A new open-source music streaming service called Napster.fm had to change its name to Peer.fm at the behest of Rhapsody, which owns the Napster brand, as reported by TechCrunch. However, the service has a bigger problem that will probably shut it down for real — or at least force it to re-source its entire music…
We’ve been following the progress of Earbits, because it’s such an outlier in the internet radio arena. Witness how it experimented with charging bands rather than listeners. Now, the company has a new idea: paying artists in data and promotion, through a new kind of currency based on fans taking certain actions rather than paying. It…
Spotify chief executive and co-founder Daniel Ek dropped a startling statistic at Los Angeles’ Innovation Forum event on Tuesday: that his freemium music service is on track to pay out $500 million to music copyright holders over the course of this year. That’s a big number — and it also happens to be equivalent to what…
We must admit: Budtobud is not our favorite-named app. Is it supposed to be a riff on “peer to peer?” We’re not sure. Regardless, what it does is neat. First, it turned your iTunes into a free group listening party for your friends. Then, the interface improved, although it still had too many windows and…
Keeping an unlimited AT&T data plan alive requires not only having been an early smartphone adopter, but also an obsessive attention to detail and the ability to resist the impulse to, say, tether your laptop to your smartphone’s data connection — even in a work emergency. If you do that even once, you lose your…
Emily White, a summer intern at NPR’s All Songs Considered, didn’t know what she was getting into when she wrote her now-infamous screed about how, despite being a hardcore music fan and college radio station manager with 11,000 songs on her computer, she has only ever paid for 15 CDs-worth of recorded music with actual…
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…
At first glance, This American Life and OK Go don’t have much in common. The former is a talk radio show known for its funny and touching stories about human connection, and the latter is a rock band known for its sugary hooks and music videos about dancing on treadmills. A closer look reveals a…
Grooveshark is getting it from all angles. Not only did its only major label deal (with EMI) collapse, but the company is now being sued by all four major labels for large-scale copyright infringement due to its policy of letting users upload music into its system, where over 30 million people stream it for free…
Doug Freeman (@dmfreeman) is a music critic for the Austin Chronicle and co-editor of The Austin Chronicle Music Anthology. He also works in PR and marketing for early stage technology startups at Jones-Dilworth. (See also Sean Adams’ own response to that interview.) Evolver.fm’s interview with Drowned in Sound’s Sean Adams earlier this week offered an interesting…
If you own an iPhone, iPad, or iPad Touch — and an AppleTV, AirPort Express or AirPlay-enabled system — you probably already know that you can play the music from any Apple AirPlay-enabled app (like Spotify or Pandora). All you need to do is tap the button within the app that looks like this: Suddenly,…
It’s true, what they say: Our digital lives are moving to the cloud. Whenever we fire up Facebook instead of a local email client, we’re taking part in the shift from locally-run software to the networked app world. However, some fairly major parts of those digital lives — our music, movies, and other activities —…
The following interview with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek originally appeared on GRAMMY.com. Ek will give the keynote address at the GRAMMY Foundation’s Entertainment Law Initiative Luncheon & Scholarship Presentation on Feb. 10 in Beverly Hills, Calif. For more information on the GRAMMY Foundation, visit www.grammyfoundation.org. The 54th Annual GRAMMY Awards airs live on Sunday, Feb….
When a digital music startup distributes massive amounts of unlicensed music and fails to pay for the music it has licensed, most of us know what happens next: They go out of business. Not so with Grooveshark. The popular P2P streaming site, which claims 30 million active users (over twice Spotify’s footprint) responded to lawsuits from…
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…
