Grooveshark’s most recent iteration looked much like a cloud-based version of iTunes with a few social aspects added here and there. The relaunch puts social front and center by emphasizing community features and Facebook-like activity streams. Users can comment on each other’s activity and easily share playlists, songs or even complete albums with each other. Ashenden called it “the first real push from Grooveshark to connect music fans with music fans.”

Ashenden also said that the company wants to bridge the divide between fans first, and then extend the same mechanisms to make connections between artists and fans. Grovveshark’s new version has a very basic artist page that includes an activity stream based on the listening and curation behavior of fans, as well as links to songs, albums and upcoming events of the respective artist. These event listings are currently pulled in from a third-party service, but Ashenden told me that the site wants to eventually give artists the tools to promote their own events and sell merchandise. He went on to say that Grooveshark has a treasure trove of listening data, and that it wants to start exposing some of that data in future releases.

These future initiatives won’t just be about making the site better, but also about adding new revenue streams. Paul Geller freely admitted that the company’s current paychecks to artists haven’t made anyone rich yet. But the same is true for competing services like Spotify: “Artists in this day and age haven’t been making a lot of money with streaming royalties,” he told me, explaining that streaming would only be one part of the pie — but possibly one that could help to shift the emphasis away from one-hit wonders, and towards more creativity. “Artists are being rewarded for a more deeper emotional connection,” he suggested, explaining that short-lived hits would over time make less money than deep catalogs of music people care about for decades.

Speaking of Spotify: Geller and Ashenden didn’t seem to worried about competing with the much-hyped music service. “We are thrilled to have Spotify in the States,” said Geller, adding that Grooveshark has seen its largest growth this year after Spotify launched stateside.

Of course, one big difference between Spotify and Grooveshark is their respective approaches towards licensing. Spotify only offers access to licensed songs. Grooveshark, on the other hand, invites its users to upload any kind of music, and then responds to take-down notices from rights holders to remove unlicensed content. That approach has given the company a much bigger catalog, but also more more trouble with rights holders.

The only major label that has licensed Grooveshark is EMI, and Universal Music is battling the service in court, alleging that it facilitates copyright infringement. Geller said that Grooveshark has been seeing “a tremendous amount of progress” in negotiations with the industry. The company is signing between 10 and 20 record label deals a month now, he added, but admits that not everyone is going to come around quickly. Said Geller: “People in the industry who have been doing business a certain way over the last 20 years are going to be threatened by this.”

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The free BBM Music app will first appear for BlackBerry owners in the U.S., Canada and Australia, with support in other regions coming soon. Each BBM friend can share up to 50 music tracks with other BBM Music users, making for a potentially large music collection powered by social relationships. The full music tracks can also be stored for offline listening.

Offering such a social music service makes sense for RIM. As the company transitions from the legacy BlackBerry platform to the new BBX operating system expected next year, sales of iPhones and Android handsets are eating away at RIM’s market share. For years, the BBM service was a key offering that no other platform had, but Apple recently introduced iMessage, which is similar: It works both as a real-time chat client and a text message application.

But iMessage has no method to share music or any other media, save photos. With BBM Music, RIM gives its users a value-add right out of the box in the form of full-length music tracks. This is a similar approach to the one that Nokia is taking with its new Windows Phone devices. Instead of turning on a new phone and having to download music or connect to a computer for audio files, the free Music Mix application plays preset music mixes, a Nokia exclusive for its Windows Phone handsets.

BBM Music is priced at $4.99 per month and normally includes a 30-day trial. RIM is currently extending the free trial to 60 days for a limited time. The subscription compares favorably to other streaming music services, but more importantly, it gives RIM two things: an additional income stream and more appeal to what was a one-dimensional but useful service in BBM. It’s not enough to compensate for a slow transition to a newer operating system, but it should help lessen RIM’s pain while keeping its loyal user base happy.

Image courtesy of Flickr user rjuttondfw

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Step 1: Get Spotify

There are two ways to get a Spotify account: either by invitation for a free account, or by paying for premium or unlimited accounts. Once you have an account set up, you’ll need to download and install the Spotify OS X client application. Then just start browsing for music and create playlists. Just a few more steps, and you’ll turn your house into one big Spotify jukebox.

Step 2: Extend AirPlay to any Mac music app with Airfoil

Next you’ll need Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil for Mac. Airfoil has been around since long before Apple introduced AirPlay and the second generation Apple TV. Any audio application on the Mac (including Spotify), or even the Mac’s system output can be made accessible to AirPlay devices with Airfoil.

1. Download and install Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil for Mac.
2. Choose Spotify in Airfoil as the application you want to play.
3. Choose the AirPlay and/or Airfoil device(s) you want to connect to.
4. Play music using Spotify.

Step 3: Extend your range with Airfoil speakers

One of the limitations of Apple’s AirPlay has been the fact that iOS devices themselves are not able to receive AirPlay streams, only send them. Luckily, Rogue Amoeba created an app called Airfoil Speakers Touch for iOS devices that allows Airfoil to play music on any and all iOS devices connected to your local network. This works great if you want to extend your playback to speakers that otherwise would not be connected. There’s also a version of Speakers for OS X (.zip file) that will allow you to extend your playback to all the Macs on your network. Keep in mind that you are limited to your local network, so this is not a workaround for taking your library on the go, which is only included in the premium and unlimited Spotify accounts.

Bonus: Remote control options to round it all off

Now that you’re playing music from Spotify around your house, how can you also control it remotely? There are two good third-party solutions to help with this: One will let you control Airfoil on your Mac, and the other will allow you to control Spotify.

• Reemote for Airfoil. Kai Aras’ Reemote lets turn on and off different combinations of Airfoil and AirPlay enabled devices on your network. You can even control their individual volumes, to some extent, and you can switch your audio source application on the host Mac. There is an iPhone as well as an iPad version of Reemote. To make this work, you’ll also need to download and install the Reemote Server application for Mac.
• Two Remotes for Spotify. To control what playlists you’re listening to from within Spotify on the Mac, there are two good solutions. Axel Moller’s Spot Remote and Anders O’s Remoteless. Both apps are universal, supporting both the iPhone and iPad. Both allow you to browse and start Spotify playlists, as well as search for tracks, artist and albums. Another thing they both share is the use of an open source library called SIMBL. The server software for Spot Remote as well as Remoteless requires that SIMBL be installed on the host Mac in order for either solution to work. SIMBL allows third-party developers to enhance the functionality of other applications from other developers. Unfortunately, while it seems to work for some, OS X Lion does not yet appear to be officially supported by either solution.

Since this does require a bit of setup, it isn’t quite as easy as just using iTunes and an Apple TV. But if you’re looking for an alternative that makes use of Spotify’s great new service, maybe this is the whole home music solution you’ve been waiting for.

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Here’s a breakdown of the other features in the service tiers, including offline mode to store tracks and advertising-free playback:

The removal of ads is nice, as is truly unlimited streaming, assuming you don’t have bandwidth caps to contend with, but to me, the big feature is Spotify playback on mobiles. And another Premium feature dovetails nicely with the supported handsets: Playlists can be used offline, allowing for music from Spotify’s catalog to be stored locally and played back without using precious mobile broadband. A great strategy for this feature would be to have the software synchronize offline playlists while on a Wi-Fi network. In fact, on the Android version of Spotify, I see options to sync music over Wi-Fi, 3G or both.

Aside from the offline storage, Spotify can help manage mobile broadband use through a playback quality setting. Low-bandwidth mode won’t sound quite as good, but uses a 96 kbps data stream; high bandwidth boosts the audio quality as well as the bandwidth due to a 160 kbps music stream. Such mobile data use can add up quickly: See our recent post on what a gigabyte is for mobile users to get an idea of how much data these types of services use.

On handsets, I haven’t yet found a feature that’s available in the Windows or Mac Spotify client that’s missing for mobiles. It’s easy to create Playlists, search for albums, tracks or artists, play locally stored tracks (yes, Spotify will play back music you’ve purchased and store on your handset) or share tunes with friends. There’s an option to shoot track information to Last.fm, Facebook, Twitter or via email. If you have friends on Spotify, you can even share your current track with them directly and a news feed in the app shows what your Spotify friends are listening to, provided they’ve enabled sharing and take advantage of it. If you’d rather hide your addiction to ABBA, you’ll want to see how to manage Spotify’s sharing settings.

I have found two limitations when using Spotify on a smartphone, however. First, not all tracks are playable, although I can’t tell how many are limited specifically to the desktop client. A good example is The Legend of Johnny Cash. When searching for this album, it doesn’t appear in the mobile search results, but does show and is playable in the desktop client. That’s likely due to Spotify’s licensing agreements with music labels and it also brings up the second limitation: You can’t play music simultaneously on different handsets and desktop clients.

That means Spotify won’t allow you to listen to music on your smartphone while your family is trying to do the same on a desktop at home. As soon as I hit the play button in Spotify’s iOS client, for example, the desktop client stopped playing. For now then, it’s one account per person unless Spotify can devise some type of family plan.

Some may compare Spotify to Microsoft’s Zune Pass service, which supports music streaming to phones, local downloads and playback of millions of tracks in a similar subscription approach. Zune Pass costs $14.99 per month, which includes users to download and keep 10 tracks per month. But the biggest drawback I see compared to Spotify is the mobile platform limitation. If you want to subscribe to Zune Pass, you can only use a Windows Phone or the older Microsoft Zune digital audio players.

With support for multiple platforms, hooks into Facebook and wireless streaming playback in addition to offline music storage, Spotify plays all the right notes for mobile music lovers. I’ve long been adding to my music library through Amazon’s MP3 store, which offers daily deals as low as $1.99 for an album. But I haven’t yet bought Colbie Caillat’s new $9.49 album that arrived earlier this week. For just a few cents more, I’ve already heard the full album twice on Spotify and plenty of other songs too, so the new service has me rethinking my mobile music plans.

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UPDATE: Spotify has confirmed it will launch in the U.S. on Thursday, July 14. In an email sent Wednesday afternoon, a spokesperson wrote that Spotify “will become available tomorrow morning in the United States by invitation and subscription.” The company plans to release more details Thursday morning at 8 a.m. EDT.

As GigaOM reported last month, a source familiar with the company’s strategy says Spotify’s U.S. launch is slated to occur in mid-July. Other reports have placed Spotify’s U.S. launch between July 5 and July 15. Any way you slice it, it’s very likely Spotify’s U.S. debut is now in T-minus territory.

We’ve been told Spotify will be made available in the U.S. under a three-tiered pricing model: A free ad-supported service, a $5/month subscription, and a $10/month subscription. Spotify already has a similar three-tiered pricing scheme in place in Europe. The company has set up a landing page where people can sign up to receive an invite for the U.S. service as soon as it’s made available.

Spotify has been gearing up for its U.S. debut for months. In June, the company closed on $100 million in new venture capital funding to help fuel its international growth. The latest batch of money came from a group that included several first-time Spotify investors, including Russian venture capital firm DST and California-based VCs Kleiner Perkins and Accel Partners.

Spotify has been available solely in Europe since its initial launch in October 2008. The service has already amassed more than 10 million users there, more than a tenth of whom pay for the service. Here in the U.S., the online music scene has a number of players such as Pandora, the Internet radio service that went public last month, and Last.fm, the long-running online radio service acquired by CBS in 2007. The level of competition in the U.S. may be why Spotify is planning to team up with Facebook: to establish a solid American user base right out the gate.

Without a doubt, the Spotify service has gained a lot of momentum in its relatively short lifespan — but how it will be received by consumers once it finally lands on U.S. shores is still anyone’s guess. Luckily, we won’t have to wait much longer to find out.

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On the desktop, you can use the software to manage and listen to music, so it’s not limited solely to media syncing. Without a music store, however, HP Play is one-dimensional in what it can do for now. Some beta testers have reported sync issues, but I had no problems moving the tracks in my Purchased playlist; even while I was using the software to play other tracks. You can manually choose what to sync or setup an automatic synchronization.

While you could always manually move music to the TouchPad, HP Play offers a nice start to what I hope will be a useful tool for webOS device owners. Neither photos nor videos are supported yet, so there’s still work to be done. But I expect HP will get them added quickly, especially since the Pre 3, an upcoming webOS smartphone, will also be supported by HP Play. Ideally, some type of wireless syncing will be part of the solution as well; the days of using a USB cable to move data between devices is dying a slow painful death that can’t come soon enough.

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Amazon changed that yesterday with the introduction of Cloud Player support for the iPad browser. While you’d think the website might work for other iOS devices, too, it really doesn’t based on trying it on my iPod touch. Using the iPad, however, brings a solid, but basic, music streaming experience. Hitting the http://www.amazon.com/cloudplayer link on my iPad brings up a clean two-paned interface: categorized music and playlists on the left, and track details on the right. Both of these areas are scrollable, so you can view long lists of albums, tracks or playlists. The web-based app works in either portrait or landscape mode.

Simple controls run along the bottom of the web page. You can play, pause, or skip/rewind tracks with touch buttons or enable random and repeat playback. The currently playing song appears, along with a progress meter for scrubbing or skipping around the song. Unlike a native music application however, you scrub through the song by dragging the progress button. Instead, you have to tap on the meter to jump to a specific point in the song.

Creating a new playlist is simple, as is adding songs or whole albums to an existing playlist. There’s also a link at the top right to buy the MP3 album from Amazon, but that seems silly to me: If you already own the song or album and have it stored on Amazon’s servers, why would you need a link to the album in Amazon’s MP store? The only benefit I can see is for people looking to see additional artist or album information, although this could be handy for those that own just a few tracks and want to complete an album.

For all intents and purposes, outside of the track scrubbing, the Amazon Cloud Player site on iPad simulates a basic music application reasonably well. The music quality sounds no different from when I stream my tunes on a desktop browser, and thanks to iOS multitasking, I can use other apps on my iPad while streaming music over the web. I have noticed that the service runs best if it retains the focus, however. When using another app, the music tends to stop after a song or two. A quick return to the web page nudges the stream to start up right away: something I hope is addressed in the future.

In contrast to the service in a desktop browser or the native Amazon MP3 app for Android, there’s no function to either upload music or download music for local storage in the iPad web version. I’ll stick to using iTunes for that as needed, but for now, I’m happy to enjoy my Amazon stored music on the iPad. And although in 2007, I felt very “locked in” to Apple’s hardware when it came to music and media, thanks to Amazon, I feel I have some real options today.

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A report published Friday on the Noisecast tech blog places Spotify’s US launch date between July 5 and July 15, citing an email exchange between a Noisecast source and major record label executive. The emails also “suggest that Spotify may launch as an invite-only service to start with” and that the subscription price will be $10 per month, Noisecast reports.

Whether or not it’s totally accurate, the report certainly lines up with other recent talk around Spotify’s stateside debut. Earlier this week, Om Malik reported that Spotify will be a major part of a new music dashboard feature Facebook plans to release at its f8 developer conference in August. And Spotify executive Jonathan Forster recently told Silicon Valley Watcher that Spotify’s US launch is on the way, but would not occur before July 5.

Meanwhile, Spotify has been getting its financial house in order for the US push. Last week the company closed on approximately $100 million in fresh funding to fuel its geographic expansion. The latest round came from a group that included Russian venture capital firm DST and California-based VCs Kleiner Perkins and Accel Partners, all first-time Spotify investors.

Why is Spotify so hotly anticipated in the United States? For one thing, with a Spotify account, you can listen to the same library of music regardless of where you are and which of your devices you’re using. It’s the same cloud-based mentality behind some of the latest big offerings from Google (with Google Music), Apple (with iCloud) and Netflix (with Netflix streaming.) In many ways, Spotify fits right into the increasingly always-connected way many of us live now.

Update: Spotify’s US launch is indeed on track for mid-July — not July 5, as some other sources have claimed — according to a source with knowledge of the company’s plans. That confirms the rumors first published Friday morning that Spotify’s US launch will occur in July.

Spotify will be made available in the US under a three-tiered pricing model, the source said: A free ad-supported service, a $5/month subscription, and a $10/month subscription. The US pricing scheme will be very similar to the three-tiered revenue model Spotify already has in place in Europe.

The company does not have a more specific launch date nailed down at the moment, because Spotify is still sorting out a few kinks associated with the US debut, the source said.

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