This week’s Rethink Music conference kicked off with a weekend Hackathon, where participants built and presented 25 music “hacks,” or hastily-created apps, at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center (a.k.a. N.E.R.D) on Sunday. You can use most of them today, and we see a good deal of potential for some of them to evolve…
The ColorHits web app was designed to let you “discover new music with color,” quite literally, based on the color of its album cover. There are plenty of ways to find music that make musical sense. Why not try one that doesn’t? You might find something you never would have otherwise. Fire up ColorHits (after requesting…
Earlier this week, we covered a new “Twitter for music” service called Splash.fm. Beatonica, on the other hand, might be considered the flipside: “music for Twitter.” It creates a simple-to-use sample-based instrument out of your Twitter friends. Yes, Beatonica is gimmicky, but we’re not scared of that when it comes to free web apps. Besides, it…
Saturday is official Record Store Day, which means it’s almost time to implement your H2BB (home-to-business bicycle) to purchase vinyl music, if you’re the type, as even relatively young digital music consumers appear to be. But Record Store Day doesn’t just have to be a nostalgia-fueled attempt to keep physical music stores in business. It can also…
Anonymous — yes, the people with the funny masks whom Time magazine recently named one of the “most influential people in the world” — appears to have released a music app. Anontune (demo here), the work of software developers who claim to be a part of the collective, works by “automating what most people do online…
Grooveshark is getting it from all angles. Not only did its only major label deal (with EMI) collapse, but the company is now being sued by all four major labels for large-scale copyright infringement due to its policy of letting users upload music into its system, where over 30 million people stream it for free…
Android users who subscribe to Spotify or have joined the 30-day free trial have a treat waiting for them this morning: a brand new Spotify Android app that has been completely redesigned, and it looks pretty slick. The new app supports the Android 4.0 operating system as well “all-new slide-out navigation, ” the ability to…
After almost a decade of musical silence, acclaimed electronic artist and SoundCloud CTO Eric Wahlforss (a.k.a. Forss) has returned with a new album of music, which is already available as a simple web app preview that will soon be joined by a more elaborate iPad app. Hugely inspired by one of Europe’s oldest musical forms — choral church…
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…
We’re being a bit tongue in cheek with the above headline, which plays on the old Coca-Cola slogan, but it’s core to these new partners’ vision. Coca-Cola will underwrite Spotify’s spread to new territories where the service is not let available. “Coca-Cola’s distribution network is arguably larger than the internet,” said Spotify CEO Daniel Ek…
Tupac Shakur is back in the headlines again for his posthumous show-stopping performance at Coachella last weekend, which just about everyone took to be a 3D hologram. It simply looked too realistic not to be, as you can sort of tell from the video above. However, ”Virtual Tupac” wasn’t a real hologram in the sense that…
Application Programming Interface, thy name be “awesome!” Excuse the geek-out, if you’re not up on your API ABC’s, but how else are we to react to the fact that Facebook just added a Listen button to its artist pages that lets you play songs from that artist just about instantly, by hooking in to each…
It’s tax day once again — that joyful, once-a-year occasion when liberal types like the author are asked quite literally to put our money where our mouths are, as folks on the other side of the aisle get to sit around telling us they told us so. We kid. We can still be friends, right? This…
There’s no shortage of social music discovery services billing themselves as “Twitter for music.” A Google search for that exact phrase turns up over 78,000 results, and with good reason. If your friends on Twitter (and Facebook and email) like something, you might like it too. That’s no guarantee, of course, as a simple glance…
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…
