Earlier this week, we covered a new “Twitter for music” service called Splash.fm. Beatonica, on the other hand, might be considered the flipside: “music for Twitter.” It creates a simple-to-use sample-based instrument out of your Twitter friends. Yes, Beatonica is gimmicky, but we’re not scared of that when it comes to free web apps. Besides, it…
There’s no shortage of social music discovery services billing themselves as “Twitter for music.” A Google search for that exact phrase turns up over 78,000 results, and with good reason. If your friends on Twitter (and Facebook and email) like something, you might like it too. That’s no guarantee, of course, as a simple glance…
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,…
Spotify recently rolled out a third batch of music apps that run within its desktop software, offering new ways to find stuff to listen to on your desktop, whether you pay for Spotify or not. This didn’t “just happen.” Rather, it’s part of a concerted effort on the part of Spotify to become, in the…
AUSTIN, TEXAS — We were delighted to receive word about The Monstro’s new SXSW chart, which “provides attendees with instant, up-to-date information about the artists and music events that are trending at any given moment, the schedule and venues of music acts, which can be sorted by genre.” At a festival like this, it often feels…
In 2007, it was Twitter. In 2009, it was Foursquare. In 2011, it was apparently group-messaging apps such as Group.me, and this year, it’s supposed to be Highlight, Glancee, or maybe Sonar. Each year at SXSW — especially at the Interactive part of the festival — every over-caffeinated kid genius with start-up dollars in her eyes…
Information overload might feel less onerous if we spread it around. Why should our eyes and fingers do so much of the work of inundating our brains with torrents of information? Our ears can chip in. Social Radio for Twitter, an iOS app temporarily available for free, reads your Twitter feed to you along with…
The worst thing about Twitter, according to Mike More of Headliner.fm, is that people — including famous recording artists — have to think of something to say. All on their own. “The white box is Twitter’s biggest problem,” he said at the Digital Music Forum East conference on Wednesday in Manhattan. Headliner.fm, which also matches…
Apple unveiled a developer preview of its upcoming “OS X Mountain Lion” on Thursday morning, the latest of the company’s operating systems to be confusingly named after a cat. As with previous releases, Mountain Lion will offer the Mac faithful and fresh converts a host of new features once it launches to the general public in late summer….
Did you know that over twenty-teen gajillion tweets appear on Twitter every day? Well, it’s something like that — the real number is about 250 million. Amidst all of that racket, legions of music fans are discussing the artists they’re listening to using the #nowplaying hashtag, clicking the Twitter button within music apps, or simply…
Say what you will about AOL, but it still reaches lots of people. Nearly 50 million of them visited aol.com last month, and approximately three million listen to AOL Radio. AOL Radio, which used to be powered by Last.fm and MP3.com owner CBS, relaunched on Wednesday with Slacker Radio underneath the hood. The new AOL Radio is…
First, some perspective: Even after yesterday’s big Facebook F8 hullabaloo, people will still listen to and discover music without Facebook, as hard as that might be to believe right now, given all the attention paid to the social network’s shift into media sharing, which suddenly made Twitter look like the stripped-down communications protocol it has…
Clearly, there’s no lack of start-ups these days trying to help us merge online and offline identities. At times, the TechCrunch Disrupt conference we checked out earlier this week seemed to be about little else. But the Sonar Mobile Profile for Local Social Networking iOS app appears to offer something special for music fans — and,…
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,…
Thanks to the DJ Jazzy Jeff and a free web app, we’re wondering why Darnell Jenkins is so important. How did we get here? First, Jazzy Jeff Townes made a whimsical video about his road manager Jenkins being the most important man in the world, and then he tweeted it. I follow Jazzy Jeff on Twitter, so the video was…
