Shuffler.fm, a music aggregation and curation site that got a ton of buzz over the summer, launched its iPad app today. The app is being touted by the company as a "Flipboard for music," but we think that comparison has its limitations, and that's okay.
Music blogs have become a huge component of how people discover and hear new music, especially in smaller scenes that may be overlooked by more mainstream channels. Shuffler.fm taps into this phenomenon by aggregating audio from countless music blogs and then using the Last.fm API to divvy them up by genre. What results is a new way to explore and discover music, and the experience feels like it was ready-made for the tablet form factor.
SoundCloud wants to make it easier to listen to music and other embedded audio files from any device. The popular social audio-sharing service announced today that they've launched an HTML5 player for audio clips, allowing playback on tablets and smartphones.
Until now, the SoundCloud player, like so many of its kind, was built in Flash. The service has native apps for Android and iOS, which are lovely, but not terribly useful when one stumbles across a sound clip embedded on a Web page while browsing from an iPad or iPhone.
Two months after going into private beta, BBM Music, a mobile music streaming service for Blackberry users, is now available in the device's native app store.
The new service lands in a somewhat crowded space, but focuses on social sharing among Blackberry users specifically, something that may set it apart from other music services in the minds of RIM customers.
The world of mobile content creation just got a whole lot more functional. Seven months after releasing its music recording and sequencer program Garage Band as an iPad app, Apple has shrunk the app down even further to fit it on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Garage Band for iPhone is impressively capable for a mobile application. It may be a bit tedious, but one could viably use the software to record and edit an entire album of music, albeit with a few limitations. It comes with built-in synthesized instruments, as well as the ability to plug a guitar or microphone into the device to capture real sounds.
Apple device owners who want to store their music collections in the cloud and listen to them on their iOS-powered devices had better keep waiting for iTunes Match. Using competing services like Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive, it would appear, is off-limits for iPhone and iPad owners. There's a setting within iOS 5 to activate iTunes Match, but the feature won't work until the next version of iTunes is released.
Apple recently pulled a third party app that let users stream music from their Amazon cloud locker, reportedly due to legal concerns.
The social audio sharing site SoundCloud upgraded its iOS app today, adding a tablet-friendly UI for iPad users. The app lets users find and listen to tracks, comment on waveforms, connect with others and record audio using the iPad's microphone.
Most of the functionality from the service's Web app is here. If you've seen the SoundCloud Mac App for the desktop, this is a very similar experience.
A music discovery app for iOS that went live recently shows just what's possible when digital music services open up their libraries and functionality via powerful APIs. Twist Radio takes the music recommendation engine from Last.fm and uses it to help users explore music from SoundCloud.
The result is an app that lets users discover more obscure, independent and often homemade music, rather than a catalogue of music that's only been formally released by record labels. That's because SoundCloud hosts mostly user-generated music, including covers, mashups and original compositions. Some more established artists and labels have even embraced Soundcloud and uploaded commercially released albums to the service. It's essentially the YouTube of audio.
Between the more than 200 features that went live with iOS 5 last week, not to mention the sales record-breaking iPhone 4S, Apple customers could be forgiven for not noticing that one last feature Steve Jobs promised in June hasn't arrived yet.
iTunes Match, Apple's cloud-based music backup and syncing service, was held back during the launch of iOS 5 and iCloud, which was probably a smart move considering the strain iOS 5 itself put on Apple's servers. Well, iTunes Match should be dropping any day now.
In May, Google launched a long-awaited music service that landed with somewhat of a thud. Compared to some of the rumors that were flying around, Google Music turned out to be a rather basic offering. It was nothing more than a "cloud locker" for one's own music files. Not a streaming service. Not an MP3 store. Instead, the service was more analgous to Amazon's Cloud Drive, except without an accompanying music store.
That's about to change, according to a report from the New York Times. Google is currently in negotiations with music labels to launch an MP3 store as part of Google Music. The move would put Google in more direct competition with Amazon and Apple, the latter of which is the market leader in digital music sales.
Spotify, the European all-you-can-stream music service American listeners just couldn't wait to get their hands on, has been growing fast. Since its July U.S. launch, Spotify has picked up more than 250,000 paying American customers, according to Reuters. This number has grown by 42% since early August.
At the time, Spotify had 1.4 million American users, including non-paying listeners. That number has presumably grown considerably since the company launched a major integration with Facebook at the f8 developer conference last month. Spotify has not revealed recent statistics about its overall user base.
