As expected, internet music service Spotify opened its doors to US residents today. And as expected the free service is currently only open to a limited number of people that have received invitations. If you want to sign up for a paid account though, you can do that right now.

Spotify is working with a number of launch partners including Motorola, Sonos, and Chevrolet to offer early access through marketing campaigns, so if you signed up for an invite last week and haven’t received one yet, it looks like there may be ways to snag one soon.

There are three service levels. Free accounts will allow you to stream music on demand from a computer, but only for 10 hous a month and you’ll have to put up with ads. The free service in other countries provides up to 20 hours of music.

Spotify Unlimited removes the ads and the time limits for $4.99 per month.

If you want to listen to Spotify on your mobile phone you’re going to need to sign up for the $9.99 per month Spotify Premium account which adds support for Android, iOS, and other mobile apps.

TuneIn Radio is a mobile app that lets you find and listen to internet radio stations from around the world. It’s probably one of the best organized directories of internet radio available — but it can still take a bit of work to find stations that match your tastes. The developers have tackled that problem with TuneIn Radio 1.9 for iOS which adds recommended stations.

What’s cool about the station recommendations are that the app determines them based on songs in your music library.

Another nifty new music discovery option is the ability to shake your device to discovery related stations. All you have to do is start playing one of your favorite internet radio streams and then give your iPhone or iPod touch a shake and TuneIn will switch to another station with related content.

The latest update also adds song presets and a quicker search function.

TuneIn Radio is available as a free download from the App Store. There’s also an ad-free version for $0.99. TuneIn is also available for Android, but the new music discovery features haven’t made it to Android yet.

Most internet radio apps either let you choose from a list of curated music streams with songs selected by a DJ (or a machine), or create a new mix on-the-fly based on your musical tastes. TuneIn Radio is a good example of the former while Pandora is probably the most popular of the latter. Mixcloud is a new app which takes a different approach.

Mixcloud helps you discover radio programs, podcasts, and DJ mixes. The company calls them Cloudcasts which is basically the company’s name for a Podcast which is hosted online and streamed on-demand. You don’t download it to your device like a Podcast. But it’s not live like a radio stream. Instead a Cloudcast brings you a pre-recorded radio show or DJ mix.

Instead of streaming songs on demand, Mixcloud lets you stream a series of songs hand-picked by… somebody. That doesn’t just help you find music you might like, but also DJs or other users you might like. You can Cloucasts to your favorites and follow other Cloudcast users to find their latest mixes.

What Mixcloud doesn’t let you do is download songs or mixes to your device, skip tracks, or fast forward.

Mixcloud offers a web-based service, and this week the company also launched an iOS app which is available as a free, ad-supported download from the App Store.

via TechCrunch

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A company called mSpot beat Google and Amazon to the punch a few years ago by offering an online music storage locker that allows users to upload songs to the cloud and stream them to any desktop web browser or to mobile devices for Android or iOS. Now mSpot is stepping up its game by combining its music locker service with an internet radio service.

Here’s how it works: You upload your music, fire up the app on your mobile device and start listening to the songs you already own. But when you want to listen to something new you just tap a button and mSpot will create a personalized internet radio station based on the song or artist you’re currently listening to. It’s sort of like Pandora, but you don’t have to manually enter a search term. Just let mSpot you want to hear more songs like the one you’re already enjoying. Of course, you can also search manually if you want.

The mSpot Music service also tracks the playlists of existing internet radio stations and sometimes recommends some of these stations as well as the personalized station. The app can also keep track of songs you’ve played recently to get a sense of your listening habits so that it can recommend additional stations you might like from the primary radio menu.

A new mSpot Music beta is available from the Android Market today. An iOS app will follow later.

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RadioTime has launched a new Pro version of the popular TuneIn Radio app for Android. Basically it’s identical to the free app in all respects but one: TuneIn Radio Pro lets you record live radio streams. It’s available for $0.99 from the Amazon Appstore, and should be available from the Android Market soon as well.

TuneIn lets you listen to internet radio streams from 50,000 stations around the globe. You can sort by location, genre, language, or other criteria, and save stations to your favorites list. If you have a RadioTime account you can login and access your presets right away.

via Android Central

Sure, one of the key selling points of Windows Phone 7 is the Zune Pass subscription service which lets you steam unlimited music to your device for about $10 per month. But if you’d rather use the popular Rhapsody service… well, now you can. Rhapsody launched an official app for Windows Phone 7 this week. It’s available as a free download from the Zune Marketplace.

A Rhapsody subscription will run you $9.99 per month, but you can try the service for free for 60 days.

The Windows Phone version of Rhapsody has all the same features as the company’s iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android apps, including support for playlists, music search, browse by genre, or view recommendations. You can also listen to Rhapsody’s internet radio stations.

One feature that the Windows Phone 7 version doesn’t appear to have yet is support for caching songs and playlists so you can listen to your music when an internet connection isn’t available.

via Download Squad and WP7applist

Virgin Mobile has launched a music app called Virgin Mobile Live. You don’t need to be a Virgin Mobile wireless subscriber to use the free app, which provides streaming radio stations, music videos, and content from music blogs as well as concert listings.

On paper, the app sounds pretty cool. In practice, I found everything aside from the internet radio station to be kind of worthless. The radio feature is nothing to write home about either. There’s only one internet radio stream available, and while the audio quality is decent, there are no real features to speak of. You can see a scrolling song title at the bottom of the page and a stop button, as well as a link to purchase the song or share the song information with your contacts. That’s about it.

As for the video content, Virgin Mobile Live provides you with links to a small number of YouTube videos for live performances, commercials, and movie trailers. You could probably find better content just by firing up the YouTube app and typing “music” into the search box.

Most of the content from music blogs isn’t really available in the app either. You just get excerpts to blog posts. If you want to continue reading, you tap a link to open the articles in your phone’s web browser.

The concert listing feature would be nice… if it worked. While I was able to get a list of performances around the globe, all that showed up for me was a Lady Gaga tour. The app wouldn’t load any local concert listings for my area at all. Theoretically if more concerts actually start to show up here, you’ll be able to check-in to concerts and share info with your Facebook and Twitter contacts.

Virgin Mobile Live is available as a free download from the Android Market for Android 2.2 and up.

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TuneIn Radio is currently my favorite internet radio app for Android. You can use the app to find local stations that stream audio online based on your location, or browse or search for stations around the world by genre or keyword. You can also save presets. And since the app is from the folks behind the RadioTime internet radio service, if you already have a RadioTime account, when you login to TuneIn you’ll automatically find your presets.

While I use the free Android app, there are also free apps for BlackBerry and webOS and a $0.99 iOS app. Now TuneIn Radio is also available for Windows Phone 7.

For the most part, the free  Windows Phone 7 app seems to offer the same features you find in the other versions of the app including a directory of more than 30,000 radio stations. But the Windows Phone version takes advantage of the operating systems’ Metro UI, including the ability to swipe left or right to flip between different screens.

via AppScout