Social music sharing has been around for quite a while now, with services such as Ping, Pandora, Grooveshark, Rdio, Spotify and others.

Now Turntable.fm, a startup released in May, has taken online music sharing to a whole another level, hitting 140,000 users in the first month.

It is similar to Second Life in some way, letting you create your own avatar, walk around, communicate with other users and create/share content.

Turntable.fm is a browser-based music streaming platform that allows you to share your favorite tracks and chat with others in real time. The service lets you create a list of tracks you want to spin from the music library, supplied by MediaNet, or upload your own mp3’s (the legality of this is still in question).

Every virtual room allows up to 5 DJ’s at a time, and if you get a spot, you can play your favorite tracks to the crowd. DJ’s in each “room” take turns playing music and everyone else can vote on each song, hitting either “lame” or “awesome” button at the bottom of the screen. Enough “lames” will get a song to skip; the “awesome” button makes your avatar bob your head and gives a DJ more points.

Besides the main purpose of sharing music, the service has the gaming aspect to it – the more DJ points you earn, the more options you will have to make your avatar really stand out in a crowd.

The fact that you can’t choose your own music lineup makes this service more similar to Pandora that functions on the same “online radio” basis.

The long-awaited release of the Turntable.fm iPhone app took the virtual DJ’ing out of home/office and to the streets (or pretty much anywhere you happen to have your iPhone). So far the app only works well with a Wi-Fi connection and has a few other glitches that the company is currently in the process of fixing.

Seems like it’s not going to be long until the service will start looking for ways to make money from sponsorships, and many up-and-coming artists might be likely to jump on that opportunity.

Turntable.fm is great for promotional reasons – it lets users discover a multitude of tracks and find artists they like. However, the service limits the number of times the same artist can be played in one “room,” making it difficult for a single band to promote their music, or for a venue to promote an upcoming concert.

As long as the service stays legal, it doesn’t hurt the music industry, but it is still too early to judge how much real profit the music industry might actually gain from the platform registered (under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) as a “non-interactive” music service, and whose business model is currently “under construction.”

Talk has been swirling for months prior to this past Saturday’s release of the Apple iPad as to whether the touch-screen tablet could be or definitely won’t be the savior of print media. (If it’s the former, paid newspaper apps clearly aren’t the way to go.)

But there’s been surprisingly little talk about what this revolutionary(?) device could mean for another struggling industry: music.

With so many labels and artists faltering because of the free exchange of their product, the arrival of a new device for conveying and possibly capitalizing on that flow of content should be a call to arms for the industry. Shouldn’t it?

Instead, it seems that the music industry is either behind the curve or waiting to see how this iPad craze shakes out. (So far, some 300,000 people are shaking it out.)

Back in January, we suggested that the iPad could enhance the music-consumption experience for end users and also empower self-managing musicians.

So far, the marketplace isn’t there yet. But there are a few early adopters.

1. Music Makers

Epicenter highlights the free Rj Voyager iPad app. Made especially for the electronic group Kids on DSP (which, by the way, seems like an obscure choice), the Rj Voyager allows users to manipulate the group’s songs through the iPad’s touch interface.

Here’s a demo (imagine your finger where the cursor is):

Wired credits the app to Michael Breidenbruecker, formerly of Last.fm and now with reality app design firm RjDj.

In addition to everything else it is, the iPad could be the quintessential active (as opposed to passive) music playback device. The tilt sensor has clear potential for adding filter sweeps and other effects. The ambient-light sensor could put on ambient music when your lights turn low. And of course the multitouch screen has massive potential for virtual synthesizers and touch interfaces yet to be conceived.

We put the question to Breidenbruecker: Will the iPad’s larger screen help people interact with music, rather than just listening passively?

“Absolutely,” he agreed. “I think the genre will see a big move forward on the iPad. I don’t think everyone is interested in fiddling around with music like musicians are doing. Instead, we will see totally new formats and also music-related games gaining traction … we want to offer a solid technology platform for this.”

Now that’s more like it!

I have no doubt that in the very near future, people — especially kids — will be making music on the iPad and devices like it.

Just as ProTools made the PC a home-recording juggernaut, the iPad will pave the way for a whole wave of tablet musical engineers.

Already on the way: Midipad, a Multi-touch iPad midi controller. (That’s the image at the top of this entry.)

Because even more compelling than people composing music on an iPad is the possibility of hyper-intuitive, touch-screen apps that facilitate home recording. Want to move a track? Just touch it and drag it. Think about it.

2. Music Players

Not great news here. Though, naturally, the iPad will carry iTunes, CNET reports that the device won’t be able to stream music until “at least the third quarter.” CNET writes:

It will be a disappointment for iTunes fans who have been speculating as to when Apple might use music site Lala–which Apple acquired in December–for its streaming expertise to launch a cloud-based music service.

Meanwhile, CBS, of all companies, is the first major conglomerate to launch an iPad app. Called, dinosaurically, “Radio.com,” the app provides streaming music (much of it from Yahoo), news and sports content.

Not exactly an auspicious start for iPad music consumers, but as streaming functionality is added and more and more people get their hands on these little machines, the music industry will be forced to adapt.

Or it can settle for what it already does best: Dying.

You may not have heard of Noush Skaugen, but the British singer is one of few independent artists who has made over a million off her music — a million Twitter followers, that is. 1,240,166, to be exact.

That’s more than Jay-Z and Rihanna combined.

How does Noush do it?

For one thing, unlike those Grammy winners, she does her own tweeting, interacting directly with fans and giving them glimpses into her real life.

Like Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, who used Twitter to mobilize fans and make $19K in 10 hours, Skaugen understands that Twitter followers aren’t just numbers. They’re people invested in her career.

In a guest column for Sandbox.fm, Skaugen explains her Twitter philosophy. Just about everything she says could apply to anyone looking to use social media to spread brand enthusiasm, not just DIY musicians. An early adopter, Skaugen found that authenticity and transparency, combined with organic cultivation of her fanbase (i.e., no tricks), brought her to where she is today.

I am sincere and transparent with my tweets, love to chat with my followers, letting them in on what’s going on behind the scenes of the music industry from an independent artist’s perspective. It’s a two-way conversation.

I don’t have a label’s intern or digital marketing rep tweeting for me – so it’s very fluid and brutally honest. There’s no smokescreen, people and fans can see straight through some marketing dude pretending they are the artist. They can unfollow as quickly as they follow. Artists are now able to connect on a one to one basis with fans virtually and in real-time, so they feel like they are on this rollercoaster with us, something not possible 20 years ago.

Earlier this month, Skaugen became the first DIY artist to perform live from Twitter’s corporate headquarters. Watch the footage here (no promises on the sound quality).

And if you spend any time exploring Noush’s various online profiles, you’ll see she’s an industrious content creator — which, in addition to connecting with fans directly, is the other thing any independent artist must learn. Case in point: the video she made of her time at SXSW.

Whether or not you dig her music, you gotta give it to Noush.

If you were trying to make a career in music, would you participate in a popularity contest that forced you to stop using your own personal Facebook, Twitter and MySpace accounts? Seems a bit defeating, doesn’t it?

Evidently, this season’s round of American Idol contestants have been forced to give up their use of social media, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The WSJ reports:

As of roughly 6 p.m. ET on March 3, all Twitter, Facebook and MySpace followers of individual “American Idol” contestants were sent the same message: “Thanks so much for following me/joining my Fan Page! All my updates from now on will be on our Official American Idol 9 Contestant Page, please become a fan there to read all my updates throughout the season!”

The show’s producers have also created consolidated Twitter, Facebook and MySpace accounts.

I’m not sure what American Idol thinks its going to accomplish by trying to control all conversation. Hoard traffic? Stifle unsanctioned campaigns? Keep contestants from tweeting from behind the scenes? It’s almost as if the producers are frightened of how social media could disrupt their model.

Well, if any of this year’s contestants do become hot, rest assured the fans will start their own campaigns. In fact, if that doesn’t happen, then Fox will have real reason to worry. In the meantime, the fact that Fox is shutting down massive channels of free and even somewhat controlled marketing is baffling.

Damian Kulash has really taken it to the mattresses with EMI.

You may remember about a month ago, the frontman of virally famous OK Go posted an open letter to the band’s forum complaining about how its label, EMI, had quashed their recent attempts to get the word out about their new album and tour via viral video.

The band has gotten where it is by shooting memorable videos on the cheap then allowing fans to share the videos on blogs, social networking profiles, etc. (See the “treadmill video.”)

“My band is famous for music videos,” begins Kulash’s Saturday, February 20, op-ed for the New York Times.

Band-label feuds are nothing new, but the fact that this one has reached the Times, features a fairly obscure group of musicians and is all about viral video and social media makes it a study in the question of whether or not free digital media will save the sinking music industry.

Major labels have fought the free sharing of content. This is just the latest battle. Kulash explains that labels like EMI only get paid royalties for their bands’ videos when people watch them on YouTube proper. But, he argues, “Viral content doesn’t spread just from primary sources like YouTube or Flickr. Blogs, Web sites and video aggregators serve as cultural curators, daily collecting the items that will interest their audiences the most.”

This is why it’s so frustrating to come across the phrase “Embedding disabled by request” where you’d normally grab the code for a YouTube video to place it on your blog. That drives bloggers like me crazy.

What difference does it make whether a video is watchable on a blog or on YouTube itself? You can still watch the video free, right? Or, you can post a screencap with a link, like I did with the video above.

Well, it turns out that breaking the circuit does make an impact in the overall result.

Kulash reveals: “When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000. Our last royalty statement from the label, which covered six months of streams, shows a whopping $27.77 credit to our account.”

He continues: “Clearly the embedding restriction is bad news for our band, but is it worth it for EMI? The terms of YouTube’s deals with record companies aren’t public, but news reports say that the labels receive $.004 to $.008 per stream, so the most EMI could have grossed for the streams in question is a little over $5,400.”

Only by thinking of media like video as marketing tools instead of products with price tags on them, Kulash says, will labels begin to thrive in the post-album landscape.

We couldn’t agree more.

Plus, EMI could use some good will. Not only is it losing billions, the giant has faced public outcry over rumors it was going to sell the Beatles’ famous record studio, Abbey Road. (EMI says it’s not. Kinda.)

On the Local: OK Go recently played in Kansas City. Read our friend Tim Finn’s review.

Weird: OK Go also recently plied its videomaking skills to conduct a tour of EMI’s posh German headquarters. Huh? Not exactly the behavior of a band feuding with its label. Then again, we could see German execs who are clueless about the reality situation going, Let’s get zees funny yanks vits ze funny videos to do a shoot of our headqvarters.

OK, bad German accent approximation, but you get zee idea.

Sometimes old dogs can learn new tricks.

In fact, you don’t have to be a fan of that old Schnauzer the Recording Academy to be completely blown away by the elegant and compelling social media campaign it’s created in the run-up to the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards — it’s a virtual doggy ballet, in fact.

Rather than explicitly spreading the Grammys’ in-house branding, the Academy has embraced the notion of user generated content as a reflection of artist buzz.

To exploit this concept, Grammy marketers have created a dedicated site, wereallfans.com (or “we’re all fans” — the contraction is a bit awkward), that collects fan-created YouTube videos, Flickr photos and tweets related to the top nominees and places them in a beautifully miasmic visualizer. It might give you motion sickness, but it’s really cool.

Best of all, you can add to the party by clicking on “join the conversation” in the lower-left corner. Log in to your Twitter, Flickr or YouTube and whatever you post will float off into the fray. Or you can create your own fan portrait. Click on the “fanbuzz visualizer” for a slightly less vertiginous interactive graph showing each artist’s buzz.

Meanwhile, over at Grammy.com, the site’s been loaded up with social features: Facebook and Twitter feeds, community blogging and a free iPhone app, to name a few of the bells and whistles.

For anyone with the money to spend on a massive social media campaign, this is pretty much how it’s done.

Oh yeah, and: Leonard Cohen FTW!

Further reading: Billboard.biz interviews the marketers behind the campaign.

Invented in the early ’90s and pushed into the mainstream a decade later through platforms like iTunes, the MP3 revolutionized music.

By digitizing and compressing audio files into smaller units that could be downloaded and shared without losing sound quality, the MP3’s creators, whether meaning to or not, swept the rug out from under the music industry.

Now, it seems, one of those same inventors is looking to give back to the business he helped decimate.

With support from one of the MP3’s original creators, a German company called BACH Technology has introduced a digital music format to replace the MP3.

MusicDNA files will play on ordinary MP3 players, such as the iPod, but contains additional “rich media” content. According to TechDirt, when a user plays a MusicDNA file, they will have access to “relevant Twitter and MySpace feeds, Wikipedia articles and sleeve art, and could link through to concert ticket retailers and more.”

The logistics are unclear, but the rich content will presumably show in BACH’s iTunes-like MusicDNA player. A portable player is also in the works. (First thought: If Apple isn’t on board…)

“What we are bringing back to the end user is the entire emotional experience of music,” BACH CEO Stefan Kohlmeyer told Reuters (via Wired). “We think it got lost in the transition to the digital era. We think a beautiful piece of audio has been reduced to a number code. We want to enrich it again.”

They also want to give power back to the labels. BACH, along with the record companies that have shown interest, hope that consumers will pay a higher premium for the rich media content. They plan for illegally downloaded MusicDNA files to contain no extra content, working like standard MP3s (which means they also play for MusicDNA files to be illegally downloaded).

Herein lies the biggest challenge: Re-training listeners accustomed to consuming music en masse and taking it everywhere to stop and visually engage with the music they’re listening to. And to pay extra for that privilege.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens when MusicDNA rolls out this summer.

Would you buy it?

Four words music bloggers dread: Embedding disabled by request.

When a band puts a video on YouTube, and the band’s label (usually a major one) decides it doesn’t want fans sharing that video on their own web pages, the label will ask YouTube to remove the strip of code that allows users to embed. Through a deal with Google, labels get paid small amounts of ad revenue anytime their artists’ videos get watched on YouTube proper. They get $0 when someone watches an embedded video.

Though it’s an annoyance to bloggers, fans and musicians alike, you rarely hear complaints about the policy. Until, that is, a band like OK Go gets involved.

You may remember the Chicago-born band for its 2005 viral hit, “A Million Ways.” The video for that song, which featured the band’s four members doing a choreographed dance routine on treadmills, became a viral smash and launched the band to nearly overnight fame.

You’d think everyone invested in the band’s success would want to replicate that action as closely as possible. The band’s label, EMI, however, had other plans — and those plans involved grounding OK Go’s latest low-budget, would-be-viral-hit on YouTube.

The band’s response? To damn the torpedoes and release the video to Vimeo (which EMI is currently suing) in order for fans to share it.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

This is actually the second would-be viral from the band’s new album, Of the Blue Coulour of the Sky. The first, “WTF,” came out a few weeks ago and is here (embedding disabled). But because the record was released this week, OK Go was extra incensed by EMI’s decision to quash the embedding. So much so, in fact, that singer Damian Kulash released an “open letter” on the matter.

It’s an interesting statement on the state of the music industry.

First, Kulash explains why the band is on a major.

See, here’s the deal. The recordings and the videos we make are owned by a record label, EMI. The label fronts the money for us to make recordings – for this album they paid for us to spend a few months with one of the world’s best producers in a converted barn in Amish country wringing our souls and playing tympani and twiddling knobs – and they put up most of the cash that it takes to distribute and promote our albums, including the costs of pressing CDs, advertising, and making videos. We make our videos ourselves, and we keep them dirt cheap, but still, it all adds up, and it adds up to a great deal more than we have in our bank account, which is why we have a record label in the first place.

He then goes on to explain the reason why labels like EMI are so protective of content: because revenue from album sales have plummeted to nearly zilch and labels need every penny they can get, including those from YouTube ads.

So why did OK Go go against its label and release its videos to Vimeo, a site that’s known for rejecting advertising?

So, for now, here’s the bottom line: EMI won’t let us let you embed our YouTube videos. It’s a decision that bums us out. We’ve argued with them a lot about it, but we also understand why they’re doing it. They’re aware that their rules make it harder for people to watch and share our videos, but, while our duty is to our music and our fans, theirs is to their shareholders, and they believe they’re doing the right thing.

And then Kulash gives the embed code for Vimeo. Snap!

This whole situation, however unfortunate, has resulted for a LOT of publicity for OK Go this week, albeit mainly on tech and music-biz blogs.

Still, in a climate where David-and-Goliath stories like this and Conan vs. NBC are grabbing headlines and causing huge backlashes across social media, maybe this is the best thing that could’ve happened to OK Go.

What would you have done in the band’s position?

Free blogs, inexpensive hosting, DIY website building, social networking, free online retail …

Today, the sky’s the limit when it comes to building up your own website, blog, business or online media channel on the cheap and making it profitable.

Cory Doctorow would know. With inspiration and lots of hard work, the journalist and sci-fi author built his tech-oriented blog Boing Boing into a business valued at $18 million, and there are many like him.

In a recent essay for Locus magazine, Doctorow explains why this works: It’s rock and roll. Or, close enough, at least.

Comparing new media to cheap and dirty rock and roll and traditional media to weighty, expensive orchestral music (though he could have just as easily contrasted punk with mainstream music — the choice in analogy isn’t the point), Doctorow breaks down the formula to something we can get behind: Why spend tons of money making something good when you can make something almost as good for the fraction of the cost?

If the Internet has a motif, it is rock ‘n’ roll’s Protestant Reformation thrashing against the orchestral One Church. Rock ‘n’ roll gets lots of wee kirks built in every hill and dale in which parishioners can find religion in their own ways; choral music erects majestic cathedrals that humble and amaze, but take three generations of laborers to build.

The interesting bit isn’t what it costs to replicate some big, pre-Internet business or project.

The interesting bit is what it costs to do something half as well as some big, pre-Internet business or project.

Take Newsweek. If you wanted to launch Newsweek today, you’d probably have to spend as much as Newsweek did. Maybe more, since you’d not only have to do what Newsweek does, you’d have to somehow outspend or outmaneuver Newsweek to get there.

But what does it cost to publish something half as good as Newsweek, say, the Huffington Post? Sure, HuffPo has brought in about $20MM in venture capital, but ignore that sum — that’s how much they can sweet talk out of the world of finance. I’m talking about how much capital it cost to build and operate HuffPo. A tiny, unmeasurable fraction of what it cost to build and run Newsweek.

And how much is Huffington Post worth? A cool $112.

What does this mean?

…he continues…

Cheaper experimentation, cheaper failure, broader participation. Which means more diversity, more discovery, more good stuff that could never surface when the startup costs were so high that no one wanted to take any risks.

The moral: Invest a little, work a lot, and start rocking.

Image courtesy Invisible Hour, via Doctorow’s Craphound blog.

Need extras for your band’s new video, but lack the budget for the pizza and Amstel Light? Why not source it to the crowd?

That’s exactly what Dutch electro-pop quartet C-Mon & Kypski did with its latest video. Redefining the term “casting call,” the group created a dedicated web page, OneFrameOfFame.com, with a built-in program to fire up the viewer’s webcam and capture footage to be included in the official music video.

Of course, a plan like that needs structure, so C-Mon & Kypski asked participants to copy a pose demonstrated by one of the band members.

The end result (viewable on the main page) is superfantastic: each band member initiates a pose that is then mimicked by dozens, maybe even hundreds of others. Talk about breaking down the wall between a band and its fans.

Best of all, some fans got creative, like this guy, who wrapped Christmas lights around himself.

That kind of fan enthusiasm, you just can’t buy.

What are some other ways bands, artists, even businesses, could make use of social video?