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…
Long before Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to found Facebook, Last.fm allowed music fans to keep an online record of the music they had been listening to in all sort of music players, including iTunes, Winamp, and more. Last.fm’s feature for this is called “scrobbling,” based on the fact that it had acquired a…
The Washington Post is in bad shape, and its social reader app, which spams your Facebook friends with the fact that you just read an article about Kim Kardashian’s latest hangnail atrocity, isn’t helping. As noted by Forbes, usage of the Washington Post Social Reader plummeted over the last 30 days from 17.4 million to…
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…
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…
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — Facebook Hipster is a work in progress at this very moment, but developer and Music Hack Day Sydney participant Syd Lawrence promises he’ll finish it today and launch it tomorrow. From what we know about Facebook Hipster so far, it pushes a lot of the right buttons, functioning like a Klout for…
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…
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…
MP3 bloggers were the revolutionaries of music criticism, taking on established outlets like Rolling Stone and Spin by being faster, cooler, and more musical — in that they could embed what they were talking about. Readers could hear it for themselves as they read the blog, rather than looking for it on Napster or waiting…
It’s clear that Spotify is the most popular on-demand music subscription in the world. Less clear is how many people actually use it. Let’s start with Spotify’s latest numbers as of March, which a spokeswoman sent Evolver.fm yesterday. It shows that over three million people pay for a subscription to the service, while over 10…
Maybe next week we’ll manage to stop writing about Spotify for five seconds, but this is just too interesting to pass up. As of this morning, Spotify’s Facebook Timeline now includes over a thousand years of music, which you can listen to at your leisure, assuming you have the time. Scroll back to the year 1001…
What an original idea: A bunch of rooms where cute little avatars can DJ music to each other! That’s what we said last May, before breaking the news (we think) about Turntable.fm, after surprising its cofounder Billy Chasen with a call to his cellphone. If you’ve tried the social DJ web or iOS app Turntable.fm,…
Spotify recently rolled out a third batch of music apps that run within its desktop software, offering new ways to find stuff to listen to on your desktop, whether you pay for Spotify or not. This didn’t “just happen.” Rather, it’s part of a concerted effort on the part of Spotify to become, in the…
What if Spotify threw a weekend-long party for digital music hackers at a Manhattan ping pong club co-founded by Susan Sarandon? Your correspondent was too laid up with the flu to find out in person, but has pieced together some details. The winner of Spotify’s $10,000 grand prize for the best app to be created…
If flying around as a kitten with a jetpack, a “butterfly” kitten, or even a kitten wrapped with bacon as techno music plays is your idea of a good time, then Techno Kitten Adventure is the app you’ve been waiting for. This music game mashes the popular lolcats internet meme with techno music, creating one of…
