It’s tax day once again — that joyful, once-a-year occasion when liberal types like the author are asked quite literally to put our money where our mouths are, as folks on the other side of the aisle get to sit around telling us they told us so. We kid. We can still be friends, right? This…
What an original idea: A bunch of rooms where cute little avatars can DJ music to each other! That’s what we said last May, before breaking the news (we think) about Turntable.fm, after surprising its cofounder Billy Chasen with a call to his cellphone. If you’ve tried the social DJ web or iOS app Turntable.fm,…
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…
Mötley Crüe’s upcoming Las Vegas extravaganza will feature the pyrotechnics and dancing girls one might expect (video below), as well as a rather unusual feature available to fans with iOS or Android smartphones tucked into their ripped jeans: the ability to choose what music plays during the last two shows of the Crüe’s residency at the…
At a MidemLab lunch a couple of weeks ago in France, I sat next to Adam Perry, drummer for The Bloodhound Gang and the man behind BandApp, which promises to help any band create iOS applications to promote and sell their music, keeping a higher percentage of revenue than they would through iTunes. Naturally, I…
At one San Francisco store, shoppers decide what music plays using mobile apps for iPhone or Android — or simply by checking in to the store and allowing their musical preferences to color the soundtrack. Roqbot, whose ingenious method for crowdsourced music selection in venues (bars, clubs, bowling alleys, etc.) we first profiled at SXSW,…
Did you miss the live webcast announcement of Google Music? Forget about the live blogs — they never read properly after the fact. Here’s our quick checklist of what Google announced today, so you can decide whether Google Music is worth a try (you might also check Google’s official blog post). Google Music is only…
Bands and labels that stream music from their Facebook pages, the way they do with Myspace, are in for a big surprise: Facebook is phasing out its native Music Player app, which allowed them to post songs and discographies on the social network. Instead, Facebook recommends that they post videos instead, rely on third-party apps,…
Facebook’s recently-launched music features are not perfect, but in the past month-plus, the social network has already boosted usage of Facebook-connected unlimited music services significantly — and none so much as MOG. The data in the above charts comes from AppData, which doesn’t track Rhapsody as a Facebook music app, but it shows MOG growing…
Some longtime Spotify users are hopping mad about the service’s new requirement that all Spotify users must now log in via Facebook in order to listen, even if they want no part of Facebook’s new media-sharing functionality. A message board on GetSatisfaction about the policy change has attracted hundreds of responses, and now, a link…
Traditional music publications printed on shiny, real paper… staples in the middle… maybe you’ve seen one? They’re on the decline for a number of reasons, the most obvious being the cost of distributing print over its more nimble digital counterpart (like this publication, as one obvious example.) The other, more overlooked reason is ”targetability,” to borrow a…
We’ve learned of another music twist for Facebook’s F8 announcement on Thursday: Myxer Social Radio, from the six-year-old MP3, wallpaper, and ringtone company Myxer. It plans to join the social, smartphone world with a real-time group listening streaming radio service that will let friends listen together via Facebook — not only that, but it will…
It might be longer in the tooth than any of the other “big five” music subscription services, but Rhapsody, with its 800,000 claimed subscribers, is still going strong. Now, it’s doing something it probably should have done a long time ago: integrating more closely with Facebook and Twitter, the way most other things do now,…
Spotify is now open for iOS developers to build whatever they want on top of millions of songs through a newly-released API. What does that mean to you? Well, if you have Spotify Premium account, you can access all of that on-demand music within any iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad app that uses Spotify’s API,…
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…
