Rogers announced the January launch on his blog Wednesday, writing:

“Beats Music is real. We’re in an internal, private beta with people who know and love music (including a few of my personal heroes). We’re providing a few artists and other influencers access to familiarize them with the service and get their early feedback. We’re making improvements based on that feedback. We can’t wait to share it with the world, and are set to launch in the US in January.”

Rogers went on to say that users can now register their user name on Beatsmusic.com.

Beats Music aims to compete with Spotify, Rhapsofy, Rdio and others by putting a big emphasis on human curation. The company has hired a number of freelance curators, who have been busy building playlists around moods, genres, artists and even situations you’d want to listen music in. In August, we reported a number of internal details about this curation process, including the fact that curators are encouraged to avoid elitism and “overly clever transitions.”

Earlier this year, CNET also reported that Beats was in negotiations with AT&T for a carrier partnership. We can now confirm that this partnership is in fact in place, and it looks like Beats will be launching out of the gate with support from AT&T, save for any last-minute hiccups.

The details of the partnership are however not clear yet. Music services have been trying to strike a variety of partnerships with mobile carriers, ranging from the ability to bill monthly subscription fees through a carrier’s phone bill to promotional app placements of carrier-distributed handsets to full-on bundles that include music access in a user’s monthly data plan — a strategy that Muve Music has been fairly successful with.

It’s unlikely that AT&T will go as far, but given the company’s existing relationship with Beats Electronics, it’s possible that the phone company will do some significant promotion.

After an increasing backlash from some high-profile musicians, Spotify is going on the offensive by sharing some information on how it generates money for the music industry. Aside from average pay-outs, which range from $0.006 to $0.0084 per play, the service is also offering musicians detailed statistics, and even an additional revenue stream: Spotify has teamed up with Topspin to allow bands to sell merchandise through its service.

The company wants to eventually take Vevo TV to cable distributors to compete heads-on with MTV, according to an Adweek report, and it is also thinking about launching genre-specific live streams. Think Vevo Hip Hop, for example. But ultimately, going live is all about devices and the way they’re changing how we watch TV.

Vevo has put a lot of work into apps for mobile and connected devices, which it built in-house with the help of a small team of San Francisco-based developers. Mobile was a big success for the company early on, and the launch of the Xbox app a year ago “turned out to be wildly successful,” as Vevo’s product and tech SVP Michael Cerda put it when we talked about the subject a few months ago.

Vevo followed up with a Roku app in December, and Cerda told me that he wants to tackle additional connected TV platforms as soon as possible. “There is a huge opportunity for us there,” Cerda said.

Continuous playback combined with curation makes a whole lot of sense for something like music videos on connected TVs. Users don’t want to pick up their remote control to pick and choose every single video, but instead want something up and running in the background without interruption. And if a viewer is ever bored by what’s playing on Vevo TV’s live stream, then there’s always tons of on-demand content available right within the same app. It’s the best of both worlds.

So how do Vevo’s cable plans fit into this? Cable obviously has a much wider reach than a device like Roku, but the real lure are cable-sized ad-budgets. One could argue that Vevo might compete with itself if the same programming is available on cable set-top boxes and connected devices. But ultimately, those set-top-boxes are changing, and the distinctions between streaming and cable distribution are going to become less and less visible to consumers (to hear more about the future of TV, check out our paidContent conference in New York next month).

In that world, a live TV channel – distributed on as many platforms as possible – will guarantee that consumers will always access to Vevo, no matter whether they’re streaming or viewing plain old TV. And that’s a smart move.

Rdio, just as a refresher, is a subscription service that tries to set itself apart from market leader Spotify with a different take on social music curation. The company offers limited free music for up to six months, but doesn’t do ads.

That’s different from Spotify, which launched a free, ad-supported mobile radio service in the U.S. last summer. The company is now looking to expand its free mobile tier to all of its 17 territories, Bloomberg reported Monday. Deals for such an offering are still under negotiation, but Spotify could start with its free streaming as early as April.

Spotify’s free mobile service is more like Pandora, offering users limited interactivity with the hopes that some are going to subscribe to a full-service offering. And the interest in music subscriptions is definitely growing: Industry association IFPI’s latest Digital Music report (PDF) claims that worldwide, 20 million consumers paid for music subscriptions in 2012. And in Europe, subscription services made up for 20 percent of all digital music revenues during that time period.

That number was largely driven by a strong showing in Northern Europe, which is Spotify’s home turf – but services like Rdio seem to bet that this success story can be repeated in countries like Austria as well.

Those quarterly results were mixed: for the company’s fiscal Q4 2013, which ended in January, Pandora clocked $125 million in revenue during that quarter, compared to $81.3 million during its fiscal Q4 2012. However, losses also grew substantially to $14.4 million, compared to $8.1 million a year ago. For its fiscal FY 2013, Pandora incurred losses of $37.7 million, which is up significantly from the $19.9 million it incurred in its fiscal FY 2012.

Pandora has long struggled with finding a business model that matches its high licensing costs. The company spent 61 percent of its revenue last year on music licensing, and it has repeatedly pushed to lower the rates it has to pay rights holders.

“You will be instrumental in unlocking music content to hundreds of millions YouTube users,” the job description states, adding:

“You will partner with Product Management, Engineering and Content to design new systems from the ground up that will generate millions of new music videos and surface YouTube’s music video catalog by artist, discography, and genre to users on mobile devices for the first time.”

YouTube recently rolled out a new app for the iPhone, which is replacing Apple’s own YouTube app on iOS 6. It is expected to release a dedicated iPad app any day now. These apps mark the first time that YouTube is monetizing mobile content on iOS,  which makes it possible to display music videos from Vevo and other content partners on the platform just as it has been doing on Android.

However, Vevo is a bit of a frenemy in the mobile music space. The major label-owned music video platform distributes its videos through YouTube, but it also has has its own mobile apps for iOS and Android. Videos watched through these mobile apps aren’t streamed by YouTube, and Vevo also monetizes its mobile apps itself. In other words: Google doesn’t get a penny when people view a music video through Vevo’s apps.

YouTube’s music video monetization strategy is in part based on a policy change the site put in place in July. Previously, publishers were able to opt out of displaying their videos on mobile devices. Now, publishers can only block their videos from being displayed without ads – which means that a lot more monetized clips, including numerous music videos, are available on mobile devices.

YouTube’s director of product management Shiva Rajaraman told me at GigaOM’s Mobilize 2012 conference that this was done in part to unify the YouTube exprience, and avoid that some content shows up on mobile while other videos don’t. “It (was) one of the most frustrating experiences around YouTube,” for consumers, he said, adding that it has required a bit of education for publishers. “It’s a paradigm shift for many content owners who think about windowing between different devices,” Rajaraman said.

Check out my entire conversation with Shiva Rajaraman below: