Change is the only constant in the music business, and that goes double for the digital music business. Nonetheless, we've assembled a list of the 10 hottest digital music websites in the world.Criteria were simple and admittedly subjective: Sites were chosen based not only on what they currently do for music fans, but also on their potential to impact the future development of the music industry. Based on how things go with the first iteration, this list could be updated periodically and opened for voting.Without further ado, here's are Wired.com Listening Post's top 10 hottest digital music websites. You may have noticed that we use imeem's music-embedding feature quite a bit when covering music on the Listening Post blog. This is not becausewe have some sort of business deal in place with them; imeem is simply thebest option we've found for embedding music without worrying about getting permission from a label. In most cases, we're able to find a full songor two to embed from their catalog.Our only quibble with this systemis that they only allow 30 seconds of certain songs to be embedded, andthere's no way to tell until you preview the post.There's a lot more to imeem than just their blog strategy, of course, which is so powerful in part due to the company's for free, on-demand music.
The site also includes social networkingfeatures, videos and loads of free music. And even songs that can only beembedded as a 30-second version stream in their entirety if you playthem while you're signed in to imeem.This may seem like an odd choice, but bear with me. IVideosongs isone of a handful of new sites that teach the guitar online through thevideo medium.
We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us.
Demand is only growing for these sites, as the GuitarHero and Rock Band.Some of their tutorials are free, others cost a small fee. At the highend of the price scale ($10), you'll find songs being taught by theperson who wrote them, or who was associated with their recording(George Martin's son teaches Beatles songs on the site, for instance). Online music education has huge potential, and the guitar is at theforefront of the movement for a number of reasons. From what we'veseen, iVideoSongs is currently the best option out there.In May, in the iTunes store were iVideosongs tutorials. The site has licensingdeals in place with the big five music publishers as well as smallermusic publishers. Their high-definition videos play full screen on acomputer or on iPods and other portable devices.This UK-based music service charges cellphone subscribers a lowmonthly fee for unlimited access to over a million tracks from their phones.
This is a fine deal as it is, but we likethe frosting too: a feature that tailors your news feeds based on theartists you listen to the most, and a social networking feature thatlets you share tracks with your friends.When I tested, the company fronted the expensiveroaming fees required for me to test the service fromAmerica, using a phone its CEO Rob Lewis deliveredto me in person.Although the service is not yet available in the United States, Lewis said he is in talks with labels about rolling the service out here. He expects the U.S. Version of the service to cost less than a current monthly Rhapsodysubscription – around $7.50 per month.I actually don't use this site, but it's not because I don't like it. After a full day of covering music and digital music news on, it wouldn't make sense to spend my free timeblogging about music on MOG.
But the one million or so people who visit MOG eachmonth have been writing up a storm, and the site recently added lyricsand a video hub to give them even more to talk about.According to a MOG spokeswoman, some of its users are gaining netfame, like, whose MOG profile currently lists her MOG meter status as 'blazing.' The site also offers a smattering of celebrity bloggers including BenGibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, Questlove of The Roots and Greg Saunierof Deerhoof, but their posting schedule is far slacker than those ofMOG's non-touring users.You can't listen to much music on the site without a, but its plentiful YouTube videos make up for that to a certainextent, and the site's navigation, design and proliferation ofmusic-oriented communication features were enough to put it on our list.Some might look at Muxtape and wonder why its features are so limited. Why can't I search?
Why can't I customize the look of the player? Andwhy are the fonts so big?The thing is, there are hordes of sites out there that offer morefunctions than most people will ever use. Muxtape doesone thing, and it does it very, very well: It allows people to createonline MP3 mix tapes in a matter of minutes, no expertise or hassletolerance required.Despite servers crashing when the site first launched and asubsequent of a small percentage of newly created mixes, the siteis back on track and has plenty of room for expansion. Muxtape'screator told us that while he won't rule out advertising completely, heplans to keep Muxtape super simple in subsequent releases, which isgood news for anyone who likes to share music without jumping throughhoops.When the guy who founded Engadget and Gizmodo joins forces with theguy who runs Downtown Records, one would expect interesting things to happen. Indeed, RCRD LBL, the joint venture between Peter Rojas and JoshDeutsch, is gaining traction among music fans who want free music. Their site merges two major online trends, blogs and free music, ina way that gets everybody paid.RCRD LBL pays recording artists and remixers a flat fee for a song ranging up to $5,000, andthen offers free MP3 downloads, streams, widgets and radio stationsusing the resulting music catalog to its users.
As I wrote back when, 'how they make money from thatis their business' (advertising and sponsorships).The company is in the process of banding with a fewother independent music-oriented blogs to present a larger chunk ofpageviews for advertisers.Imagine a big, invisible net that could haul in all of the fish that are hiding under variousrocks and crags of the world's oceans. Except the fish stay just where theyare, despite the fact that you get as many fish as you want.That's basically what SeeqPod does for music. It scours the netfor MP3s in all sorts of locations, presenting them through a simple searchbox, a moving tracker that showcases the site's latest discoveries and an that turns the internet into a music collection for your iPhone.
In addition, you can (anywhere HTML is used.As with many innovators before it, SeeqPod is currentlystaring down a. But as a directory that doesn'thost any music, it would appear to have certain legal protections./Paradoxically, as more people seem to be investing time rather thanmoney to acquire music, a growing number of fans are ponying up coldhard cash to invest in bands themselves.Once they reach a certainlevel of fan investment, bands on Sellaband and SlicethePie get to use a pool of theirinverstors' money ranging from $30,000 to $50,000 to record and market an album. Not only do investors get a copy of that album, but they see a returnon album sales and can trade shares in bands as they would a company's stock.Sellaband was the first company to pioneer this approach, but we're including SlicethePie here too, since.If you've ever tried to puzzle your way through iTunes' musicsubmission process, you know how labyrinthine and tedious it can be.
Now, multiply that hassle by the number of digital music outlets in theworld, and you start to see why TuneCore is so important.In case you haven't heard of it, TuneCore allows anyone to distributesongs or albums to iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, eMusic and so on, forpreposterously low fees. None other than Trent Reznor used TuneCore todistribute his 36-song opus Ghosts I-IV to iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody and other outlets.This company is a true enabler, and TuneCore's latest move could make it even more disruptive. The company recently released an API that gives anyone the ability todistribute other peoples' music digitally, worldwide (with permission, of course).Whatever the next version of the record label is, it's probably going to require a distributor that looks a lot like TuneCore.This is another sort of counterintuitive choice. Isn't YouTube a video site? Guess again, says a certain digital music insider, who once said to me, 'Want to see the best on-demand music service in the world?
Go to YouTube and close your eyes.' He was right.Thanks to licensing deals with the labels, hordes of loyal users scouring the dustbins of history for every last scrap of available footage, and a generous embedding policy, no list of the best music sites in the world would be complete without YouTube.Honorable Mentions, for hosting so many music blogs (as suggested by Michael Calore of ). He writes, 'I have no idea why everyone's choosing that platform in particular, but when I want to find either advance releases or obscure, out-of-print '70s Turkish psyche-prog vinyl rips, i add 'blogspot' to my google search and there they are.combines some of the biggest trends in music:. Although the company has only signed deals with a few labels, itspotential is huge – especially in the youth market. Kids and teenswith cellphones but not credit cards and time but not money will likelysee the value in watching an ad or playing a videogame with a corporatelogo in order to download free music to their cellphones.scrapes scores of so you don't have to, but the sheer volume of music on the site can be sort of overwhelming.has an awesome scrobbling feature that lets your friends know what you've been listening to, great social features, and a that compensates indie artists, unlike.
But it needed a bigger selection of on-demand music even before.is still the king of band pages, but now that sites like imeem have on-demand streaming and allow external embedding, its importance could diminishing. Plus, if ad-supported music is the future, as far as MySpace is concerned.probably would have made thelist if its catalog were larger and if the Copyright Royalty Boardwasn't threatening to drive it out of business with., 'the world's first free and legal P2P service,' has had a rocky start, with a of, despite having in place with of the big four record labels. The company still has a long way to gobefore it realizes its full potential, but oh, what a potential that is.
Qtrax's vision is to bring vast amount of music on P2P networks –- asmany as 25 or 30 million songs (over three times what's available oniTunes) –- back onto the reservation by cleaning them up, wrapping themin DRM (partially so that playcounts can be easily tabulated) andpresenting them to users for free in an ad-supported environment. The labels are apparentlyconsidering allowing this to be done, but haven't yet fully committedto the concept. As a result, Qtrax's catalog of official label releasescurrently reside on its own servers.has already, but it could become a household name if they implement to keep music updated on the devices in cars.Photo.