It has been a while since I checked in on Earbits, the commercial free online music application that encourages you to become an active fan of the bands and musicians on your stream. Since then, it has greatly improved and I have constructed a hybrid classical radio channel via its excellent Chrome extension feature. For those […]
Archive | Digital Watch
Reflections on forgetting that I bought an Apple Music subscription
The music-techno-chattering classes are pondering recent Pandora news: a huge drop in the online song server’s stock price, largely attributed to the launching of Apple Music. Bottom line: in the third quarter of this year Apple Music, claiming 6.5 million paying customers, pinched Pandora audience expansion to the tune of 1.3 million listeners. “Let me […]
Digital Watch: Watch the Final Pitches in WNYC’s Podcast Accelerator Competition
Podcasters wanting an inside look into how public radio and podcast experts evaluate new show ideas have an opportunity to peek under the hood of WNYC’s Podcast Accelerator Pitch Session. On Friday at 3:30 PM PDT the Online News Association will live stream the five Podcast Accelerator finalists giving their last pitches to the judges: […]
Digital Watch: If Streaming Music Were Cheaper, but Limited, Would Listeners Buy?
Terrestrial and satellite radio still lead music discovery in the U.S. according to Nielsen’s new 2015 Music 360 report, released this week. Although 75% of the population now reports listening to music online, 61% of Americans say they found out about new music from radio. Surprisingly, this represents a 7% increase over 2014. Despite the […]
Digital Watch: Is the New Apple TV Your Next Internet Radio? Is HD Radio Adoption Like Color TV’s 50 Years Ago?
Apple held its perennial fall unveiling today, and amongst the updated products on display were a new, bigger iPad Pro and a fresh Apple TV. Of course, you can listen to internet radio on an iPad, though I don’t see how the iPad Pro will be any better for that application than any other model. […]
Digital Watch: Reviewing the New TuneIn Premium
TuneIn Radio has been kind of a deceptively quiet player in the online radio wars that have heated to a boiling since Apple introduced Beats 1 Radio at the end of June. Yet the service claims a user base of 60 million monthly active users who clearly find value in the service’s single-platform access to […]
Digital Watch: The Inevitable Decline of Free Streaming Music; FM in More Smartphones; Mad Genius Bows Out
There has been quite a bit of action on the digital and internet radio front this past week, including more terrestrial radio in smartphones, the sign-off of a streaming radio service, and indications that free on-demand streaming music may have reached its peak, ready for an inevitable decline. T-Mobile to Activate FM in Smartphones FM […]
Digital Watch: Bluetooth Is Magic for Podcasts and Internet Radio
Call me late to the party, but I’ve finally fallen in love with Bluetooth audio streaming. At this point most readers should be familiar with Bluetooth, which facilitates pretty easy wireless connections between devices of all kinds. In this case I’m specifically discussing using Bluetooth to send audio from a computer or mobile device to […]
Digital Watch: AT&T Android Phones Get FM in 2016
On Tuesday AT&T, the nation’s second largest wireless carrier, announced that it is activating the FM radio chips on Android smartphones subscribed to its service. Beginning in 2016, subscribers buying new compatible phones will be able to use the free NextRadio app to listen to both terrestrial broadcasts and those stations’ internet streams. Sprint, the […]
Digital Watch: Happy Birthday MP3!
Yesterday was the 20th birthday of the MP3. As historian Brian McCullough tells it on his Internet History Podcast, on July 14, 1995 an email made the rounds at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Germany declaring, “everyone voted for .mp3 as extension for ISO MPEG Audio Layer 3!” At that moment the files […]