Barring a freak announcement from Neil Young or YouTube, Beats Music will be the first of the big three (at least) music services launching in 2014, all three having pushed back launches from 2013. Beats Music, led by a crew of music industry veterans (including Jimmy Iovine, Trent Reznor, Luke Wood, and Ian Rogers), will…
If you pay by the month for music, your kith and kin might call you crazy behind your back. Isn’t that stuff free? On the other hand, if you are a subscriber, you’ve probably realized that if you like music, you could do worse than to pay $10/month for 20 million songs. Accessing those same…
Spotify made two landmark announcements at a Manhattan press event on Wednesday. The first: a free version of its iOS and Android apps that lets anyone with those smartphones play any track on Spotify, via Spotify playlists. It differs from the free desktop version, in that the playlists always shuffle, so you can’t play any track…
It might seem crazy for YouTube to launch a music subscription somewhat along the lines of MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody, and Spotify, because you can already play just about any song in the world on YouTube, for free, in seconds — even music from The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and other artists who refuse to put their…
On-demand music subscription service Rdio has partnered with Cumulus Media, an AM/FM broadcaster with 525 radio stations around the country in a deal that could help both companies achieve key goals, the New York Times on Sunday — even though terrestrial broadcasters and online music services would appear to be natural enemies. Traditional radio companies are…
Netflix is amassing lots of new subscribers as television watchers “cut the cord,” and each generation of graduates faces the question of whether to tack on television channels as part of their monthly internet bill, or just stick with the internet and save the rest for ramen burgers. These are the same people who might…
We’ve been thinking for quite some time about this apparent podcast renaissance, because… why should it be? Aside from being saddled from the worst new word for content (other than “blog”), the podcast seemed destined to becoming one of those technology relics that, before too long, nobody seems to remember how to use, like the…
If you’re a die-hard listener to Songza’s situational playlists, created by its staff and users (and until recently, a third-party algorithm called Radioza), this could be of interest. Songza announced Club Songza on Friday, a music subscription that lets you hear the same music you would have heard anyway, with two changes: no advertising, and double…
Well, this isn’t going to change the world, but it sounds like a step in the right direction. DayTrotter, the original music subscription that creates scarcity in a digital world by making about a hundred new, unique music videos each month, recently announced a twist on the idea of subscribing to music (a big deal, with…
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…
A Bloomberg report that Google would launch a “Spotify killer” gained credence on Tuesday with Fortune’s report that YouTube — a division of Google — is in fact working on a subscription service, according to unnamed sources at Google and in the music industry. Notably, this latest report refers to YouTube as the one to launch…
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….
Most of us get our dose of new music on the interwebs, whether via streaming radio, blogs, blog aggregators, friends, feeds, label newsletters, or hybrids like Shuffler.fm, the online music blog curator that’s also recently joined the lineup of Spotify apps. This one’s different. The popular site The Turntable Kitchen, part personal blog, music blog, tech blog,…
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…
In what its publicist calls “ eMusic’s biggest strategic shift since 2005,” the longtime indie-oriented music subscription service is now also music download store. EMusic is the only major music subscription that offers MP3s that you can download and play in whatever software you want (even in apps like this, which can’t handle Spotify-style subscriptions). That’s not…
