Earlier this month, a friend of mine recommended that I check out WeAreHunted.com, a music site that purports to track the top 99 songs of the day through social networks, forums, blogs, torrents, Twitter and the like. This multitude of sources is meant to reveal a much fuller picture of global music listening patterns than simple physical sales.

Much more than just iTunes and peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks, music is everywhere in the online environment, having found a ready home in social networks like Facebook and MySpace. iLike, one of the first music products developed for Facebook, allows users to share their musical preferences with friends, even going so far as bookmarking specific songs for others to listen to. MySpace users can actually stream licensed music from an embeddable player, giving visitors to their profile something to hear while they’re there, and bloggers have been linking to legal (and illegal) MP3 files for years.

Other services like LastFm and Grooveshark are developing into social networks in their own rights, focused on music. Users upload and share their music libraries with other online users, similar to a shared iTunes library, but with the ability to comment and post messages. In fact, the way LastFM and Grooveshark take advantage of recent advances in remote computer storage is changing some users’ attitude towards ownership of music — unlike earlier P2P music-sharing sites, LastFM only allows for streaming music, asking users to choose access to music over ownership of music. While user-generated playlists and recommendations dominate LastFM, Virb.com, another social networking site, focuses much more on user-generated content and encourages mash-ups of music, videos and photos with a built-in system of recommendations..

Blip.fm, meanwhile, piggybacks on the immense popularity of Twitter, turning users into online DJs. In addition to sharing songs and playlists online, Blip.fm allows users to post songs via their Twitter accounts for all to see and hear.

Some readers may remember Muxtape, an earlier service that encouraged the sharing and linking of online music. Muxtape eventually shut down under legal pressure, and it will be interesting to watch how all of these other websites fare. Quite a few have entered into partnerships with record companies and are openly courting more, while others appear to be taking a similar stance to YouTube, putting the onus on users not to upload pirated material and for labels to notify the sites when something illegal shows up.

Regardless of how it’s delivered, though, it’s clear that music listeners are changing how they get their songs. WeAreHunted.com’s holistic approach has it right —— the gulf between what gets bought in record stores and what is listened to online is getting bigger all the time.