Before a piece of music is everywhere, it is nowhere. At one magical point in between, new music appears on the internet for the very first time, in a certain, specific place. This moment has always been rife with significance, and now, everyone from Apple iTunes to the New York Times to NPR is looking…
Late last year, Spotify told a roomful of us about some great-sounding new features that would make it easier for people to do all three things they need to do with music: discovery, audition, and collection. Today, Spotify rolled out its web player app with new features, some of them seemingly designed to compete with Rdio…
I set out this morning to build a chart listing the various features of the major music subscription services: Rdio, Rhapsody, Spotify, and we assume the recently-launched Google Play Music All Access, although it remains to be seen whether it will succeed on the level of those standalone music services — or whether it will…
First we collected music objects, then we hoarded MP3s to the point that many of our computers’ music collections became so huge and labyrinthine as to become almost useless. Now that most active music fans play music from the cloud as much or more than we access our local libraries (remember iTunes?), we music fans…
Apparently, it is possible to cobble together some APIs over the weekend to make an iOS app that takes a picture of an object, then plays a song about that object. That is precisely what Martino Bonfiglioli and Christian Zanin (both of musiXMatch) did at Music Hack Day Paris this past weekend. Their creation, Camera…
Spotify recently rolled out some of the new features it teased in New York last December with a new way to “follow” people — not in the religious or stalker senses, but in the Twitter sense of seeing what they’re up to. Spotify being a music service, that means seeing what the famous people you like and…
Venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson, whose firm invests in Turntable.fm, SoundCloud, Twitter, and other companies, weighed in on an issue we’ve written about several times: true music portability. By that, I mean the ability of music fans to take their music from one service to another, instead of being locked into Spotify, Pandora, or any…
Take a trip down to the follicles on the tip of the end of the long tail of music, and join us as we work our way through the obscure, bizarre music on the Tumblr, Rdio Obscuritites (also on Twitter). Much of these albums are horrible from a musical or taste perspective, but a great deal of…
I am all for unplugging from the internet and technology, from time to time. As I sat on a porch watching at the ocean a couple of summers ago, I reached for my phone to rewind the scene to show someone a ship that had passed. When something like that happens, it’s time to unplug….
SoundTracking, Apple’s favorite music app of 2011, celebrates the moments of your life with music on iOS, and last fall, became a Spotify app. Its vision expands again with Tuesday’s integration of full-length tracks that play within the app, from Rdio, Spotify, or YouTube. You can add these features in the latest update. The company…
Armed with little more than a web browser, you can listen to just about any song in the world, for free, one way or the other. A problem exists with using a browser as your music interface — and it’s a big one. If, like the author, you often have dozens of tabs open in…
According to the latest numbers from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), global music revenue rose 0.3 percent to $16.5 billion in 2013, reversing 12 straight years of declines (.pdf). Apparently, where music is concerned, 13 is a lucky number. “At the beginning of the digital revolution it was common to say that…
The proliferation of social and music services are good for music fans, overall. But do we really need to see every song our friends play? I think we all know the answer: There is such a thing as too much information, at least where humans are concerned. (Machines are different.) It usually makes more sense…
Many of us first experienced voice recognition as horrible customer service: You inevitably find yourself screaming “representative,” “operator,” or, most desperately and least effectively, “HUMAN!” while your coworkers laugh at your plight. I expected the worst from Apple’s Siri, only to be pleasantly surprised the first time I encountered it, when my friend’s iPhone sent me…
When you’re in charge of a publication, sometimes you look at server logs to see what people are reading. We try not to obsess too much about it, because it encourages repetition of the same formulaic story ideas over original articles with a mind to the future. Still, we can’t help but notice that lots…
