Disruptive discount provider Groupon and live events company Live Nation have teamed up to launch GrouponLive, a new site for ticketing deals. Live Nation Entertainment, formed by the combination of concert promoter Live Nation and ticket seller Ticketmaster, currently promotes over 20,000 shows per year. But with the economy's downturn, selling out a show is hard these days. The new venture, GrouponLive, will address that problem, not only by discounting seats, but also through the power of the Groupon brand, which brings the news of concerts and other events to Groupon's worldwide user base of millions. Many of these users represent new business for Live Nation, as they may not have heard of the events being promoted beforehand or they decide to buy a ticket at the last minute, but only due to a deal.
I don't know about you, but when I hear the word "Lollapalooza," I think about beer, grunge rock and application programming interfaces. Wait, what?
Okay, so maybe an API isn't exactly what comes to mind, but this year, the rock festival that once helped propel bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam is looking to launch something else entirely: an open API chock-full of real-time scheduling data, stage geolocation and more.
The Lost Sounds Orchestra is a music ensemble that exists to play only music that has been long lost from the collective memory of our cultures. It seems like a contradiction in terms. But the LSO is an outgrowth of the ASTRA Project, a group which has developed a computer modelling system that allows researchers to generate the sounds that ancient instruments made. So if an archaeologist finds a battered ancient instrument, ASTRA can figure out how it sounded and Lost Sounds can make it sing again.
We spoke with Domenico Vicinanza about the confluence of Web-based computing, archaeology and modern performance. Vicinanza is the ASTRA Project Coordinator and the Lost Sounds Orchestra Technical Coordinator. He also works as a Project Support Officer at DANTE, the organization building and operating GEANT, the pan-European research and education network backbone. Within ASTRA and LSO, Vicinanza leads the team of researchers reconstructing ancient instruments and acts as liaison with archaeologists, musicians and engineers.
The more features and improvements that European streaming music service Spotify makes, the more we here in North America cannot wait until it finally jumps across the pond. Today the company announced that its users will be able to integrate and download playlists onto assorted iPod, iPhone and Android devices from any of Spotify's subscription services.
In addition, Spotify has introduced a new music downloading service with song bundles that make it competitively priced with the iTunes model. Spotify's mobile application, previously only available to paying members, will also be available to Spotify Free users, which account for 90% of the service's 10 million users. Why do you care? Because Spotify is coming to the United States and soon you will have very strong music alternative to bypass the walled garden of iTunes.
Music recommendation service Pandora marked today what it calls perhaps its proudest milestone in 6 years since launching: 10 billion user interactions indicating approval or disapproval of a particular song. Those thumbs up or down are used to determine subsequent recommendations for a particular user's Pandora channels.
The 10 billionth thumb was pointed up and was for the song "Ridin' Solo" by Jason DeRulo, an autotuned song I personally consider annoying and repetitive. That's the beauty of Pandora: I don't have to listen to anything like that song if I don't want to.
Something I've believed since I began work for ReadWriteWeb is that nothing we write about here exists in a vacuum. No matter how obscure or specific or rarefied, every story we tell is about someone somewhere doing something. War, the economy, revolution, social movements - everyone everywhere is affected by everything. So when I saw what my best friend, Kelvin Holland, had done, I saw, among other things, a story about us.
Lo these many years ago, Kelvin and I met at what became Ask.com. He wound up as the Head of Testing and I ran corporate projects. He now works in the DC area as the web producer for a history publisher. It was there he met Al Webber, a jazzman of the old school. Al recently passed away, but not before technology empowered Kelvin to capture, preserve and share a part of the man's ineffable essence.
Apple's long-rumored, cloud-based music service may be coming to fruition. According to reports, Apple has acquired the domain name iCloud.com from Swedish cloud services provider Xcerion for $4.5 million. Coupled with the 500,000 square foot data center that is being finished in North Carolina, Apple may finally be ready to make its big cloud push.
The speculation so far has been that the data center will be for iTunes storage and streaming. Think "iTunes Everywhere." It is also likely that Apple will rebrand its existing cloud product MobileMe at some point, perhaps with the iCloud designation. Either way, with a $4.5 million price tag for the domain name, it is likely that iCloud will be a significant chip in Apple's portfolio.
Google is in talks with European-based streaming music service Spotify, according to a report today on CNET. Google has been rumored to be working on launching a streaming music service of its own for years now, with clamor over the potential service reaching a peak last summer when Big G was said to have a service near ready for launch last fall. That rumor did not, however, come true.
Spotify has had a similar past, but perhaps this sort of deal could get both companies what they really want - a piece of the musical pie in the U.S.
Now if there's one oddball fixation we revel in here it's ancient sound. Whether it's Babylonian language, Shakespeare's accent or chirping Mayan temples, we're going to pull you aside like an irritatingly insistent music fan who just knows he can turn you on to Hawkwind.
Well, it's that time again, folks. This time, it's the sound of the two trumpets, one bronze and the other silver, that were buried with the boy Pharaoh, Tutankhamum. They laid sealed away for over 3,200 years in the Pharaoh's tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, until that tomb was opened up by Howard Carter in 1922. It was played for the first time in for a BBC recording in 1939.
The peer-to-peer music streaming service Grooveshark has had a series of run-ins with mobile providers. Its iOS app was pulled from the App Store in August of last year, and its Android app was booted from the Android Marketplace earlier this month.
The company has now fired back at the music industry and at Apple and Google, contending there's nothing illegal about its app.
