions like this will disappear for good.”

What Spotify does offer is quicker access to songs than illegal downloading does, albeit currently without downloadable files but the company has expressed interest in creating versions of Spotify for mobile phones, car stereos and mp3 players. Whatever happens, Spotify is fast becoming the shining beacon of today’s digital music models.

http://www.spotify.com

For years we’ve heard stories of court cases in the U.S. where the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) attempted to sue copyright infringers for damages only to find out those people had died or ended up being seven and twelve year old girls so why does the music industry still tread down the path of punishment? Why doesn’t it foster a pragmatic approach to the digital music problem? Imagine if Napster had been welcomed rather than attacked? There are alternatives suggested which need to be looked at. Examples include a plan to make file-sharing legal but charge for the volume of data transferred. Another involves the user paying for an add-on subscription to their broadband to download music with the revenue dished out amongst the copyright holders i.e. – the record companies. Legal services like Spotify which allows access to an unlimited streaming music library with occasional adverts between songs are pointing the way forward also.

The industry needs to recognise that people will always want to share music, whether it is by cassette tape or an MP3. That proponent means this cat and mouse filesharing game will continue unless an agreeable solution for both the industry and the customer is reached.