Once a year, the South By Southwest music, tech, and film festival draws huge crowds of people from all over the world, sometimes contributing as much as a third of all of Austin’s revenue for the entire year. Last year (the most recent for which numbers are available), SXSW drew 155,000 people who “injected more…
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry released its annual global recorded music revenue report this week. Unlike the previous report, this one saw a decline in overall recorded music revenue by 3.9 percent, to $15 billion — mostly due to shrinking revenues in Japan that we totally saw coming. Over a billion of that…
Now that the dust has settled from SXSW, we’re poring over the best stuff from the trade show, points made at panels, and what we saw at the first ever SXSW Music Hackathon Championship. Expect more coverage there soon, but for now, what concerns us is the Auto-Canonizer, from the hackathon. One of the most intriguing…
Neil Young has been recording his music in the high-resolution music format that the PonoMusic store will sell for quite some time, according to what he told SXSW attendees last night. Many other artists and labels, however, have not been doing this, which will render Pono’s catalog of high-resolution music fairly anemic relative to other…
SXSW is a massive, massive event, but the SXSW Interactive trade show is quite manageable, especially compared to CES. As such, we were able to scour the show floor for every single digital music app, service, and device on display. Here it is — all the music stuff from the SXSW Interactive show floor, in…
You have many options when it comes to apps that want to help you find live music to see, wherever you happen to find yourself. While it’s not the most comprehensive one we’ve seen, Music Punk has a big difference: It should you video of the bands playing live, so you can determine whether they…
Playing music is fun — learning music theory, decidedly less so. To help people learn music theory concepts in a fun, pleasing way, Meludia offers a beautifully-designed series of little gamified classes, beginning with the ability to determine whether a melodic sequence is rising or falling, before proceeding to more complex stuff. “I’ll start with…
Researchers say music can make you exercise harder. And, as the New York Times reported last fall, if you can create or affect music with your exercising, the exercising feels easier. The author of that piece suggests that this could mean “the human love of music might have evolved, in part, to ease physical pain.”…
Typically, when bloggers write about a band, they’ll include a link to their music via SoundCloud or YouTube. According to the makers of Rockstar Cash, when they do, they’re missing out on an opportunity to make a bit of extra money. “It’s a platform where musicians and bloggers can monetize free music or writing a…
As every hardcore Star Trek fan knows, Spock played a freaky-looking instrument called the Vulcan Harp in four episodes of the classic television show, most notoriously in “The Way to Eden.” Now, they can play it. Star Trek Vulcan Harp ($2, iPad) was completed last summer, and by December, the app was ready for release, having…
We eagerly await the moment when some enterprising hardware company builds service-agnostic buttons that you can stick on your wall, to like, heart, and ban your music without navigating through a bunch of smartphone screens or walking over to a computer like some sort of premillennial caveperson. That day has yet to come, but it’s…
One of the most popular locations in any airport, or indeed here at SXSW itself, is the device-charging kiosk. People will contort themselves into uncomfortable positions and cozy up to complete strangers if it means a few more minutes of power for their precious, essential devices. Unlike what one might call “dumb” power kiosks, the…
Neil Young plans to release his $400 PonoPlayer portable audio player and the proprietary music download store that goes with it at SXSW, via a Kickstarter campaign set to begin on March 15, according to a press release making the rounds. The device will play PonoMusic files, with audio elements designed by Ayre Acoustics, after…
The hottest hackathon at SXSW 2014 will undoubtedly be the SXSW Music Hackathon Championship on March 12, because the hacker who will be there to build functional digital music technologies from a suite of APIs and their own ingenuity consist of the cream of the music-hacking crop, with $13,500 in cash prizes at stake. On the…
AUSTIN, TEXAS — The cars of today, and especially tomorrow, generate rivers of data that will change everything from how meteorologists understand the weather, to how towns identify their most egregious potholes, to — our favorite — how people will listen to music in the car. Over half of all music listening takes place in…
