The power of Spotify is its expansive database of music that you can stream on your desktop or with a premium account, a mobile device. You’ll be extremely hard-pressed to not be able to find a particular track or musician that you like on the service.

As the company is turning itself into a music platform complete with its own app store and public API, more and more great apps are popping up around listening to tracks on Spotify.

One absolutely gorgeous app is called SpotON Radio and it’s available for iOS. The premise is simple, you enter an artist that you like and the app uses the popular Echo Nest API to create a radio station of songs that are similar to the artist you chose. This functionality might sound familiar, as it’s exactly what Pandora has done quite well for years.

The difference between an app like this and Pandora is that you can save tracks to your existing playlists or create new ones, since the app is built around Spotify. You must have a premium Spotify account to use the app, so if you’re still on the fence about dropping down $10 a month, SpotON might change your mind.

Thumbs up!

As I mentioned, if you’ve ever used Pandora you’ll be extremely familiar with what SpotON has to offer. As soon as you log into the account with your Spotify account you’re shown a list of your top artists, meaning the ones you listen to the most. From there you can let the app build radio stations comprised of tracks and artists that are similar to the one you chose:

When a station is created, you’ll be able to do a few things with it; save it as a Spotify playlist, thumbs up and thumbs down tracks to help the app choose music for you, and share your stations on Facebook. The app itself is beautifully designed and having used it for a better part of the day, I can see myself not using Pandora as much since being able to find new tracks and save them directly to a Spotify playlist is something I just can’t do with Pandora.

The great part about jumping between tracks is that you don’t have the constraints that Pandora puts on you by limiting how many times you can jump ahead to the next track.

The app is currently free but hints on its app store copy and website that it could have a cost associated with it in the future. While I would highly suggest this app even if it cost a few bucks, the fact that its free makes the download an absolute no-brainer. Again, if you haven’t picked up a premium account for Spotify, you’re really missing out. SpotON is just one way a seemingly infinite database of great music can be put to use in a whole host of ways.

➤ SpotON Radio for iOS

Discovering music has become easier thanks to services like Pandora and Spotify. It seems that everywhere you turn on Facebook, you’re shown a new track someone is listening to currently or a new music video on YouTube.

While all of these services provide instant and on the go music recommendations, sometimes you just want to get dirty and dig through information about musicians to find out their history and who they’ve influenced or have been influenced by. When you use Pandora, you know that a station has music that is related, but they don’t spell it out for you to learn why the music is similar.

I found a site today that is perfect for music junkies, and it’s called Music Bloodline. For someone who isn’t just a casual music listener, this site is a goldmine of information and artist discovery. By showing you how artists are influenced and who they’ve in turn influenced, you’ll spend hours digging through these links to find musicians that you’ve never even heard of.

This visualization uses the popular Rovi API that powers many entertainment apps, and was created during Music Hack Day Boston 2011.

Bob Dylan has influenced everyone

When you first load the site, you’re shown popular artists on the left hand side and those are the musicians that are the most influential. You’re shown a popular artist in the middle, and to the right of that the artists that they have in turn influenced.

If you like, you can search in the box up top to find one of your favorite artists and start from there, however I found that it’s fun to just click through what you’re shown to see the lineage between how these musicians have influenced each other over the years.

When you click on an artist, it will move to the center spot and give you a quick bio about them as well as links to tracks and albums on Spotify. It’s a really handy launching point to listen to some new music or to add tracks to existing playlists on the service.

If you’re not in the mood to listen to automatically created music that’s similar and would rather do some reading and historical digging into the relationship between artists, then I suggest giving Music Bloodline a try. Once you start clicking around you’ll probably end up blowing a few hours of your time, but you’ll be adding more music to your playlists, so it’s worth it.

Music Bloodline

There are quite a few ways to find new music that could jump right into your daily listening playlist, but most of the services either require your friends to participate like Spotify, or use a complex algorithm to generate its own playlists like Pandora.

One app wants your mood to do all of the work when it comes to discovering music. The Musicovery Player gives you a feature it calls the “mood pad” which lets you change the type of music that is playing just by tapping on the area that fits your current mood at the moment.

The app is free and comes with a 30 day free premium account which gives you access to the entire Musicovery catalog. After the 30 days, you can pay $4 a month if you end up liking the service. If you don’t pay, you can still use it with your own music that you have stored on your device.

It’s a calm kinda day

With the mood pad being your main interface for the app you’re not just going through and picking individual songs to listen to, you’re generating playlists with whatever feedback you give it. You can move your finger around and get a sampling of the type of music that mood would generate and once you’re happy with the selection just move your finger away and the playlist will be generated and start playing.

When you first open the app, tracks are downloaded automatically that match what you have on your device already, so you’re not caught waiting when you’re ready to listen to some new tunes.

The mood axes are calm to energetic and dark to positive and when you tap anywhere in between the technology is surprisingly accurate in the music that it chooses. I’m a huge music fan and mostly use Spotify to find my favorite tracks, but after using this app for a while it’s nice to jump back and forth effortlessly between playlists that are generated on the fly.

Here’s a video demo of the app and its mood technology:

If you do want to interact with the playlists, you can favorite tracks or ban them from being played again which is similar to the thumbs up and down approach of Pandora.

Most of the time when I’m working all I need is background music, so setting the tone with the mood pad is super simple and doesn’t require a lot of attention from when I’m busy. If you’re super into curating playlists of music, this isn’t the app for you though.

➤ Musicovery Player for iOS

With its presence on platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, and Mac and PC desktop apps, the service continues to gain popularity globally. This expansion was promised last year, and the company came through with its “early 2012″ launch target.

Users in Australia and New Zealand can start using Rdio with a 7-day trial, and the cost will then be $8.90 each month, or $12.90 with mobile service (Australian).

Rdio sports an impressive database with over 12 million songs, all available ad-free. A small section of users will be happy about Rdio’s continued expansion, as they’ll now be able to keep listening to their music while traveling abroad.

➤ Rdio

Last November, I introduced you to Daria Musk, a musician who is leveraging Google+ to launch her career in a brilliant way. Her story stood out to me as a reason why Google+ can win the social network war, or at least stand its own against powerhouses like Facebook.

Musk grabbed onto Google+ and squeezed everything she can out of its current features, namely Google+ Hangouts. She holds live concerts whenever she wants to, including a 24 hour marathon on New Year’s Eve and Day. No travel was involved, no roadies needed, and all of her fans got to watch and interact for free.

Recently, the Google+ team brought Musk out to Mountain View all the way from Connecticut to talk to the team about how she has adopted the product and brought her music to thousands of people from hundreds of countries.

In the video, Google+ product marketing manager Louis Gray talks to Daria Musk about her experiences with the product as well as the history of her career to date. Listening to what a powerhouse user thinks about Google+ is well worth your time:

The idea of “global concerts in an instant” is one that will more than likely be adopted by artists with household names, and Musk is a trailblazer when it comes to this approach. She envisions a day when Hangouts will become a part of stage shows in the future, so that global crowds can be involved with the live action. She could be on to something.

Daria Musk on Google+

Musician David Bowie is known for a lot of things, namely his music and choice of wardrobe. On Sunday, the man who turned himself into “Ziggy Stardust” turned 65. Ten years ago, Bowie made a bold prediction about copyright and the music industry that has recently resurfaced.

In an interview with the New York Times, the man who has sold 140 million albums suggested that he soon wouldn’t want to be on a label because copyright would be dead by 2012. It’s 2012 and copyright isn’t dead, but he’s not far off with his predictions:

I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.

Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.

If you take out the bit about copyright not existing, Bowie is right on target. Everything about the music industry has indeed changed, and he called it way back in 2002. With services like Spotify and Rdio allowing listeners to wade through massive databases of music, the idea of purchasing an album is becoming extinct. Of course Apple’s iTunes isn’t suffering at all, but I’d bet that complete album sales are showing signs of fatigue over the past few years.

Not all musicians are embracing new technologies, as we learned with Coldplay’s stance against streaming music. The band wants to control its own distribution and doesn’t allow its music to be streamed. With digital music sales surpassing physical last year, we’re not done with the evolution of music yet.

For new artists who are trying to gain a following, touring is the best option to get in front of fans. No longer do you need a label to get you a spot on MTV or Radio, the Internet can easily turn you into a star if you have the chops. Just ask Justin Bieber.

The NYT is reporting today that Grooveshark is being sued again. This time the lawsuit comes from major record label EMI.

Less than two months ago, we reported that Universal Music Group was going after Grooveshark for illegally uploaded tracks to its music sharing service. While Grooveshark denies the claim, we haven’t heard much of it since, meaning it hasn’t been settled or dismissed as of yet.

EMI’s lawsuit claims that Grooveshark is in breach of contract, since it hasn’t paid music royalties that it agreed to pay since signing a deal in 2009.

The report by the NYT claims that these royalties total somewhere around $150,000. In addition to this new claim by EMI, Grooveshark has now infuriated all four major record labels with Sony Music and Warner Music Group joining the original Universal claim.

Grooveshark doesn’t appear to be worried about EMI’s claims, or so it seems from this company statement:

This is a contract dispute that we expect to resolve.

Grooveshark allows users to upload songs of any type to its service, letting them share the tracks with friends. With over 15 million songs in its database, it appears that record labels are starting to take notice of chunks of its libraries being shared for free.

Music has always been social, well before we had the Internet. We created mixtapes for every occasion; driving in the car, for when we get dumped, a new relationship, and the list goes on and on. A few sites have tried to harness the mixtape phenomenon and Spotify playlists have made sharing lists of music a pleasure once again.

A new site called “Everyone’s Mixtape” takes playlists a step further by visualizing the experience with an actual cassette tape, allowing you to include music found on YouTube, Vimeo, and Soundcloud.

Here’s how the site describes itself:

Everyone’s Mixtape’s celebrates the art of creating mixtapes. You can add to an existing mix, or start one of your own. Share with the world, your friends, or that girl from science class.

Everyone’s Mixtape is not about adding songs and hitting shuffle. It’s about the time you looked at a cassette’s length as a challenge. About the time you stayed up most of the night making sure all the tracks flowed from song to song. It’s about the time your heart skipped a beat when the boy from science class handed you your first mixtape.

It’s more than a playlist.

Creating a mixtape for someone is definitely fun, and the site makes it drop dead simple.

Everybody Hurts, Sometimes

When you get to Everyone’s Mixtape, you’ll see a list of playlists that are open for anyone to add to. The categories are one’s you’d expect like; Sunday Morning, Summer BBQ, Heartbreak, and Party. Just click on one of the mixtapes and find a song to add on YouTube, Vimeo, or Soundcloud. To add a song, simply drag the URL on top of the mixtape itself.

You can click on each track to listen and let the entire mixtape cycle through. To add songs or create your own mixtape, you have to sign up and choose a username. Unfortunately, when you listen to a track you’re not shown who submitted it. I think that would be a killer social touch to be able to see a profile for someone who has shared a song that you really like.

Make your own

Here’s a How-to video on how to make your own mixtape, it’s a pretty simple process:

Just name your mixtape, and start adding songs to it. You can change the order of the songs by dragging them around, even on the public playlists, which is a nice touch.

Once you’ve meticulously created your mixtape for that special someone, you can grab the link for it or share it on Facebook. This is cool, because your friends can come along and add tracks to it, or re-order the playlist. It makes for a fun social experience that you don’t get on Spotify, Rdio, or Last.fm.

I could totally see Everyone’s Mixtape taking off, considering how simple it is to use. With a beautiful interface and the ability to interact with public mixes, creating the perfect ‘Heartbreak’ combination could become somewhat of a contest.

With a few extra social features, the site could become stickier and bring people together in a way that other sites can’t. I think that Spotify integration would be a snap for the site as well, and that’s something I’ll keep an eye out for.

Everyone’s Mixtape is definitely more than a playlist, and the more time you spend working on your playlists, the more excited you’ll be to share them.

➤ Everyone’s Mixtape

Enjoy, and Happy Holidays punk style from The Next Web.

If you’re a fan of listening to the Top 40 countdown on the weekends with Ryan Seacrest, I feel bad for you. But seriously, the list you hear on the weekends are pulled together based on requests and airplay for songs on the radio. Who listens to the radio anymore?

Twitter is a source for all types of trending topics, including hot trends in music. One service has decided to focus solely on that and does an outstanding job.

TopForty.it tracks all of the tweets with the #NowPlaying hashtag and pulls them in as a vote toward who reigns supreme in the hearts, minds, and ears of Twitter users. It’s elegantly designed and is built for quick sharing of the tracks you can’t get out of your head.

While one service called Twitter Music Trends captures what’s hot in real-time, it didn’t punch out the daily top 40 feature quite like this service does.

Twitter + YouTube = TopForty.it

With all of the tweets that the service brings in, the top forty tracks for the day are calculated. Along with their current placement in the Top Twitter 40, the tracks previous day on the charts are being tracked as well, much like you’d expect on Billboard or Seacrest’s top 40.

If you click on a song, the official YouTube video launches on the top of the page, but doesn’t shoot you off to another page. You can continue catching up on where your favorite artist ranks today. The service also lets you Tweet out what you’re listening to or like it on Facebook.

It’s a perfect use of Twitter’s information, and an example of what the service could do itself with the amount of information it has passing through its servers every second. Twitter could easily become the source for top music, movies, and anything else. Maybe that’s a part of its plans to make money. Until then, TopForty.it has nailed an experience that makes total sense, tell us what’s hot right now based on what we’re listening to. It’s simple, and extremely well done.

Now pardon me, I must go watch that Katy Perry video for the 17th time.

➤ TopForty.it