Google will synchronise the music to a Google Music library in such a way that the playlist will remain the same on all devices, be it a laptop, mobile phone or tablet. Each user will be able to store upto 20,000 songs for free, but they will have to be manually uploaded.

Music can also be purchased from a music store in the Android Market. Over 13 million tracks from the big music companies like Sony, EMI and Universal will be available to buy, in addition to tracks from several independent labels.

Google Music on an Android mobile

Individual artists who have the necessary permissions will also be able to upload their music and build their own artist page through the artist hub interface.

This service will obviously compete with Apple’s iTunes. The cost of each track on Google Music will be the same as that on iTunes, ranging between $0.69 and $1.29. However, the cloud computing service by Google will be free, whereas Apple charges $25 for it.

While Google may not generate a lot of revenue through this service, it will help them build customer loyalty to Android-based mobile phones. Once a user has purchased music from a particular service like Apple or Google, they are unlikely to switch to another device.

The service will provide some music for free everyday, and those tracks will be displayed in the music library. Amazon also offers free tracks daily, but the service is rather complicated.

Google Music has already been integrated into Google+ and that will make it more popular as it can now be shared with friends. Social aspects of Google Music could be the main driver of its success, as it could potentially out-shine popular services such as Spotify and Last.fm primarily due to its larger user base.

Reviews of the service are lukewarm. A lot of the criticism focuses on the fact that the service has been released 8 years later than iTunes. The service also requires users to upload each and every song they wish to store and can create problems when users upload old iTunes tracks that had DRM encryption.

The biggest plus points in favour of Google Music are the price – free! – and the true portability of the service – it can be played on any device, incuding iPhones and iPads.

Most industry experts, though, recognise the Google Music service for what it is – a suitable replacement for the iTunes eco-system for Android devices and a means to complete and tether the Android user experience.

YouTube’s parent company, Google, has been fighting a court case with several music publishers and TV / Movie companies regarding the use of pirated and copyrighted content on YouTube since 2007. Viacom had also filed a class action suit at the same time.

In 2007, the courts ruled in favour of Google, stating that YouTube was protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The litigants had filed an appeal against the verdict at the time.

The parties concerned have now arrived at an understanding whereby Google will pay royalties to the music company concerned for the use of their content on YouTube.

Financial details of the agreement have not been revealed.

A post on the YouTube blog says, “We already have deals in place with a number of music publishers in the U.S. and around the world, and today’s deal offers more choice for rights holders in how they manage use of their songs.”

The blog further states that “When these publishers allow YouTube to run ads alongside user-generated videos that incorporate their compositions, the publishers and the songwriters they represent can make money.”

While the deal has been signed only with publishers, it is also expected to benefit songwriters, recording artists and record labels. This will be possible thanks to Google’s Content ID technology, which allows recognition of songs and other music.

How exactly Google will monetise the content sufficiently to pay for every instance of copyright infringement is not clear. However, the relatively recent success of YouTube’s monetisation efforts obviously will play a big part in this.

For some time now, there have been rumours that Facebook might tie-up with Spotify to launch a music streaming service on their social network.

This service will enable users to play songs simultaneously with their friends. This was recently revealed by tech blog GigaOm. At the recent eG8 forum, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg also mentioned that he believes that music will be the next industry to be disrupted by social.

Apart from this impending partnership with Spotify, it is also expected that Facebook will make similar deals with other music streaming services. A number of speculators believe that the social network is likely to launch a music dashboard, which will enable users to see and stream music based on the recommendations from their friends. Thus, users will know in real-time what music their friends are listening to, just as they can on services such as Last.fm.

It is not yet known how exactly Facebook can be expected to benefit from this facility as the cost of streaming music legally is already quite high, resulting in losses for several music streaming services.

Music streaming and video viewing on Facebook is already a very popular activity and a number of other companies are already capitalising on this fact. Facebook has most probably identified it as a revenue opportunity and wants to earn some money for themselves.

If this service is initiated, it is likely to lead to more advertising on Facebook. The service would also give competition to Apple, who have their own music streaming service, Ping.

Following the recent release of Lady Gaga’s latest album, ‘Born This Way’, Amazon decided to offer their users a deal that was too good to refuse. They decided to let users download the album from the Amazon MP3 store at a price of just 99 cents. There was such a huge barrage of requests that it ended up nearly crashing their server. Users reported that the album took ages to get downloaded.

Lady Gaga has been promoting the new album prior to its iTunes release through her Twitter feed. Considering the fact that she has over 10 million followers on Twitter, the album was bound to be much in demand.

The album was available for $11.99 for the regular version and $15.99 for the deluxe version on iTunes. Compared to that, the Amazon offer was extremely reasonable and users rushed to make the best of it.

Amazon launched this special offer to popularise their recently launched Cloud Drive / Player service. To make up for the initial server slowdown due to the increased demand, which left users unable to download the full album, Amazon has offered the album at the same price again yesterday, along with 20GB of free Amazon Cloud Drive storage.

This time around, they say they are ready for the onslaught.

Born This Way reached the top of Amazon’s MP3 best selling list soon after the offer and has stayed at the top since then.

Several music recommendation services such as Pandora and The Echo Nest have sprung up recently, to help users to find the music of their choice. Orpheus Media Research conducted a study in February 2011, which was reported by Mashable, to find out how useful these services are.

The study was conducted a across a sample of 500 users over 18 years of age. Of the people surveyed, 61% were casual listeners of music, 35% were music enthusiasts and only 4% were indifferent to music. 40% of the respondents had over a 1,000 songs in their personal music library, and 59% felt that music played a key role in their social lives.

The study reveals that 54% of the respondents had used a music recommendation service, and 40% of them use such services quite regularly, ranging from a few times a week to daily.

While only 15% (77 individuals) of the total number of people surveyed said that they found the type of music they liked while using music recommendation sites, 92% of these people had gone on to become fans and had even recommended the music to their friends.

However, 40% of the participants said that the services proved to be accurate less than 50% of the time, and 22% even said that it was nearly impossible to find the music of their choice.

57% of the users said that they still refer to the radio or word-of-mouth method to find the right kind of music. 14% use main stream media, while 10% use music streaming services.

Room for Improvement

No single service provider is a clear winner in this market. Most users create profiles across a number of services and use a combination of sites and apps to find the music of their choice. 43% of those surveyed, wished it was possible to discover new music through one website.

This could be good news to both current players in the market as well as aspiring new entrants, as there is obvious scope for someone to develop a good service that gains widespread approval and goes on to command the majority of the market.

Dr Greg Wilder Chief Science Officer at OMR said, “People clearly expect more from music recommendation systems. Current search technology is expensive and limited to subjective descriptions of music, which are often just not good enough. We are focused on changing that.”

This is certainly good news for the industry, as it means that music downloads to mobile handsets are expected to more than double in value within the next 5 years, from $2.4 billion in 2010.

The music industry had been going through a very lean phase for the last several years due to the rampant prevalence of online piracy. After the introduction of P2P file sharing, people tended to avoid buying records and CDs from the market, and just downloaded the music illegally.

In order to fight this piracy, companies like Apple introduced iTunes in 2003. People could now easily and legally download the music in the form of ring tones, ring back tones, full track services and music videos by paying for it.

While PCs with MP3 players were earlier required to download the music, the recent technological advances made by the handset industry have now made mobiles the most popular tools to download music.

In fact, according to the Juniper report, the sales of the iPhone will soon exceed that of the iPod because of this. Google has also gone into the mobile music business with the intention of making their Android OS more popular than Apple’s iOS.

Whether this saves the music industry as we know it, or seeds a revolution where record labels become obsolete or have to redefine their business model in order to effective monetise music downloads by consumers without worrying about piracy eating into their revenues remains to be seen.

The NY Times has now started including e-book sales in their list of best sellers. Their competitors had started this practice much earlier.

In fact, the Billboard charts, which are in many ways the music industry’s equivalent of the New York Times’ Bestseller list, included the sales of electronic music and radio airplays when determining the Hot 100 much before that.

According to the statistics available from the NY Times, e-books seem to be selling much faster than the regular print versions. This is especially true in the fiction category and also to a large extent in the non-fiction category.

Interestingly, the top 5 titles in the e-book versions and the print versions are the same, but the top 5 titles in the hard-back and paper-back versions of the printed books are different.

The fact that e-books are selling faster than the printed ones has also been corroborated by USA Today. The rapidly growing sale of e-books is bound to lead to the question of piracy.

It is a well known fact that people generally exchange their books with their friends and colleagues. In fact, an old proverb says that one of the best things about gifting someone a book is that you can always borrow it from them. If this were to start happening with e-books, it will invariably lead to allegations of piracy from publishers and sellers such as Amazon.

“I Gotta Feeling” was released by the band in the beginning of June last year, was at the top of the charts for 2 weeks and then continued to remain in the top 40 for a total of 33 weeks.

The Black Eyed Peas also hold the record for the maximum number of downloads by a single group – a total of 3.3 million, in the U.K.

Martin Talbot, Managing Director of The Official UK Charts Company, says that this is a very significant milestone. While the industry started recognising the importance of downloads as far back as 2005, by counting them as part of the singles charts, this is the first time that a song has actually been legally downloaded so many times.

Initially, downloads were counted only after a CD was made physically available in shops. One year later, the rules were changed, and downloads started getting counted even without a CD release.

Now, 98% of all singles’ sales are through downloads. However, according to record company executives, the easy availability of downloads is only adding to the problem of online piracy, which results in the loss of millions of pounds of revenue to the record companies every year.

While this might be mixed news to the record company, it definitely marks a continued change in the way the U.K. public consumes media. Digital definitely seems to be the way forward. The record companies need to catch up with the rest of the business world and start building a more digital media friendly business model.

Myxer, which was started in 2005, now boasts a user base of 30 million unique visitors who download entertainment content from it regularly.

A ‘More Malice’ content channel has been created on Myxer to promote the album. It will provide behind the scenes content on mobile videos to promote the album. The Myxer URL is:

http://www.myxer.com/MALICE

More Malice is the sequel to Snoop’s previous album, ‘Malice in Wonderland’. The record is accompanied by a mini-movie based on the previous album and it features Snoop Dogg playing the central role of Malice.

While the presence on Myxer is central to the album’s release, it will not be limited to the site. Ring tones and wallpapers of the album will be available to interested users. Embeddable widgets will also be placed on various music sites and on Snoop Dogg’s social network profiles.

CEO of Myxer, Myk Willis says, “It is becoming clearer by the day, that artists’ fans want to use their mobile phone as the connection vehicle to their favorite artists. We recently launched MobileStage as a free, customisable mobile web site for artists, and the response has been great.”

Artists seem to increasingly recognise the value of connecting with their fans directly. Radiohead launched a very successful album solely online back in 2007. In the past couple of years most artists have built Facebook Pages and Twitter profiles, which they or their PR teams use to interact with fans, keeping their loyal customers engaged.

“These days its all about the artist interacting with the fans directly”, said Snoop Dogg. “I know what my fans want and now with Myxer I can give them what they want and need by delivering the best content straight into their hands, giving them exclusive content, and what they can expect to see on my upcoming More Malice album.”

http://www.inrainbows.com/

What makes this particular music release interesting is the fact that the artists eliminated the need for a major record label to promote their music and that the artist left it up to users to decide how much they wished to pay for the music they were downloading.

ComScore reported that an estimated 1.2 million visitors viewed the Radiohead site during the first 29 days of October, with a significant number downloading the album. According to their research and calculations, only 62 percent of the fans who downloaded the album did not pay for it, with the remaining 38 percent paying an average of £2.93 per download.

48 percent of downloaders from the UK paid for the album, averaging £2.47 per download. A lower percentage (40%) of US downloaders paid for the album, but they paid a higher average of £3.94 per download.

Findings from the ComScore research report have come under fire with Radiohead releasing a statement questioning the validity of the numbers. ComScore replied by defending the validity of sampling as a means of estimating numbers.

Disregarding the absolute correctness of the numbers presented in ComScore’s report, a more important finding from Rodiohead’s experiment has been the likelihood that the future of the music industry is definitely set to change, with a greater number of artists seeking ways to liberate themselves from their record labels and use the power of the Internet to broadcast their music to listeners at a fraction of the cost.

Yahoo! Podcasts will be closed on October 31st. There was no official word about why this was done when the announcement was made on the site in the last week of September. According to TechCrunch, the arrival of video sounded the death knell for most podcast services.

However, this week, news has emerged that Yahoo! intends to sell Kelkoo, the European comparison shopping service. “It’s had its good and its bad points, to be quite frank,” Yahoo’s U.K. managing director, Glen Drury admitted to Forbes. He continued: “I think that Kelkoo and all its competitors need to really re-think the way that they’re going to run their businesses in the future.”

Perhaps the most surprising story, though, comes from Yahoo! Music. All technical development work has been halted in Yahoo!’s entertainment division. A skeletal crew will continue to maintain the various entertainment properties, which include MusicMatch, Launch and Yahoo! Music. However, the editorial and development functions are being reassigned to other groups.

Employees previously working on entertainment at the San Diego office of Yahoo! have mostly been reassigned to work on the email service. The company is reportedly focusing on ad platforms and email. Some perceive this to be a good move, because MusicMaster has not been very successful and the other entertainment groups aren’t contributing much in terms of revenue either at present.

Signs of trouble seem to be cropping up every few weeks at Yahoo! When a company starts shutting down and selling off assets with increasing frequency, like Yahoo! has, investors start taking notice. Whilst aligning themselves with their main money-making markets – search advertising and email – might be a good thing, one can’t help but wonder if they’re not already too late to fight against Google’s ever-growing dominance of the industry.