Clear Channel, the largest radio station owner in the United States, has teamed up with music intelligence platform The Echo Nest to build an Internet radio service similar to Pandora and Last.fm.
Clear Channel's iHeartRadio service uses The Echo Nest's massive dataset of 30 million songs and 5 billion related data points to let users create radio stations based on their musical tastes. It has been dubbed a potential "Pandora killer" by Billboard and indeed its functionality could hardly be more similar to Pandora's. Users can create stations based on a particular artist or song, vote tracks up or down and skip a limited number of songs per station.
A new iPad app called Groovebug just launched. It uses your iTunes music collection to create "an iPad magazine tailored to your musical tastes." The familiarities to Flipboard seem a little forced. You do use the swiping motion to go from one page to another but, outside of that, it doesn't feel much like a magazine experience. Also, Flipboard is more sophisticated about how it embeds external content. Although I did like how Groovebug embeds YouTube videos.
That's not to say that Groovebug doesn't have a lot of potential. I think they're onto something in regards to bringing the Flipboard experience to music. The personalized (through your iTunes) aggregation is a good start, but I'd like Groovebug to help me discover more music and media content about music too.
For many users of Spotify, the feature that's most painfully absent from the music streaming service is a recommendation engine for songs and artists. After all, listeners have come to expect this feature after years of it being available in Internet radio products like Pandora and Last.fm.
Echofi is a new Web app that hopes to solve this problem. It takes Spotify's music library and mashes it up with the API from The Echo Nest, a powerful music intelligence platform that contains data about more than 30 million songs.
Facebook will launch its much-rumored music platform at next month's f8 developers' conference, CNBC reported this afternoon.
Rather than go up against the likes of Spotify, Rdio and MOG, Facebook will instead be partnering with those music streaming services. While few details are known for sure, it looks as though the social behemoth is aiming to offer a way to listen to music from third party sources from within Facebook itself.
Music streaming service Spotify is opening up development tools to iOS developers which will allow them to write tools for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Spotify functionality will now become available for integration into any iOS app and will be able bring the music services library of 15 million tracks to a variety of applications.
The new coding options could spread Spotify far and wide in the application ecosystem. It is the mobile equivalent of being able to put a radio widget into a website. The service, called libspotify, is available for Spotify Premium users and developers starting today.
iTunes Match, the cloud music syncing feature that will be launched with iOS 5 this Fall, is now available to developers. Earlier reports that it would enable streaming of songs turned out to be false, but Match is a significant update to the way iTunes works nonetheless.
Beginning this Fall, users will be able to sync their iTunes-purchased music across devices automatically thanks to iCloud, a larger initiative that does the same for contacts, calendars, documents and apps. Music fans who want to take this syncing to the next level and include content they acquired beyond iTunes can pay $24.99 per year for iTunes Match. This includes independently produced music that isn't available among the iTunes Store's 18 million songs.
I recently received an email from the guys at MixApp. MixApp was the first collective listening web app. It was founded at the beginning of 2010 by a group of friends who wanted to build the product for themselves, like Foursquare's story. Now, they are closing shop:
"Dear all,"At long last the MixApp adventure is coming to an end. We'll discontinue the service the evening of August 27, and hope that everyone will take this coming week as an opportunity to say their good-byes."
If a tyranny bans a song, you want to believe the song will be a tower of power, a cry for freedom, a scream of defiance or a gob of spit in the face of God. Unfortunately, China's latest pop song blacklist puts paid to that idea.
In its supposed quest to bring "order" to the Internet music market, China has created a list of 100 songs that are now banned in that country. (Well, if history's any guide, it's less a quest for market order than for orthodoxy.) And man are they awful.
Internet radio service Pandora posted its first financial results as a public company yesterday, six months after filing for an IPO. While the company may not yet be profitable, it's off to a pretty good start in terms of growth. Its total revenue grew 117% year-over-year and its total listeners grew 125%.
Contained amongst these investor-pleasing stats was another takeaway: The company is now commanding ad rates comparable to those sold on terrestrial radio stations, as GigaOm pointed out.
BBM Music, a mobile music streaming service exclusive to Blackberry users, has officially gone into closed beta, RIM has announced.
As its name would suggest, the service works over Blackberry's proprietary messaging platform, which can be used to share songs and playlists amongst other BBM Music subscribers. A subscription will cost $5 per month and include access to 50 songs at any given time. Twenty-five of those songs can be swapped out per month and users can gain access to more music via friends who opt to share it with them. Thus, the more socially connected you are via BBM Music, the more music you can listen to.
