Apple is expected to announce its new iRadio music streaming service at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference later today, according to multiple sources, and has already inked special deals with all three major labels as well as Sony/ATV, which is Sony’s publishing arm. Sony/ATV CEO Marty Bandier says Sony/ATV will get 10 percent of the ad revenue…
The U.S. Department of Transportation hasn’t yet made up its mind about whether entirely-self-driving cars will be allowed on the nation’s roadways, although it has told states they can allow them to be tested and also said that semi-autonomous features, like staying in a lane or slowing down to avoid a collision, could be a…
Hot on the heels of our Q-and-A with Google’s music group product manager Paul Joyce comes this Spin Magazine interview with Google head of content programming for Android and all around good guy, Tim Quirk. In the interview, Quirk reveals an interesting point about the difference between how people look for music and how they…
Marissa Meyer has pledged not to screw up Tumblr and to leave it more-or-less autonomous, as part of Yahoo’s bold $1.1 billion acquisition of the company. Her pledge should mean that all the #music on Tumblr will be okay (unlike the porn), which is a good thing for music fans among the 4.8 million people who access…
We’ve been writing a lot about Google’s new music subscription service this week, because of course we would. Google is a force to be reckoned with — and now, that force is reckoning with the likes of Spotify, Rdio, and Rhapsody in a bid for your $10 per month, in return for unlimited access to…
The Windows version is here. Sometimes, you love a song and it’s not on the web. That’s just not right, because the three or so generations alive today are largely responsible for making sure that all the important and interesting stuff (and not just important cat videos) make it onto the internet. This is because…
The nicely-designed Twitter #Music app for iOS made a big splash when it was released a couple of weeks ago, quickly becoming the most popular music app in iTunes. Then, inevitably, once people who were interested had installed it, that ranking fell, leading, also inevitably, to a round of denunciation this week about how it was…
Before we get to the new version, let’s get right to the latest numbers for Songza’s activity-based music apps, which offer playlists for various activities, weekdays, moods, and times of day, because they are big: over six million iOS installations; over 560M (corrected) songs in the last 30 days; almost 4.7 million monthly active users;…
Microsoft’s Kinect proved that real people are actually interested in moving their bodies to motion-control stuff on a screen. Leap Motion, whose $70 motion detector is decoupled from a gaming console, could end up having a wider impact. It’s not just for gamers, and desktop and laptop manufacturers are reportedly looking at integrating Leap into…
Five days after it was released, Twitter #Music is the most popular free music app in Apple’s iTunes app store. It’s now the sixth-most-popular free app overall, beating out Spotify at number 19: Twitter #Music’s main feature is a popularity chart, so it’s fitting that the app itself is also charting well, so far anyway….
Twitter is a data goldmine, one reason its awesomely-designed new music app has a fighting chance even though it doesn’t see the whole internet. Part of that is how efficient its hashtags and other infrastructure elements slice through what everyone is doing so neatly. The same rich data that makes Twitter so powerful for us (allowing…
Twitter is all over the music tech news today, but Facebook just quietly rolled out another social music feature too: the ability to specify what you are listening to — you know, the same way the new Twitter #music app lets you say what’s #NowPlaying. When you post a status update on Facebook, a new…
The latest research from NPD Group shows that Apple’s iTunes still dominates the digital music sales market, although Amazon is gaining. Apple’s iTunes store sold 63 percent of the digital music purchased by consumers in the fourth quarter of last year, followed by Amazon MP3 with 22 percent. That leaves just 15 percent for every…
We like 8Tracks (web, iOS, Android) for mixtape sharing, because it makes it easy, and pretty. You simply upload songs from your computer (or choose them from SoundCloud or Free Music Archive), then share them anywhere, even on a webpage: The original idea for 8Tracks, according to founder and CEO David Porter, was to build…
A McGill University study found that activity in the brain’s nucleus accumbens reflects one’s willingness to buy music after hearing it for the first time. It’s hardly surprising that a part of the brain also known as the “reward center” would be responsible for deciding whether to buy (or like/favorite/collect) a particular piece of music,…
