We spent the latter part of the afternoon surfing through DJ download sites in search of new tracks to program in the next Netmix podcast. We came across a couple of cool new features, like this audio player by the folks over at DJDownload.com, the leading British online dance music retailer.

There are 39 out of this week’s Top 100 included in the player for your listening enjoyment. The coolest part of the player is the “needle drop” feature, where you can “drop” your cursor anywhere on the wave form and start the track from that point. This is a solid differentiation that sets DJDownload.com apart from their competition.

One thing we also noticed is that the music in Beatport’s Top 100 is vastly different from the music on DJDownload or Traxsource, another popular download spot on the web.

As the phenomenon of MP3 DJing continues to grow, we’re starting to see real differentiation displayed on the front-end in terms of what, in the physical world, we used to call the “end-rack”–the shelves at the end of every aisle in a record store where all the new stuff or specials were located.

What most consumers didn’t know, many labels rented that shelf space from the retailer to make sure their product was front and center so the consumer could easily find it. The same is true today for download stores. Home page space is a an important promotion point and revenue driver beyond the sales of music and other products.

Enjoy this player and don’t forget to go to DJDownload.com to create your own.

Music Industry Downfall, Part II: The Rise of Social Streaming Written by Alex Patriquin (contact – e-mail) — May 12th, 2008 | If any industry has felt the brunt of the internet as a disruptive technology, it’s the music industry, which has been dealt a heavy blow by the onset of digital music distribution.

According to Compete’s measurements, the majority of activity for online music are free streaming music services. A distant second is legal downloads, then subscriptions followed by P2P downloading.

read more | digg story

On his blog, Michael Robertson, founder of MP3tunes.com shares his thoughts on the recent Imeem deal with UMG and why that is bad for Imeem and bad for digital music web companies in general. Whether Imeem can drive enough eyeballs to their content for the deal to make sense remains to be seen. Minimum guarantees for content are killing startups who need the capital to innovate and not just hand it over to record labels who can’t really guarantee much of anything nowadays.

read more | digg story