The Google I/O conference takes place today, and the most exciting part of it for music fans will be Google’s new music subscription — or rather subscriptions, plural, because as reported by my former CNET colleague Greg Sandoval, Google has been readying two separate music subscriptions — one aligned with Google Play and Android, and…
With the end of the year approaching, “Best of” lists are everywhere. To help you cope without ignoring them, we’ve aggregated a lot of those into a “streamable” article: the ultimate collection of the best music of 2012, so you can check out all the most critically-acclaimed music of the past year, all in one…
Following an apparently disastrous meeting with Facebook, Dalton Caldwell — he of imeem fame — vowed to unseat not only Facebook but Twitter too, with App.net, a fledgling social network that lets you share text messages as well as app activity. Third-party developers, says Caldwell, will be able to use it without worrying about the…
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…
If you’ve already heard of the social cross-service music app for the desktop, Tomahawk, you already know how cool it is. Freelance developer Syd Lawrence, the same man who brought us the frivolous This Was My Jam, donned his thinking cap to build Toma.hk, a simple-to-use web app that lets anyone embed music on blogs or link…
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…
Update: SXSW appears to have forced this site to shut down. The holidays are over, leaving us with 356, 339, and 357 shopping days until Christmas, Hannukkah, and Kwanzaa respectively. Let’s use that time productively, shall we? You might not want to think about this now, having recently braved the crowded malls and shopping centers, but…
Last.fm essentially invented the idea of tracking what people play in various services and sharing it with others about ten years before Mark Zuckerberg announced last month that Facebook would do the same. Today, Last.fm actually “scrobbles” from more devices and music services than Facebook does, but Facebook has the users — and therefore, the…
Right now, if you want to try Spotify’s new app platform, you need to download a special preview version of the Spotify desktop application. However, Evolver.fm has learned, Spotify plans to roll out its app platform to all of Spotify’s 10-million-plus active users by the end of next week. [Update: we later learned that the launch…
At one San Francisco store, shoppers decide what music plays using mobile apps for iPhone or Android — or simply by checking in to the store and allowing their musical preferences to color the soundtrack. Roqbot, whose ingenious method for crowdsourced music selection in venues (bars, clubs, bowling alleys, etc.) we first profiled at SXSW,…
The old staleness: hiring an expert to design soundscapes for bars, restaurants, museums, and the like. The new hotness: allowing the sonic environment to shape itself around the musical preferences of the people in the room. The catch: If you’re the private type, your taste will be left out of the equation. Everyone else will…
(We’re reposting this one in advance of Valentine’s Day, just in case you’re looking for someone.) Are you dating? More specifically, are you dating a music fan? Don’t talk about your undying fealty to Nickelback, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, or any of the other artists mentioned above. Tastebuds.fm, which promises to match people based on…
Attention music fans: You might want to watch what you listen to on music apps that connect to Facebook and other services. Each song you listen to helps these services build a detailed view of your listening preferences, so if you favor a guilty pleasure too often (here’s mine), it could come back to haunt you…
Where would we be without APIs? Actually, we’d probably be right here; we’d just be way more bored. Developer Rony Fadel contacted Evolver.fm alerting us to his creation Twist Radio for iOS, powered by APIs (application programming interfaces) from SoundCloud and Last.fm. If you’ve been dutifully scrobbling your music playback to Last.fm (now owned by CBS),…
Put on your headphones. It’s time to listen to music in a new way that might just blow your mind. The above headline doesn’t really do justice to Tomahawk and the new Tomahawklet add-on, which added support for the popular Turntable.fm group-listening service today. Here’s how to work this strange magic for yourself. First, get…
