In a new report, The State of Music Online: Ten Years After Napster, the Pew Internet Project traces the evolution of online music, and the changes that have been forced on musicians and the recording industry. While the history is fascinating, Pew’s conclusions are notable for anyone accessing “free” music using peer-to-peer file sharing systems, music search sites like Songza or SearchMe Music, or even streaming “radio” stations like Pandora or Last.fm.

The good news is that the “suits,” as Pew described them, have dropped most of their heavy-handed tactics against users. However, they’re still hard at work trying to keep control of musical content, and getting people to pay for music. According to the report:

“Through digital fingerprinting and other tracking technologies, the record labels are monitoring copyrighted content as closely as ever and are counting on two major new strategies to help them: First, is a landmark partnership with internet service providers to monitor file sharing activity and potentially cut off service to the worst offenders. Second, is a series of partnerships with universities that would incorporate music subscription fees (predicted to be less than five dollars per student) into student tuition bills. If successful, a similar ISP-based fee could be implemented for the general public.”

It’s a worthwhile read.

I love Searchme as a “recall engine,” using it to find web pages or sites that I’ve previously visited but can’t remember the site name or URL. The visual display of results, with the ability to quickly scroll through mini-versions of pages makes it easy to recognize sites that I’ve already seen.

I also love Searchme’s music search capabilities. Through an arrangement with iMeem, you can play entire songs, directly from the music search result page. It’s a great way to decide whether you want to buy a song from iTunes or Amazon (both of which only let you hear 30 second snippets of songs).

Searchme also offers a sort of “visual bookmarks” feature called “stacks” that let you save pointers to content you want to revisit.

Searchme likely won’t replace your regular search engine, but it offers enough really cool and useful features that you’ll want to add it to your web search arsenal.

About two months ago, we published 7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should. That became a popular article and let us know that we should continue uncovering largely unknown search tools in future articles. So, here’s the second in an irregular series of posts about search tools you should know about.

Track This Now

Track This Now is a news search engine that displays results geographically on a Google Maps interface. Track This Now offers real-time tracking of news articles from 236 countries around the world. Just provide the topic you want to search for and the country(ies) you want to target, and Track This Now shows you news coverage of that topic mapped out. Here’s a recent search for “Google” targeting the U.S.

According to the web site, a widget is in development to let you embed news search maps directly into your blog or web site. And Track This Now also recently added geographic search engines for tracking any keyword/topic on Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. All in all, the suite of search tools at Track This Now offer a compelling way to get a snapshot of what’s going on now in news, social conversation, images, and videos.

StateStats

This is a search tool that shows the popularity of any search term on a state-by-state basis in the U.S. For example, StateStats shows that states in the southeast U.S. tend to do the most searches for the term walmart.

You can see the state rankings on the map at left. The second column adds extra information about other terms that correlate with your original query. Creator Doug Beeferman specifically warns against drawing certain conclusions from the data in the second column:

“… the fact that walmart shows a moderate correlation with ‘Obesity’ does not imply that people who search for ‘walmart’ are obese! It only means that states with a high obesity rate tend to have a high rate of users searching for walmart, and vice versa.”

All disclaimers aside, this is an interesting search tool that mashes up search data from Google Insights for Search with state data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Jogli

Jogli is a music search engine that claims to have more than 12 million albums and 500 million songs on offer, and you can listen and watch videos for free. A search for your favorite band brings up a pretty standard interface, showing albums and videos.

Below the fold are sections showing related artists, playlists created by other users, and more. When you search for an individual song, the interface changes slightly to show lyrics prominently. It’s easy to use and runs pretty deep — it found a little-known UK band I like called Vib Gyor, but didn’t find a little-known Irish band I like called Agiven. If anything, Jogli seems to rely too heavily on sourcing videos from YouTube, which becomes a problem when things happen like Warner Brothers pulling videos from YouTube.

2itch

2itch is a local search engine with a unique twist: Its goal is to list businesses that are open 24 hours a day, and show them on a Google Maps interface. 2itch claims to have more than 4,000 U.S.-based, 24-hour businesses listed. A search on my semi-remote zip code only brings up a few truck stops along the highway in an hour or two in each direction; the best coverage, understandably, is in a handful of major cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Phoenix.

There’s an add listing form where users can submit businesses to be listed. 2itch already offers a Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget and a mobile version; the site says an iPhone app is in development.

Ninja Tickets

In the previous tools column, we profiled a new search engine for tickets called FanSnap; in this column, we’ll profile an older ticket search engine called Ninja Tickets. Like other ticket search engines, Ninja Tickets doesn’t sell anything — it aggregates tickets that are available through other ticket-selling web sites. What sets Ninja Tickets apart is its Price Rating tool, which attempts to list tickets in the order of best market value based on price and seat location. The Price Rating tool appears as a star-based rating next to each search result.

Ninja Tickets does caution, though, that their search engine is still in beta and that users should check to make sure tickets don’t have obstructed views.

Finally, an update…

Soovle, one of the search engines covered in the previous article, has added a few new features based on user requests from new traffic after being profiled on Search Engine Land. Chief among these is the ability to store, send, download, or print the keywords they discover via Soovle. This is done by simply dragging keywords to a new book icon in the upper left of the Soovle interface.

Google China Music Search ranks music on the home page by some form of popularity metric. You can clearly search by artist name and other criteria. You can even download the DRM-free music in mp3 format at a rate of 192kbps. Google offers the ability to stream the music via a Flash player. Lyrics are also provided in a pop up window. The pages seem to contain advertisements but I am not sure if the revenue is shared with the musicians.

In February, Danny wrote a piece named Google To Fight Baidu In China With Legal Music Downloads? That article goes more into the other services available in China and some of the challenges Google will have in the Chinese market.

Baidu has been plagued with copyright lawsuits over music search in the past; the most recent news we have is that they beat the music labels in court.

Postscript: A Google spokesperson gave us a statement clarifying the ads in this application:

Google does not share in the revenue generated by advertising in connection with its Music Onebox product in China. All ads visible on the product in connection with the product run on Top100’s website and revenues from those ads are shared between Top100 and its music label and publisher partners.

The concept is straightfoward; you allow the search engine(s) access to your microphone (either by dialogue box with Midomi or downloading a piece of software with Humming Search), and then you hum your tune. With Midomi you can hum for as long as you like, with Humming Search it’s a 15 second count down. The search engine then compares your humming to its database and provides you with a selection of possible matches. At least, that’s the theory of the thing.

Of course, the first problem is, ‘what exactly is a hum?’ Is it actually ‘hmmm hmmm hmmm’, or does it include ‘De da de deee dadada da’ as well? Is singing allowed? For someone who likes to know about search syntax, Boolean operators and so on, these are very important questions. Anyway, onto the searching. I hummed. I sang. I dah dah’d until I was blue in the face. I even got various songs from my collection, played them and put the microphone next to the speakers. In the end I even said ‘This song is…’ and named the piece(s) I was attempting to hum.

All to no avail. Humming Search would listen intently, go off and search and then – nothing. Not a suggestion, not an idea, not even an error message. Perhaps it just didn’t like my voice, or perhaps I wasn’t humming to the right pitch – the oral equivalent of getting my syntax wrong maybe? After warbling for 10 minutes or so I gave up in defeat. Clearly I am not destined for greatness in the field of musical entertainment.

Midomi was much more successful if you count getting results back as success. However, in that case I’d have to say that a search engine was successful if it gave me results about civil engineering when I’d run a search on cat breeding. True, I hummed and it listened. Then it gave me results, but they were not even close to my strangled renditions of various classics or popular hits. Eventually I realised that I had to admit defeat when my wife came into my study and said with a note of irritation ‘What IS that noise?’ To be fair, what response can one give? ‘I’m singing to my computer’ doesn’t sound too great. ‘I’m playing ‘what’s that tune’ with a search engine’ is little better. I did try ‘I’m seeing if a search engine knows the song that I’m humming to it’, to which she replied ‘If you already know what it is, why are you asking the question?’ And I suppose that is a basic flaw in this whole ‘you hum it’ system – if you don’t know what the song is in the first place, even when you are provided with a list of possibilities you’re going to have to wade through all of them to find the one you want.

So for once, I admit defeat. I was unable to get any kind of sense out of either search engine, and to be fair this could be entirely the fault of my singing/humming voice. Consequently I feel unable to recommend or scorn either search engine – you’ll simply have to try them yourself, but do it when no-one is around, because otherwise they’ll think you’ve finally flipped.