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A couple of smaller players in the digital music sector are maneuvering to keep pace in an increasingly crowded field.

Turntable.fm, a startup music service with an emphasis on sharing songs with friends, is in talks with the four major record companies about obtaining "unprecedented" streaming-license agreements, according to a report today from Bloomberg. Over at MOG, a scrappy music service that has struggled for years to build interest, announced that it would offer a limited number of songs for free--provided users are willing to work for the privilege.

With Apple expected to soon officially roll out … Read more

We told you about Turntable.fm's new approach to the music service scene back in June. The service is fun, interactive, and has really caught on since.

Today Turntable.fm released its first mobile app. It's built for the iPhone and is available in the App Store [iTunes link]. We are going to show you how to get started with the mobile app. Read on for more.

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Grooveshark just can't seem to shake its copyright woes.

A group of songwriters and music publishers filed a lawsuit on July 15 in Tennessee against the digital-music service, claiming Grooveshark enables users to obtain music illegally and therefore is liable for copyright infringement, contributory infringement, and vicarious infringement.

Grooveshark, based in Gainesville, Fla., is a service that offers free music by enabling users to post their own tracks to the site and then share them with other users.

Grooveshark's "users and subscribers are actively infringing plaintiffs' copyrighted musical compositions," the plaintiffs said in their complaint, filed … Read more

This week: The new MacBook Air, Mac Pro, and Mac Mini are coming soon, allegedly right alongside OSX Lion. We handicap the chances of seeing those this week or next.

Then it's time to show off some social media games. Scott demos Tiny Tower for iPad and Dan plays Civ World on Facebook. Finally, turntable.fm is the hottest invite-only ticket on the Web right now, so we throw it up on the screen to check it out live.

Bonus: Download the show's jaunty theme song as a free MP3 here.

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As a prospective wannabe DJ and geek, three things in today's world incapacitate my productivity: finding good music, cute little avatars, and Facebook.

Enter Turntable.fm, one of the freshest streaming-music apps to hit the Web scene. Turntable.fm is part music-streaming service, part chat room, and part election. Turntable.fm is similar to other music-streaming Web apps like Pandora and GrooveShark; users can create their own custom playlists and listen to music of similar genres and interests. Now imagine taking that playlist you worked so hard on and sharing it with an audience. Live.

Users create a … Read more

Livio Radio, developer of a free car Internet radio app for iPhone and Android, and Dice, developer of audio integration kits for OEM car stereos, have teamed up to provide a solution for streaming Internet radio to your car without ripping out the stock receiver. It starts with an app on your iPhone and ends with hardware that takes over your car's satellite radio input.

Livio's app delivers more than 45,000 Internet radio stations and Internet streaming AM and FM radio stations via your smartphone's data connection. (The app's free version steps down to 300 … Read more

It's graduation time for college students, but today we're exploring an offer from Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel to give a $100,000 fellowship to students who drop out and start their own company. He argues that people under 20 can learn more useful real-world skills at a start-up than at a university, where they'll ultimately leave in massive debt.

We're also offering tips on how to shop at Costco, the dropping prices of external media cards, the return of The 404 Audio Draft in a new Web site Outloud.fm, life lessons to be learned from Adam Sandler's "Billy Madison," and a couple of rules for leaving a voice mail on our show.

Have a fun (and safe!) Memorial Day weekend, everyone!

YouTube turns 6 years old today, and we could spend an entire episode playing our favorite videos, but instead we're shifting gears to a different media sharing site:Outloud.fm is a collaborative way to play and discover new music with your friends! Anyone can join a chat room (or start their own) and immediately begin uploading songs that get added to an infinite playlist.

The current song plays simultaneously for everyone in the room, and we've created an exclusive 404 Outloud.fm room for our listeners to share and play their favorite tracks! The three of us will be in the room throughout the day, so log in using your Twitter or Facebook and start uploading music!

On today's episode of The 404 Podcast, we're celebrating YouTube's sixth birthday and discussing a recent change to TwitPic's terms of service that gives the company the distribution rights to any picture uploaded to the site. We also have plenty of stickers left, so send a self-addressed stamped envelope to the address below and we'll send you a few!

CNET Networks c/o The 404 Podcast 28 East 28th Street, 10th Floor New York, NY 10016

American rock singer Rob Thomas needed a new way to promote his single, "Someday." His agent, Nick Lippman, used Headliner.fm to promote a campaign around the new song. Headliner.fm gives artists like Thomas a way to connect with other musicians, and gives those other musicians an incentive to recommend new music to their own fans.

Lippman, a vice president at Lippman Entertainment, said Thomas' fans were asked to create a cover image for the single, with the winner's design being chosen. "The contest was a success. We used it to target people who would be interested, because we knew hip-hop guys weren't going to care about his single," Lippman told CNET.

Headliner.fm can be used to help new bands find and book similar unknown, rising stars. Lippman said he uses reports from Headliner.fm to see which bands are talking about one of his up-and-coming bands, New Kingdom. "Finding similar acts that dig New Kingdom outside of their hometown helps us book tours with them," he said.

New Kingdom and Rob Thomas are two of the 78,000 artists using Headliner.fm's service. Headliner.fm's founder, Mike More, says the service is based on musician recommendations: "If you ask another artist to market for you, it's much more powerful than when the recommendation comes from a fan."

I spoke to More on Monday at the MusicTech Summit in San Francisco, where it seemed the tension between old-school music industry folks and digital media geeks softened. Even though many artists use Facebook fan pages and Twitter for their social-media presence, there's still a lot of noise to sort through, for musicians and listeners. Who has time to watch every tweet sent out by Rob Thomas? Existing social-media tools are also limited by the number of fans the artist has. Headliner.fm expands the social network to fans of other artists.

Last week, Headliner.fm partnered with SoundCloud, a start-up that allows artists to upload and share their music. For instance, a band can ask fellow artists to send out messages that link to an iTunes song download page, promote free songs to download, or steer new fans to their YouTube and Facebook pages. … Read more