I really like appearing on the radio to talk digital music with John Schaefer, the host of WNYC’s SoundCheck, which appears on National Public Radio stations across the country. Here’s the latest (and here’s the archive):
Erstwhile iTunes software designer and marketing leader Alec Marshall had a front row seat to watch music downloads chip away at the CD, starting in the ’90s. He says the streaming services replacing the download for many of us are not capable of returning recorded music revenue to its high water mark, either. His answer:…
Hot on the heels of our Q-and-A with Google’s music group product manager Paul Joyce comes this Spin Magazine interview with Google head of content programming for Android and all around good guy, Tim Quirk. In the interview, Quirk reveals an interesting point about the difference between how people look for music and how they…
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…
In a way, Vio reminds us of those old advertisements that depicted a brain on drugs as an egg frying in a pan. In this case, it’s your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch on drugs. This novel $3 app for iOS grabs audio from the iPhone’s microphone and applies reverb, delay, and other effects listed…
We children of the ’80s remember MTV as a starmaker. A hot video in steady rotation meant everyone was going to run out and buy the cassette — or, in extreme cases, the cassingle. MTV doesn’t work like that anymore. It has lots of programming, but music videos are no longer the main focus on…
Music Hack Days, where techies take time off from their freelance gigs and day jobs to build all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff out of APIs and hardware, are lots of fun — in part because the point isn’t to make a commercial release. It’s to make something cool. That doesn’t mean something cool…
Do you like neat things that are from the future? Stop whatever else you’re doing and check out the immersive music collaboration between Beck and director Chris Milk. The flat version of this went viral earlier this month, but this version, released on Tuesday, lets you look around the venue as Beck and his cohorts…
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…
Pitchfork started as site called Turntable when founder Ryan Schreiber was barely out of high school. Now it’s a Spotify app, a “TV” channel, and many other things. We asked Pitchfork vice president of video programming RJ Bentler about the evolution of Pitchfork TV and had a pretty interesting conversation by phone about how video on the internet still…
We stopped by Next Big Sound’s New York office for a chat with its data scientist Victor Hu, formerly a mathematician for the U.S. Department of Defense and “stats whiz” for the New York Yankees, to see how the company gauges music popularity for clients including Billboard, which relies on Next Big Sound for one of its…
In 2012, much of the world became accustomed to seeing what our friends were listening to on Facebook. It was the year when millions of us stopped listening to digital music alone quite so much, and began tuning in together, whether at the same time or asynchronously. It’s easy to poke fun at the way…
Tubalr is simple. It slaps a nice front-end on top of the YouTube API that lets you enter any artist name and click one of two buttons, like so: The result: hassle-free artist radio that starts up quickly, and has the added bonus of showing videos. Tubalr plays music videos from YouTube, programming the channels using…
You know how, for the past decade, you’ve been able to track everything you’ve played on your iPod, iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, Spotify, and more — and have all of that stuff create a Last.fm profile, which is useful for all kinds of reasons? No? Well then, do you use Facebook? It’s basically doing…
One of the greatest things the web has done for music fans is archive our extensive music history. Thanks to YouTube, Wolfgang’s Vault, the John Peel Archive, and countless other music apps, we have unprecedented access to live footage, rare interviews, vintage memorabilia, and actual music, which might otherwise have gone missing. The new iPhone/iPad…
