Yesterday Apple didn’t just unveil a bunch of new iPods, they also unveiled the sparkling new iTunes 10, which includes a social network for music, one they call “Ping”, where artists and bands can come together, talk music, follow each other and what not. It’s a sort of MySpace/Last.FM/Twitter things, and from the looks of it, seems pretty decent. We’ll have to wait and see how it fares against its competitors.

Popularity: 2% [?]

According to Mashable, a hacker by the name of Ch Russo has hacked The Pirate Bay by using SQL injection vulnerabilities in The Pirate Bay’s database, whereby he got access to usernames, passwords and emails of all registered users. The site is currently down due to “database upgrades”.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Shocker: Google’s online music site, and iTunes competitor, is likely to be named Google Music. The new feature will be an online, cloud based music service, where users can access their music from several devises. It was first teased a few weeks ago at Google I/O. Apple is rumored to be working on a cloud-based version of iTunes, which would make the two services direct competitors.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Music service Shazam has just hit 1 million downloads after only 7 months of existence. Shazam originally made its debut on August of 2009 at the Nokia Ovi Store. Shazam is a music service hat allows users to identify what song they’re currently listening to by way of recording a short sample and then sending it to a remote server for processing.

If you are not familiar with Shazam, here is a short video demo for you to check out.

Read

Popularity: 3% [?]

The Orchard, one of the largest independent music distributors, is going away from being a public company and into a private one. The largest shareholder, Dimensional Associates, has offered to buy the remaining 58 percent of the shares for $2.05 a share, making the whole company worth just over $13 million. The company has been losing money over the past year, while the shareprice has slumped as well.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Music Streaming Service MOG has announced that they’ve raised $9.5 million in a new round of funding, after previously raising $10 million.

The service launched last December and offers users to stream any music for $5 a month and in good 256kbps audio quality.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Finnish startup Linkotec, which makes the online-based music player DazzBoard — a sort of online rival to iTunes if anything — has announced that they’ve raised another $1.5 million in VC funding.

DazzBoard is a fully functioning media player ala iTunes but works only online and doesn’t have some of the constraints iTunes has. However, there still are constraints, for one, DazzBoard is only available on Windows where it requires a plugin to work (a Mac version is in development).

Popularity: 3% [?]

TuneWiki, the online social music player (and not really a wiki), has announced that they’ve raised $7 million in a Series A funding, led by Motorola Ventures, followed by Intellect Capital Ventures, HillsVen Capital, Novel TMT and prior investor Benchmark Israel.

TuneWiki offers apps for iPhone, Android and other handsets, where its player is capable of generating items like lyrics for each song, and generally more information (and products) about the songs they’re listening to.

Popularity: 3% [?]