In the early days of Web 1.0 beta (i.e. the ’90s), most of us who were paying attention thought music middlemen were on their way out. Technology on the near horizon allowed bands to sell tickets, merchandise, and recordings directly to fans, while promoting their music through early internet radio, where payola and corporate sway…
It’s a problem that exists all around the world: Radio stations can only play on song at a time, and those songs tend to be the ones that a person or algorithm has already decided is worthy of airplay. We all know there’s plenty of great new stuff sitting there, but it’s not always easy…
On Apple’s iOS smartphones and tablets, most people stick with the default music player — formerly called “iPod,” and now just “Music.” Google’s Android platform is a different story, with several developers competing to be the preferred music playback app for an increasingly large group of music fans, now that Android has gobbled up over…
With spring mostly sprung at our East Coast headquarters, it’s time to revive our weekly roundup series of the latest and greatest music apps. February and March were prolific months for music apps, and with SXSW, two Music Hack Days, and everything else going on, This Week In Music Apps was on pause. The good news:…
Now that nobody listens to the radio anymore, the Federal Communications Commission has finally decided to greenlight applications for low-power FM radio broadcasting permits. Onlookers (we like Nieman Labs’ report) agree that should lead to a flowering of weird and wacky local radio stations to deliver music and news to micro-communities across the country. We kid…
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…
AUSTIN, TEXAS — As the Music leg of SXSW approaches, we chatted with the nationally-syndicated American Public Media’s Marketplace about how artists are grappling with apps, and the revolutionary nature of music apps vs. previous forms of physical playback devices. You can tune in here: (photo courtesy of flickr/H. Michael Karshis)
AUSTIN, TEXAS — The great thing about being a music fan these days is the plethora of listening options. The worst thing might be considered closely related: keeping track of your “collection,” if we can even call it that anymore, considering its fractured nature as we switch between various classes of music service. MSpot might…
AUSTIN, TEXAS — This is the second part of our exclusive SXSW interview with Peter Blom, co-founder of the popular SpotON Radio app for iOS, which turns Spotify into an artist-based radio service. See the first part here. Eliot Van Buskirk, Evolver.fm: Do you think it hurts you that because Spotify’s mobile app lacks a free trial,…
Information overload might feel less onerous if we spread it around. Why should our eyes and fingers do so much of the work of inundating our brains with torrents of information? Our ears can chip in. Social Radio for Twitter, an iOS app temporarily available for free, reads your Twitter feed to you along with…
It’s always a pleasure to chat with host John Schaefer on WNYC Soundcheck, airing locally in New York and nationwide on NPR affiliate stations. Yesterday, joined by music technology writer Geeta Dayal, we discussed digital music collections as part of the show’s “Supercollectors” series. (As usual, I stuck around to hear the musical guest, which a…
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…
Music doesn’t happen in a vacuum — and not just in the physics sense. Music comes from “scenes.” Scenes arise in cities and other areas due to a unique confluence of people, timing, building blocks from previous scenes, economics, geography, demographics, real estate prices, and countless other X factors. The main job of eMusic staffers…
BlackPlanet Radio, a collaboration between Songza and a subsidiary of Radio One (not to be confused with the English radio station by the same name) called Interactive One, was designed to allow African Americans to create radio stations and share them with each other. The service includes 53 official stations from a catalog of 14.5 million songs and…
If you own a restaurant or any other venue where music plays, you generally need to pay BMI and ASCAP. If you want to remix a track legally, you need permission from the copyright holder. And if you want to put music in your independent film project, you need to negotiate a synchronization right for…
