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Kindle Fire, owners? Aol, TechCrunch’s not-so-evil overlord, has a new app for you. Aol just released a retooled version of PLAY By Aol specifically for the Kindle Fire. This reskinned app is optimized for the Fire’s 7-inch 600×1024 screen. Everything from the layout to the iconography to the cover art was redone to look as good as possible on the Fire.

Like the other versions of PLAY, this music app puts the device’s on-board MP3 collection into an immersion environment. While it features a media player, the entire app is built to provide an experience not traditionally found in a simple player including social features and the ability to share songs on Twitter, Facebook, and the PLAY network. Plus, PLAY features a SHOUTcast player with access to 55,000+ stations.

Spiritual guru and AOL Mobile First Senior Director Sol Lipman said in a released statement today, “The Kindle Fire can’t get much more awesome, but somehow we made beautiful babies together with PLAY. It’s the best social music experience on the Fire, and I say that because I’m only mostly unbiased. Look, just stop reading and go try it.”

Aol released the Android and iOS versions of PLAY last summer. Since then the app has been downloaded 1 million times. The Kindle Fire version is the first edition of the app made specifically for a larger screen.

The app costs $.99 on the Amazon App Store or there is an ad-supported version available as well.

A big domestic market of 92 million people, English as an official language, a large IT talent pool, and a strategic location in South East Asia: the Philippines surely has the potential to become the next web powerhouse coming out of Asia. I traveled to the country last month (on a private trip) to realize that the startup scene is still in its infancy – but that’s poised to change very soon.

One pioneering startup from the Philippines is Twitmusic, a Twitter-based social music service aimed at artists and their fans. As an artist, having an account on Twitter is one thing, but Twitmusic allows them to upload and share songs (and other content) through Twitter in a matter of minutes.

Existing Twitter users can log in to leave comment on tracks, “love” them, re-tweet them, or share links with followers using the #nowplaying hashtag with one click. Users can also embed individual songs elsewhere, download them (here‘s a pretty popular, downloadable one), or buy tracks on Twitmusic via iTunes.

The obvious idea here is to provide artists with a more efficient viral promotion and distribution channel to reach, engage with and sell music to fans – seamlessly integrated with Twitter. Users can listen to songs for free on Twitmusic, discover new tracks or artists, and share content with followers without having to register for a new site.

And Twitmusic’s concept seems to work: MC Hammer is actively using the service (here is his Twitmusic profile page), as are Bryan Adams, Bow Wow, Jon Secada, Jason Mraz, and over 4,000 other artists currently. Adams even chose to release his latest single exclusively on Twitmusic.

Here’s how a dedicated page for a song (in this case Jason Mraz’s “I won’t give up”) looks:

With the initial traction, the eponymous Manila-based startup behind the service has seen interest from investors around Asia, but co-founder Stefano Fazzini told TechCrunch exclusively that the core team has moved to the US a few days ago.

As the first company from the Philippines, Twitmusic was accepted into 500 Startups, the Silicon Valley-based accelerator and capital fund (which just raised another US$50 million). Twitmusic has become part of 500 Startups’ 4th batch just ten days before the program started (on April 2), with Fazzini saying the demo day will be held around the end of July.

This should be encouraging news for many startups in Asia with a global focus, especially seeing how young the service is: Twitmusic was launched in October 2011 (AngelList entry).

For more information about Twitmusic, hit this link for a recent, in-depth interview with Fazzini and Twitmusic marketing director Sandra Seifert. The Huffington Post UK covered Twitmusic in February.

Oh, you liked that band since before they were cool? Now you can prove it with Splash.FM. Launching in private beta today, the music social network lets you share songs and raise your Splash score when you help others discover them. Splash.FM lets you follow other tastemakers and listen through lists of the most popular songs across the site or your network.

Splash.FM’s biggest weakness is also a differentiator — it has no streaming licenses so major label songs only play as 30-second samples, but tunes by independent artists can be played in full and downloaded for free.

If you want to join the private beta, the first 500 readers to enter the code “TECHCRUNCH” in the bottom right of Splash.FM will gain exclusive access.

Splash.FMs share box lets users select from an expansive library of pre-loaded songs and samples, or upload anything they can’t find similar, to Turntable.fm. If a song appears on iTunes it plays as a sample, otherwise it can be played or downloaded unless the artist complains. This naturally skews the site towards undiscovered indie bands, remixes, covers and other content more likely to appear on Hype Machine blogs than the radio.

If Klout is your influence score across the web, Splash.FM wants to define the influence of your music taste. Users can “Splash” or favorite songs they discover on the site. Each song displays a Splash Lineage, or the order of who discovered it first. As a user’s shared songs are splashed by others, their Splash Score increases creating an addictive gamified experience.

Splash.FM was founded by two students, Alex Gatof from University of Michigan and Jason Fiedler of UPenn, using a friends and family seed round. Built on HTML5, the site is accessible from mobile. The startup plans to monetize through a combination of iTunes store affiliate links, sponsored placement for artists, and analytics services for the music industry.

The big question is whether users are willing to discover music on Splash.FM if they have to listen to elsewhere, such as on subscription streaming services, YouTube, or iTunes. It’s certainly annoying when you start grooving to something shared by a friend and it suddenly cuts off 30 seconds in. A year ago people were used to hearing samples, but in the age of Spotify, serious music fans who Splash.FM is targeting demand more. Many of its use cases are now handled by on-demand streaming services, or one-upped by Facebook’s new Listen With simultaneous playback feature.

I think Splash.FM would work better as a Spotify app allowing major label tracks to stream in full. However, This would exclude user generated uploads as well as the newest tracks from the blogosphere, and reduce revenue options. Rdio’s API are another option. As it stands, Splash.FM is a fun companion app for discovering music and taking pride in your own taste. Unfortunately, its appeal is limited to hardcore independent music seekers who won’t miss streams of mainstream acts or mind keeping another tab open.

iOS: SoundShare is a new iPhone app that makes it very easy to share songs you enjoy with your friends, start conversations around them, and peek in on what your friends are listening to in an unobtrusive way that encourages conversation instead of intrudes on their privacy. More »

Google Music‘s upcoming online store will let you share songs with your friends, according to music industry sources, an unprecedented selling point for the fledgling service.

Peer-to-peer file sharing has been the bane of the music industry for the past decade. So how is Google getting away with making it into a feature?

One source said users who buy songs will be able to share those songs with friends, and those friends will be able to play the songs a limited number of times without purchasing the songs themselves, Business Insider reports.

So it’s not a Napster-esque torrenting free-for-all, but it accomplishes a happy medium between what consumers seem to want (more music and more sharing) and what record labels and musicians want (more money).

The deal bears some resemblance to Facebook’s music integrations, which launched at f8 this year. On Facebook, you can listen along with friends via music-streaming services such as Spotify. However, what Google is reportedly proposing puts a lot more control in users’ hands and leaves less to serendipity.

We’ve known the music store was coming since Google Music’s launch this spring at I/O, the company’s developer conference.

However, yesterday, Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin told attendees at the AsiaD conference in Hong Kong that not only was the store coming quite soon, but that it would incorporate “a little twist – it will have a little Google in it. It won’t just be selling 99-cent tracks.”

While we’ve never questioned that Google intended to deliver an innovative product to its users, we have scratched our heads over how the company was planning to deal with record labels, most of which already have agreements with heavyweight competitors such as Apple and Amazon.

However, being able to negotiate such a compromise that appeases two diametrically opposed interests is innovation in itself. We’ll see if the deal is sealed when the Google Music Store actually launches.

Filed under: VentureBeat

Yesterday, we outlined a bit of what we’ve heard about Facebook’s upcoming f8 conference. One big launch will be their official foray into music. Today, we’ve heard more about that launch.

One thing we’ve heard from a very good source is that a key aspect of the service will be “scrobbling”. The term, made popular by Last.fm, means that when you listen to a song, it gets sent to your profile without you have to do anything. I assume there will be a way to turn this off, or a way for you to selectively share songs, but this is a key to the service.

Not that a post-music-to-profile feature should be surprising. Facebook’s core feature is the feed, and music will now make it even more robust. In fact, depending on how popular Facebook Music is, it could end up being one of the biggest sources of feed content.

And I think it will be pretty popular based on the second bit of information we’ve heard. Facebook Music will also apparently offer content resolution between all the different music partners involved. This means that if you’re listening to Rdio and a track goes up on your profile, a MOG user can click on the track and still hear the exact same song in full. Essentially, you’ll only need to sign up for one of the major music services Facebook is launching with to be able to access most content (there undoubtedly will be some songs available on one service but not another, so it probably won’t be fully seamless, but I assume you’ll be able to hear previews regardless).

This content resolution will likely be the most important aspect of Facebook Music. It turns Facebook into the great social music unifier. You can share songs without having to worry if your friends will be able to hear it or not based on what streaming service they use.

It’s not clear what partners Facebook has gotten to agree to this unification beyond Rdio, MOG, and Spotify. It’s certainly possible that while other services will be a part of Facebook Music, those three will be the key ones.

In terms of functionality, we’ve also heard that there will be a standard player that plays music without interruption from page to page as you browse Facebook. Om Malik previously reported on the persistent controls as well as a larger Music Dashboard area. Malik stated that the player would be at the bottom of Facebook, but we’ve heard that Facebook has been testing variations on this player, so it’s not yet clear where it will reside (top, bottom, etc).