MOG - "music discovery for real people." Features artist, album, concert and music video reviews by us, the community, also includes recommendations based on your profile and taste so that you discover new music. A prominent part is for MOG TV which shows videos personalized to your taste. You can spend your life here.MOG is similar to Last.fm, but it first uploads a listing of a user's digital music collection to their MOG page, then it keeps track of what music is played on the user's computer. See also the Wikipedia entry on MOG

Amazon is selling 2,000,000 tracks as DRM-free MP3s! From Amazon.com’s press release:

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today launched a public beta of "Amazon MP3," a new digital music download store with Earth's biggest selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads. Amazon MP3 has over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels. Amazon MP3 complements Amazon.com's existing selection of over 1 million CDs to now offer customers more selection of physical and digital music than any other retailer.

"Amazon MP3 is an all-MP3, DRM-free catalog of a la carte music from major labels and independent labels, playable on any device, in high-quality audio, at low prices," said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President for Digital Music. "This new digital music service has already been through an extensive private beta, and today we're excited to offer it to our customers as a fully functional public beta. We look forward to receiving feedback from our customers and using their input to refine the service."

Every song and album on Amazon MP3 is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. This means that Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device… organize their music using any music management application such as iTunes or Windows Media Player; and burn songs to CDs.

Link

I'm going to start a new series of posts highlighting some of the best music sites on the Internet. So let's get right into it:

Last.FM - The mother of all web 2.0 music communities is Last.FM. It has an active user base of 15 million users. There is information on almost all artists ever including their top tracks, a radio that plays the artist’s top songs and the weekly top listeners. Each user can display the latest songs they played and their musicial preferences all time. You can join musical groups, download the Last.FM player, make friends and compare your musical taste with them. The “Recently Played” widget on many weblogs is the output of the Last.FM goodie called audioscrobbler.
see also the Wikipedia entry on Last.FM.

Mashable put together a nice little run down of what they think the 12 best music social networks are:

• Flotones
• Mercora Radio
• MOG
• Last.fm
  
• GarageBand.com's iLike
• JamNow
• MusoCity
• Haystack
• Sonific
• Midomi
• iJigg
• Sellaband

There are simply too many of these to keep track.

Read this cool account of how Aphex Twin hid an image in tracks, #2 (the long formula) on "Windowlicker".

Link

Marek Michalowski is a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His latest project is Beatbots - cute little robots with microphone noses and video camera eyes which can dance to music. In the video on his site, the 'drum' clip is OK, but the clip of the robot dancing to Spoon's 'I turn my camera on' is fantastic.

Two great posts from Peter at Create Digital Music -- if you're a Pandora fan or just love internet radio, they're a must-read:

• Interview with Pandora Founder: Royalty Rate Hike

• Interview with Pandora Founder: How Pandora Works