Imagine that you're listening to Lou Reed's classic Transformer album. The glammy I'm So Free has just faded and the lonesome final track, Goodnight Ladies, is about to begin. Suddenly, a woman's voice chirrups: "Littlewoodsdirect.com!" Then the music starts again. This is how the record labels hope to make money from people streaming music online. Go to the recently fully-launched We7.com and you can hear any of 3m tracks, providing you'll listen to a three-second advert first. You can even download MP3s by acts including Motörhead, Moby and the Kinks for free, although they also contain an advert. But what really marks We7 out is the option to hear thousands of full albums, be it Transformer, Pet Sounds, Thriller or the new Girls Aloud record. There is an ad between each track, but you soon stop noticing them. And, ultimately, they do seem a reasonable trade-off for having so much quality music on demand.
PureSolo.com is another new site hoping to create what people in suits would call "new revenue streams" for recording artists. The idea is that amateur musicians select their instrument, browse the 10,000 available tracks and pay to download their choice. They can then use the free PureSolo Player to record themselves playing, say, the guitar part for Pink Floyd's Money or the oboe part for Take That's Back for Good, while the rest of the song is performed by some impressive-sounding session players. There's also a karaoke route, whereby you can download a track, bellow along to it, tweak the levels and burn it onto a CD. Those with genuine musical ability may be unhappy that you can't monitor your performance while you record it, but the rest of us will be too busy perfecting our one-headphone-clasped-to-the-ear recording pose to care. It's enormous fun, and the first download is free when you sign up.
We wrote last week about Last.fm's ability to suggest music you might like based on your current listening habits. Now, a Hungarian PhD student has created an interactive map depicting the relationships between thousands of acts, taken from Last.fm's database, at sixdegrees.hu/last.fm. In truth, it's all quite confusing; the explanation of the map talks about the "the inhomogenous density of the vertices". But it is interesting to type in your Last.fm username and see where on the map your own listening habits sit, or to look at the way the different genres, depicted by different colours, bleed into each other. And it's definitely worth spending a few minutes studying the bafflingly complicated hi-res version of the map; note, for example, the Amy Winehouse-led jazz invasion of pop, or the Cramps' curious links to reggae and pop. Fascinating stuff.