Sharing music is becoming a favorite social feature for many people with Facebook introducing the News Ticker and deep integration with apps like Spotify and Rdio using the Open Graph platform.

Letting people know what you’re listening to and what music you’ve purchased is a great way to not only let your friends know what you’re interested in, but it’s a great way for artists to sell more music and nab new fans.

Google Play is getting some social treatment thanks to a Google+ integration called “Shared With Me” that is an automatically generated playlist of all of the music your Google+ friends have shared with you on the service. This functionality lets you take advantage of the fact that if your friend buys a song, you get a full listen for free.

Here’s what the Google Play team had to say about Shared With Me:

Just like your email inbox, there’s a handy count of everything you haven’t listened to yet. Those tracks are bolded in the playlist. You’ll see a thumbnail of the person who shared the track with you and the first few words of their Google+ post. You can sort this list by song, sharer, duration, album, artist, or even price, and delete any tracks or albums you don’t want to see there. If you love what you hear, each track has a buy button so you can own it too.

Music you buy and share will show up in the “Shared with me” playlists of the people in your Google+ circles.

When you go to Google Play, you’ll see the new playlist on the left hand side:

Along with the song and artist information, you’ll also see who shared the track with you. Right from this playlist you can give the track a listen and of course buy it for yourself if you like.

➤ Google Play

During her presentation at Microsoft’s Think Next conference, she showed off some of her work and then “performed” an amazing set with robotic drums that she controlled from an iPad.

You’ve gotta check this out:

Here’s a closer look at the drums that have music composed and played with a music sequencer all on an iPad:

Pretty awesome huh? Wanna know how they were made? Check out Segal’s blog post for full geeky details.

When I was at SF Music Hack Day last month there were a few projects that jumped out at me. Some of them were software based and a few were hacks of hardware. One project that instantly caught my eye was a projected called “Tabber”, which is a contraption that hooks onto your guitar to teach you how to play.

Yes, I’m attracted to bright blinking lights, but as I watched one of the developers hacking away on it alone in a room, I could tell that this thing might actually work. What Tabber does is stream guitar tabulators to a device and lights blink up on the next note of the song. You can tweak the speed of the song so you can keep up with it until you’ve mastered it, which makes this thing an incredible learning tool.

The team behind the Tabber has finally launched its Kickstarter campaign to bring the device to the masses. To make it a reality for all, the team of three passionate music geeks are hoping to raise $45,000. Check out the Tabber in action:

Along with looking super neat and potentially helping you to become the next Van Halen member, the team wants to keep the project hackable and open-sourced:

We believe that music is every bit as much about people as it is about notes in a song. Our goal is to create a community of not only music lovers, but creative people who like to build things that others can use. What kind of things will get built? We don’t know yet, but that’s the point. Should our project reach it’s funding goal, both the hardware and software will be hackable to people and we’ll be able to share all of those ideas on www.tabber.co!

If you’re a music fan or a hardcore gadget fan, this is a project that you should really get behind. I can attest to the fact that the team is hardworking, believes that everyone can learn how to play guitar, and are more than passionate enough to see this project all the way through.

With Kickstarter blowing up with activity lately, I see no reason why the Tabber won’t see similar success.

➤ Tabber on Kickstarter

Rdio has announced big changes for its product at SXSW today as it holds a live broadcast discussing new features and a focus on sharing and playlists.

The company has said that it is now focusing on people by giving people the tools they need to create awesome playlists and share the music that they love.

Here’s a look at the site’s new design for its web version:

Among the new features for Rdio are:

- Focus on album artwork and songs
- Brand new navigation with a focus on top charts, new release, and friends playlists
- Adaptive design that fits the screen size you’re using
- Collaboraitve playlists
- Drag and drop sharing
- Private playlists
- Suggested user list

Here’s a video demo of the “new Rdio”:

By pulling out personal features like “your heavy rotation”, Rdio wants you to get outside of your own music listening experience and push you to see what your network is listening to. The company is definitely taking a few pages out of Spotify’s books when it comes to a social music listening experience. Obviously, Spotify doesn’t have a web version like Rdio does, so that’s a definite advantage for the company.

Paying subscribers can get this new version today by logging into their account and accepting the switch to the new version.

In case you were wondering to yourself what would become of Myspace now that it’s under new management after a $35M firesale to Specific Media, here’s your first glimpse.

Fox Digital Entertainment announced today that it would be releasing a brand new scripted Web series called “LET’S BIG HAPPY” exclusively on the social network that its parent company News Corporation used to own. That’s right, Fox is debuting a show on Myspace.

The show revolves around indie music so Fox figured that Myspace, which in its heyday was the place to debut and share your music as an artist, was the best place to launch the show. Here’s what Fox Digital Entertainment’s senior VP Matt Glotzer had to say about it:

We are excited to further our partnership with Myspace with a show like LET’S BIG HAPPY. With independent music as its focus, the series could not have a better launchpad.

The show is being sponsored exclusively by Taco Bell and is the second such deal between Fox and the once-purchased-for-$580M social network. Previously, Fox and Kia partnered up to bring a show called “WOLFPACK OF RESEDA” to Myspace.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed but I have to imagine that the team at Specific Media, which includes Justin Timberlake, has to be pretty stoked to get an opportunity to turn the Myspace brand around. I didn’t make that up, because the quote from Roger Mincheff, the current president of Myspace Entertainment, has words like “incredible” and “thrilled” in it:

LET’S BIG HAPPY is a stage for up-and-coming musical acts and provides an incredible opportunity to reach fans worldwide. The new Web series is in sync with Myspace’s unwavering commitment to developing artists. We’re thrilled to join forces with Fox Digital Entertainment to deliver on our promise to create and serve up original must-watch online programming.

I will now start popping my popcorn to watch how this train wreck project turns out.

Skipping tracks and pausing your music is something that you probably do twenty to thirty times a day. If you’re at work and someone starts chatting with you, you’ll start seeking out the pause button until the conversation is done.

What if you didn’t have to click a button at all? A new app by a company called Flutter lets you simply hold your hand up to your webcam to start and stop your music and it’s pretty freaking awesome.

The free app for Mac is a lightweight download and once you open it up it leaves your webcam on. While you’re playing your music in iTunes or Spotify, simply put your hand up in a “stop” gesture from at least six feet away from the camera:

This gesture for playing and pausing is the only one available right now for Flutter, which is in alpha, but if you start using your imagination then this app could get infinitely cooler with the addition of a few more gestures. Imagine being able to make a swipe motion that changes tracks without even having to click a button. Check out the app in action below:

It’s a really neat concept that could become quite handy when you have to quickly grab a phone call or want to pause your playlist during a party at your house. This app is definitely one to watch as I get pretty excited at the notion of being able to do more by just making hand signals and gestures.

The one downside to this is that if you’re using other apps like Skype that use your video camera, you won’t be able to use them at the same time. Other than that, get to gesturing!

➤ Flutter for Mac

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