If you’ve been trying to use Beats Music these past few days, you already know it has all kinds of problems (which the pre-launch reviews missed, because the general public was not using the app yet), in addition to being nice in many ways. These performance issues prevented music from being played, “onboarded” users over…
Beats Music launches today, offering a new twist on the digital music subscription. Part of the idea behind Beats Music, as originally envisioned by Jimmy Iovine, Trent Reznor, Dr. Dre, Ian Rogers, and Luke Wood, is to offer a combination of handmade playlists and recommendation algorithms to make it easier for music fans to just…
We’ve been wondering what Beats Music will look like since July 2012, when Beats Electronics bought the MOG music service, and also since July 2013, when Beats Music was still called “Project Daisy,” so-named after the dog of Beats Music president and COO Luke Wood. After years of strategizing, redesigning, conceptualizing, and everything else that…
Sony and Bandsintown announced on Friday that Sony Music Unlimited will provide music to Bandsintown. This is a great idea, because Bandsintown is an app for finding shows to see, and one aspect of deciding what show to see is, well, “what does this band actually sound like?” With this Sony Music Unlimited integration, Bandsintown,…
The on-demand music service Rdio, formerly available as a free trial or paid subscription, is now available for free in the United States. To date, this has been the biggest difference between Spotify and Rdio. Now, that difference no longer exists, in this country anyway. Anyone can now go to Rd.io and play any of…
Most who have been online for a while probably associate BitTorrent with the bit torrent file sharing protocol. BitTorrent, the company, which uses that protocol, has been in the legitimate content business for a while now — most recently with its music bundles, which let artists turn BitTorrent downloads into a distributed storefront or ad-supported…
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…
One can actually lay eyes on the Clearview Clio, a $350 transparent curved Bluetooth speaker that snatched Engadget’s award for Best Audio Product of CES 2014, after Brian Heater spied it on the CES show floor. ClearView calls its Clio “the first invisible speaker,” which is patently absurd, and not just because some speakers are built…
Beats by Dre is one of the electronics biggest success stories of the past decade. When conventional wisdom dictated that nobody cared about sound quality, Beats Electronics made enough money by selling premium-priced headphones to buy an election. Letting go of it was the biggest mistake its former parent company Monster ever made. Rapper 50…
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…
We’ve come a long way since the first digital music fans scrounged around for bad-sounding MP3s to assemble from separate files from Usenet to play on their computer speakers. The first MP3 players fell to the splendor of the iPod, which begat the smartphone (really), whose apps put just about all the world’s recorded music on…
It’s notoriously impossible to keep track of everything at CES, so I’ve been keeping tabs on coverage from people I’ve worked with personally covering the show. It takes a certain kind of person not to be overwhelmed. Wayne Cunningham scored pictures and a description of the Audi Android tablet, and now another former colleague, Wil…
On the heels of the launch of the Open Automotive Alliance by Google, four major automakers, and Nvidia comes a sneak peak of the 10-inch Android tablet Audi will include with some of these cars, as well as additional details on how they’ll work. First, they won’t be embedded in the dashboard; instead, the Audi…
Lyor Cohen, the music industry bigwig who began his career as Run DMC’s road manager before founding Def Jam Records and helming Warner Music Group, is launching a record label called 300, with Google as the primary investor. While this doesn’t count as Google (owner of YouTube and Google Play Music), starting its own record…
As we predicted last month (sign up for more predictions), the home music war is getting real in 2014. Pure joins the rest of today’s music announcements from CES with additions to its line of Sonos-like wireless speakers for the home, plus important new firmware to improve its sound quality. Like Sonos, Pure’s Jongo speakers require the…
