We’ve been writing a lot about Google’s new music subscription service this week, because of course we would. Google is a force to be reckoned with — and now, that force is reckoning with the likes of Spotify, Rdio, and Rhapsody in a bid for your $10 per month, in return for unlimited access to…
Grandpa’s CD player was an awful piece of technology by many estimations. Purists hated the idea of slicing precious analog sound waves into bits, on philosophical if not auditory grounds. Owners of cassettes and vinyl were justifiably bummed to have to buy everything all over again. And on the label side, that CDs didn’t include the copyright…
Twitter’s not talking about the music app it is reportedly set to debut either Friday or this weekend, during the Coachella Music Festival, but already, several clues have emerged about this standalone music app, based on Twitter’s now-confirmed acquisition of We Are Hunted, which analyzed Twitter and other sources to identify trending music. The official…
Apple makes iTunes. Android comes from Google. That doesn’t stop you from controlling iTunes using an Android phone or tablet, because iTunes is compatible with something called DACP, which you can use without knowing what it is. Once you run one of these apps, it’ll generate a four-digit code; enter that into iTunes once, and…
AirPlay is Apple’s most underappreciated achievement. Its AirTunes feature puts digital music in the home more cheaply and easily than anything else — and unlike so many Apple things, it’s widely-interoperable. Not only can you find plenty of speakers and stereo systems that have AirPlay built in, but many iOS apps include it natively, so…
DoubleTwist, which makes two of the most popular Android music apps in the world (AirSync at #7 and doubleTwist player at #23), just entered the U.S. streaming radio market alongside Pandora, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn. DoubleTwist’s Magic Radio has the power to extend your library, playlists, and musical taste to over 13 million songs. We’ll get…
Spotify’s strategy, from the beginning, has included allowing people to listen for free on the desktop. There’s a catch when it comes to playing that music away from a computer. If they want to take the millions of tracks on Spotify to their iPhones, Androids, televisions, or other devices, Spotify users have to pay for…
If you live in a place and you enjoy live music, you might enjoy Timbre. To find good shows near your place, you need simply fire up the app and start listening. You can skip around until you find something you like, and then it’s time to buy tickets. Last fall, we were impressed by…
For almost as long as scientists have devised ways to store digital music in ever more efficient ways, other scientists have agonized over how to “repair” that work. This typically involves trying to replace what the process of acoustic compression has removed — compression that is necessary for the files to fly around the internet…
Facebook’s big musical achievement has been to make it easier to find music through your friends — first by embedding YouTube and SoundCloud files, and then by linking Spotify, Songza, and other services directly into Facebook, so you can see what your friends are listening to, and even join them. In our exclusive interview with…
Rhapsody, which bills itself as “America’s #1 digital music subscriptions service (Spotify comes from Sweden), unveiled a neat app today that lets Android users identify songs as they play over speakers. Rhapsody SongMatch (free) lets premium Rhapsody subscribers add these songs to their collection instantly, so basically, you can collect music wherever you go, storing it…
Apple’s iOS created the modern smartphone as we understand it today, but Google’s open-source copycat Android quickly made up ground, and is now the top-selling operating mobile operating system. According to the latest IDC predictions, Android’s top sales rank will persist next year. So why are there so many more great apps for iOS than…
Our favorite music app ever to have been invented in a bowling alley is undoubtedly RoqBot, a social music game of sorts that lets the patrons pick the music that plays anywhere — within the guidelines of what the venue owner has in mind. Not only does that prevent ceaseless rickrolling, but it lets venue…
Venturebeat and Business Insider posted an amazing chart last night (above) showing the rise and fall of various personal computing platforms from 1975 to 2012. See all that blue area at the top — the stuff that’s so prevalent, it could almost be the sky? That represents shipments of Windows desktops and laptops, and its shrinkage is…
Can you imagine if subscription music services had to sell their own hardware? Thankfully, for many reasons, they do not. In order to deliver a new music player for their millions-of-songs-strong catalogs, services like Rdio can simply release new apps to iTunes and Android (and the others, when it has time). Having been poring over the…
