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…
Spotify and Shazam released Grammy predictions before the big awards show last night, based on their music service and music ID apps, respectively. People use Spotify to listen to music, and Shazam to identify songs that are playing, or to show off to their friends that they are hearing that song, according to what Shazam…
(This is a guest post from Brenna Ehlrich of MTV O Awards. People are subscribing to actual music objects through a brand-new startup called Merch Box and receiving stuff like this by mail. Brenna investigates. ) As Nemo came barreling through Brooklyn this past weekend, I hunkered down in my living room, ready to partake in one…
Can you imagine if subscription music services had to sell their own hardware? Thankfully, for many reasons, they do not. In order to deliver a new music player for their millions-of-songs-strong catalogs, services like Rdio can simply release new apps to iTunes and Android (and the others, when it has time). Having been poring over the…
There’s a good reason no company has released a music subscription service that delivers the choicest cuts to DJs, even though most of them use laptops for some or all of the music they play in dance clubs around the world. The problem: DJ software is very specialized, with advanced features you won’t find in…
When we first caught a glimpse of the unlimited, on-demand music service Rara last December, we pointed out that it faced huge obstacles in making an impression on music fans, given that these services have pretty much the same catalogs, and even entries that people have heard of, such as MOG, have struggled to convert…
Microsoft just officially unveiled its new music service, Xbox Music, which it hopes will compete with iTunes, Spotify, and everything else like them. Rolling out on October 26, the new Microsoft Xbox Music service is divided into three parts, explained Xbox Music general manager Jerry Johnson and director of industry relations Christina Calio to Evolver.fm during a…
There’s been a lot of talk lately about whether unlimited music services devalue music by underpaying the people who make the songs that makes them worthwhile in the first place. Rdio has a novel solution, which admittedly won’t save the music industry, but which does offer artists a new way to make money: by turning…
We Americans had to wait years for Spotify to hit these shores. Now, the Swedish music service is taking a right turn towards our northern neighbors. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the world’s most popular on-demand music subscription will launch in Canada, as revealed by an April 23 management report filed by Spotify’s holding…
