We spend a lot of time thinking about the future of music as an app phenomenon – mostly for listeners, but also for musicians: instruments for the synth wiz, ways for musicians to market and monetize tunes, and recently, how this whole transition into apps has affected music bloggers. Our lengthy conversation with Sean Adams – founder of influential music…
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…
At first glance, This American Life and OK Go don’t have much in common. The former is a talk radio show known for its funny and touching stories about human connection, and the latter is a rock band known for its sugary hooks and music videos about dancing on treadmills. A closer look reveals a…
If you were told to make an iPhone app that to capture the current zeitgeist, what would it look like? A gas price calculator, perhaps, or something like the Inhuman Microphone? Or how about an app that lets you make dubstep tracks from Tim Tebow’s voice –does that sound about right? We thought so. Enter…
When the MP3 revolution hit its stride, the coolest thing about it was how much control we were given over our music. Weightless files and tiny players let you carry your entire library around with you, all the time. Anything you wanted to listen to — so long as you had already hunted it down…
AUSTIN, TEXAS — Turntable.fm, a social music service that goes beyond the usual buzzword with a service that turns music fans into avatars so they can DJ music for each other in rooms, is officially “legit.” On Tuesday at the SXSW Interactive festival, Turntable.fm co-founders Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein announced that their company had…
Exfm began as a Google Chrome extension more suitable for geeks than music nerds, who might not really grasp the concept of browser extensions. Then it evolved into a ready-for-primetime web app, and after that, an app for Android and iOS that made us ponder the question, “With friends like these, who needs iPods?” However, the app…
Responding to complaints about its practice of limiting data plans it sold as “unlimited,” AT&T clarified the amount of wireless data its smartphone customers can use before it starts throttling their bandwidth this week. The new limits at which AT&T will slow down users’ bandwidth: 3GB per month for smartphone users or 5GB for subscribers…
We first checked out Herd.fm about a year ago, after it had been a finalist in last year’s SXSW Accelerator contest. Back then, the app shared music based on your physical location, allowing you to “drop” tracks at various venues for other users to “pick up” and listen to — a pretty neat idea. Unfortunately,…
Paul Miller, records and tours under the moniker DJ Spooky. He also writes books, makes art, writes articles, and releases his music in an interactive, remixable music format: DJ Spooky and The Secret Song 2. These apps not only let you remix his songs so they can sound different every time you play them, but you…
Much has been made of our supposedly decreasing attention spans when it comes to music. The proliferation of MP3s, peer-to-peer file sharing, and streaming services like Spotify and Rdio have put ridiculous amounts of content at our fingertips and in our pockets. Some argue that all this music weakens our ability to appreciate it. Why focus…
Apple unveiled a developer preview of its upcoming “OS X Mountain Lion” on Thursday morning, the latest of the company’s operating systems to be confusingly named after a cat. As with previous releases, Mountain Lion will offer the Mac faithful and fresh converts a host of new features once it launches to the general public in late summer….
Depending on when you tuned in to the 54th Grammy awards Sunday night, you may have seen one of four shows: One was stately and appropriately low-key in its remembrance of the late Whitney Houston; another was unabashedly celebratory; a third was full of the usual awkwardly-forced collaborations; and the fourth one had way too much…
Here’s one for the “How on earth did nobody think of this before?” files. Video Star for iOS facilitates the creation of homespun music videos to go along with any song on your device. To use it, you simply choose a song from your music library and start shooting. You can act along with the…
At a MidemLab lunch a couple of weeks ago in France, I sat next to Adam Perry, drummer for The Bloodhound Gang and the man behind BandApp, which promises to help any band create iOS applications to promote and sell their music, keeping a higher percentage of revenue than they would through iTunes. Naturally, I…
