As the thermometer consistently tops 70 degrees here in New England, it’s safe to say summer is coming in. For music lovers, that means music festivals. This week’s batch includes Last.Fm’s Festivals app (available for Android, iPod and iPad) to get you ready for this year’s wave of shows. We’re also featuring two radio-like apps…
We’ve just received word of a promising-looking new online music outfit out of Australia whose main premise is to help bands sell tickets to online shows, which they can then webcast using their own equipment to fans worldwide, or just in specific regions. PlayFi is a fairly standard online music store that lets fans set…
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,…
This Week in Music Apps, of course, is a chance to gather together all the intriguing stuff we find in our daily quest to bring you the best new music apps. We’ll get to that of course, but first, we’d like to point out that some stories — like honey, which has been found in…
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…
For those looking to have a little fun with the music they’ve been listening to, Last.fm Playground houses a number of interesting projects and visualization charts for people who have been scrobbling their music. Don’t know how to scrobble? Never fear, our editor just wrote a tutorial to help. As with any real-life playground, Last.fm Playground has…
In our exclusive interview with Grooveshark CEO and co-founder Sam Tarantino a couple of weeks ago, he listed no fewer than eight reasons why music should be free — and why his company should be the one to make it that way. For now, despite lawsuits from all four major labels, Grooveshark continues to distribute…
For those who wish to enjoy online the potent mix of glory and humiliation that karaoke brings, tokStar represents a promising new development. Choose your song, enter your name, enable your camera and microphone, wait your turn, and you’re up and running on its virtual stage, singing your heart out for the voting pleasure of…
If you’ve already heard of the social cross-service music app for the desktop, Tomahawk, you already know how cool it is. Freelance developer Syd Lawrence, the same man who brought us the frivolous This Was My Jam, donned his thinking cap to build Toma.hk, a simple-to-use web app that lets anyone embed music on blogs or link…
The Byrds and the Bee Gees web app attracted a fair amount of attention at Rethink Music Hack Day for the way it generated a Spotify playlist based on what your parents were likely listening to when you were conceived, with an extra option that asks you to specify “whether your dad was smooth back then.” Springing…
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…
First, let us note that you cannot yet use Soundtastic, built by Eric Bae at Music Hack Day Sydney this past weekend. But we witnessed a fully-functional demonstration, and it was pretty impressive. Bae likens his creation to “StumbleUpon for music,” and in a way, he’s right. Soundtastic mines your Facebook page for your Likes, then starts…
It’s a problem that exists all around the world: Radio stations can only play on song at a time, and those songs tend to be the ones that a person or algorithm has already decided is worthy of airplay. We all know there’s plenty of great new stuff sitting there, but it’s not always easy…
