A few months ago, Google introduced their cloud music service, Music Beta, available via invite only.  The quick value proposition behind this, as the company noted on the homepage, is the ability to “upload up to 20,000 songs from your personal music collection to listen from any computer or on your phone, even offline.   All for free.”  The concept is cool, but certainly not unique, a la Amazon’s Cloud Drive/Player and Spotify, among many.

Yesterday Google introduced Magnifier to further expand on this offering and possibly open the door to easier monetization down the road.   Could a head to head competition with iTunes soon follow (which would be like putting a flyweight up against a heavyweight)? Magnifier touts itself as a “music discovery site that will keep your collection growing [and] will feature great music and the people who make it, including videos of live performances, interviews with artists, explorations of different musical genres and free songs that you can add to your Music Beta collection.”

Great collaboration between OK Go, dance group Pilobolus and Google Chrome.

The HTML5 Google Chrome Experiment visual is incredibly interactive and provides an added feature allows viewers to add their own message to the video and replay as the band dances it out. Check out the site if you have Chrome–if not, it is worth downloading.

Turntable.fm, a new social media site where participants interact and play music, is growing rapidly. With over 336,000 people joining in the past few weeks, it has proven to be a popular and addictive site among music lovers. The turntable.fm user, represented by a cartoon avatar, can enter one of several virtual DJ rooms and listen to music being played by other users/DJs. Instead of listening, the user can also choose to participate and play their own favorite music from the site’s extensive music database if there is available space on any of the five turntables that are in each room.

The DJ rooms are often titled by the theme of the music being played, for example “Indie While You Work” or “DJ Wooooo’s House/Dance/Electro.” There can be up to 5 DJs in a room, along with several listeners, and as each song is played, people can vote whether the song is “Lame” or “Awesome.” If a person likes a song and votes “Awesome,” their cartoon avatar begins nodding its head to the beat of the song. DJs acquire points for every “Awesome” vote and they can also gain fans.

The founders, Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein, have been in talks with investors and the site is said to have received $6 to $7 million in funds. The site is licensed to play music through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Although the site does not yet feature advertisements, Turntable.fm has a high level of engagement among its users and could become a valuable space for advertisers. Check it out!

The Mother of All Funk Chords is the best meme that I have come across.  Created by Kutiman as part of his project ThruYOU, The Mother of All Funk Chords is a mash up of several different YouTube videos that blend together to create one funky sound.  Even after the seeing all of the auto-tuned songs from Auto-Tune the News, Kutiman’s work still remains my favorite.  Check it out!  For more Kutiman videos check out his YouTube channel here.

Lady Gaga is the biggest artist in the world. With over 8 million people following her Tweets and over 11,000,000 fans on Facebook, she has built herself an army of little monsters through the power of social media. So what’s left when you have built such an impressive army? The answer is simple: harness them. Today, Lady Gaga made an announcement via Facebook to all of her little monster all over the world to join a new facet of her social media onslaught – The Official Lady Gaga Street Team.

The goal of this newly formed Street Team with Fancrops, which promotes social media with a purpose, is a brilliant idea that enables the legions of voracious Lady Gaga fans to take her message and brand even further, faster into the social media stratosphere. After you sign up to be a member of the Street Team, using your existing social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, and Itunes, a new team member can choose to complete the tasks assigned.

Tasks include simple things like posting your favorite lyrics from her new single, Born This Way, on Facebook and tagging it via Gaga. Then you simply submit a screen capture of your completed task through the Lady Gaga Street Team website and earn points towards the purchase of Gaga merchandise. Each task is assigned a different value of points (i.e. posting her interview with Jay Leno on Facebook will earn you 50 points, and simply reviewing and rating “Born This Way” on Itunes will earn her little monsters 200 points). It’s really that simple, but this goes way beyond the promise of essentially free merchandise. The true power here, which is yet to be measured, is the ability to not only make your fan base feel more included in your world, but also to pick specific things you want promoted about your brand/message and unleash them into every major form of social media. Paws up everyone! For Lady Gaga, this is only the beginning of her total global domination via all forms of media.

(I posted a blog about Jelli on last year’s blog site, but I feel compelled to share this awesome site once more before my internship ends).

Last year, CBS launched an online service called ‘Jelli‘ – a 100% user-controlled radio that has since been gaining popularity. Site visits are now in the thousands in comparison with the numbers of last july.

A live broadcast of Jelli can be heard on weeknights on KITS-FM (live 105) from 8pm to midnight and every Sunday evening, 10pm to midnight, but otherwise it plays on the Jelli iTunes podcast online 24/7. Listeners compose a personal playlist of songs they’d like to hear and vote online to pull a song off the radio instantly if enough people feel like changing it.

Upon signing up for Jelli, one is introduced to the website and given directions on how to navigate, vote for a song that one either likes or dislikes by and given the ability to chat live with other listeners. I have never seen such a clever integration between digital and traditional broadcasting before. It’s definitely worth bookmarking.

The latest must tune-in in Streaming Radio is NPR Music’s Exclusive First Listen.

NPR is giving listeners the chance to hear upcoming albums weeks before their release!  The best part of it all is it’s absolutely free with no sign-up necessary.  Advertising is limited to a brief audio pre-roll before the music starts.

Current streams include the latest from MGMT and Jeff Beck.  My personal recommendation is She and Him’s Volume Two.  It’s a gem.

Austin, Texas will be hosting the 24th annual South by Southwest Festival from March 12 – 21, 2010.

Over the years, SXSW has been a launching pad for emerging media and entertainment.  After its launch in 2006, Twitter saw a turning point at SXSW 2007 when Tweets per day tripled over night.  In the film category, Current Oscar nominee The Hurt Locker made its American premiere at SXSW 2009.  Most notably, hundreds of bands, including The Strokes, Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, and Hanson, have been discovered after performing in downtown Austin at SXSW.

South by Southwest 2010 will boast many exciting events ranging from Augmented Reality panel discussions to Courtney Love’s reunion with Hole!