If you've spent more than a few tracks worth of time playing with Pandora, you know that you can't access every song or even every artist you may be into. You can find plenty of music by the Pixies, for example, but another favorite from my college days, Liz Phair, is nowhere to be found on the service.
Raditaz launched earlier this month with promises 14 million licensed tracks, compared to the "more than 900,000" currently offered by Pandora. But guess what?
Still no Liz Phair. And now, seemingly, no Pixies either.
Not even two years after reaching 1 million users, social audio service SoundCloud announced today that it has surpassed the 10 million user mark. The Berlin-based company has risen to become a major force in audio content creation and sharing on the Web, becoming a sort of "YouTube for audio" used by musicians, journalists and pretty much anybody with a need to record and share their own audio files.
To celebrate the milestone, the four-year-old startup has released an audio slideshow storytelling app called Story Wheel. It uses the Instagram API to grab a set of pictures, from which you can select the ones you want and order them. Once the photos are arranged, a brief narrative can be recorded in the browser. The end result is a shareable photo slideshow annotated by you.
In 2011, we collectively listened to 64,876,491,602 songs on the Internet. Whether it was on YouTube, SoundCloud, Rdio or MySpace, the citizens of the Web listened to quite a lot of music last year. Bands and musicians made over 3 billion new fans, who viewed artist profiles over 16 billion times. These are just a few data points recently released by Next Big Sound, a startup that tracks the popularity of music and individual artists across a range of digital music providers and social services.
Digital music only continues to grow and mature, as streaming services explode, Internet radio companies go public and developers begin using the power of open APIs to mash up sounds and services. SoundCloud alone saw 231% growth last year, while Twitter saw a 104% increase in music-related activity.
The world's biggest social network wants to change the way you share TV shows, music and games. Think frictionless sharing meets social TV for all media. Given what Facebook recent announcements about integration with cameras and cars, is full media integration? If you're still unsure, take a hint from this: Earlier this week, Facebook announced frictionless sharing for your TV with Boxee.
Grooveshark may have been booted from both the iTunes App Store and Android Market, but that's not stopping the controversial music streaming startup from forging ahead with its mobile strategy. Rather than going back and forth with Apple and Google, the company has taken matters into its own hands by launching a Web app that forgoes Flash in favor of HTML5.
The Grooveshark HTML5 app can stream music from any modern mobile browser, including Safari on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Until now, the service wouldn't work on (non-jailbroken) iOS devices, since the desktop Web app for Grooveshark utilizes Flash for playback.
That the Web has revolutionized music is not exactly a news flash, but most people typically think about that in terms of music consumption. iTunes. YouTube. SoundCloud. Spotify. Group listening sites like Turntable.fm. Recommendation engines like those of Pandora, Last.fm and the Echo Nest. Now voice-controlled Internet radio apps are coming pre-installed in new cars. There's no doubt that they way people discover and listen to music has changed radically, and will continue to do so.
The Internet and mobile technology are beginning to have an equally significant impact on the creation of music itself. Extremely powerful recording, DJing and sequencing software is making its way from laptops to tablets and smartphones, for example. Now, the way people learn to play music in the first place is changing as well.
Surprise! You know that free, unlimited Spotify account you eagerly signed up for when the service first launched in the U.S. over the summer? That was a six-month trial, in case you missed it in the fine print. Next week will mark the half-year anniversary of Spotify's long-awaited U.S., which means that those who were first in line to get a free account will start to see limitations fall into place.
Spotify's free accounts are normally restricted to ten listening hours per month. If you really, truly love a particular song, you'll only be able to stream it five times in a given month. These caps will come on top of the usual limitations of free accounts: You have to listen to advertisements and there's no mobile access.
The ability to create expressive, gorgeous, geographically-agnostic gateways to the human experience is one of the true boons of the social Web. If you're still laboring under the misapprehension that the Middle East is mostly donkeys and dahabiyas, Mideast Tunes, especially in its new incarnation, will disabuse you of that notion.
Lauched in 2010, the site was dedicated to bridging "barriers of faith and geography to unite young people committed to fostering constructive discourse in the Middle East through music." I don't know if that's happened, but it rocks.
In 2012, anybody who starts a band or begins recording their own music at home is probably not quitting their day job and awaiting huge financial returns. If they're good at what they do and the Web helps them build a huge audience, then great, but that's unlikely to be their chief motivator. Of all the ways for artists to make money early in the game, selling music is generally not seen as a cash cow. For many, making their music available for free and getting it on streaming services is a better way to get exposure and monetization is a strategy best saved for later.
The state of online music sales for independent artists may not be as abysmal at it feels though, according to some data recently shared by Bandcamp. The artist promotion and e-commerce site found that some of their paid music downloads were being initiated by users who had searched explicitly for pirated content.
What becomes possible when technology cuts out the middlemen in music publishing and distribution? A lot of very strange and sometimes wonderful things.
Berlin based music and audio sharing network SoundCloud has raised a reported $50m more venture capital from the super prestigious Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mike Butcher at TechCrunch Europe reported today. The company had raised about $16m in two previous rounds. If you're not familiar with SoundCloud, now is a good time to learn about the site. It's a vibrant and innovative community, about to either blow up huge or go down in flames with the change that comes from a large and high-priced investment like this.
