Recently, my editor downloaded a cycling app called Ride the City, which maps urban cycling routes for you based upon road safety. As an early adopter, he was able to get this (reportedly excellent) app for free. When a recent update featuring a slew of new capabilities bumped the price of Ride the City up…
Whenever a music app cracks the top 10 in the (lowercase) app stores, we pay attention. While we look at music apps all day, these sudden rushes of popularity are a nice reminder that non-music-nerds get down with this stuff too. SongPop, a ridiculously engaging music quiz game for iOS, Android, and Facebook, is becoming…
Ah, the eternal question facing many a college student: to rage or to chill? To party or not to party? To shotgun cans of Natty Light or fire up the old N64 and play a few post-ironic rounds of Mario Kart? Those are the questions haunting some young minds of today. RageChill (free), a streaming…
The details often vary, but most streaming radio apps function in the same general way — cue up an artist station, start giving feedback in the form of “likes” and “dislikes,” and let the app respond by giving you music that fits the profile of what you’ve told it you’re into. The technology behind the…
The feeling of déjà vu that accompanies the recognition of a musical sample is uniquely compelling: You’re hearing something that’s at once familiar and completely new. If you’re anything like me, you’ll immediately start reaching into the filing cabinet of your memory, trying to piece together where you first heard that fragment of sound. Perhaps you’re a…
My father is a financial adviser. I am a musician and blogger (Evolver.fm and Animal New York). Ordinarily, our chief areas of interest wouldn’t seem incompatible, so much as completely unrelated. I work in the realm of social media, apps, and buzzed-about new bands; he deals in hard numbers, trading, and bull and bear markets. How…
“Pilletu,” the new single from El Gato, La Virgen, y El Diablo, a self-described electrofolk band from Santiago, Chile, is a plaintive, slow number that pairs spare acoustic strumming and melancholy vocal hook with skittering drum machines and auto-tuned harmonies. It’s an effective mix of traditional balladeering and of-the-moment electronic production. To accompany the “Pilletu”…
The electric guitar has thrilled listeners and players alike for decades, without any major technological innovation in the way that it’s taught. Sure, practice books and learning systems come and go, but none has gained enough traction to replace the tried-and-true methods of shelling out cash for lessons or banging around aimlessly until you work…
We spend a lot of time thinking about the future of music as an app phenomenon – mostly for listeners, but also for musicians: instruments for the synth wiz, ways for musicians to market and monetize tunes, and recently, how this whole transition into apps has affected music bloggers. Our lengthy conversation with Sean Adams – founder of influential music…
At first glance, This American Life and OK Go don’t have much in common. The former is a talk radio show known for its funny and touching stories about human connection, and the latter is a rock band known for its sugary hooks and music videos about dancing on treadmills. A closer look reveals a…
At its San Francisco headquarters, Rdio recently held its first-ever hack day — a marathon event where coders build stuff that works, fast. Most hack days, including the one our editor just attended in Sydney, are open to the public and consist of programming wizards getting together over a 24-hour period and building a slew…
We’re all for apps that let beginners and seasoned geeks alike make music in a fun, easy, engaging way, but with the potential for sonically interesting results. We like to call them apps for making music without really trying. eDrops (free-$2, for iPhone and iPad), the latest entry in this field, takes its musical inspiration from the…
If you were told to make an iPhone app that to capture the current zeitgeist, what would it look like? A gas price calculator, perhaps, or something like the Inhuman Microphone? Or how about an app that lets you make dubstep tracks from Tim Tebow’s voice –does that sound about right? We thought so. Enter…
It’s tax day once again — that joyful, once-a-year occasion when liberal types like the author are asked quite literally to put our money where our mouths are, as folks on the other side of the aisle get to sit around telling us they told us so. We kid. We can still be friends, right? This…
Spotify has received plenty of attention for its app platform, and rightfully so. Rdio also has an app platform, offering access to the same songs, more or less. Evolver.fm caught up with Rdio vice president of engineering Todd Berman to discuss the one-year anniversary of Rdio’s developer API; the service’s approach to third-party apps; and his belief…
