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…
Promising an experience akin to sharing music with your bunkmate in college, summer camp, cruise ship quarters, or wherever else they have bunkbeds these days, MusicBunk recently launched as a social music player that’s free on iOS and Android. On a basic level, the MusicBunk app connects you with friends and like-minded fans so you can…
Let’s start at the beginning: The Gregory Brothers are the amazing folks responsible for “Bed Intruder,” the “Double Rainbow” song, “Winning!” and other viral monstrosities of song. These Brothers (which include one woman) endorse an app called Songify, which was created by Khu.sh, which is now part of the Smule music app development powerhouse. On…
On paper, Tone Target sounds like a fine way to improve one’s musical ability. This iPhone app displays musical notes moving across the screen, along with a cross-hairs indicator that shows your pitch as you sing, whistle, or play an instrument. If you sing the right notes, the app scores that as a hit. If…
The 2012 London Summer Olympics is just around the corner, and advertisers are already using the occasion to try to move product. There will always be a certain irony in cigarette companies sponsoring tennis tournaments or purveyors of sugar water sponsoring the Olympics — especially when “Americans are drinking themselves fat,” in the words of New…
(This is a guest post by James Martin of Midemblog.) The winners of TNW Conference’s hackathon in late April tackled a common, but as-yet-unaddressed problem for format-shifting music lovers: What do I do with all those CDs on the shelf that I don’t listen to anymore? Covify’s solution: rather than laboriously enter each album name into Spotify, why not show my…
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…
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — We already know the vinyl revival is not going away. Now, there’s a handy new app looking to help record shoppers (not to mention CD holdouts) listen to albums before buying them, as well as sharing their prospective purchases with friends a la Instagram. Enter: InstaSound. This iOS app (with a companion…
Clearly, this is not the way we will all listen to all of our music in the future, but choosing music based on weather is a pretty neat trick. In our testing so far, WeatherMusic (free for web and iOS) actually selected some fairly appropriate songs based on the fact that it is currently 18 degrees…
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…
We really enjoyed the music game app Techno Kitten Adventure and its dizzying psychedelic world. The same developer, 21stStreet Games, ups the ante with Nyan Cat Adventure, continuing the developers’ visual antics in the spirit of Nyan Cat, a meme that began as a viral video and now has over 70 million views. 21st Street Games is about to…
Soundrop, the Spotify app that lets you join virtual rooms to listen to music along with friends and like-minded strangers, released a new version on Monday morning with several improvements designed to make it easier to find your Facebook friends on the service as well as rooms playing music you might like, plus fun new…
Clearly, there’s no shortage of musical instrument apps for iOS. Nonetheless, every week, a new batch appear worthy of consideration by the sonic tinkerers in our midst. We just spent a buck on SpaceLab even though we usually wait for developers to send us a code, purely on the strength of the above screenshot and a…
Spotify was well on its way to celebrity status on Evolver.fm and elsewhere even before most U.S. listeners had heard of the service, let alone had the chance to experience label-embraced freemium music. The pre-import Swedish service earned its first mention here within the first weeks of our launch, following a barrage of global press coverage about…
Smartphones and tablets were supposed to be different from what we think of as “computers.” They were supposed to turn us into mindless consumers, concerned only with ingesting the output of “professional” creators rather than empowered to make things ourselves, the way we did with computers. However, there are holes in that argument. In the…
