Most of the loyal users of Starmaker Karaoke for iOS are 11-16-year-old girls, college girls, and “young mothers” who have made it the top karaoke app in the iTunes app store, although they’re not karaoke enthusiasts, per se. Instead, according to Starmaker product manager Reed Kavner, they love pop music from the radio and want to sing…
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,…
Madonna’s half-time show at the Super Bowl drew mixed reviews, but one thing everyone seems to agree on is that M.I.A. managed to sneak an obscene gesture into Sunday’s broadcast, which drew a record-setting 111.3 million viewers. M.I.A.’s attention-grabbing moment appears to have had the desired effect, at least where music blogs are concerned. According…
Have you ever wondered what goes on at a Music Hack Day? We’ve covered plenty of them — including some of the stunning variety of music apps created at these events — but this video from Eric Steinhardt of The Echo Nest will give you an idea of what they’re all about far more quickly: Disclosure:…
Google’s generous policy towards its YouTube API (application programming interface) lets app developers build all kinds of neat music apps out of the music videos found there. Most recently, we came across Cull TV at a recent NYC MusicTechnology meetup. It’s something like the 50th app we’ve seen to date that applies a filter to YouTube…
We’re working on another music app story right now, and it’s going to be good, but for now, we just can’t resist sharing this video of kid trying to operate a magazine as if it were an iPad. If you doubt that technology is changing our minds’ operating systems, this might convince you otherwise: (via…
Ten years ago this month, in a small-ish theater at Apple Computer headquarters at One Infinite Loop, I saw Steve Jobs unveil the iPod. On November 2, 2001, I wrote, “The iPod is revolutionary in a number of ways, and its descendants will replace the PC.” I think I was right, as we’re starting to see now with…
Let this be a lesson to the technology press, present company included. Just because Apple usually declines to comment when we approach them, it’s still worth checking with the company to verify the speculation of others. Yesterday, we and many others took Insanely Great Mac’s video depiction of iCloud music “streaming” at face value. However, contrary…
If you’ve been looking for a virtual drum set that lets you tap whatever objects are at hand to play a four-drum kit on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, well, that’s a pretty amazing coincidence. TableDrum is on sale right now for $1 in iTunes — a 75 percent savings off of the usual…
Music publishers — including songwriters and companies that buy their publishing rights — reached a resolution with Google’s YouTube site on Wednesday, and will begin receiving royalties under a new licensing scheme. This deal between YouTube and the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) ends litigation that began in 2007, and means that the music will…
Evolver.fm editor Eliot Van Buskirk appeared on Fox News Live on Monday to discuss whether music apps are the future of music. You can check it out here: Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com I’d like to make one correction: Turntable.fm’s investment reportedly valued the company at about $40 million, which I stated was the…
The following video only had 31 views when we found it, but it appears to show some of the creators of Turntable.fm adding an (unimplemented) feature that rewards users with an insanely high number of DJ points with the ability to place a still image, or possibly video, of their actual face within the service….
We sat down with eight luminaries from various parts of the digital music and affiliated industries to find out what apps they’re using — or which apps they’ve made — backstage at the FlashFwd Awards in New York City on June 8. With apologies to the master of this format, we present the individual interviews:
Watchitoo makes a video app that fosters communication between the subjects and viewers of live videos, with interesting implications for live online music. At the FlashFWD Awards in New York, we sat down with Watchitoo strategic events manager Hila Raz to learn a little more about how it works:
At New York’s FlashFwd Awards, we caught up with David Chaitt, editor of the SoundCtrl blog, to discuss a synthesizer that makes music by reading minds in the following short interview: And here’s a demonstration of Teletron, the mind-controlled synthesizer:
