I apologize for what some might experience as the presumptuous headline query, but I am unable to interpret the latest SoundCloud news otherwise. Here is the lead paragraph in last week’s Bloomberg report: “The largest record labels are closing in on a deal for a stake in buzzy digital-music service SoundCloud Ltd., in exchange for […]
I had fun over the Fourth of July rummaging around the Internet Wayback and looking at old images of audioscrobber.net, Richard Jones’ early version of Scrobbling as he was joining forces with Last.fm. Here is screenshot circa November 2004. Jones was a third year student at the University of Southampton at the time he cooked this […]
Spotify’s data gathering subsidiary The Echo Nest has surveyed Spotify users state-by-state for their favorite fourth of July songs—or as Echo puts it: tunes that “are played proportionally more on the Fourth of July than during the rest of the year.” Here are some state’s Independence Day faves. For California, it’s ‘America F*ck Yeah’ from the […]
Google has acquired Songza, the curate-according-to-your mood song search and jukebox service. “We aren’t planning any immediate changes to Songza, so it will continue to work like usual for existing users,” Google’s press release says, but “over the coming months, we’ll explore ways to bring what you love about Songza to Google Play Music.” And: “We’ll […]
The tech investment world is discovering 8tracks.com (we’ve known about it here for quite a while). Forbes has a huge story about the music playlist application titled “What if You Became a Big Company, But No One Noticed?” (translation: “no one” equals “people with money”). The piece cites a Comscore survey identifying 8tracks as the […]
Just for kicks the other day I decided to go to the Internet Archive’s Wayback browser and check out Shoutcast as it was getting hot. This screenshot is from April 27, 1999 and displays the “top ten Shoutcasts,” which seem to have been overwhelmingly Techno music oriented channels (with pop and rock thrown in). The […]
If you are a dedicated music application watcher like me, you spend a lot of time reading articles about what Pandora should do (or what should be done to the service). Every new app is a possible “Pandora-killer.” Take The Motley Fool’s Saturday headline: “Did Amazon Just Kill Sirius and Pandora?” Apparently the author is quite […]
Here at Radio Survivor we’ve discussed how an internet fast lane might negatively affect internet radio, especially mobile internet radio. But we weren’t expecting it to actually happen so quickly. What I’m talking about is T-Mobile’s announcement on Wednesday that the company will allow customers to stream music to their smartphones without it impacting their […]
Myspace seems to be making a comeback of sorts. Well, let’s modify that—various news sites are peering into the service and noting with bemusement that it still exists. So Forbes posted this unflattering headline on Friday: “How To ‘Frankenstein’ Your Brand Like MySpace: The Social Network That Refuses To Die.” C’mon folks, a little kindness please. […]
I was rummaging around the early recording industry trade journal Talking Machine World the other day, and ran into an item that reminded me of a recent Pandora innovation: its mobile alarm clock feature. The Internet Archive has copies of TMW from the Progressive Era through the 1920s. I quote from a January 1906 edition […]
