“Our goal is to make Cloud Player the most widely compatible cloud playback solution available, giving our customers the capability to buy their music once and enjoy it everywhere,” said Steve Boom, Amazon’s well-named VP for digital music.

Sounds familiar?

It should, because Apple has said similar things on multiple occasions. The difference is that Amazon actually has the capability to make it happen, as it not only has its own devices but also builds software for other company’s devices, such as iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets, and more.

Cloud Player stores all your Amazon music purchases and up to 250 imported songs or free. If your music library is larger — and whose isn’t — you can import up to 250,000 songs into Cloud Player and store them for $25 per year in a feature similar to Apple’s iTunes Match.

You can safely bet that Cloud Player will not be music-only for long, as Amazon continues to invest in digital content of all kinds.

But Amazon isn’t exactly doing the happy dance today. Like all software companies, it has glitches, and one in its ubiquitous Kindle iOS software is causing an annoying issue for iPhone and iPad users: It’s deleting their book libraries. Amazon acknowledges the issue, and it says that it does not currently recommend that users install the update.

Getting all your books deleted is not necessarily catastrophic — users can simple resync with Amazon, presumably when an app update-to-the-update is released, to redownload all their content.

But it is annoying and time-consuming, and it could be seriously dangerous for those users who have sent PDFs and other documents to their Kindles via Amazon’s send-to-Kindle functionality. If you don’t have backups for those files, it’s possible you’d lose them for good.

The issue? Amazon issued a statement to The Verge:

“We have identified an issue with the app update that may cause your app to become deregistered. To register, enter your Amazon account e-mail address and password and all your Amazon content will be available in the cloud. We have submitted an update fix for this issue and are working with Apple to release.”

photo credit: AJC1 via photopin cc

That’s not a huge move, but given that it’s the first increase in more than a decade, the music industry has a legitimate reason to scream and shout, and let it all out.

“It is hard to remember a year that has begun with such a palpable buzz in the air,” Frances Moore, the CEO of the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) said today in a statement. “The music industry has achieved its best year-on-year performance since 1998. The direction of travel toward growth is clear.”

Just two years ago, Moore said, the major digital music services such as iTunes and Spotify only were in 20 international markets. Now, they’re in over 100 countries, including Brazil, India, and Russia. Digital music sales are clearly where the growth is, and markets as diverse as the U.S., India, Norway, and Sweden, digital revenue has overtaken physical revenue.

Source: IFPI

Global digital music revenue

Music still has a long way to go: digital revenues were 34 percent of the music industries revenues. And they’re growing fairly slowly, too. Digital revenue of $5.6 billion in 2012 is up only about 10 percent from 2011′s $5.1 billion.

But the trend is, finally, up.

And it’s not just downloads. The IFPI says that subscription revenue is up also. In fact, it’s growing quicker than the download business: up 44 percent from 2011. In some countries like Sweden, South Korea, and France, more people subscribe to music than download it, a trend that appears to be catching on in the U.S as well.

Of course, the IFPI says that illegal and pirated songs are still a major roadblock to music industry nirvana. Megaupload figures prominently in this narrative, and the IFPI says that FBI estimates of “damage to the creative industries” by pirating on Megaupload was in the region of a half billion dollars.

All told, the IFPI and its national affiliates found and requested removal of 15.9 million infringing music files in 2012, a process that it says “remains an unsatisfactory and inefficient remedy to tackle massive online infringement.”

All told, however, the music industry is finally going up and to the right in revenue as well as impact, with 68.9 billion legal streams of music in North America alone in 2012, along with 1.6 billion albums sold.

One thing that doesn’t appear in the IFPI’s massive 36-page report?

Any mention of the man who dragged the music industry kicking and screaming into the digital age: Steve Jobs.

Image credit: IFPI

Shares went as high as $289, bouncing up from $261 before the release. For the quarter, revenue was up substantially to $21.27 billion, a 22 percent increase from the fourth quarter of 2011, but revenue decreased 45 percent to $97 million.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos largely credited the strong earnings increase to ebooks, which he said is now a multi-billion dollar category for Amazon — and growing at 70 percent annually. Physical books, in contrast, are slowing. While still growing, Bezos said the growth rate is down to 5 percent, which Bezos said is the lowest growth rate in Amazon’s 17 years of existence.

And one which seems likely to reverse into a decline in 2013, given the growth of ebooks and Amazon’s tablet sales.

Amazon said that its tablets have held the top four spots on the retailer’s sales charts ever since they’ve launched, and that its flagship device, the Kindle Fire HD, is the most popular item in the store. While the reality is that there’s a lot a retailer can do to influence what is most popular and what sells well — and Amazon certain has done that, positioning the Kindle Fire HD front and center on its home page even today — the reality is that the Kindle family, with price points from $119 to $299, is a pretty solid entry-level tablet device.

Source: Amazon

Digital sales at Amazon

However, the company still refuses to release actual sales data on the Android-based tablets — although third-party data suggests Kindle market share is growing fast and total device sales were likely between 10 and 12 million as of the end of 2012.

Digital media seems to be the future at Amazon, and the company reported increases in the amount of content available as Prime Instant Video now has 36,000 titles for viewers to choose from, and 23 million movies, TV shows, apps, books, and more in Amazon’s overall catalog. Amazon recently released a new mobile web store for digital music specifically for iPod and iPhone, clearly competing with digital music incumbent Apple.

Those popular Kindles have helped 23 authors who publish on Kindle to sales exceeding 250,000 in 2012 alone, and 500 books published on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform have reached the top 100 Kindle books bestseller list.

Image credit: Jennifer Van Grove

U.S. music sales grew 3.1 percent in 2012 to set a new record for the music industry, according to year-end report compiled by Nielsen and Billboard.

Last year’s sales growth is especially significant because it shows that the rise in streaming music service use isn’t necessarily discouraging people from buying the songs that they like. That’s saying a lot considering many of those music services had record-breaking years themselves. Spotify reached a milestone with 5 million paying subscribers this year, and Pandora saw a record number of listener hours logged on the service.

As for the report, the music industry sold a total of 1.65 billion units in 2012, which includes the sale of digital singles, music videos, digital albums, and physical albums. Nielsen also found that digital album sales increased 14 percent for the year to 118 million units and accounted for 37 percent of all albums sold. (That’s up from the 31 percent digital album sales accounted for in 2011.) Of course, physical album sales continued their decline, dropping 12.8 percent from 2011.

And while vinyl record sales continued to climb again in 2012 (17.7 percent to 4.6 million units), the real star for music sales were in digital singles, up 5.1 percent from last year to 1.3 billion tracks sold.

We’ve pasted some highlights from the industry report below:

• Overall album sales (including albums and track equivalent album sales) were down 1.8 percent compared to 2011.
• Total album sales were down 4.4 percent in 2012 with sales totaling 316.0 million units compared to 330.6 million in 2011.
• Ten albums sold more than one million units in 2012.
• The ]country genre showed the greatest gains in 2012, with sales up 4.1 percent compared to 2011. Rock, which continues to be the biggest genre, was up 1.4 percent vs. 2011.
• Country also saw a 38 percent gain in digital album sales in 2012 vs. 2011, the largest increase of any genre in the digital album format.
• For the fifth consecutive year, more vinyl albums were purchased than any other year in the history of Nielsen SoundScan.
  • In 2012, vinyl record album sales reached 4.6 million in sales, breaking the previous record of 3.9 million LP album sales in 2011.
  • Sixty-seven percent of all vinyl albums purchases came from an independent music store during 2012.
  • Vinyl album sales in 2012 were up 19 percent compared to 2011 and accounted for 1.4 percent of all album sales and 2.3 percent of all physical album sales.
• For the second consecutive year, Columbia Records ends the year with the largest market share among all label groups with a 9.05 percent album label share.

Music button image via italianestro/Shutterstock

Free is the ultimate weapon — for the world’s biggest advertising company.

More than a year after Apple introduced iTunes Match, technology that lets you sync all your music to the cloud and enjoy it on any device (errr, any Apple device), and three months after Amazon announced similar capabilities with its Cloud Match service, Google is following suit:

We’re also launching our new matching feature to streamline the process of uploading your personal music to Google Play. We’ll scan your music collection, and any song we match against the Google Play catalog will be automatically added to your online library without needing to upload it, saving you time. This will be available in Europe at launch on November 13 and is coming to the U.S. soon after. This will all be for free — free storage of your music, free matching, free syncing across your devices, and free listening.

According to CNet, Google was going to announce the new service at its October 29 event. Then, of course, Hurricane Sandy happened. So Google announced the news on its blog instead. This was expected … but the big news is coded into the last sentence of the announcement.

Can you say “free?”

The announcement’s last sentence uses the word “free” no less than five times: free storage, free matching, free syncing, and free listening. Without mentioning any competitors, Google is emphasizing as hard as it can the fact that iTunes Match costs $25/year and Amazon’s Cloud Match, while free for up to 250 songs, also costs $25 for up to 250,000 songs.

That may force Apple — and Amazon — to make some changes. Both Apple and Amazon make money when people buy stuff from them — digital or physical stuff. Google, on the other hand, makes money when people give their attention to its services — it sells that attention to advertisers.

Google’s version of the music matching services will allow users to add up to 20,000 songs from their existing music collections to their Google Play account. One other key difference from Apple’s matching solution is that Google will enable music streaming of those songs to Android devices or web browsers (Apple’s version is not exactly streaming; it’s download and play).

That’s huge, since you’ll be able to access your music whenever and wherever you want, on just about any device, as long as you have an Internet connection.

Some music execs have called matching services “legitimizing” piracy, but the main goal is to enable consumers to finally leave behind those mounds of plastic-encased music for the digital world. In order to offer this service, Google needed the approval of the major music labels.  The Europe-first strategy is likely a function of the status of contract negotiations with various labels.

The question now is: How will Apple and Amazon respond?

photo credit: darren131 via photopin cc

At VentureBeat, we come across a lot of funding news every day. In order to bring you the most information possible, we’re rounding up the quick-and-dirty details about the funding deals of the day and serving them up here in our “Funding daily” column.

CloudPassage lands $14M

Cloud security startup CloudPassage has raised $14 million in second-round funding Wednesday. CloudPassage helps companies such as Foursquare store sensitive data in the cloud securely. The new round of funding was led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from previous investors Benchmark Capital and Musea Ventures.

KULA Causes grabs $1.1M

Charitable giving e-commerce service KULA Causes announced it has raised $1.1 million in funding from an undisclosed investor. KULA has created its own currency that people can convert loyalty points, rebates, and gift cards into KULA currency, which is then given to a charity.

Isolation Network files a $6.6 million form D

Isolation Network Inc., the parent company of INgrooves, raised $6.6 million in a second round of funding according to a Securities and Exchanges Commission filing. INgrooves is a digital music and video distribution, marketing, and promotion services company that counts Universal Music Group and MTV as clients. Isolation Networks raised a $5 million round in March 2012.

H. Bloom blossoms with $10 million

Subscription-based flower-delivery service H. Bloom has raised $10 million in funding, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filling. The company delivers “luxurious” bouquets for consumers and commercial customers. The round was led by Shasta Ventures with participation from existing investors.

ABB invests in water monitoring startup TaKaDu

Electricity infrastructure provider ABB just led $6 million investment in water infrastructure monitoring startup TaKaDu. TaKaDu offers water infrastructure monitoring as a service. The company’s software links to existing sensors in the water network like flow meters, quality sensors and pressure meters.

Khosla Ventures puts $7 million into password killer OneID

Security company OneID is helping to eliminate one of the weakest links on the internet: the password. It uses public key cryptography to eliminate the need for the password and hopes to change the way people think about their identities on the Internet. The company received $7 million in its first round of funding today, led by Khosla Ventures.

Beamit raises seed funding

Beamit, a mobile payment service, raised $2.4 million in seed funding, reports TechCrunch. The company specializes in processing international remittances, which is when a person working in another country sends money to his home country. Founder’s Co-op with the round, with Bezos Expeditions and TomorrowVentures participating.

Condé Nast buys Ziplist

Magazine publisher Condé Nast purchased mobile shopping-list and recipe organizing app Ziplist Wednesday, All Things D reported. The purchase price wasn’t confirmed, but is said to be $14 million. Ziplist originally raised $4.5 million from Softbank Capital and Martha Stewart.

Flowers image via Flickr user Sweet.Eventide

As much criticism as record labels receive for how they treat artists, Sony Music might take the cake. The company pulled the ultimate in shameful activities this weekend by raising the price on Whitney Houston’s Ultimate Collection album on iTunes and Amazon within 30 minutes of her death on Saturday.

Music mega-star Whitney Houston died on Saturday at the age of 48. And when a high-profile artist passes away, fans often look to re-experience their music, which causesdigital and physical sales soar. Most recently, Michael Jackson’s catalog considerably jumped on the charts after his death.

But instead of reverence in the wake of Houston’s passing, Sony chose to raise the price of one of her most popular hits collections. The Ultimate Collection album in the U.K. jumped in price by more than 60 percent from £4.99 to £7.99 within 30 minutes of Houston’s death, according to Digital Spy. The album price fell back down to £4.99 some time during the weekend, but it’s unclear when it happened.

Fans originally blamed Apple for the price hike on iTunes, but The Guardian is reporting that Apple automatically raised the price after Sony Music “lifted the wholesale price” of the album.

Houston’s Ultimate Collection was originally released in 2007 and was the second top-selling album on iTunes on Monday morning in the U.K., according to The Guardian. In the U.S., Houston’s 2000 Greatest Hits collection is currently sitting in the number two slot on iTunes album sales chart, while Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” her most popular song ever, is currently sitting at the number one position for individual song sales.

Houston’s catalog is expected to dominate the music charts during the next week, according to the Official Charts Company.

Sony Music and Apple did not immediately respond to queries about the price hike.

Lyrics are a massively underestimated market segment, says Tom Lehman, co-founder of RapGenius, one of the progenitors of this “lyrics 2.0″ movement. “People don’t understand how popular lyrics are, and how much people like to read and understand them,” he says.

In fact, a staggering two percent of all Google search queries are for lyrics. The share of Bing’s pie is even larger, at seven percent. After ‘Facebook,’ the term ‘lyrics’ is the most common search term on Google in the US.

The existing lyrics services, spoiled by the high demand and dearth of disruptive thinking, have left the field wide open to those who see this shadow opportunity. Lehman referred to the shoddiness of existing lyric services as “so bad, it’s a meme.” Indeed, most of the incumbents, topped by MetroLyrics, AZlyrics and Sing365, hail from a bygone era of the web where banner ads, popups and poorly conceived user experiences were the norm.

Lehman describes the system as fundamentally broken. “Rather than pummeling users with ringtone ads, which are scams anyway, why not take a longer-term approach?” he asks, referring to monetization strategies based on stirring peoples’ passions about artists and their music.

Yet these existing players still manage to command incredibly high traffic. The world’s highest-trafficked lyrics site, MetroLyrics, sees over 31 million monthly unique visitors according to Quantcast and Alexa estimates. Such traffic, despite their relatively unchanged and low quality experiences, shows that anyone who’s able to deliver value from innovative uses of lyrics has a chance to reap big rewards.

A Blueprint for “Lyrics 2.0″

At the core of the new offerings is a basic re-imagining of how people interact with lyrics. According to Lehman, existing sites tend to view lyric queries as a “superficial reference” type of activity where users merely try to confirm what they hear (is that really a bathroom on the right?). In his experience, that view is overshadowed by a deeper desire to connect, engage and even obsess about lyrics through analysis and discussion.

RapGenius’s product caters to that new context, seeking to build knowledge and community through user-populated, highly detailed in-line explanations of lyrics, especially rap and hip-hop lyrics, which often have insider references and other deep meanings that are seldom understood on the first listen.

So far, more than 30,000 users have signed up to discover, interpret, explain, and debate lyrics with one another. More than 10,000 songs are fully explained by the community, some songs being viewed tens of thousands of times with contrasting interpretations and viewpoints on key lines. The site expects to reach over 5 million monthly unique visitors soon.

The site design is minimal and modern, a clear departure from existing services, which took aesthetic cues from the big sites of their heyday, making RapGenius more Tumblr than Altavista. The well-conceived layout with its intuitive highlights and bubble overlays is perfect for the infusion of explanations, analyses, context and criticisms to song lyrics. The same approach is envisioned for their upcoming mobile experience, which already sees 17 percent of site traffic (redirecting to the desktop version at the moment).

James Hritz, vice-president of monetization at TuneWiki, another social music company that’s placing big bets on lyrics 2.0, corroborates the trend. “Lyrics are about self-expression, community and learning,” he says, pointing to RapGenius as a service that “gets” this need. His own firm is radically re-envisioning its lyrics offerings to provide deeper, more meaningful experiences to music consumers in the vein of RapGenius.

TuneWiki has already learned a lot about how powerful lyrics can be. With a user base that’s 60 percent international, many flock to the service to use lyrics as a tool to learn English. Since TuneWiki’s software can directly translate its database of more than 4 million fully licensed lyrics to any of 45 different languages, people can hear their favorite tracks in English and read the lyrics in their native tongue. The site’s Lyric Legend iPhone Game that debuted last year was an early demonstration of how lyrics have disruptive powers companies like MetroLyrics simply haven’t executed on.

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Music sales in America are up 1.6 percent this year as of May 8 compared to the same period last year, mostly due to an increase in digital album and track sales, according to a report by the research firm Nielsen.

There still isn’t any actual explanation for the rise in sales — a minor reversal after 10 years of decline for the industry. Nielsen points to the release of The Beatles’ catalog on iTunes in November, sales of which could have spilled over into 2011. But that really doesn’t make sense for more recent months. Another possibility is that more people are buying digital music now for media players and phones acquired over the holidays.

Instead of fighting with Google over its new cloud service, music industry executives should be focused on figuring out what’s working so well for digital sales this year, and expanding on that as much as possible. There’s also a chance that this is a just a fluke sales rise, particularly since we’re still early in the year. If the digital sales rise continues for the next few quarters, then it will definitely be worth figuring out what’s driving that growth.

Other figures worth noting: Vinyl album sales have increased an impressive 37 percent since last year, continuing steady growth for the format since 2008. (Lesson of the day: Hipsters can effect change in a major industry.) But don’t get too excited yet, as vinyl still accounts for a mere 1.2 percent of physical sales.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With the iPhone app Didiom, syncing music files to your phone may become a thing of the past. That’s why we’re choosing Didiom as the first innovative app for VentureBeat’s Mobile App Spotlight.

Didiom lets you stream music to your iPhone or iPod Touch (or BlackBerry, or Windows Mobile 6 phone) from your Windows PC over Wi-Fi and 3G. It’s available in two flavors: A free, or Lite, version that lets you stream up to five songs, and a Pro version that offers higher-quality audio and unlimited streams for $9.99 a year.

Setting up Didiom is simple: First download the desktop client, then create a Didiom account, and finally choose the music folders you’d like to sync with the service. Didiom gives you access to songs, podcasts, audiobooks and playlists — though it won’t support files encrypted with DRM from iTunes and audiobook company Audible. (Apple now sells unencrypted MP3 files on iTunes, but older files may have DRM.)

The Pro version lets you stream audio at up to 128 Kbps quality — which is noticeably worse than CD quality. Still, the quality drop is a decent trade-off for the convenience of accessing your music from practically anywhere.

In my testing over AT&T’s 3G network in New York, Didiom managed to quickly find my music library, and it was able to play back files within a few seconds of accessing them. The app itself is well-designed and stable. Didiom takes advantage of the iPhone 4’s multitasking capabilities, allowing you to listen to songs without staying in the app, although it doesn’t integrate with the iPhone’s native playback controls.

Didiom, short for “digital distribution of music”, started out as a graduate project for founder Ran Assaf. In an email interview, Assaf mentioned that his original plan in 2004 was to let users stream music from a large licensed catalog. Eventually, the company pivoted its focus to placeshifting, or the ability to access your files from anywhere.

Driving the service is a peer-to-peer (P2P) placeshifting technology that Didiom has been developing since 2004, which makes streaming files from computers to phones easier. With Didiom, your music never hits any intermediary servers — instead, it’s encrypted and piped directly from your PC to your phone. That’s a far less problematic approach than other pioneers of streaming, like MP3.com, an online-music pioneer which copied files from users’ libraries and stored them on its own servers. That last step — copying them to servers — raises potential copyright issues. And that’s what Didiom smartly avoids.

When asked if music labels took issue with the service, Assaf said, “We demonstrated the technology to the labels. They did not raise any concerns. It was important for them to know that Didiom is not a music locker service, and that we do not duplicate or upload music from the computers of our users to our servers.”

Assaf counts other services like Orb, ZumoCast, and Simplify Media (which Google acquired earlier this year) as Didiom competitors. He says that Didiom stands out “in terms of speed, navigation, streaming quality, user experience, DRM support, compatible devices and availability on app stores.” He added that Didiom’s streaming technology is more stable, and less prone to error due to Internet outages, as well.

Didiom certainly performed better in my testing than ZumoCast and Orb. When it comes to music, I also prefer Didiom to Libox, an innovative streaming service we’ve covered in the past.

Didiom, founded in 2005, is based in New York City. The company has received some funding from angel investors but is primarily bootstrapped.

Developers: Want to get your app featured like Didiom? Then submit your app for consideration!

The Intel AppUp developer program is sponsoring VentureBeat’s Mobile App Spotlight. However, VentureBeat’s editorial staff selects apps for the program according to its customary editorial standards, without input from Intel.

After ten iterations of iTunes, Ping marks Apple’s first step into the social realm. Jobs played it off as a simple way to discover music by following friends and artists. But he also called it a “Facebook plus Twitter for music.” With Google, Apple’s new archenemy in the mobile world, eyeing its own version of Facebook and Twitter, it’s likely that Ping is a part of much larger strategy for Apple.

iTunes has always been a hub for Apple, bringing together its devices like the Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, with content: music, movies, TV shows, apps and books. But while it’s great software, it has always lacked something that is a major part of the way we consume content: people.

Others have been quick to notice the gap and jump on it. Last.fm, for example, launched a social network around music many years ago which tracked and shared music you listened to on iTunes with friends. MySpace offered a way to connect people around content like music and artists, and grew into a social network of mammoth scale. While Apple products like the iPod have been a popular way to experience content in the past, the discovery of that content has often taken place elsewhere — the places where our friends hang out online.

So, Ping looks to bridge the gap between what iTunes has to offer — music — and where people discover those offerings — namely social networks.

But music is no way near the end-all-be-all for iTunes: The store sells everything from movies to TV shows, podcasts, books/audiobooks, and apps today.

This means that Apple would be short-sighted in looking at Ping as just a music-discovery tool. More likely, it sees it as a way to get serious about social, something it has never paid much attention to. It’s mastered the technology, the content, and now, it is going after the most important layer: people.

Today, on its launch date, I can follow my friends and artists on Ping, see the kind of music they’re consuming, and what they have to say about it. But in the future, it’s inevitable that I’ll also be able to see the movies and shows they’re watching, the books they’re reading, and the apps they’re using. In other words, it’s a social network based around content and consumption, not status and comments.

This should be news to Facebook and MySpace. The former has tried to be a neutral platform for sharing content, while MySpace, with an early lead in Hollywood’s movies-and-music scene, has tried to reinvent itself around the “socialization of content.” But with 160 million users and millions of songs, movies, shows, apps, and books, Apple has a far more direct connection with content. On Apple’s products, people don’t just talk about content. They consume it. And, intriguingly, they pay for it — something that social networks have struggled to capitalize on, often by sending people to iTunes to buy content, in exchange for a share of the sale.

There are implications for other players besides Facebook and MySpace. When giants fight, startups get trampled. Blippy, a service that tracks purchases, lets you see what others are buying on iTunes. Miso and Tunerfish, two startups in the social TV space, let you track what friends are watching. If Ping were to start tracking activity other than music, there would be little incentive to use such services.

Apple must surely be thinking it’s time to cut out the middlemen. Who needs partners when you’ve got 160 million friends?

Getting noticed is a challenge for everyone building apps. Join us at DiscoveryBeat 2010, and hear secrets from top industry executives about how to profit in the new cross-platform app ecosystem. The conference takes place on October 18th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Go here for conference details, or to apply to the “Needle in the Haystack” business contest. Early-bird tickets are available until September 15.

Google gave a brief glimpse of what appears to be a Web-based competitor to Apple’s iTunes Store during the company’s keynote session at the I/O developer conference in San Francisco. The service would let users find, purchase and download songs they like in a Web-based store. Google didn’t offer any details on pricing or what record labels the company would work with.

It appears that a recently acquired company called Simplify Media is helping Google power this. The Redwood City-based company makes it easy for consumers to access their music, photos and videos through multiple applications whenever they want. The company made a mysterious announcement two months ago that it was discontinuing its app.

The company said:

“We are unable to share our future plans at this time but hope to be able to announce the re-launch of the technology soon. In the meantime, we will continue to operate the existing service for at least the next 3 months. Many thanks to those of you who have supported us and helped us improve Simplify over the last few years! We hope you will enjoy its future incarnations as well.”

Google has made a few forays into music over the past year. Last fall, it launched a service that let songs show up in search results and partnered with MySpace, Rhapsody, Pandora, Lala (which was later acquired by Apple) and iLike (which was later acquired by MySpace) to provide free initial streams of songs. Consumers have to pay if they want to listen to more, however.

[Photo: Engadget]