While techie hipsters (techsters?) complain that Turntable.fm is so over, most people and even music fans only recently began to grasp the concept of downloading MP3s from the internet and transferring them to a portable MP3 player, in the grand scheme of things. When you obsess about technology all day, it can be easy to…
It’s an idea that’s been kicking around for years — that maybe people don’t want to subscribe to music in general. Maybe, in cases of extreme fandom, they want to subscribe directly to the artists they love, without all of the layers of record labels, distributors, online music stores, and so on. The fan pays,…
Hype aside, apps really can be a fine way for artists to “connect with their fans,” as overused as that expression might be. MobBase debuted another interesting entry in the budding market for helping bands build apps — a trend that at the very least gives them a new way to promote themselves to their…
A confidential report forwarded to Evolver.fm indicates that independent labels saw a major boost in revenue from the Spotify unlimited music subscription service in the first quarter of 2012. Merlin calls itself “the virtual fifth major label” for the way it represents many of the world’s leading independent record labels. It’s one of the “good guys,”…
The Washington Post is in bad shape, and its social reader app, which spams your Facebook friends with the fact that you just read an article about Kim Kardashian’s latest hangnail atrocity, isn’t helping. As noted by Forbes, usage of the Washington Post Social Reader plummeted over the last 30 days from 17.4 million to…
Forget, for a moment, how you feel about services that automatically share the music you’re listening to in the privacy of your own home to all your Facebook friends. Love it or hate it, what cannot be contested is that Facebook’s strategy of trying to become the “connective tissue” for music is paying big dividends…
Saturday is official Record Store Day, which means it’s almost time to implement your H2BB (home-to-business bicycle) to purchase vinyl music, if you’re the type, as even relatively young digital music consumers appear to be. But Record Store Day doesn’t just have to be a nostalgia-fueled attempt to keep physical music stores in business. It can also…
Grooveshark is getting it from all angles. Not only did its only major label deal (with EMI) collapse, but the company is now being sued by all four major labels for large-scale copyright infringement due to its policy of letting users upload music into its system, where over 30 million people stream it for free…
Tupac Shakur is back in the headlines again for his posthumous show-stopping performance at Coachella last weekend, which just about everyone took to be a 3D hologram. It simply looked too realistic not to be, as you can sort of tell from the video above. However, ”Virtual Tupac” wasn’t a real hologram in the sense that…
Say you’re a big fan of Sleigh Bells (the band, not the wintertime equine accessory). Wouldn’t you want to listen to whatever Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss rocked on their iPods last week? We already have the technology to make that happen, in what could be the biggest Untapped App of them all: artist radio apps that…
Spotify continued its quest to become the operating system of music on the internet with today’s launch of an embeddable music player that puts legal tunes on websites and blogs, for free, while compensating copyright holders. Wherever these buttons are used — and there’s a long list of launch partners below — people with Spotify…
In our round-up of tools for attending the SXSW Film, Interactive, and Music festival last month in Austin, Texas, we recommended that people use Sched.org to manage their schedules. I’ve attended somewhere around ten SXSWs, and Sched.org is the best tool I’ve found for keeping one’s schedule straight at that festival, insofar as such a…
Doug Freeman (@dmfreeman) is a music critic for the Austin Chronicle and co-editor of The Austin Chronicle Music Anthology. He also works in PR and marketing for early stage technology startups at Jones-Dilworth. (See also Sean Adams’ own response to that interview.) Evolver.fm’s interview with Drowned in Sound’s Sean Adams earlier this week offered an interesting…
This is the second part of an interview with the legendary Sean Adams, founder of the Drowned In Sound music reviews site. “I spend about 60 hours a week ploughing through music, to try to prevent those who don’t have as much time from wasting it listening it to things which aren’t as good as…
MP3 bloggers were the revolutionaries of music criticism, taking on established outlets like Rolling Stone and Spin by being faster, cooler, and more musical — in that they could embed what they were talking about. Readers could hear it for themselves as they read the blog, rather than looking for it on Napster or waiting…
