European upstart music service Spotify just announced that it is putting new limits on its millions of free account holders. "[I]t's vital that we continue offering an on-demand free service to you and millions more like you," the company said in its announcement, "but to make that possible we have to put some limits in place going forward."
CNet's Greg Sandoval reported yesterday that some new limits were coming, based on unnamed but clearly well-informed sources. Free account holders today are able to listen to up to 20 hours of music on-demand, song by song and album by album, each month. The new limits will allow 20 hours for the first 6 months of any user's new account. After 6 months, free listening will be cut down to 10 hours. That means 20 minutes on average, every day of the month, for free. That's still generous, as far as I'm concerned.
Peer-to-peer music streaming app Grooveshark has had an-again off-again relationship with mobile providers. Last summer, the service hit iOS only to be pulled from the app store just days later.
Today, Google booted the app from the Android Market in "a move that comes after some of the top music labels have accused the service of violating copyright law," according to CNET's Greg Sandoval.
The Android Developer Console has been experiencing numerous issues and outages over the past several days, Google confirms. As of this morning, these problems remain unresolved. Beginning March 31, many Android developers began reporting trouble accessing the Developer Console, Google's backend system that allows for the publication of Android Market applications and updates to existing apps. In the official Android Market Help Forum, developers said they've encountered error messages, problems with data and statistics not updating and failures in loading application lists.
However, Google tells us that the problem is only affecting "some" developers.
For online radio service Pandora, the car was a logical place to take their web app. At a SXSW Interactive panel on connected cars, Jessica Steel of Pandora noted that radio is already a well established experience inside a car. "50% of all radio listening happens in the car," she said, so it was "a really important strategic destination" to bring Pandora into the vehicle.
This is the fourth post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming media has changed with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. So far we've looked at music on smartphones, news apps on the iPad and RSS Readers on smartphones. Today we go well outside the traditional PC world, where the Web has only just begun to make inroads: the car.
There is simply nothing like Twitter for being a fly on the wall. People sit at work and tweet about what they're doing. They tweet at night, they tweet in the morning and they tweet a lot on the weekends - find a vein of good tweets from a group of people you want to learn from, watch it over time and the world is your oyster.
That's my theory, anyway. One of the things I'm interested in tracking are the streaming music services. So tonight I built a Twitter list of people who work at Rdio, Pandora, Mog and Spotify. (Then I remembered Grooveshark!) Give it a click and you can follow it too. I'll show you how I made it below - and of course this process could be applied to any field.
Amazon has just launched a suite of music products that allow users to store their tracks online and them stream them over the Web or to any Android device courtesy of the Amazon MP3 mobile application. The launch has the tech world abuzz, not only because Amazon beat Apple and Google to the punch, both of whom are reportedly working on digital lockers of their own, but because Amazon hasn't even received the record labels' permission to host these tracks on its servers as of yet.
But is Amazon's cloud-based music storage service really all that innovative? Some journalists and analysts are saying it's not. Do you agree?
Update: Amazon has now launched the service described below, under the name Amazon Cloud Drive.
Amazon is preparing a music locker service, a website where you'll be able to listen to music you've uploaded from your local collection (or otherwise proven you've bought) now streaming from any computer with a web browser. That according to a number of media reports, most recently by Ethan Smith at the Wall St. Journal, who reports that the service may be announced as early as tomorrow.
Wouldn't it be great if MTV documented and showcased emerging bands on its television network, instead of making uninspired, irritating reality TV shows? Well if MTV won't do that, then a new web site that launched this month will. Noisey is a video-based "new music discovery platform" that is profiling new bands and local music scenes from around the world. The site was built using HTML5 and as a result it delivers a visually appealing app-like experience. This could be the future of music TV. I for one hope so, at least.
Noisey, currently in public beta, features mini documentaries of bands alongside videos of live music. I tested Noisey out by viewing the coverage of a young band I discovered via this year's SXSW Music festival.
Nowadays, music discovery can be a magical, yet completely disconnected, experience. There are tools to find the most popular music from blogs, algorithms to suggest music according to characteristics and custom created lists and channels made by curators. Still, something integral is missing - your friends.
Once upon a time - long before peer-to-peer file sharing services hit the Web - the way to discover music was by trading mix tapes with friends. Nowadays, you might burn a CD for a friend but, as our music collections increasingly move into the cloud, it's becoming harder and harder to share your musical tastes with your friends. AudioVroom wants to change this and bring your friends to the music discovery experience of apps like Pandora.
Streaming music subscription service Rdio today announced availability of a series of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that outside developers can use to add playback of Rdio's 8 million song catalog and social features like popular playlists to their web applications.
Developers that can sign up new subscribers to Rdio's $5 or $10 per month paid services will receive a 2% to 3% commission for the lifetime of the subscriber. That could help create a small army of sales people that could sell Rdio in settings outside of the Rdio iPhone app, where Apple will soon begin taking a hefty 30% cut.
