Comedian Louis CK made a great point that’s worth revisiting (transcript), even if you’ve seen it before: that “everything is amazing and nobody is happy.” The disruptive funnyman was referring to the way we complain about the world we live in, even as we enjoy unprecedented abilities and conveniences thanks to the preposterous degree of technological advancement over…
SoundTracking, Apple’s favorite music app of 2011, celebrates the moments of your life with music on iOS, and last fall, became a Spotify app. Its vision expands again with Tuesday’s integration of full-length tracks that play within the app, from Rdio, Spotify, or YouTube. You can add these features in the latest update. The company…
Most people who make apps are entrepreneurs, which is as it should be. According to Steve Jobs, they’ve made over $1 billion on iOS alone. Perhaps it takes someone of a more artistic bent to build a platform for pinning songs and live-recorded audio to specific locations on a map — and then open-source it, so that…
The music industry’s troubles are well documented, hinging on contradictory realities: Music is too free to be expensive and too expensive to be free. People no longer spend money on music automatically, so promoting it is arguably more important than ever. One approach is to try to “turn your band into a virus.” Let’s take a…
We’ve been on a reduced posting schedule of late, as we enjoy the last days of the dwindling summer, but now we’re back on track with a bunch of new apps for you to check out as part of our This Week In Music Apps series. First, our latest reviews: This Week in Reviews First Location-Based Spotify…
Spotify has approved its first third-party app for the fascinating intersection of music and location: Tunaspot, which turns the sharing of location-based playlists into a virtual geo-caching game, wherein the dominant metaphor is that chicken of the sea, the mighty tuna fish. The Tunaspot app, developed in the music app hotspot Malmö, in the larger music app…
Road trip season is upon us, as college kids and working stiffs who wish they still had the summer off gas up their tanks and hit the highway. As such, it’s a convenient time for you to find out about Roadtrip Mixtape, an intriguing web app that lets you input any two cities in the…
AUSTIN, TEXAS — Wahwah.fm lets you turn the music stored on your iPhone into an internet radio station that gets broadcast worldwide, or to other people near your location. Not only that, you can also check out what other users are broadcasting. To get started with this innovative app, you can sign up with Facebook…
At SXSW 2012, three years after it was the toast of SXSW 2009, Foursquare plans to launch a new feature that will reward fans for checking in to supported shows with free merchandise, instant seat upgrades, the chance to meet the band, “special encores” (which the band plays if over 100 people check in, for…
Having released a music app this summer that sculpts sound based on where the listener is located within the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the app-developing band Bluebrain released a follow-up this month that does the same for Central Park. You can’t hear it unless you’re there — but if you are, you can experience…
Spotify is now open for iOS developers to build whatever they want on top of millions of songs through a newly-released API. What does that mean to you? Well, if you have Spotify Premium account, you can access all of that on-demand music within any iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad app that uses Spotify’s API,…
For bands, radio exposure has never been the end result. It’s always been the means. Whether to boost album or ticket sales, artists have traditionally seen the radio as a method for promoting a product or good. So has Joey Flores. Last year the Venice, CA, musician-turned-marketer launched Earbits, a site that masks direct marketing and…
We sat down with eight luminaries from various parts of the digital music and affiliated industries to find out what apps they’re using — or which apps they’ve made — backstage at the FlashFwd Awards in New York City on June 8. With apologies to the master of this format, we present the individual interviews:
Local programming may keep FM radio going strong in some regions, but in many cases, syndicated radio broadcasts come from nationwide feeds, and only plug in those “[your city here]” identifiers to make them feel local. Geo-aware music services, such as the new Raditaz iPhone and Android app (first mentioned in our weekly wrap-up), are…
It’s not every day that writing about music apps means discussing a $2.6 billion initial public offering. Pandora’s IPO valued the company, whose customizable streaming radio service is used by approximately one out of every ten Americans, at $2.6 billion dollars, or $16 per share under the symbol “P.” As the chart above shows (via Google,…
