Attention all social media music playlist mavens: are you posting your own personal favorite tunes, or are you really favoring content based on how you want others to see you? If it’s the latter choice, you are not alone. An Aalto University (Helsinki, Finland) user study concludes that “being authentic is very important for social […]
The Music Machinery blog alerts us to a new Spotify related application, Acrostify, which creates Spotify playlists based on “acrostics,” aka secret word messages embedded in other things. Since yesterday (Sunday, August 10) was the Russian composer Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov’s birthday, I input “Happy Birthday Glazunov” and selected the “classical” format. Out came this playlist: […]
My otherwise chaotic Sunday was rescued by the discovery of Gaana, India’s online music and radio emporium. It works beautifully on my Google Chrome tablet and comes with endless streams of Bollywood hits. I strongly recommend the Filmy Mirchi radio channel, which will surely cheer you up under most circumstances. I also love the Perla […]
If you are a classical music lover, 8tracks.com offers many great playlists. They are perfect for inspiration and/or background for study. Here are some recommendations: evening: an excellent piano oriented mix. Lots of Chopin and French impressionist music. It is 47 minutes long and has eleven tracks, including a nice improvisation on Satie’s Gynopedie. The […]
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 […]
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 […]
We’ve been following the Federal Communication Commission’s latest open Internet proposal, and like my colleague Paul Riismandel, I’m skeptical about it. FCC Chair Tom Wheeler’s plan seems tailor made to forge a two-tiered Internet in which the big ISPs pick winners and losers via priority access “fast lane” deals. The big question for us around […]
Late last week the news broke that Apple is buying Beats Audio for $3.2 billion. As most observers have noted, this is an unusually large acquisition for Apple, which tends not to buy companies that already have such prominent brands, for so much money. With the Beats acquisition Apple gets a successful audio company selling […]
Paul Lamere’s Music Machinery blog has a revelation that caught my eye. Tracking billions of Spotify plays for a research project, the Development Platform Director for The Echo Nest reports that almost one in four Spotify users will skip a song within the first five seconds of play. The probability that the content will be skipped […]
Latest Sprint buzz: the carrier may try to acquire T-Mobile. This follows Sprint announcing that it will offer six months of Spotify Premium to “all new and existing postpaid Sprint customers” who are on one of its “framily” plans. This is good news, except that if you take advantage of the aforementioned offer your carrier is Sprint. […]
