As part of our ongoing investigation into how people collect music in these overwhelming times, let’s talk about the three basic stages of this process — and how our current music ecosystem fails us, and how the right interface can solve the problem. That interface is the triptych, and we’ll get to it soon. Interface…
As many of us do, I recently ended up in a Facebook conversation about parenting or music. In this case, it was about both conversational mainstays: Namely, how do you allow a child in 2013 to decide to listen to something of their choosing? “I’ve been thinking lately about the downside of having a digital-only…
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…
We really like music apps, but some of them don’t exist, which is annoying. That’s okay. Along with some of our readers, Evolver.fm has been not-so-quietly inventing our own music apps out of thin air (this being a particularly good one), then posting the ideas in polls so people can vote on which ones they’d…
First we collected music objects, then we hoarded MP3s to the point that many of our computers’ music collections became so huge and labyrinthine as to become almost useless. Now that most active music fans play music from the cloud as much or more than we access our local libraries (remember iTunes?), we music fans…
We like 8Tracks (web, iOS, Android) for mixtape sharing, because it makes it easy, and pretty. You simply upload songs from your computer (or choose them from SoundCloud or Free Music Archive), then share them anywhere, even on a webpage: The original idea for 8Tracks, according to founder and CEO David Porter, was to build…
Clark Dinnison, founder of Noon Pacific, emails a hand-curated mixtape to subscribers each Monday, for free, made up of music he’s read about on leading blogs, or heard about from friends, family, or wherever. It runs on the 8tracks platform, and it sounds good. As such, we figured we’d check in to see what advice…
DRM, or digital rights management, used to be a big conversation point — and not just among techies. Steve Jobs even wrote a letter to the whole world in 2007 about how it needed to go away. In a sense, DRM did vanish from music after the major labels dropped their requirements that iTunes and…
The following is a guest post from Peter Kirn of CreateDigitalMusic, which focuses on music apps for creating sounds. It’s a bit outside of our usual scope, but this software looks pretty far-out. Thanks, Peter. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: manipulating sound presets should be as intuitive and powerful…
The following is a guest post from Sean Walker of iOS Musician. He can think of four reasons why the iPad is home to so many vintage analog synthesizer recreations — apps that are made to look and sound like ancient analog gear, but with the convenience (and affordability) of a digital product. Vintage synths…
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Chief Swine Defender (his real title) at BreadPig, just gave the second of three keynote addresses on the first day of SXSW in Austin, Texas. In it, he laid out a well-worn yet important argument: that the Internet needs to stay open in order to realize its potential to help humans by…
A Bloomberg report that Google would launch a “Spotify killer” gained credence on Tuesday with Fortune’s report that YouTube — a division of Google — is in fact working on a subscription service, according to unnamed sources at Google and in the music industry. Notably, this latest report refers to YouTube as the one to launch…
I am all for unplugging from the internet and technology, from time to time. As I sat on a porch watching at the ocean a couple of summers ago, I reached for my phone to rewind the scene to show someone a ship that had passed. When something like that happens, it’s time to unplug….
We love our music apps, and the smartphones that made it commonplace to carry around advanced, diverse music functionality, rather than relying on a “dumb” iPod or waiting until you get back to your computer to try the cool stuff. However, phones are getting in the way of apps. Case in point: You’re listening to…
Welcome to part two of our condensed, super-digestible interview with RJ Bentler, vice president of video programming for the influential music tastemaker Pitchfork. The first part of this interview covers the interactive promise of internet-on-the-television. This second (and final) segment concerns Pitchfork’s plans for putting its original video programming directly on the television — an area…
