Evolver.fm editor Eliot Van Buskirk recently headed over to Google’s New York headquarters to interview Alex Winter, director of the film Downloaded, which chronicles the rise, fall, and after effects of the Napster P2P file sharing client, one of the most historically influential pieces of software ever written. If you recognize Winter, it could be…
If you loved the television show Reading Rainbow, which aired from 1983 to 2006, and has since turned into an app — or you have a kid who loves it because you enjoy getting them into your old stuff — then this will be of interest. You’ll also be intrigued if you’re a fan of…
If you think of the guitar as a relic of the past, fit only for aging bar blues bands and camping hippies, think again. Observe, as Incident Tech’s gTar, the guitar that has an iPhone for a brain, allows this man to record a song in multiple parts — including a drum machine and multiple…
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…
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…
