As reported by the Wall Street Journal today (and echoed via Techmeme), Spotify plans to launch a “top 50″ chart that will give fans and the music industry insight into which songs are most popular on its freemium music subscription. Update: Spotify tells us Spotify must be running in the background to play the charts….
We all have different strengths, and for too many of us, they do not include computer programming. By converting drawings into programs that play music, Tunetrace (iOS; free) makes computer programming a touch (get it?) more accessible to the right-brained among us. From QApps, an app venture from researchers at Queen Mary, University of London, Tunetrace for iOS…
Well, this isn’t going to change the world, but it sounds like a step in the right direction. DayTrotter, the original music subscription that creates scarcity in a digital world by making about a hundred new, unique music videos each month, recently announced a twist on the idea of subscribing to music (a big deal, with…
Google’s new music subscription service, Google Play Music All Access, lacks an official iOS app, which comes as no surprise. Google and Apple are hardly “besties” when it comes to digital music or smartphone platforms. However, Evolver.fm has learned that an iOS app called gMusic, which is already capable of playing music from a Google…
We’ve been writing a lot about Google’s new music subscription service this week, because of course we would. Google is a force to be reckoned with — and now, that force is reckoning with the likes of Spotify, Rdio, and Rhapsody in a bid for your $10 per month, in return for unlimited access to…
I set out this morning to build a chart listing the various features of the major music subscription services: Rdio, Rhapsody, Spotify, and we assume the recently-launched Google Play Music All Access, although it remains to be seen whether it will succeed on the level of those standalone music services — or whether it will…
The Google I/O conference takes place today, and the most exciting part of it for music fans will be Google’s new music subscription — or rather subscriptions, plural, because as reported by my former CNET colleague Greg Sandoval, Google has been readying two separate music subscriptions — one aligned with Google Play and Android, and…
Even if you’re not in London from May 17 to 19, you might enjoy MusicTechFest 2013, a nifty conference that will unite stakeholders in the digital music industry (including Seevl, Shazam, Shuffler.fm, SMC Group, SoniqPlay, Songs2See, SoundHound, SoundWave, SpectralMind, Spotify, Stylus, and plenty of companies that start with other letters too), as well as policy makers,…
It’s easy to get the impression these days that everything under the sun is now just a few clicks away on the internet — that is, until you look for something that’s not there. My first ever feature story for the web, from 1997 or so, a CNET piece called “Cellphone Horror Stories,” appears to…
Note: This tutorial for Windows was adapted from this tutorial for Mac, which is why some of this text appears cribbed from there. Sometimes, you love a song and it’s not on the web. That’s just not right, because the three or so generations alive today are largely responsible for making sure that all the…
You might have noticed that every music blog in the world and half of its tech blogs are linking to Daft Punk’s iTunes page right now. As one example, Gorilla vs. Bear’s post simply includes an image, a video, and the words: “It’s here. Listen now at iTunes.” If you make the jump from any of these non-critical, “listen…
Last week, CNET reported on an extension for Google’s Chrome web browser that let people scrape songs off of Spotify’s web player, for free, and save the music as MP3 files. This was obviously fairly problematic and possibly illegal, as far as browser extensions go, so Google hastily deleted the app from its Chrome app…
