YouTube has lots of music content, but until now they haven't given music first class treatment. YouTube treated music videos the same way it treated a video of a skateboarding dog or the grape stomp lady. That just changed with the launch of the YouTube Music Discovery Project.

You can now type in the name of an artist or song and YouTube will build you a video playlist that includes the artist/song you searched for and similar artists/songs. It will also show you artist bios.

Napster is offering 20 free MP3s to the subscriber who can come up with the best dance party playlist.
I am entering the contest, which means the rest of you are going for second place :-).
The toughest part for me will probably be limiting it to only 20 tracks. So many good songs, so little room on the playlist!
See the Napster blog post announcing the contest.

There is an interesting guest blog post over on HypeBot today from John Topper, the manager of moe and Cornmeal. He proposes 10 questions my 8 year old daughter will ask me by the time she gets to college. I think one of his theories on the music industry is spot on: CDs diminishing, presumably in favor of digital music stored on computers. The rest left me confused. Why would live music diminish? Is it just me, or is this really obvious? Do you see live music going away?
Please share your opinion in the comments.

One of the best reasons to have a subscription to a site like Napster, Rhapsody or Zune is because you get access to most of their catalog for just one low monthly fee ($7-$15 a month). This allows you to listen to entire songs for which you wouldn't normally be willing to pay at no extra charge. This is in contrast to download-to-own sites like iTunes, where you can only listen to the whole track if you buy it (99 cents - $1.29 each).
A great time to be a member of a subscription site is during Grammy season. I don't listen to a lot of pop and top 40 music, but I am still interested in hearing the Grammy winners. I wouldn't want to buy most of these songs though. If you want to keep your fingers on the pulse of the music industry's popular favorites without shelling out a lot of cash, get a music subscription.
Take a listen to the Grammy nominees on Napster: Award Nominees 2010

Lately I've encountered great videos and a book on sampling, remixing and music mashups.

If you're under age 30, or probably 40, you probably already know what "sampling," "remixing" and "music mashups" mean. If you're like my parents though, you may have never heard these terms.

• Sampling - using a piece of recorded music in another piece of music.
• Remixing - taking a song's constituent parts and mixing them together differently to create a new song.
• Mashups - combining multiple recordings into a new recording.

These three techniques are the basis of entirely new forms of music that have emerged over the past 30 years, including hip-hop, house, jungle and trip-hop. Aided by digital technology, these techniques have enabled artists, producers and DJs to make music that has crashed headlong into copyright law.