Quoted: Songza is a new music search engine that lets you hear the songs that you search. Currently in private beta, ...

I’ve been looking around the Jamendo site that I mentioned in my previous post. It’s a website that facilitates musicians to sell their music by donation, as Radiohead have recently done with much publicity. As well as finding a lot of cool music, I found that they publish the data on the donations that people have made to musicians on the site. Naturally, as a nerdy economist, I was much more excited by the presence of this data than the music itself.

Quoted: Music is nice, but free music is even better. With all the talk of DRM, lawsuits and the RIAA we ...

STEVE CASE AND MUSIC LUMINARIES JOIN TO CREATE
ONLINE MUSIC SERVICE QLOUD

Qloud debuts free, on-demand streaming music service –
iTunes playlists now accessible anytime, anywhere, to anyone from any computer

Company’s My Music application built on Facebook® Platform reaches 1 million registered users – making it more popular on Facebook than Last.fm, Pandora and Imeem combined
“Supergroup” of investors and board members includes Case and former Yahoo!, Island Records, Warner Music Group, EMI Music, and AOL executives

WASHINGTON, D.C. – November 1, 2007 – Steve Case’s Revolution LLC today announced that it has formally launched a new online music service – Qloud (pronounced “cloud”). With 1 million registered users and 120 million recorded plays in less than three months, Qloud’s My Music application built on Facebook® Platform is already the second-largest music application on the social utility.

Case is joined by a number of online and music industry luminaries as investors and board members in Qloud, including the founder of Island Records, Chris Blackwell, who discovered U2 and Bob Marley and was recently inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; the founder of Launch Music, Dave Goldberg, who most recently headed Yahoo! Music; the former head of AOL‘s online music properties, Jim Bankoff, who will now serve as Qloud’s chairman; Ted Leonsis, Vice Chairman Emeritus of AOL and Chairman of Revolution Money; and music industry executives Paul Vidich, formerly EVP Strategy and Business Development of Warner Music; and Tom Ryan, formerly Global SVP of Digital and Mobile Strategy of EMI Music. Qloud was co-founded by former AOLers Toby Murdock and Mike Lewis.

The Qloud My Music application is a revolutionary music service that delivers online music to users how they want it – legal, cost-free, DRM-free, on-demand and linked to their personal music libraries – and where they want it – inside social networks where they can share music with and discover it through their friends.

Dalton Caldwell, the chief executive of Imeem, a music-oriented social network, and Steve Jang, Imeem’s director of business development and marketing, agreed to answer questions from Bits readers. Here is the first batch of their answers. If you have more questions, post them here.

Q: Do you think that the record companies are working with you, in part to counterbalance the power of iTunes?

Quoted: Who's to blame for falling music sales? Illegal music downloaders? Internet radio consumers? Britney Spears? Regardless of the cause, the music industry has largely seen declining music sales as a

As of 4 p.m. Sunday, 10,712 people had downloaded the free Seriously Westcoast Life Vol. 1 compilation created by the Vancouver Sun and Nettwerk Music group ... and that's with 13 eight hours left before the exclusive offer is over.

The downloadable album includes music by Sarah McLachlan, the Barenaked Ladies, the Be Good Tanyas and a ton of artists from Nettwerk's past, present and future that the Vancouver Sun is making available for free. "We all knew that the digital revolution is the way people get their music," says Sun Arts & Life editor Dominic Patten of the download's success so far. "Now we are seeing it in action, and it looks pretty good."

While newspapers and other publications have been giving away or offering music to readers in the past, as the Daily Mail did recently in the UK with the new Prince CD, the collaberation between Nettwerk Music Group and the Vancouver Sun is the first time that a specifically compiled collection, not available anywhere else, has been given away by a major media outlet digitally.

Earlier this year, there was a huge fuss over the UK's Daily Mail newspaper's promotion giving away the new Prince CD for free with a copy of the newspaper. It seemed like a pretty good way of dealing with the troubles facing both the newspaper industry and the recording industry -- offering a new way of financing music combined with a new way to promote and distribute music, all the while helping give people a reason to actually buy a newspaper. It was so reasonable that it freaked out the recording industry, music stores and even other newspapers. However, it appears that some newspapers have decided to go even further. Michael Geist lets us know that over the weekend, the Vancouver Sun put up a freely downloadable compilation of songs from Nettwerk Music. You may recall Nettwerk as being the Canadian record label that seems to actually understand that the trick isn't in fighting against consumers (or in suing them), but in giving them what they want. Thus, it's not really a huge surprise that it would be this label that took part -- allowing well known acts like Sarah McLachlan and the Barenaked Ladies to take part in this promotion. What's a little strange is that the promotion only lasted for one day. However, it is good to see more newspapers (and bands) at least experimenting with this type of model. It has a long way to go, but through this experimenting the next generation of music business models are going to be discovered.

Quoted: Start-up that made a splash a year ago has yet to launch online music service. Despite setbacks, company isn't ruling out public offering.