Cool Hunting: Imagine an online social network that provides free, on-demand online music but without the legal anxiety of peer-to-peer networks. More interactive than conventional internet radio, though not as gratifying as Napster was in its glory days, Jango is a New York City-based music site with a large database of songs and artists and is instantly addictive.

Now in its beta launch, there's a waiting list for new members though the first 100 readers to click this link can join. If you don't make the cut, not to worry. The site maintains a waiting list and it should only take a couple of days for an account to get activated. Once you're in, you can invite three of your friends.

The interface couldn't be more simple. Simply type in a musical artist you like and the site will play their songs. You can also specify how broad your tastes are by setting it to play only the artists you have identified or you can opt to hear artists it considers to be in the same genre. This isn't risk free. After adding a few classic rock bands the site began playing The Eagle's "Hotel California." Luckily by clicking on the frowning face icon, I was able to banish that song from ever playing again. Conversely, you can tag songs you like and the site will make sure to keep them in the mix.

Jango: Social Internet Radio [Cool Hunting]

DeVillain Guitar Company: The world’s first folding electric guitar will be introduced at the Musikmesse in Frankfurt on March 28 2007. The Centerfold guitar solves a transport problem that every guitarist has experienced.

”The ’magical’ thing is that the guitar can be played directly after it’s been unfolded and it’s just as tuned as when it was folded away”, says Leif Rehnström, Managing Director of the newly started DeVillain Guitar Company in Skellefteå, Sweden.

Behind the development of the folding guitar, patent applied for in Europe, Japan and USA, is SAS airline pilot Fredrik Johansson. He is a devoted guitarist but couldn’t take his instrument with him on flights around the world. During the last ten years, Fredrik has been working on the development of a folding guitar that could easily be taken on a plane.

”The resulting product not only solves the problem he was experiencing but also that of all the other guitarists who are fed up carrying their cumbersome guitar cases on buses, subways, bikes…", says Leif Rehnström, who has sworn over these transport difficulties many times after several years as a professional musician, with power pop group The Drowners among others.

You don’t even have to take the strings off when you fold the neck of the Centerfold, as they are rolled up by the guitar.

Press Release [DeVillain Guitar Company]

TrendCentral: While the terms “free” and “legal” aren’t usually used together to describe the business of music downloading, a new platform called We7 has developed a system that does just that. Currently in beta, We7 gives brands the chance to communicate with users by "grafting” a short (around 10 seconds) audio or video ad to the front end of the file. Custom tailored to each user through demographics and preferences supplied by the user, these ads in turn provide revenue to the artists. And after about four weeks, users are given the option to have the track ad-free. Users can play their DRM-free files on any device, and can share these files via We7 with whomever they’d like.

Ad-supported free music downloads [TrendCentral]

JoshSpear.com: In today’s fast-paced world, young Catholics are finding it hard to slow down enough to say the rosary. The Catholic staple, wherein “we say fifteen decades or tens of Hail Mary’s with an Our Father between each ten, while at each of these fifteen decades we recall successively in pious meditation one of the mysteries of our Redemption” is apparently thought to be monotonous (no way!) by the young faithful. In order to address this pressing issue, a “critical concept design” has emerged in the shape of the iRosary, which attempts to make the rosary more attractive and flexible for younger believers.

The iRosary converts the iPod’s white headphones into a hybrid prayer bead that can be shifted and then heard as an “audio bead” during prayers, which are themselves monitored via the iPod’s integrated calendar. As an added bonus, the iRosary accommodates for various degrees of piousness by allowing users to choose between three settings: “Infidel,” which recites the entire prayer for the listener to follow along to; “Believer,” which only displays the right prayer in the mode; and “Shepherd,” which allows the user to listen to music and hear the sound of the beads.

Now Praying: The iRosary [JoshSpear.com]

TrendCentral: A social networking site with a musical slant, Indaba Music gives users a place to not only share their own music, but also facilitates public and private sessions through which multiple artists can collaborate on recording projects. For example, someone who has a guitar part but needs a bassline may use the service to complete their vision. The objective is to link members with other musicians worldwide who they wouldn’t typically have the capability to work with otherwise, thus allow them to collaborate, mix and create a completely new sound.

New sites allow musicians to collaborate online [TrendCentral]

TrendBlog: BurnLounge is a community-powered digital music service. BurnLounge provides music fans with the necessary software and an expansive catalog of music, to create and sell music (and fan merchandise) to peers from their own digital music stores. This consumer-driven retailing model draws on the power of peer relationships and shared interests of its seller’s communities. After purchasing the software, participating sellers can sign up as “fans” for free and redeem their BurnReward points for products, services or music downloads on BurnLounge. Affiliates pay an additional $6.95 per month but can redeem BurnRewards points for cash. Music Mogul have to pay a one-time set-up fee off $215 and $14.95 per month to gain access to Business Management features, which allows them to build teams.

Peer-Selling Sites - Peer2Business [TrendBlog]

Bradenton Herald: Are you concerned that your wanna-be-cool-too preteen might be following their older siblings onto social-networking Web sites such as MySpace.com and Facebook.com?

Thankfully, there are several sites that a 9-year-old can explore without alarming their parents, including Whyville.net, ClubPenguin.com and even National Geographic, which has a My Page for kids.

Now the world's biggest kid brand, Disney, is jumping into the social-networking trend with a splashy, fun and character-laden Web site that Disney pledges will be safe for children. The launch date has not been released but expect it before January ends.

While I'm a little uncomfortable with the obvious emphasis on Disney-branded characters, from Hannah Montana to Captain Jack Sparrow and the engaging new world of Pixie Hollow for Tinkerbell and her fairy friends, I bet that your kid will have a blast playing here.

Taking the lead from other social-networking sites, Disney will let your little girl create her own fairy, give it a personality and share that character with her friends. If you have a son, let him play a game with Lightning McQueen and then brag to his buddies via chat about his high score.

"We wanted to break new ground," said Paul Yanover, executive vice president for Disney Online, during a private screening last week at the International Consumer Electronics Show here. "We want to immerse people in the characters, stories and experiences that are Disney."

Disney to offer kids' social site [Bradenton Herald]

TailoredMusic.com is a group of professional musicians dedicated to helping you to create the ultimate romantic gift—the gift of custom-tailored music.

Have you ever wished that you could write your own love song for that special someone in your life? TailoredMusic.com enables anyone to create their own personalized love song with the confidence and finesse of an experienced songwriter.

TailoredMusic.com

Influx Insights: Myspace started out as a tool for emerging LA bands to connect and build out their fan base. The genesis of this brand was in music, but years later, music still has an important aspect of the site, but its role has been diminished somewhat.

So what fills the void for the music fan?

Mog.com is a potential candidate. It's a music based blogging network. Users blog about music and connect to others who share similar tastes and interests. Mog says it helps you create pages that are an "extension of your musical soul".

The smart thing about Mog is that it recognizes that the best way to recommend other music to you is not with an algorithm, but other people, so Mog matches you up with others that it believes can help you discover new music.

Mog and niche social networks [Influx Insights]

TrendCentral: For London women tired of manicures every week or expensive and time consuming nail regimens, the latest and greatest is the nail tattoo. Using a super fine needle, the tattoo artist goes through the first few layers of your nail to create an extremely detailed image directly onto the nail. Fans are loving the intricate, as well as the thrill of doing something a little different that is not permanent---as the nail grows out, so does the tattoo. Although we have not yet seen this trend here in the US, we know that hip Londoners are going to New Wave Tattoo in Muswell Hill, London.

Nail Tattoos [TrendCentral]

Gothamist: Two of the biggest brands in the world came together today in New York to announce a partnership for a new product. Nike and Apple - who wasn't content just with opening a store on 5th Avenue - announced the Nike+iPod - a wireless system that can track your running progress and allow you to choose a "PoweSong" to pump you up when you hit a wall. The sensor fits into a special compartment under the insole and a receiver attaches to the iPod (which only works for the Nano). With the sensor, a voice can tell you what your progress is through the headphones with the touch of a button. Nike is rolling out several new Nike+ shoes in the fall, with the Air Zoom Moire as the first in the Nike+ line. There's also a pretty spiffy Nike+ website where you can track your run history and set up competitions with your friends.

Nike and Apple Together With a New Product [Gothamist]

Entrepreneur: Apple Computer's iPods are everywhere these days, and they're hungry. Just ask Catherine Keane, 24, who started her business, HungryPod, shortly after an acquaintance offered her $500 to load his CD collection onto his iPod. Keane took the offer and determined that with two more customers paying similar prices, she could launch a business for $1,500--enough to buy a computer that could handle large volumes of data transfer.

Loosely based on what its first client paid, HungryPod charges $1.75 per CD for the first 50 CDs, and $1.50 for each additional CD. Keane will pick up both the CDs and iPods at her clients' homes or offices in Manhattan for an extra $15--unless they have more than 100 discs, in which case pickup is free.

Keane, who interned at a top 40 radio station in Florida prior to starting HungryPod, also recommends music to clients based on their collections for a fee. According to Keane, 1 in 4 customers requests this service.

Thanks in part to a small story in The New York Times, Keane's advertising efforts on Craigslist and word-of-mouth, HungryPod has expanded to three employees and four computers, and expects 2005 sales to reach $100,000. Now others want to get involved, so Keane has hired a marketing/sales employee and hopes to start HungryPod centers nationwide in the near future.

Loading Service [Entrepreneur]

DailyCandy: You’re standing in a crowded record store attempting to hum (over blaring emo-core) the melody of an unidentified song you heard on the radio to a bemohawked salesperson who has a look on his face that, translated into English, means "kill me now."

Wow. You’d pay money not to go through that again. So do. For just 99 cents, 411-Song, a service available through your cell phone, can identify any little dittie from a fifteen-second snippet.

Whether in your car, at a club, or hanging at a too-cool-for-questions-like-that dinner party, just dial the number, wait for the beep, then hold your phone up. Within moments you get a text message with the names of the song and artist.

Name That Tune [DailyCandy]

The Post Online: One Ohio University senior is making efforts to promote the underground hip-hop community by forming a new company.

Titled Element 9, the company strives to perform many functions of a record label without tying its clients to strict contracts. Stu Pflaum, aka DJ Xplosive, officially began the company in mid-June, though it has been in planning stages for a long time.

Five artists currently work with Element 9, including Pflaum. Also in the mix are former OU students Detrick Rhodes (L.I.F.E.) and Jim Korte (KRES), DJ Kut Nyce and Almighty Texas Boiz. Korte also designed the company's Web site, http://www.element9hiphop.com.

Pflaum called Element 9 a "promotional outlet" and said the company's functions include helping artists secure royalties and publishing rights.

New business creates opportunities for hip-hop artists [The Post Online]

WBOC.com: Mash-up Music: it's a trend that gives new meaning to the term "music mix."

It's taking two different songs - and mixing them together. One popular one these days is the blend of Alicia Keys' vocals for her song "Karma" with the music track for the song "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder.

Wyclef Jean of the Fugees says mash-ups are more than just a fad. He says it's a taste of things to come, musically.

The new trend - mashed music [WBOC.com]

Boston.com: In a downtown office building an hour's drive north of Silicon Valley, the technology revolution beats on.

Young musicians, their headphones plugged into desktop computers, are analyzing thousands of songs -- from popular artists to garage bands -- by more than 400 musical measures. In an adjoining room lined with rock posters and shelves crammed with compact discs, T-shirted engineers are shooting pool while employees on their lunch break jam in an acoustic rock session.

Welcome to Savage Beast Technologies Inc., a five-year-old software start-up that is busy building a ''music genome" to identify the world's recorded music according to vocal, lyrical, melodic, harmonic, and instrumental attributes. The results are fed into a massive database to spit out recommendations for music-loving shoppers at Best Buy, Borders, AOL, and other retailers that license Savage Beast technology.

Start-up composes a 'music genome' [Boston.com]

Wired News: College junior Kyle Taylor is downloading hundreds of songs by No Doubt, Bruce Springsteen and others onto the Compaq laptop in his cramped dormitory room. With a few more clicks of his mouse, Taylor is watching commercial-free Seinfeld episodes on his computer. In just minutes, he then downloads the entire movie A League of Their Own.

The 20-year-old is not breaking any laws. Nor is he at risk of expensive lawsuits brought by the entertainment industry over copyright violations.

Taylor and his classmates at American University -- and thousands more students at other U.S. colleges -- are among the earliest customers of a new generation of legal downloading services approved by the largest music labels and Hollywood studios. Students appear enthusiastic, despite some early kinks that can keep them from loading songs onto iPods.

"You can one-click-download an entire album, and the downloading time is, like, a minute," Taylor said. His laptop holds more than 3,000 songs.

In the search for online customers, entertainment companies are aggressively pursuing college students, who cannot remember life before the internet. This generation works off laptops more than it watches television, plugs into high-speed university networks, uses the web for homework and headlines -- and on average carries around more than 1,000 songs on a hard drive.

Already, dozens of schools are rolling out downloading services from Ruckus Network, RealNetworks, Napster and Sea Blue Media. So important is this university market that Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the world's largest label, has paid the entire bill at some schools during trial semesters. Sony-backed artists are available for downloading on all the major services.

Students Use Next-Gen Downloads [Wired News]

GlobeGazette.com: Transported half a world away via a digital connection, best friends Emily Coovert and Simone Boissonneault drift into their own head-bobbing universe of sound as they watch a Japanese stadium show, a furious mix of hard guitar licks, operatic Queen-like vocals, the occasional classical flourish and bouncy beats. It is one of, give or take, 500 J-rock — or Japanese pop — songs they've burned onto CDs.

It's not the kind of stuff you'll hear on MTV.

The music twangs out of a computer vibrating with the shrieking screams of teen girls and the vision of skinny, androgynous Japanese men prancing across a stage, howling into microphones like David Bowie in his heyday.

But the Lexington, Ky., teens are into more than just music. Emily's hard drive is crammed with 800 to 1,000 pictures of their favorite Japanese fashions and singers. Her closet, and floor, are carpeted with brightly colored scarfs, shirts and printed skirts that, when assembled, are all the necessities for creating a kind of Japanese street fashion favored by a group known as "fruits."

"The Idiot's Guide to Buddhism" is on a shelf, next to a dozen or so Japanese graphic novels known as manga. "Memoirs of a Geisha" is in a tangle of covers on the bed, and on the back of Emily's door is information about the foreign language and international economics program at the University of Kentucky.

Other teens might swoon over rocker John Mayer, but these girls are gaga for guys named Mana and Gackt.

Emily, 17, and Simone, 16, are part of a growing, Internet-influenced trend that has American teens coveting Japanese culture.

American teens latch on to Japanese pop culture [GlobeGazette.com]

Imagine… you could actually have a mini-jukebox in your mobile phone! T-Mobile has recently launched Ear Phones, introducing a totally new category in music. Ear Phones enables customers to browse, download, store and play CD quality, digital music for the first time ever in their T-Mobile phones.

Music is already mobile. Just look at the phenomenal success of the iPod, Apple's best-selling digital music player. But now, Ear Phones go a lot further: it lets T-Mobile customers browse, download, store and listen to music in their mobile phones - wherever they are, whenever they want. There is no need for a separate digital music player; no need for downloads to your PC too. In addition, Ear Phones is simple and rapid. With just 3 clicks, you can browse and download the songs of your choice! Uniquely, Ear Phones also enables customers to download music before it is available in the shops. And not to worry, all major handset manufacturers and giants of the music industry - Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, and so on - back the Ear Phones. This gives subscribers a whole range of choices from the different record companies.

Let's Get Down To Business...
The folks at T-Mobile have recognized one important demand of today's consumers: instant gratification. In a fast-paced society like ours', consumers demand convenience and speed. With the rapid download of songs anytime, anywhere into your mobile phones, this is sure to please many consumers, especially youngsters and executives who are always on the go. People everywhere are passionate about music, and they have an increasingly personal relationship with their mobile phones. Surely, Ear Phones is a perfect marriage of both trends. CoolBusinessIdeas.com thinks that incorporating such concepts, where new innovations or ideas can satisfy more than one need of the modern consumer, is likely to make your product a success. Try to think out of the box, making the impossible become possible. Who knew, 50 years ago, that music could have gone mobile (or that mobile phones would have been such a phenomenon today)?

Related Ideas & Trends
T-Mobile Press Release
T-Mobile Turns Handsets Into Mini Digital Music Players [Silicon.com]