It might seem obvious that standalone music apps would find their way into car dashboards, but it’s actually not. When Pandora founder Tim Westergren drove me around Las Vegas listening to the first instance of Pandora in the car three years ago, he saw it breaking the other way, towards the phone. His reasoning: People…
Evolver.fm editor Eliot Van Buskirk recently headed over to Google’s New York headquarters to interview Alex Winter, director of the film Downloaded, which chronicles the rise, fall, and after effects of the Napster P2P file sharing client, one of the most historically influential pieces of software ever written. If you recognize Winter, it could be…
A new open-source music streaming service called Napster.fm had to change its name to Peer.fm at the behest of Rhapsody, which owns the Napster brand, as reported by TechCrunch. However, the service has a bigger problem that will probably shut it down for real — or at least force it to re-source its entire music…
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…
Why is music too free to be expensive and too expensive to be free? Napster isn’t entirely responsible, but it sure was a lot easier for the average music fan than Usenet. Yesterday, Metallica’s Lars Ulrich hugged Napster co-founder Sean Parker at a Spotify media event in New York. Over a decade ago, the two had…
Metallica’s Lars Ulrich hugged Napster co-founder (and Spotify investor) Sean Parker on a stage today in New York — twice. No pigs were spotted flying nearby. I missed that shot because I am not a photographer, but here’s Lars hugging Spotify CEO Daniel Ek: Ulrich announced that as of today, Metallica’s entire back catalog will…
We normally shy away from celebrity gossip, but this one’s just too juicy to pass up. According to the New York Post, which never shies away from stories like this, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker (Plaxo creator, Napster employee, and investor in Spotify and Facebook) parted ways angrily after a drunken spat outside…
Facebook’s big push into digital music could be a boon to music services, artists, and the fans, because it can provide the “connective tissue” that has been sorely missing from the industry for well over 10 years. Microsoft’s Zune promised us “The Social,” but nobody bought the hardware and now it’s gone. With Facebook music,…
Music subscription services have generated more interest than ever this year, as Spotify launched in the U.S., Facebook offered all of them a life-line in the form of deep feed integration, and the proliferation connected devices like smartphones made them more attractive than they were when you could only use Microsoft-DRM-enabled hardware to play the…
First, some perspective: Even after yesterday’s big Facebook F8 hullabaloo, people will still listen to and discover music without Facebook, as hard as that might be to believe right now, given all the attention paid to the social network’s shift into media sharing, which suddenly made Twitter look like the stripped-down communications protocol it has…
As details emerge about Facebook’s plan to integrate with music services to let friends share their listening experience, one thing is abundantly clear: Music fans and the music industry desperately need this — or something like it — to happen. Here’s the core of the problem. When music fans use an online music service, whether…
It’s hard to imagine now, but there once existed a time when digital music libraries were filled with accurate information that came directly from the information provided on each compact disc you loaded onto your computer. Then Napster came along, and everybody got fooled into thinking that Phish had scripted that cover of Snoop Dogg’s “Gin…
Compared to things like bicycles or shoes, music subscription services are remarkably undifferentiated. They all have more or less the same selection of music, and it’s generally available for the same monthly prices: $5 for listening on a computer, and another $5 to add mobile device(s). But in practice, several factors and details offer music…
The site that started it all, and either destroyed or revolutionized (or both) the music industry, Napster has been through several iterations since it rocked the web in 1999. Currently it’s a perfectly legal subscription streaming site, owned by Best Buy. Napster boasts a library of 12 million tracks, and offers a range of plans. Web access runs…
Industry insiders and digital music fans alike have been abuzz ever since Apple boldly announced that it would claim 30 percent of revenue on an ongoing basis from apps that sell subscriptions to content within the iTunes — everything from magazines and newspapers, to, apparently, digital music, movies, and other forms of content. Unless Apple…
