Lyor Cohen, the music industry bigwig who began his career as Run DMC’s road manager before founding Def Jam Records and helming Warner Music Group, is launching a record label called 300, with Google as the primary investor. While this doesn’t count as Google (owner of YouTube and Google Play Music), starting its own record…
This is a guest post from Midemblog by Syd Lawrence, who has made so many music hacks and apps that he has his own tag here. So it’s been a busy few months, which means I am sorry; it’s been a while. It also means this is going to be one epic post, on all the best…
I appeared on a number of panels at Midem 2012 in Cannes, France earlier this year, including a keynote interview with Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio, maker of the astoundingly popular Angry Birds app series. In the following interview, Hed discusses how piracy can increase business, opines on whether music wants to be interactive, drops a hint…
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…
CANNES, FRANCE — Rovio’s Angry Birds is one of the most popular apps of all time, with over 500 million downloads, a series of animations, plush toys, and even a full-length feature film said to be in the works. Music fans might be delighted to learn that in addition, the company is working on a…
CANNES, FRANCE — We’ve been quite busy appearing on panels and meeting with sources here at Midem 2012, but perhaps no one at this music industry festival worked harder and slept less than the music app developers at Music Hack Day Cannes. In an oxygen-starved room on the fifth floor of the Palais des Festivals,…
CANNES, FRANCE — Spotify gets a lot of attention, especially since its U.S. launch last year, but Rhapsody chief Jon Irwin didn’t appear fazed about that when Evolver.fm sat down with him at the Midem conference for an update on his music subscription service. According to him, despite Spotify’s current lead (with 2.5 million paying…
(This is a guest post from James Martin of midemblog. Evolver.fm is an official publication of Midem 2012 in Cannes, France, where Evolver.fm editor Eliot Van Buskirk will appear on panels and judge the following midemlab music apps. We figured we’d repost midemblog’s lists of the finalists in midemlab 2012, which includes videos and descriptions for each app, in the spirit of not reinventing the wheel.) BandApp BandApp is…
(This is a guest post from James Martin of midemblog. Evolver.fm is an official publication of Midem 2012 in Cannes, France, where Evolver.fm editor Eliot Van Buskirk will appear on panels and judge the following midemlab music apps. We figured we’d repost midemblog’s lists of the finalists in midemlab 2012, which includes videos and descriptions for each app, in the spirit of not reinventing the wheel.) Cleeng Cleeng is…
(This is a guest post from James Martin of midemblog. Evolver.fm is an official publication of Midem 2012 in Cannes, France, where Evolver.fm editor Eliot Van Buskirk will appear on panels and judge the following midemlab music apps. We figured we’d repost midemblog’s lists of the finalists in midemlab 2012, which includes videos and descriptions for each app,…
(Some doubt the impact of Spotify’s announcement of third-party music apps that run within the Spotify application. We know, our Spotify coverage has gotten a bit out of hand this week. We’ll post about something else soon, really. But because we concur that Spotify apps are all kinds of interesting, we herewith present the following…
Note: Evolver.fm editor Eliot Van Buskirk will appear at the midem conference in January 2012 to judge music apps submitted to midemlab. The deadline to submit music apps to the contest is November 4. In anticipation of the event, here’s a guest post from midemblog’s James Martin — an interview with former Universal Music Group UK…
Surprise, surprise: Qtrax, the free on-demand music service that made big waves in 2008 with its failed attempt to launch a free music service with music from all four major labels, is back, and you can download it today. A new Microsoft Silverlight version of Qtrax, available at a hidden URL that’s currently making the…
The latest Music Hack Day, held in France during the Midem music festival this past weekend, produced a bounty of oddball musical creations. In part one of this roundup, we told you about robot dance fights, a hangman-style lyrics quiz that pays out in free music, and a smartphone app that helps you fake being…
The Music Hack Day series, where brainiacs, dreamers, entrepreneurial-minded tinkerers and other engineers gather to build new music products within a single day, stopped off in Cannes, France this the past weekend as part of the Midem music industry conference, an annual event where music industry and music technologists gather to hobnob, debate the future,…
