Are you a Last.fm addict? Does Pandora suck? Do you want to be in charge of your music discovery or should Charts do the job for you?

Music Discovery is a hot topic. Here’s a selection of some recent interesting articles:

Slacker vs Pandora -Bob Lefsetz - Fine music lovers as Lefsetz hit a wall with Pandora’s “dummy” recommendations. Slacker fine-tuning features seem a better fit for this sophisticated audience. Nice read!

Why The Music Industry Still Needs Taste-Makers – Creative Deconstruction - We’re all drinking the KoolAid of social media and machine learning filtering systems. But the average user still needs human/human-like taste-makers to tell him/her what’s worth listening to. The author has a point and the article deserves a bookmark!

The Future of Music is Filtered – Jaggernaut Brew An overview of all the possible ways to filter and manipulate the discovery (human-brand-social-machine learning). Food for thoughts.

Music Explaura: Exploration and Discovery in Action – Information Retrieval Gupf Explaura ia a fascinating promise…but I beleive both Creative Deconstruction and Jaggernaut Brew are right when they point to the need for “branded” /human filters (the taste-makers)

Recommendation Systems: Where Are We Now, Where Do We Need to Go? For a more scientific analysis of the status of the industry

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New Companies who are working on it from a different angle

-WeAreHunted – Social Music Discovery

We Are Hunted Presents the 99 Most Popular Songs on Twitter – ReadWriteWeb

Forget Billboard. We Are Hunted Charts The Music People Are Listening To On The Web – TechCrunch

-Twitter -140 chars Media Discovery and Marketing Platform

TWEET CHILD O’ MINE How Twitter Is Changing Music – Billboard Interesting post reporting on the effect on music sales of being discovered via Twitter

5 Twitter Tips For Bands From Co-Founder Biz Stone – Billboard Nothing too revolutionary, but shows the interest of the company in positioning itself as a media discovery and marketing platform

10 Ways to Share Music on Twitter – Mashable

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Companies who are specialized at creating music recommendations, recently in the news

Mufin the sound driven music recommendation engine announced new features including an iTunes plug-in and full video playlist functions on the mufin site. More on their blog

EchoNest recently chosen by Spotify

The annual San Francisco Music Tech Summit collects experts and entrepreneurs dealing with the ways technology is transforming the music industry.

A few highlights from this year’s edition gathered throughout the blogo/twittershepere:

-A RIVER OF (SMARTER) DATA

Digital music is still in its infancy. There’s definitely more than playlists, music in the cloud and artist pages. And a few innovative companies promise to have the answer.

-Say good-bye to editorial picks and dummy collaborative filtering. The future is a gigantic “music brain” that is fed by the massive river of unstructured information that is the Internet in a continuous learning process.

At the Music Recommendation panel, the Boston-based EchoNest demoed its product which spiders millions of blog posts, playlists and forums and draws from both the sonic analysis and text mentions to create smarter recommendations. The much-hyped Spotify will be soon deploying the EchoNest engine through its Expand Playlist feature.  Paul Lamere blog post is a recommended read for a better understanding of the engine’s ins and outs.

A different way to tackle the issue of discovery comes from theSixtyone with its Digg-style platform.

-BandMetrics

What are people talking about and what are they saying? Can the stream of data be analyzed to help bands improve their online presence and be used a prediction engine?

BandMetrics is trying to crack the nut. It is still a beta but the promise is alluring: using semantic, it aims to provide the tools to track the dissemination of, and sentiments towards, your music online. It demo’ed its product to the attendees of the summit and announced the release of a new music data exchange format.

-A SOCIAL EXPERIENCE: CONNECTING BANDS WITH FANS. IPHONE AND MOBILE

There has never been more opportunity for musicians to take control of their careers. Recording and career promoting technologies are now in the hands of the artist. At the same time, there is lots of competition out there among artists.

ILike brand new syndication platform, demoed at the conference, is meant as a tool to help artists’ marketing and distribution efforts. It allows them to update tour dates or band photos on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Bebo, Hi5, etc., from a single dashboard. iLike also allows artists to create and submit iPhone Apps for their band using a template powered by iLike.

Mobile was obivously a hot topic. Pandora’s CEO boasted some amazing metrics from its mobile experience: 5 million users through the Iphone and counting 18/20k new ones every day.

The bottom line  perfectly summatized by Boothism in his blog post

• Social networking can be an effective tool, but it’s not the Holy Grail. You should have a plan before going in and be active with your network-respond to fans, answer questions, interact and be fun! On the flipside, more and more bands and brands are hiring “community managers” to manage their online presence.

• Bands cant depend on the technology, the labels or anyone to control their careers, they have to take control themselves.  It’s a scary prospect for a lot of creative folks, but with the industry the way it is, not knowing your audience and your business model=yes, the soupline.

• By taking control of their careers many more musicians will be able to eat and live comfortably off their music, but we’ll likely see a decline in super mega ultra obnoxiously rich rock stars.

-BUSINESS MODELS?

TopSpin Ian Rogers claims that given a reason to buy, fans want to and will pay for premium content and services. Initial data, gathered in the beta phase ,prove that the average transaction value goes all the way up to a  $22 and in one recent case, 84% of the paying users opted for the premium tier price over the lower one.

But why wait for customers to come to you and chose whether they want to pay and for what. Griffin’s Choruss project pushes for a forced subscription model where college students are “volontueering” a monthly fee for p2p activity. The legal aspects of the project are still obscure, as well as how the indie and unsigned bands could participate to it

BREAKING NEWS

French National Assembly Adopts 3 Strikes Law

iLike Launches Custom iPhone Apps, Syndication Platform To Help Artists Connect With Fans

Imeem About To Expand iPhone Music Storage By Way Of The Cloud

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OPINIONS AND REPORTS

Seth Godin: Another View Of Free

Bruce Houghton: Despite The All The Gloom And Doom I’m Still Optimistic About The Music Industry

Is the Long Tail really long?

Not just a matter of semantics:about “pirates” and “theft” in the music industry.

Spotify CEO interview ortability and subscriptions to a social music experience as key future developments.

FACTS

Live Nation looks to ticketholders for more revenue

The Biggest Music Sites Online?

Music Industry So Weak You Only Need To Sell 83,000 To Be No. 1

Pandora Mobile In Numbers.

BREAKING NEWS (SORT OF..)

-Google launches a free ad-supported music service in China with the blessing of the labels. [WSJ]

TRENDS

-Why buy when you can listen free?

- The agreement between Spotify and 7Digital sparks a debate on the mixed streaming-store business model.  Glenn Peoples at Billboard views Lala as a possible winner because of its more focused user experience. [Billboard]

-But what do teenagers in the US want? According to a new report by NPD, teens acquired 19% less music in 2008 than they did in 2007. CD purchasing declined 26 % and paid digital downloads fell 13% compared with the prior year. In contrast, 52% of teens listened to online radio in 2008 vs  34% in 2007. Downloading or listening to music on social networks also saw a large increase from 26% in 2007 to 46% in 2008. [NPD Press Release].

-TIme for more numbers with Q1 already over. And the reality is again doom and gloom for the music industry with no Platinum album for the entire first quarter of 2009. Not a single new album sold more than a million copies in the U.S. (enough to win the platinum distinction) [MusicIndustryReport]

GOING UP, DOWN OR UNDER

-Fearing the outcome of lawsuits by Warner Music and EMI, music search engine and playlist generator SeeqPod has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection.  [HypeBot] Streamzy which let users build playlists from the songs on SeeqPod and YouTube, is on sale on eBay. [Epicenter].

-After blocking all music to UK users, YouTube is now yanking tunes in Germany, after the expiration of its contract with local royalty collector GEMA [PaidContentUK]. At the same time, Amazon opens its MP3 store in Germany [HypeBot]

-Last.fm is still free. Plans to launch the subscription service worldwide except for the US, UK and Germany have been delayed and Last.fm will focus on accelerating new features as SMS billing [MusicAlly]

-How is MySpace Music doing? Epicenter has an in-depth review. Reading is recommended. [Epicenter]

-What is Facebook Connect for? There are many ways to use it and one of them is to automate file-sharing:that’s what Pirate Bay is up to. Now under each track you can find a Share it on Facebook link! [HypeBot]

-More headaches for Ticketmaster, faced with a new classaction for its secondary ticket market practice. This one comes from the US. [MusicAlly]

GOING MOBILE

-On the AppStore side, some good news for Music Apps: the Pandora IPhone App hit 4 million downloads, AOL Radio 3.6million and other music app stars as Clear Channel iHeartRadio, Shazam, Tap Tap Revenge are not far (though numbers are not confirmed) [DigitalMusicNews]. In the meantime, Lala is rushing to get its app live, but still has some kinks to work out according to TechCrunch [TechCrunch]

-At CTIA RIM launches its new BlackBerry World App and one of its focus will be Music [MocoNews]

-And what is Nokia up to? It’s preparing its app store and it promises it will be a “smart” and “social” one. [VentureBeat interview]

GOING SOCIAL

-The clever team behind MusicMetrics launches MuZoid. a Twitter music exploration application. Send a tweet with the name of a band or artist to twitter.com/muzoid and in seconds you receive a link to a web page with gigs, a discography with price comparisons between vendors, and a recommendation of similar artists that you might enjoy.MuZoid uses MusicMetric’s text-mining technology to provide gig and album information for each artist. The company regularly sifts through data from a database of over 6 million artists. If MuZoid doesn’t know an artist, she makes a note of it and gets busy learning. Once enough information’s available, she’ll tweet back to the original querant with an update.[TechCrunch UK]

-Moonalice will post live tracks from their new CD release show on Twitter. Immediately following the end of each song, Moonalice’s sound team will upload it and “Tweet” its availability! [HypeBot]

-SellaBand, one of the online services that enables music fans to invest in up-and-coming artists, will sell its artists on CreateSpace, an Amazon company via a dedicated SellaBand store [Press Release]. Chuck D, named its US Ambassador, speaks about the project and the importance of being good internet marketers to win in the new digital era of music [MusicAlly]

-TopSpin CEO on the importance of engaging fans as a marketing tool [TopSpin]