Turntable.fm, whose launch was originally reported here, was an amazing, first-of-its-kind web app that nobody uses anymore, because it flamed out and people moved on. The problem with this group listening app, which let a handful of people choose music for everyone in the room, with everyone represented as cute little avatars in an actual room…
It’s 2014. Many of us already have connected speakers that we can control with apps, using a variety of wireless protocols, with Apple AirPlay and Sonos being particular crowd favorites, and many other promising wireless solutions on the horizon. Music has led the way through many major technological developments, from the iPod music player begetting…
AUSTIN, TEXAS — The cars of today, and especially tomorrow, generate rivers of data that will change everything from how meteorologists understand the weather, to how towns identify their most egregious potholes, to — our favorite — how people will listen to music in the car. Over half of all music listening takes place in…
The following is a guest post from Aaron Ford, digital advertising manager for online media distributor The Orchard. Aaron regularly helps recording artists advertise on various networks, so we feel like he probably knows what he’s talking about when it comes to advertising music. We hope this is of interest to recording artists and readers who are…
Kevin Arnold, founder of IODA Music and the Noise Pop Festival, unveiled a new service called OpenAura on Wednesday designed to give artists more control over how they appear online, while offering them a new way to make money. How much money remains to be seen — but what is clear already is that OpenAura…
The music business is about to get its own alternative currency, called Songcoin (Update: Songcoin is now live). The alternative currency phenomenon is real, as weird as that might feel to those of us who would never consider shelling out cash for points to buy special pixels for that Farmville game we never really got around…
If you’re a music fan, and your music collection is scattered all over the place, which it is, BitTorrent offers a great app called BitTorrent Sync that helps somewhat, by letting you access the music downloads on all of your computers, from all of your devices. It’s a good start, from the point of view…
It’s easy to make fun of FM radio: no personalization, over-saturated with audio ads, prone to over-caffeinated “morning zoo” antics, and barely customizable at all. Still, it can be nice to get those news and weather snippets in between songs someone and/or something decided you should hear that morning, in that particular city or region….
Most of the music services available today have more or less the same music, so they distinguish themselves with third-party apps, free versions, improved designs, mixtape-style playlists, and other attractive features. On-demand music services have the same music (more or less) because the same copyright holders decide which songs to put on subscription services, and they…
For those not yet familiar with the somewhat maligned dubstep genre, A) It consists of more than Skrillex (pictured above), B) Some of it’s actually pretty good, and C) The “drop” is the part of the song when everybody goes wild because the song just turned inside out and started making crazy bass noises. SoundCloud, which…
I’ve spent the better waking part of the past 17 years reading and writing words on a screen, which is fine. It’s my job, and I like it. Lots of us stare at screens for much of the day for our job, school, or whatever — and then we watch another, larger screen that night,…
Rdio and Shazam extended on Tuesday a joint feature in Shazam’s app that lets music fans preview and collect songs they’ve tagged from speakers into 29 new territories. This is not a trivial integration. Shazam believably claims to generate 10 percent of all digital music sales in the world, indicating that successful integration between music…
Years ago, I believed experts who said Net Neutrality wasn’t a big deal because it A) It never existed in the first place (because many ISPs prioritize traffic in some way, say, for or against online gaming), and B) The free market would solve the problem, because ISPs that threw up bad content roadblocks would be…
Barring a freak announcement from Neil Young or YouTube, Beats Music will be the first of the big three (at least) music services launching in 2014, all three having pushed back launches from 2013. Beats Music, led by a crew of music industry veterans (including Jimmy Iovine, Trent Reznor, Luke Wood, and Ian Rogers), will…
Nielsen and Billboard released their sales numbers for 2013 this week. Some might be surprised to hear that sales of digital songs in iTunes, Amazon, and other download stores dropped from 2012 to 2013. Isn’t the music industry supposed to be going digital? Yes, but downloads are not the future. On-demand streaming music are replacing…
