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…
The Recording Academy, the people who put on the GRAMMY® Awards (and who sometimes get upset if you call them “Grammy Awards,” “The Grammies,” or even “GRAMMY Awards” without the “®”), want to give credit where credit is due. The organization’s “Give Fans the Credit” initiative promotes the noble goal of crediting all of the…
Every major automotive manufacturer has a strategy for integrating apps into cars. Music apps are among the most attractive, to the point that some experts believe in-dash AM/FM radios will be phased out entirely by 2015. On Wednesday, BMW announced the addition of four new BMW Apps, half of which are music-related: Rhapsody (music subscription),…
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…
Music subscriptions services are like gas stations on the same intersection: They all have the same price, give or take. MOG/Beats, Rhapsody, Rdio, Samsung Music Hub, Spotify, Microsoft XBox Music Pass — take your pick, but you’ll typically pay ten bucks a month, assuming you want the ability to play the music on anything other…
Rhapsody, which bills itself as “America’s #1 digital music subscriptions service (Spotify comes from Sweden), unveiled a neat app today that lets Android users identify songs as they play over speakers. Rhapsody SongMatch (free) lets premium Rhapsody subscribers add these songs to their collection instantly, so basically, you can collect music wherever you go, storing it…
It’s no simple matter to make music fans happy enough to pay $10 per month, even for unlimited access to most of the music in the world, while also paying royalties to record labels, music publishers, and artists. As another indication of just how tricky that balancing act really is, one of the leading services —…
Television has great potential as the next great music app platform. Today, it took another baby step in that direction, as Rhapsody announced that its $10/month subscribers will be able to extend their unlimited music subscriptions to so-called “smart TVs” made by LG, Panasonic, and Samsung. “Smart” typically means “WiFi-connected.” But as almost every appliance…
In the early days of the web, the technology space was flush with not only money, but a specific type of optimism: that this new medium would allow anybody to make whatever they wanted, and have the world see it (assuming it was any good). This was before Facebook, of course. If you wanted to…
A fascinating experiment began this month on NPR’s All Songs Considered blog. Bob Boilen, creator and host of the influential radio show by the same name, deleted all 25,000-or-so songs on his hard drive and shifted them into Apple iCloud using iTunes Match. So far, his experiment seems to be going well, although we don’t…
Forget, for the moment, about how much Spotify pays out to artists. Focus instead on the nature of those payouts. In the olden days (i.e. 20 years ago), recording artists had to convince you to fall for their music once — just long enough to buy a CD. Since the inception of pop music as a…
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…
AUSTIN, TEXAS — Spotify might get more of the press these days, but the veteran Rhapsody recently broke the one-million-subscribers mark, due in part to its acquisition of Napster and Facebook integration that lets people try Rhapsody without whipping out their credit card for a free trial. Unlike Spotify, tThe Rhapsody app lets people try…
CANNES, FRANCE — Spotify gets a lot of attention, especially since its U.S. launch last year, but Rhapsody chief Jon Irwin didn’t appear fazed about that when Evolver.fm sat down with him at the Midem conference for an update on his music subscription service. According to him, despite Spotify’s current lead (with 2.5 million paying…
On the heels of its purchase of Napster, Rhapsody announced on Thursday that it now has one million subscribers in the United States, which it says makes it the most popular premium (i.e. paid) unlimited music service in the country. Not all of these one million Rhapsody listeners pay for their music by entering a…
