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The New Era of Music Apps: Subscription Services. At the end of last week, last.fm suffered an outage that lasted up to 24 hours. In her report on the story, ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez noted that she no longer uses online radio services like last.fm and Pandora. Instead, she's "moved on to bigger and better things" in the form of new subscription-based services like MOG, Rdio and Spotify. There are others, including long-time subscription service Rhapsody and the hip Grooveshark (popular with RWW readers). For the purposes of this post, we're going to focus on the 3 new kids on the block - MOG, Rdio and Spotify - and look at what makes them so compelling. There are two main aspects of MOG, Rdio and Spotify which are driving up usage of those products: 1. But these new services are online apps.

By comparison, last.fm and Pandora are "online radio" services - a stream of songs that you have little control over, other than to play songs similar to a certain artist or tag. 2. ReadWriteWeb's Product Innovation Series: Introducing Google Places. Today the Local Business Center is becoming Google Places. Why? Millions of people use Google every day to find places in the real world, and we want to better connect Place Pages — the way that businesses are being found today — with the tool that enables business owners to manage their presence on Google.

We launched Place Pages last September for more than 50 million places around the world to help people make more informed decisions about where to go, from restaurants and hotels to dry cleaners and bike shops, as well as non-business places like museums, schools and parks. Place Pages connect people to information from the best sources across the web, displaying photos, reviews and essential facts, as well as real-time updates and offers from business owners. Google Places will continue to offer these same tools, but the new name will simplify the connection with Place Pages. This reflects our ongoing commitment to providing business owners with powerful yet easy-to-use tools. TUAW -- The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Engadget. Official Google Blog. Business Technology News - Wall Street Journal.

TechCrunch. Business Technology News - Wall Street Journal.