The hottest hackathon at SXSW 2014 will undoubtedly be the SXSW Music Hackathon Championship on March 12, because the hacker who will be there to build functional digital music technologies from a suite of APIs and their own ingenuity consist of the cream of the music-hacking crop, with $13,500 in cash prizes at stake. On the…
Concertgoers, nightlife lovers, and actually anyone who’s looking for something to do in their city or town might have a friend in Access The Night (free, iOS). With a mere glance at the app, you can get somewhat of a sense of what’s happening at the live music venues nearby, as well as other places,…
AUSTIN, TEXAS — The cars of today, and especially tomorrow, generate rivers of data that will change everything from how meteorologists understand the weather, to how towns identify their most egregious potholes, to — our favorite — how people will listen to music in the car. Over half of all music listening takes place in…
Here’s a neat party trick, possibly quite literally: Queue up a bunch of your favorite party anthems in the LiveTunes app, choose the “sold out arena” setting, and see how long it takes people to notice the crazy crowd noise in between and during each song. At first, LiveTunes (iOS, $2) sounds like a gimmick. Did…
We’ve been thinking a lot about how speakers are evolving from things that simply turn electricity into sound into smart, networked objects, sometimes with interfaces. This week saw the release of another interesting next-level speaker, the Aether Cone. It’s rechargeable and wireless, but it really shines in the “Internet of Things” sense of having screenless controls that…
Some music-making apps are designed for Jedi-level music producers who can’t wait to get back into the studio, while others are for beginners looking to have a little fun. FiddleWax ($3, iOS), from Adam Kumpf of Luxemborg, sits somewhere in the middle. Anyone could pick it up and make something resembling music, but if you know…
The following is a guest post from Aaron Ford, digital advertising manager for online media distributor The Orchard. Aaron regularly helps recording artists advertise on various networks, so we feel like he probably knows what he’s talking about when it comes to advertising music. We hope this is of interest to recording artists and readers who are…
Your speakers are probably dumb, in the sense that a telephone was considered dumb compared to a smartphone. All most speakers do is turn electricity into sound, as they have for well over a hundred years now. While they’re the most important contributor to sound quality (along with headphones), they haven’t had any features at…
Apple launched its new iOS car integration at the Geneva Motor Show this week, allowing new car drivers to plug the latest generations of iOS devices into their cars with a brand new onscreen interface designed to work without requiring a lot of the driver’s visual attention. Rather than running iOS in the car dashboard…
Evolver.fm editor Eliot Van Buskirk appeared on Digital Music Trends to discuss Warner Music Group’s deal with Shazam, an American Idol royalties lawsuit, new playlists on YouTube, SongCoin, SoundFocus raising capital, the Brit Awards ratings, World Mobile Congress, and what’s next in the wearable space: Stay tuned for more digital music news, reviews, and analysis.
Hip hop fans and artists are constantly searching for the newest ways to discover, write, see, and record new music. As we continue to move forward in the digital age, smartphones and tablets are the means of choice for a lot of that. These six apps that should probably find a home on every hip…
Let’s get this out of the way: There is no perfect app for watching live music on your computer, phone, tablet, and/or television, and there probably never will be. The licensing issues are simply too complicated. Having once predicted that live online music would start to make sense in 2008, I have a new guess:…
Incident Tech, maker of the advanced, iPhone-powered gTar, says it has signed landmark deals with major music publishers Sony/ATV Music Publishing and EMI Music Publishing after 18 months of negotiations to offer around two million song tutorials within the gTar app, which runs inside a special $400 guitar. This is no ordinary music-teaching app, in other words….
Kevin Arnold, founder of IODA Music and the Noise Pop Festival, unveiled a new service called OpenAura on Wednesday designed to give artists more control over how they appear online, while offering them a new way to make money. How much money remains to be seen — but what is clear already is that OpenAura…
The music business is about to get its own alternative currency, called Songcoin (Update: Songcoin is now live). The alternative currency phenomenon is real, as weird as that might feel to those of us who would never consider shelling out cash for points to buy special pixels for that Farmville game we never really got around…
