At its San Francisco headquarters, Rdio recently held its first-ever hack day — a marathon event where coders build stuff that works, fast. Most hack days, including the one our editor just attended in Sydney, are open to the public and consist of programming wizards getting together over a 24-hour period and building a slew…
If you’ve already heard of the social cross-service music app for the desktop, Tomahawk, you already know how cool it is. Freelance developer Syd Lawrence, the same man who brought us the frivolous This Was My Jam, donned his thinking cap to build Toma.hk, a simple-to-use web app that lets anyone embed music on blogs or link…
The Byrds and the Bee Gees web app attracted a fair amount of attention at Rethink Music Hack Day for the way it generated a Spotify playlist based on what your parents were likely listening to when you were conceived, with an extra option that asks you to specify “whether your dad was smooth back then.” Springing…
We’ll stop writing about all the neat stuff to emerge from Music Hack Day Sydney at some point, but I’m not done with this thing yet, even as my jetlag is finally waning. Although this latest iteration of the Music Hack Day series produced only just north of 20 functional apps, they were all humdingers….
Application Programming Interface, thy name be “awesome!” Excuse the geek-out, if you’re not up on your API ABC’s, but how else are we to react to the fact that Facebook just added a Listen button to its artist pages that lets you play songs from that artist just about instantly, by hooking in to each…
Say you’re a big fan of Sleigh Bells (the band, not the wintertime equine accessory). Wouldn’t you want to listen to whatever Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss rocked on their iPods last week? We already have the technology to make that happen, in what could be the biggest Untapped App of them all: artist radio apps that…
Spotify has received plenty of attention for its app platform, and rightfully so. Rdio also has an app platform, offering access to the same songs, more or less. Evolver.fm caught up with Rdio vice president of engineering Todd Berman to discuss the one-year anniversary of Rdio’s developer API; the service’s approach to third-party apps; and his belief…
Spotify continued its quest to become the operating system of music on the internet with today’s launch of an embeddable music player that puts legal tunes on websites and blogs, for free, while compensating copyright holders. Wherever these buttons are used — and there’s a long list of launch partners below — people with Spotify…
MP3 bloggers were the revolutionaries of music criticism, taking on established outlets like Rolling Stone and Spin by being faster, cooler, and more musical — in that they could embed what they were talking about. Readers could hear it for themselves as they read the blog, rather than looking for it on Napster or waiting…
AUSTIN, TEXAS — Rdio, the music subscription service from Skype and Kazaa co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, announced major changes to its music subscription service designed to “put music and people front and center,” in an effort to evolve past what it calls the “boring” “spreadsheet” approach of some other music services. The company…
Okay, crowdsourced party music is officially a trend on the app scene, if not at many actual parties… yet. Anthm is the latest one we’ve seen that lets partygoers decide what to play next, as a group. Like a hyper-local Jelli Radio, a democratized, real-world version of Turntable.fm, or maybe a more precise version of…
Music services sometimes issue press releases when their catalogs break certain thresholds — 10 million tracks, 12 million tracks, and so on. But they never mention it when a certain artist, album, or song disappears from their catalogs, which happens as licensing contracts end, or when musicians reconsider the wisdom of licensing their music to…
Tired of listening to music on your lonesome? Facebook might have the answer. About a month ago, the social network built some “connective tissue” between music fans and the services they use to listen. At its most basic level, Facebook now lets you A) let your friends know what you’re listening to on supported music services, and…
The Rdio music subscription service, from the co-creators of Skype, made its name by letting users follow each other the way they would on Twitter or Facebook. As such, it may have seen some of its thunder stolen by Facebook’s big music initiative, which gives similar social features to 12 music services and counting —…
When MTV’s second O Music Awards air later this month, we’ll receive an answer to a question pondered over many sleepless nights. No, it’s not about the future of the iPod or Facebook music, and it’s got nothing to do with Wub Machines and reality remixers. The question: Who is the web’s Hottest Music NYLF (Nerd You’d Like to…
