geekosystem

Twitter launched it's recently rumored music service today! Twitter #Music was announced this morning on Good Morning America, and comes in the form of an iOS app and web service. Notably absent is an Android version of Twitter #Music, so I'll focus on the web service which at the moment seems buggy and not fully formed.

With the anticipation and excitement for Grand Theft Auto V reaching new levels daily, it's a wonder that it took this long, but it's finally happened: Rockstar's released playlists of all the Grand Theft Auto radio stations on Spotify and iTunes, starting with Grand Theft Auto III and even including handheld games like Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.

Spotify has all but eliminated my need to ever buy music. For a few bucks a month I can queue up practically any song I can think of and rock out. Now they supposedly want to bring that same level of convenience to video. Reports say Spotify is going to launch a video streaming service like Netflix that will offer original content -- also like Netflix. That's all well and good, but I already have Netflix.

Seriously, Finland? We understand that Internet piracy is a problem, but this is just too much. Police raided the home of a nine-year-old girl and confiscated her laptop -- her Winnie the Pooh laptop -- because she was accused of downloading one song off The Pirate Bay. That really happened. We all live in this world now.

Microsoft apparently didn't learn too terribly much from the whole Zune fiasco, as the leaked pricing plans for their Xbox Music service aren't exactly competitive. It looks like a month of the unreleased service will cost a cool $9.99 in the United States, with a slight discount if users purchase a year worth. That's the same amount one might pay to Spotify for a Premium membership, which is honestly a better deal. Maybe they just think Xbox 360 users aren't aware of this fact?

We often forget how good we have it. We live in a world of high-speed broadband Internet, 3G connectivity, and Wi-Fi networks, and it's made us reliant on things that didn't even exist ten years ago. Could you go back to listening to commercial radio all the time? I didn't think so. Still, if an alternative like Spotify had existed way back in the 1980s, it probably wouldn't even have been that great. Squirrel Monkey, software de-maker extraordinaire, has whipped up a vision of streaming audio for a different decade.

A few months ago, some U.S. Spotify users had a rude awakening: The unlimited free streaming they'd become accustomed to turned out to be a 6-month trial, something Spotify mentioned from the start, but was glossed over by many. The revelation occurred -- when else -- right around the 6-month anniversary of the U.S. Spotify release. But for anyone affected, or expecting to be affected any day now, there's good news. Spotify has now extended its unlimited free streaming trial, and it seems to be an indefinite extension.

So you got Spotify as soon as it came to the States. You've been jamming on those free tunes like it's your job. Free Spotify has become a vital part of your everyday sanity-preservation strategy. Well you better get ready because there's an end. You may not have been aware -- I know I wasn't -- but "free unlimited Spotify" never really existed. What you experience as free unlimited Spotify is actually an automatic  6-month trial of Spotify Unlimited, except with ads. The real kicker? Spotify's 6 month anniversary in the U.S. is rolling around next week. So this is a good time for a reminder.

As you may be aware if you aren't living under a rock, Facebook's f8 conference was held today in San Francisco. During the conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made something very clear; there are some big changes coming down the pipe. The first and most striking, from a design perspective, is the Timeline.

The current (and previous) Facebook profile pages do a good job of representing your life in the recent past. While they present some static information like music you like, where you go to school, where you are employed, and so on, most of the information on your profile is very recent activity like status updates and posted links. The Timeline aims to change that by presenting information that aims to represent you as a whole instead of as the last few minutes or hours.

In a world were there are already many different music service options, there is now one more: BlackBerry Messenger Music. In hopes of working its way into the market (presumably), BBM Music seems to be tackling the subject from a somewhat different angle, however. BBM Music, currently in closed beta, goes for a $5 per month subscription. For that price you get to build a music profile of 50 songs, 25 of which you can swap out for new ones each month. Sound a little limiting? Well, that's because they are trying their best not to directly compete with streaming giants like Spotify.

The focus of BBM Music, it seems, will be a social one. In addition to your personal collection of songs, you can then share your collection with friends and your friends can share with you. If you find a song you like, you can then add it to your library. On top of that, you can make playlists that include your songs and the songs of your friends, and then share those. Share, share, share.

Remember Google Music? Well, then it seems like Magnifier has done one of its jobs. Magnifier, a new blog recently launched to work in tandem with the Google Music Beta, aims to bring tunes to your attention, tunes that you can then add to your Google Music collection, along with all the songs in there that you already own, uploaded and have presumably heard. The blog explains itself like this:

Well, when I was in junior high school, I had a friend whose older cousin lived in England, and that cousin would always send my friend great new records we usually knew nothing about, except that if the cousin liked them there was a very good chance we would, too...So, Magnifier is basically Music Beta's cousin who lives in England

So, basically Magnifier will recommend you music based on the opinion of its team (made up of people who you probably don't know) and allow you a free download. That's all well and good, but not quite anything worth doing the Sid Vicious pogo about.

European cloud-based music streaming service that the Internet really, really liked to talk about, Spotify, has finally made its United States debut. There are two versions available, a free version and paid version. The free version is currently only available via invite, while the pay version is available to everyone.

There are a few pricing plans available. The "Open" plan is the free option, and will allow users to stream tracks locally from their computers, and share tracks and playlists with friends, though they'll have to deal with an ad-supported service. The biggest caveat for the free plan, though, is for the first six months, free members can only listen to music for 20 hours per month, then after that six month period, users can only listen to music for 10 hours per month, and will not be able to listen to a track more than five times, essentially making the service worthless and forcing people to move on from the free option. The next tier up, the "Unlimited" plan, will cost $4.99 per month, and gives the user full access to music without any kind of silly restrictions. The highest tier, the "Premium" plan, will cost $9.99 per month and basically adds mobile devices onto the features of the Unlimited plan, but also adds an offline access to playlists (somewhat curbing the biggest downfall of the cloud, in that if you do not have Internet access, you do not have access to anything on the cloud), as well as provides a higher quality stream and exclusive content, like early access to album launches. Interested? Pop on over to the official US Spotify site, and head on past the break to check out a promotional video for the US launch.

A fellow named Benjamin Oláh Lindholm came up with a clever, geeky way to show his affection for his girlfriend Elizabeth: He used digital music service Spotify to assemble twenty-six different song titles into a love poem. Who knew there was a song called "As"?

MOG Mobile, the much-anticipated mobile application for MOG's streaming music service, is officially available for download at the Android and Apple app stores. For $9.99 a month, the free-to-download app gives users access to a library of more than 8 million songs at standard 64 kbps and high-quality 320 kbps bitrates -- not just for mobile streaming, but for download as well.