It’s November 2009 and we’re nearing the end of a decade. It’s been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. With that in mind, over the coming weeks ReadWriteWeb will look back on the defining Web trends of the past 10 years. From the dot com boom, to the nuclear winter after, to the passion and enthusiasm of the pre-Web 2.0 innovations (such as RSS and podcasting), to the highs and hype of Web 2.0, to the current era of the real-time Web, to the near future of the Internet of Things. We’ll explore all of this and more.

We’re starting with online music. No industry, except arguably the newspaper one, has been rocked (pardon the pun) more by the Internet than the music industry.

Napster & Kazaa: Online File Sharing

The online music decade started with Napster, a music file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning that operated between June 1999 and July 2001. Napster enabled people to freely share MP3 files over the Internet; however it quickly ran into major legal trouble. Napster was the subject of lawsuits in 2000 by touchy metal band Metallica and others. It was eventually shut down by court order, after several major record labels went after the service.

After Napster’s demise, a P2P application called Kazaa became the most popular service for music file sharing. But it too eventually succumbed to record industry attacks.

Curiously, both Napster and Kazaa were recently reincarnated as law-abiding services. After years of re-launch attempts, Napster was acquired by Best Buy in September 2008 and was born again in May 2009. Meanwhile Kazaa turned into a legit music subscription service in July this year.

iTunes / iPod: Digital Music Goes Commercial

While Napster and Kazaa tried to skirt around the commercial imperatives of music, like paying artists, Apple took on the record industry in an entirely legal way. In January 2001, Apple launched a digital music player for music callediTunes. Then in April 2003, the iTunes Store was launched. It offered the ability to buy songs for 99 cents each, which had a major impact on the music industry.

Soon after Napster’s demise in 2001, Apple launched what was to become a revolutionary device in the music industry. The iPod was launched in October 2001 and it became the most popular portable music player since the Sony Walkman in the 1980s.

Fast forward to 2009 and iTunes continues to evolve. In January Apple announced that iTunes would go DRM-free. In September 2009 Apple launched version 9 of iTunes, which included a Genius-like recommendation feature for apps and ‘iTunes LPs’ - a feature that brings liner notes and artwork to digital albums.

MySpace: Music & Social Networking

MySpace was launched in August 2003 and soon became a popular hangout for local bands, especially indie rockers. MySpace provided a way for those bands to promote their music and reach a wide network through social networking.

As ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez wrote last month, it was a virtuous circle for MySpace. The bands’ presence on MySpace “began to attract a young, hip crowd of users who were interested in following pop culture, and, in particular, the up-and-coming artists they discovered while browsing through the network. Only eight months after its launch, MySpace began to experience exponential growth, as its users created profiles and friended others who would then, in turn, invite more users to join the social network. Thanks to the “network effect,” MySpace soon became the place to be online. Everyone was there.”

However by 2008, MySpace had ceded the social networking crown to Facebook. In 2009, MySpace is once again trying to reclaim its heritage as a music service. In October MySpace launched ”Artist Dashboards” and integrated its music video vault with recent acquisition iLike.

Pandora & last.fm: Online Music Discovery

Online music services have flourished in the ‘web 2.0′ era, when the ability to find new music and share it with others via the Web became increasingly sophisticated.

Two services in particular stand out. One is Pandora, a free online music discovery service. Pandora was founded in 2000 and continues to grow, despitevarious legal issues over the years. As ReadWriteWeb’s Frederic Lardinois noted earlier this year, Pandora derives its revenue from targeted audio advertising in its music streams and affiliate sales through Amazon’s MP3 store and iTunes.

Last.fm is another online music discovery service. It was founded in 2002 and was sold to CBS in 2007. It continues to innovate in 2009, for example in May this year last.fm announced combo stations, allowing a user to create a station with up to three artists or tags.

Conclusion

This post and series was inspired by one of my favorite blogs and podcasts, NPR’s All Songs Considered. They’re currently looking back at the decade in music and much of the discussion is about how the Internet helped define it.

And it’s true, when you think of music at the end of 2009 you think of iTunes, Pandora and last.fm - MySpace even. The record industry is still coming to terms with these and other changes.

Source: NY Times

Analysis: Vinyl, Digital Sales Hit New High Marks 
November 11, 2009 - Digital and Mobile | Retail 

By Glenn Peoples, Nashville

Vinyl and single track download sales set new records last week, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. The two events represent very different trends that were born from the rising popularity of digital music.

As of November 8, four artists broke Rihanna’s single-year digital tracks sales record of 9.9 million tracks: Michael Jackson (11.3 million tracks year-to-date), Lady Gaga (11.1 million tracks year-to-date), Black Eyed Peas (10.3 million tracks year-to-date) andTaylor Swift (9.98 million tracks year-to-date). The top three artists have already topped 10 million tracks sold this year and one, Taylor Swift, will surely pass the mark next week. Next week, sales of digital albums should surpass last year’s total of 65 million and sales of digital tracks should top the 1 billion mark.

Year-to-date vinyl record sales topped two million units last week, breaking the previous record of 1.9 million units last year. At the same point in time last year, SoundScan had tracked 1.5 million sales of vinyl records.

That’s roughly a 37% year-over-year improvement. Vinyl has come a long way from the period in the ’90s when it was a format that was almost exclusively used by underground rock bands and DJ-oriented genres. Many years passed when most artists - especially mainstream artists - did not have vinyl releases (many still do not have vinyl releases). Though it gained momentum towards the end of the decade, it wasn’t until the mid-2000s when new releases of all stripes were being released on vinyl, when it was seen as a purer way to experience music in an era of near-ubiquitous digital music. Labels started offering MP3 downloads with vinyl purchases, thus creating a great digital-physical combination. Today, consumers can find vinyl in both mass merchants and the usual Independent stores.

The two trends - digital sales on one hand, vinyl records on the other - could not be more different. For all the efficiencies of digital music’s distribution and supply chain, vinyl counters with an equally expensive and inefficient process. Yet, the two are on the rise.

There is no doubt digital formats represents the future of recorded music. iTunes is just the beginning. New types of digital services promise to change how consumers acquire and experience music. Yet the concurrent rise of digital and vinyl tells us this: Through their purchases of vinyl, a small yet dedicated group of music fans are showing artists and labels that digital does not fill all their needs.

Source: Billboard

MSN in talks with MySpace on music collaboration
Category: Music

Exclusive: Microsoft’s MSN Is in Early

Talks With MySpace About Music

Tie-Up

by Kara Swisher
Posted on October 27, 2009 at 3:34 AM PT

Microsoft’s MSN is in preliminary talks with MySpace about using the social networking site’s music service, MySpace Music, to help power music offerings on the giant portal.

While sources at both companies cautioned that the talks are still early, Microsoft (MSFT)–which has its own music site that it programs with original and partnered content–execs are interested in goosing it.

That’s because MSN Music consistently ranks substantially lower than other big online music properties in terms of traffic, while MySpace Music is always near the top.

Sources said Microsoft execs don’t think they can do as good a job as MySpace is doing and don’t see the point in striking needed but complex deals with music labels, which the News Corp. (NWS) property already has.

In an April report by comScore (SCOR), for example, MySpace Music was No. 2, just behind AOL Music, with 27.4 million unique monthly visitors. MSN Music was No. 6 with just 7.4 million.

Nonetheless, music is an area MSN cannot lag so badly in, given that entertainment is one of the key categories it is focusing on as it preps for a major renovation of the portal.

As BoomTown wrote in mid-July about a wide variety of changes coming to MSN:

MSN, Microsoft’s online portal, is also preparing a major redo of what U.S. and, possibly, international consumers will see, as it doubles down on five key content verticals, while cutting back on others.

In a new focus that will start to be apparent in the next month, MSN will heavily add to its News, Sports, Finance, Lifestyle and Entertainment offerings, weaving more data from [its search service] Bing into the mix.

“It’s a decision to make it so MSN does less better,” said one source close to the situation. “So there will be a focus of attention on a smaller number of categories in which we can be either #1 or #2 in, rather than #4 or #5.”

It is not clear exactly what the financial terms would be in any tie-up between MSN and MySpace, which could include licensing of content and other services related to music.

But such a deal is not unusual–MSN’s sports site is powered by Fox Sports, which is another News Corp. property.

And such a partnership would also key into concepts that MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta outlined in a recent interview onstage at the Web 2.0 conference.

Key among them was boosting music and entertainment overall and making them the prime focus in the site’s efforts at reinvigorating itself, as well as expanding distribution of MySpace.

In fact, MySpace recently bought social music service iLike to expand its distribution all over the Web, for example–including on Facebook, the longtime social networking rival from which MySpace is now trying mightily to differentiate itself.

In his appearance, Van Natta also unveiled a music video hub, the ability by users to buy music using Apple (AAPL) iTunes, and a set of better analytical tools–called MySpace Music Artist Dashboard–to help artists figure out how to best work with fans.

But MySpace needs more than these, and a link with Microsoft would provide it with a traffic gusher, since MSN’s main page remains one of the most trafficked sites on the Web.

If such a distribution partnership were struck, it would also raise the question of what will happen regarding MySpace’s negotiations with Google (GOOG) over renewal of their search deal, which expires next summer.

Dissatisfaction over the pricey three-year deal has been expressed by both sides; their mutual grumbling is one of the biggest open secrets in Silicon Valley.

Doing a search deal with Bing is the obvious and only alternative, although few expect any agreement to be as rich as the one MySpace did with Google in 2006 for $900 million.

Interestingly, it was recently reported that both Google and Facebook were bolstering music search and sales offerings, and Google’s apparently includes the use of the iLike player.

In other words: This could get really complicated.

Execs at both MySpace and Microsoft I reached out to declined to comment.

Post from Boom Town

Eliot Van Buskirk 

• October 26, 2009  | 

Photo courtesy of Flickr/ici et ailleurs

In the olden days, boys and girls used to spend hours using double cassette decks to carefully craft mix tapes to share in order to express their innermost longings in an artsy way. It sometimes led to love and inadvertently increased record sales by sharing a little taste of previously undiscovered bands.

Then came Napster and the CD burner, making the process even easier. Finally, mix sharing was thoroughly disrupted by online “mixtape” sharing sites such as the popular Muxtape, whose sharing function was disabled by the RIAA over a year ago. Following the closure of that site, we posted a list of alternatives last summer. Already, 60 percent of them are now offline for various reasons, in at least one case due to major label lawsuits.

These online mix-sharing sites are clearly something of a moving target, because they tend to operate under the radar or pay unmanageable licensing fees. But we’ve turned up a fresh batch you can use to share virtual mix tapes with friends and strangers around the world, without paying a cent.

Without further ado, here are the eight best ways to share playlists (honorable mentions below):

1. QCMixtapes or MixCloud: If you’re a disc jockey who records your live sets, a bedroom DJ who handcrafts mixes by adding cross-fades manually, or just a plain old control freak when it comes to virtual mix tapes, you’re best off with one of these sites or something similar. QCMixtapes uses the excellent SoundCloud as a back-end database to let you upload and share lengthy mixes as single files so you keep total control over the flow. There’s a great selection of mixes from the community there for browsing (including by genre), and you can share mixes with specific friends by sending them a URL. Mixcloud offers a similar concept, although we prefer the QCMixtapes interface. The only downside with these options, which offer more freedom and control than anything else on this list, is that you have to handcraft your mixes the same way people did back in the cassette days — which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on your point of view.

2. 8tracks.com: Essentially a lawyer-approved version of Muxtape, 8tracks offers surprising flexibility with mixes of eight songs or more (updated; also, the name has nothing to do with the plastic cartridges of yore). The site complies with webcaster licensing rules that bar users from adding more than two songs from the same artist, mentioning more than three artists in the title of a mix, mislabeling tracks and so on. The company pays a percentage of expenses, so long as it enforces mild programming rules and doesn’t make above $1.25 million in a year (updated, see below). Users, however, need only worry about which songs to include in their mixes so long as they follow those simple rules (if not, the site will remove your mix from the site until you edit it). 8tracks recently added a smart queuing feature that starts a similar-sounding mix when the one you’re listening to ends, as well as a widget that lets you post your mix directly to your Facebook feed.

3. Playlist (formerly Project Playlist): No stranger to legal wrangling, Playlist fought off a lawsuit from EMI, which now licenses the service, but is still working on inking deals with other copyright holders. Don’t let that faze you; the site has a large catalog of music from sites all over the web, all of which you can add to your shareable, embeddable playlist with a single click. Unlike other sites that use this approach, Playlist manages smooth playback and avoids dead tracks by caching songs on its servers. Bonus: You can turn any of your playlists into a Group Playlist that any of your friends can edit.

4. Opentape: Do you still actually have your own website? Good for you. The rest of us socially networked types with no domains of our own are just being lazy. OpenTape lets you upload a bunch of MP3s to your server using a web tool or FTP and present them in a user-friendly, Muxtape-like interface that lets you reorder, rename, customize and share your mix using your own server. This open source software was developed in direct response to the closure of MuxTape and borrows a piece of that site’s publicly available code for rearranging songs in the mix. And although Opentape lives on your server, it lets you embed playable mixtape widgets anywhere HTML is used. The freedom is nice, but the legal ramifications are all yours with this service.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/not an egg

5. Imeem: This ad-supported social media site is not exactly a secret. By now, you’ve no doubt heard that it contains free, full-length versions of millions of songs you can listen to in their entirety as many times as you want. But Imeem’s playlist feature is quite powerful too. One caveat: If you want your friends to be able to hear the full versions, send them to the playlist’s URL on the site. If you embed it somewhere else on the web, some of the songs turn into 30-second samples. In order to listen, your friends will have to have or create an Imeem account, but that’s a small price to pay for access to your handcrafted masterpiece.

6. Lala: This music service was (re)designed to help you move your music collection into the cloud and let you buy streaming songs for a fraction of what they cost in iTunes. But its playlist-sharing feature is also worthwhile — the site has a legal catalog of around 8.5 million songs, which you can arrange into mixes of any length. There’s one big drawback: Your friends will only be able to listen to each song once for free before paying for them. If they want to hear the playlist again, they’ll have to pay 10 cents a song in Lala credits. Bonus: Lala recognizes playlists you’ve created in iTunes, so there’s no need to recreate them online.

7. Grooveshark: Another veteran of a major label lawsuit, the latest version of Grooveshark (to be unveiled later this week) is an improved design created with listening, rather than playlist-sharing, in mind. The site relies entirely on user uploads and responds to copyright-holder complaints by removing content, so you can’t always find what you’re looking for. But the service is now licensed by EMI, and it’s working on signing the other three majors. It includes a healthy selection of playlist-sharing options: e-mail options, embed codes and hooks for Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon.

8. Mixtape.me: Much like the Europe-only Spotify, Mixtape.me is a streaming-music application that closely resembles iTunes and other software designed for local music playback. The powerful playlist-creation engine lets you search for tracks, or link to an MP3 somewhere online if what you’re looking for isn’t already in the catalog (and there are plenty of holes; most files come from the Skreemr MP3 search engine). Extra features include a “quick playlist” feature for sharing a playlist without creating an account, drag-and-drop functionality that works anywhere on the site to add songs to a playlist and comment-enabled playlist liner notes that include artist biographies from Last.fm, lyrics from LyricWiki and videos from YouTube. Share playlists through your profile, URL, embed code or Twitter, directly from the site.

What did we miss? Add your suggestions to the comments section; we’ll circle back with a voting-enabled version of this story featuring your suggestions.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/Landroid

Honorable mentions:

ArtoftheMix: This one includes a selection of excellent mixes you can’t listen to.

Blentwell: One of many blogs that links to DJ mixes, Blentwell includes a wide range of electronic and dance genres.

ffffoundtape: The catalog on this site depends on users adding URLs. It’s still useful for cobbling together playlists from MP3 blogs — just copy the songs’ URLs and add them to ffffoundtape to construct your mix.

Hypetape: We like nearly everything about HypeTape, including the Muxtape-like interface. But it uses blogs for its catalog, so you run into plenty of songs that won’t play, and the only way to search is by artist.

MixTapeCollective: You’ll find great stuff here. As with ArtoftheMix above, none of the mixes are playable, so you’re on your own when it comes to tracking down the songs.

MakeMyMixTape: This site lets you create a quick mix using only the name of a genre — a novel approach, but it has yet to launch.

Mixa: This clever site takes the “virtual mix tape” thing literally, by offering a USB stick shaped like a cassette that you can hand-label before giving it to that cute girl from English class who never answers your texts.

Muxtape: After its relaunch, you can still use Muxtape to create online mixes — but only if you’re an artist or label with full copyright control over the songs you’re uploading.

Spotify: This much-loved freemium music app, which allows playlist sharing and collaboration using a simple URL, is still only available in Europe.

R.I.P.:

Enjoy the above services while you can; by next year, some of them may have joined the following mix-sharing sites in oblivion.

FavTape

Mixwit

Muxtape (the original version)

SeeqPod

Source: Wired.com

Story HighlightsMusic, like laughter, opens up blood vessels and produces protective chemicalsConstricted vessels can lead to high blood pressure, increase heart attack risk

Hospitals across the country use music therapy to help patients heal

By Val Willingham
CNN Medical Producer
(CNN) — If you didn’t catch the white coat and the stethoscope, you might take Dr. Mike Miller for a middle-aged rocker, roaming the halls of the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore.

For years, Miller, a research cardiologist, has been studying the effects of happiness — or things that make people happy — on our hearts. He began his research with laughter, and found watching funny movies and laughing at them could actually open up blood vessels, allowing blood to circulate more freely.

Miller thought, if laughter can do that, why not music? So, he tested the effects of music on the cardiovascular system. “Turns out music may be one of the best de-stressors — either by playing or even listening to music,” said Miller.

The setup was basically the same as with the laughter study: Using high-tech imaging, Miller measured blood vessel size as people listened to music.

The results did not surprise Miller. “The inner lining of the blood vessel relaxed, opened up and produced chemicals that are protective to the heart,” he said.

But when participants listened to music they didn’t particularly enjoy, Miller said, “the vessels actually began to close up.” Watch Dr. Gupta explain how music helps the heart »

That’s exactly what tension — or stress — does.

Long-term stress can wreak havoc on the cardiovascular system. Over time, it can cause blood vessels to stiffen and become rigid, constricting blood flow. As people get older, arteriosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, becomes a problem. Constricted vessels can cause blood pressure to rise and increase the risk of heart attack and stroke. Stress can also suppress the immune system, contribute to infertility and impotence, speed the aging process and even rewire the brain, leaving people more vulnerable to anxiety and depression.

But music can counter the effects of stress. “It gives us an overall feeling of good, well-being — a sense of euphoria in some cases,” Miller said.

A recent study out of Stanford University found elderly patients who were diagnosed with depression gained self-esteem and saw an improvement in their mood when they were visited by a music therapist.

In fact, many hospitals across the country use music therapy to help patients heal. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, uses music as part of its cardiovascular surgery healing program to “promote relaxation and reduce tension, stress and anxiety.” Because music helps these patients relax, it decreases their pain, improves their moods and helps them to sleep better, especially during recovery.

Miller has not only seen these same results in some of his patients who use music therapy, but he said he also believes music can be so relaxing that it can actually keep the body young. “We would like to believe that it may slow down the aging process,” he said.

But be careful what you listen to. Whether you like Beyoncé or the B-52s, Chopin or Johnny Cash, Miller found that listening repeatedly to the same tune diminished the music’s effects on the body. “You just don’t get that boost if you listen to the same song over and over again,” he said. “You need to vary your songs, so when you hear the song fresh, it brings back the sense of joy and opens up the system.”

So, the next time your boss gets on your nerves, or the kids are driving you crazy, or the car breaks down, don’t start pulling out your hair. Instead, turn on the radio, grab your iPod or pop in a CD, and let the music carry you away.

Source: CNN

So that’s why a glass of wine and a CD turned up louder than usual helps turn the blues away.  Even if the music is blues which actually cures the blues it’s all good.  I love to dance at these times.  Dancing is a great liberator as well as music. ~ R

Couldn’t Hold Out

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