Photo by Jackie Roman/ Hell Gate Exclusive- image is copyrighted, not for use without permission

The past couple of weeks have been a full on assault of new social media and digital music subscriptions/ revamps. It’s enough to make our heads explode. Sifting through all the news (you can read about the US launch of Spotify elsewhere) has lead us to concentrate on one idea— Who will win the battle when it comes to music connoisseur’s tastes?

In one corner we have Last FM- who has recently revamped their model to include more social media, such as a friend finder button, and a partnership with MTV.

In the other corner we have the highly viral, highly hyped about Turntable FM, which gained 140,000 users in its first month and has celebrity DJ sets as its de rigueur.

You can get to them via Facebook and there are pluses and minuses for both.

Last FM was criticized for yanking its on demand streaming and only getting 30 seconds of listening time for new tracks. What it does nicely is music recommendation for the listener and allows them to listen to track what they listen to on the Last FM site and other players as well.

Turntable FM is a different beast as it is “Alive Web” (real time). It sounds cool and democratic with users voting on their favorite DJ sets, but with its ratings and avatars it reeks of online gaming. With the engagement required of the user, it may be addicting and time-consuming, demanding way too much attention of users that are already implementing a myriad of social networks and apps into their daily lives.

Don’t know about you guys, but we are feeling stretched thin when it comes to keeping up with all this. It will be interesting to see how things shake out.

For some real reporting on Last FM and Turntable FM check out the articles here and here.

Now if someone created and avatar of a dick-ish independent record store employee that recommended good tunes we’d get behind that.