A few months ago ReadWriteWeb asked the question, "What are Hulu's Mysterious Plans?" Our own Sarah Perez covered the rumors surrounding a subscription model, premium services and of course, the much anticipated iPhone application. While Hulu continues to keep mum on its new monetization plans, today's reports reveal that the company is focusing on its music-related content. Sponsor In a company blog post Hulu announced signing a partnership with EMI for Norah Jones content. While Hulu is best known for its HD television and movie programing, the site's latest deal may be a sign of things to come. In the past Hulu has featured music content like its Live from the Artists Den and Live From Abbey Road series', but this latest EMI deal may mean further plans to branch into the music business. Although EMI is Hulu's first external music partnership, the fact that the company began as a collaboration between NBC Universal, Fox Entertainment Group and ABC / Disney means that its music-related reach is likely further than we realize. What's more, the company already has the technology to stream music from their service as the same means can be used for delivering video and music. While it's too early to say how this will play out, if Hulu's decides to bundle on-demand streaming video and music, this iPhone owner would happily subscribe. Discuss

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Hulu and Music: Where There's a Stream There's a Way

It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440. Just as Johannes Gutenberg's printing press brought books to the mainstream public in the 15th century, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web brought commercial publishing to the people. Sponsor The Web has always been a medium where people could just as easily write as read (yes, the read/write Web ), however it didn't reach its potential until blogging came along earlier this decade. Blogging Blogging not only allowed anybody to publish easily to the Web, it ended up shaking up the print media world. Blogging began in the 90s as a form of online diary - Rebecca Blood wrote a good pre-history in 2000. One of the early popular blogging services was Blogger.com , launched by Evan Williams (who subsequently became a co-founder of Twitter) and Meg Hourihan in August 1999 . The service was acquired by Google in February 2003, a couple of months before ReadWriteWeb began. At that point, 2003, blogging was still seen as an informal diary-type of publishing. Around 2004-05, blogging started to become accepted as a legitimate news source. This was around the time that ReadWriteWeb began to publish tech news, as well as analysis. By the end of the decade, many blogs were directly challenging newspapers - proving that a solid news brand, such as Huffington Post, can be created from almost nothing in a few years. RSS Blogging software was one part of the democratization of media. RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") was another. There were and still are different versions of RSS , created by Dave Winer and others. But whatever the flavor, syndication has had a major impact on media. Basically RSS allowed people to subscribe to updates from blogs and other publications. Using RSS Aggregators, people could read news from a selection of niche and general news publications. Blogs were the first to utilize RSS, but mainstream media followed during the 2005-06 period. Today it is very rare for a major news website - whether it be the New York Times or a leading blog - not to use RSS. Twitter & The Real-Time Web The next major development in news media occurred towards the end of this decade. It was of course Twitter and the Real-Time Web . To be fair, this has challenged not only traditional media - but blogs as well. Now anyone, whether they're a writer or not, can publish 140 characters to the Web. And it might end up as breaking news, as the Hudsen River plane crash proved earlier this year. Media in the Next Decade There is much talk of the mainstream media "dying" and blogs usurping traditional media companies like the New York Times. While it's true that blogs sometimes report breaking news stories or analyze them better than newspaper websites, I'm a big believer in the power of brand. Washington Post, Wall St Journal, New York Times - these are all powerful brands and they reach a much wider audience than the vast majority of blogs. The challenge of course for mainstream media is to (drastically) reduce their costs, because few people want to pay for content these days - news or otherwise. However, in my view the traditional news media industry is in much less danger of extinction than the music industry . Musicians can bypass record labels completely nowadays, but there will always be a need for news to be questioned, put in context and analyzed. The best media publications of the next 10 years will do that and be successful, the ones that don't will fade away. See also: Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music Discuss

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Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media

In 2008 the idea of another subscription-only music service was enough to get your knickers in a torrent. Sure Rhapsody was doing well, but they'd been around for forever and in 2008, freemium was the music model du jour. With a year to reflect, co-founder of the Future of Music Coalition and longtime San Fran Music Tech Summit organizer Brian Zisk tells us what it takes to survive in today's music environment. Sponsor In August 2008 ReadWriteWeb asked What Would the Perfect Streaming Music Service Look Like? While Pandora , Imeem and Muxtape were mentioned, services like

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Future of Music Coalition's Brian Zisk: The Do's of Streaming Music