As the editor of this thing called Evolver.fm, it gave me great pleasure to appear alongside Ben Sisario of the New York Times and Andy Malt of CMU on the episode 129 of Digital Music Trends. Topics covered: Twitter #Music Grooveshark’s legal woes RoyaltyExchange’s system for letting musicians sell parts of copyrights to regular investors China’s…
Netflix has begun to unravel the Gordian knot of Internet distribution and Hollywood content, following a magic realization: In order to negotiate with the folks who own all of the television shows and films, it probably helps to have some desirable video content of its own. After all, you can’t bargain without chips, and if you already own…
SXSW is almost over — well, it technically ends on Sunday, but that’s pretty much only good for catching your flight back home or, if you’re brave enough to soldier on another day, sticking around to play softball and eat barbecue with legions of SXSW volunteers. Or maybe you didn’t go this year, like us, due…
Twitter did it in 2007. FourSquare did it in 2009. Highlight sort of did it at last year’s SXSW. So, will any app break away from the pack at SXSW 2013 to become the “it” app of SXSW 2013 — the one that takes first the festival’s ultra-wired attendees, and later the world, by storm?…
We’ve seen apps that let you “play” guitar — probably too many of them, frankly. We’ve also seen fretboards that light up, ostensibly to help you learn the instrument. On top of that, we’ve seen tutorials of all shapes and sizes from apps to videos, as guitar teachers take to the internet, the better to…
Marketers tend to view Facebook Likes as a window into, if not the very soul of a person, then at least their musical interests. However, we’ve caught wind of a trend that complicates Liking. The short story: If an artist starts to gain traction (i.e. other people think they are cool), some people will Like…
Music apps are such a thing that people are making movies about the people who make them. Granted, this film is only about three minutes long, and it’s a fairly one-sided, glowing tribute, but still — it’s neat to learn more about the man partially behind one of the most successful music app developers of…
Guitar virtuoso Ron Jarzombek shreds way hard on his new song, “Beyond Life and Cosmic Kinetics, which is great, but that’s not what attracted our attention. Jarzombek tapped iOS developer Oleg Kolokolov to turn his song into an advanced, well-designed song app that lets the listener adjust the levels — or mute entirely — each of the tracks,…
Forget 3-D, which hasn’t made people buy new televisions in quite the way the consumer electronics industry had anticipated. Wirewax is taking a different approach to immersive video with “taggable” videos that let viewers click to learn about or purchase items depicted. Recording artists are doing whatever they can to attract an audience and promote their albums,…
This week, we’ve seen swings that play music on the streets of Montreal and a dress called the Ruffletron, a futuristic musical instrument that makes beautiful music when touched — and that’s not even counting the squid that was a music visualizer app. Is everything turning into apps? Now comes news from Argonne National Laboratory (via NBC)…
The idea of an automatically-generated slideshow that synchronizes each photo to the beat of a song sounds like the provenance of Music Hack Days. But no, this music app stuff is going mainstream. MyMusaic is no mere music hack, but rather a start-up out of Los Angeles that any photos from your hard drive or…
YouTube has an API — that is to say, an application programming interface. Those let people build stuff on top of big databases, such as YouTube. Many people have done this, which is why we are loathe to point out yet another tiny barnacle on the YouTube behemoth, which we’re going to do anyway, below. For…
The following is a small departure from our regular music app coverage that we cannot resist reposting, because it contains valuable, easy to understand information about how to shoot a music (or any other) video that doesn’t suck. The ubiquity of video cameras is great. It would be even better if the skills to shoot…
Remember Paint — as in Microsoft Paint, the ultra-basic graphics program that has shipped with every Windows operating system since 1985? As it turns out, people are still using this program, the “Comic Sans“ of graphic design, in one case to make what we’re pretty sure is the most bare-bones music visualization app ever. Even weirder, it apparently…
It’s no secret that DJs trigger samples made by other people. So why keep it a secret by only playing audio? Video DJs bring a new level of transparency to the DJ craft by including video in the mix, usually depicting the source of the audio sample (although really, they can attach any video to…
