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You know what the Internet needs? Another way to tell people what music you're listening to.

No, really. There may be more services competing for your music-sharing attention than there are thinkpieces about Lana Del Rey on the Internet today. (Right now, you can link one of those streaming services to your Facebook, you can Tweet about what you're now playing, or you could share your Last.fm info, just to name a few.) But nothing we've seen yet holds quite the charm of a very simple new site called This Is My Jam.

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Douglas Zimmerman

Macworld attendees check out Silent Frisco, the wireless headphones-assisted dance party.

​There were more curious wallflowers than hula-hooping dancers yesterday as the wireless headphones-assisted dance party Silent Frisco took over the second floor of the Macworld conference. (It continues today from noon to 6 p.m. with DJs Motion Potion and u9lift). For Sunset Promotions, which takes Silent Frisco to locales like Ocean Beach and Treasure Island and plans an ambitious schedule of events this year, it's a huge opportunity to turn people on to the joys of a dance party, without the elements that can be barriers to entry for many (late night hours, intoxication, loud noise).

Across the hall, in the area dubbed the "Music Studio," students and staff from Berklee College of Music are offering live performances and workshops. Highlights from today's schedule include learning how to build the best project studio for your personal music needs and surveying the best of the current mobile music-making applications. But let's review the real draw for music fans at Macworld -- the gadgets.

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Bow to your master, Apple fanboy.

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He made your computer, your phone, your TV entertainment system, your music player, and he created the store where you buy most of your music. But just in case you think your screen-circumscribed life isn't already a total shrine to Steve Jobs, the most arrogant technologist of our age, now there's an action figure in his image to get your jollies with. And it's so creepy that only you, the most pathetic Apple fanboy alive, could possibly not hate it.

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​Over at Dan Mitchell's Digital Tremors column on our news blog, the Snitch, there's an interesting debate brewing over the recording industry's response to some piracy advocates' claims that its employees downloaded music and other files illegally. Mitchell's take is that while disputing these claims should have been easy, "the RIAA, as is its wont, nevertheless made itself look completely stupid in its response."

It's a fascinating read:

TorrentFreak, a news site that basically supports illicit downloading, last week used a half-assed ISP-lookup service to conclude that employees of both the Recording Industry Association of America and the Department of Homeland Security had downloaded illicit copies of various copyrighted works, including episodes of the Showtime series Dexter, and songs by Jay-Z and Kanye West. The site had earlier made similar charges against several big media companies.

These accusations are far from solid. TorrentFreak, as its name implies, essentially promotes and defends piracy.

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Turntable.FM, a keynote case study at Billboard FutureSound.

​Billboard FutureSound takes over Terra in San Francisco on November 17-18. Inspired by the TED talks and gatherings that feature leaders of thought, the conference aims to bring together top investors, labels, and entrepreneurs to brainstorm workable solutions for the tensions across the digital music divide.

Rather than adopt the typical flow of panel discussions, there will be demonstrations of both current and future technologies from new start-ups, such as Bckstgr and Tracktrack.it, as well as practical road maps for success via presentations and keynote case studies from executives from companies such as Turntable.FM and Pandora. Where other conferences tend to lean in one direction or other, the goal here is to be useful to technological as well as musical minds.

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Phyllis Keating

Pete Townshend

​Last night, Who guitarist Pete Townshend made a rousing speech at a British radio festival, blasting Apple's iTunes store for its treatment of musicians "whose work it bleeds like a digital vampire." His speech even included a list of things Townshend believes Apple should do to encourage and support musical creativity.

While we're all for supporting musicians, Townshend's diatribe was sorely misguided and misinformed. In the interest of an honest conversation about the ailing music industry and what could be done about it, here are five of the things Townshend either didn't realize or got spectacularly wrong. You can read the full text of his lecture here.

1. Apple is a business -- a large, shrewd, brutally self-interested American corporation.
And it is solely concerned with its own growth and success. Certainly its products have had ancillary benefits to others, and to society at large -- including, ahem, musicians. But doing good for musicians is not what Apple is about. Unlike, say, the BBC, Apple is a for-profit entity that owes no inherent debt or responsibility to the American people (at least not legally, in the strict capitalist sense). So making a list of things the company should provide to musicians (out of the goodness of its $400-a-share heart?) seems not only naive, but idiotic.

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The Flaming Lips

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The O Music Awards -- MTV's online-streaming attempt to honor the world where music in 2011 lives and dies -- are Monday. Did you previously care? No? Well perhaps you will upon hearing that the Flaming Lips will pay a heartfelt tribute to Steve Jobs in the form of a Beatles cover.

The real question, however, is: What Beatles song will the Flaming Lips pick to honor the deceased Apple founder? And we have the answer after the jump...

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Finally: A search engine with moves like MC Hammer

​In perhaps the greatest gift to headline writers unleashed on the blogosphere this minute, Bay Area hip-hop figurehead, ordained Christian minister, and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass regular MC Hammer announced some curious news in S.F. this week:

He's starting his own search engine. And it's called WireDoo.

Explaining the search startup at this week's Web 2.0 conference, Hammer says the aim of WireDoo won't be to compete with giants like Google and Yahoo (if Yahoo can still be called a giant), but rather to provide "'a deeper kind of search' that can show relationships to queries," according to the New York Times.

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​Our curiosity was piqued this morning upon hearing that about 30 independent record labels -- including greats like Kill Rock Stars, Sub Pop, Anti-, and Daptone -- have partnered to create a new music discovery site called The New Record.

Unfortunately, we've been trying to download MP3s from the site all day -- and even though we've occasionally been able to get its beta-version pages to load, we haven't been able to listen to any music yet.

The idea, however, is cool. According to Hypebot, the New Record was founded by Bill Armstrong of L.A. label Side One Dummy, and aims to curate new, independent music in the form of streams and MP3s before their formal release. It doesn't say so explicitly, but The New Record is clearly a more label- and artist-friendly response to the pairing of streaming services like Spotify with Facebook -- with the goal of getting its users to buy actual records. No paltry payouts here, at least if users do actually end up buying stuff.

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In case you missed it, Bjork just became the first artist ever to release an album as a series of apps. Depending on your perspective, you're either breathless with the futuristic, multi-media innovation of it all, or -- if you're like me -- it kind of makes you want to stick your head in a bucket of cold water and never listen to music ever again. Bjork is, and always has been, an innovator. It's the reason she sounds like no one else, and it's the reason she's had such a long career. And while I respect her fearless commitment to stretching boundaries, I'd like to acknowledge that not everyone on earth is thrilled about music moving in ever-more digital directions.
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